“I don’t want my car smelling like an ashtray.”
Rachel was sitting Indian style, her legs folded into each other. After their first year away at college, Rachel looked the same as she always had: olive skinned, thin limbed, brown hair worn over one shoulder. Fiona did not. She had never been tall or petite; her skin was not terrible but not great; and her face was quite squashed, as if all the features had gathered together too close in the center of it. And now she was twenty pounds heavier. The best she would ever look was average, and this summer she was flirting with ugliness.
“You know,” Rachel said to Fiona, looking over at Steph smoking, “she tells everyone she’s from L.A., but she’s really from Sacramento.”
Fiona and Rachel were the only counselors on this outing who had spent their childhood summers at Marigold. All the others were new. Still, the girls had been fifteen the last time they were there. The summers in between, they had been too old to be campers and too young to be counselors.
Chad and Yonatan now appeared in the rearview mirror carrying two handles of vodka, a jug of cranberry juice, and a case of Coors Light. Chad grunted as he dropped the case onto the ground and knocked twice on the Jeep’s door.
“A little help would have been nice,” he said when they got into the Jeep.
“We’re dainty,” Rachel said.
“Dainty American girls,” Chad said. “There’s an oxymoron.”
Fiona drove a few miles up the main drag toward the Super 8, where they would stay that night and party, the five of them. Lakeville, where Camp Marigold was located—about twenty-five miles up Route 63—was a pretty, rural town. There wasn’t much to do, but at least it had all the idyllic country attributes: farms with grazing cows, charming milk silos, unmanicured fields full of dandelions. Torrington also felt like the country but a less charming version of it. Everything was paved, and the only open spaces were parking lots between the Grand Union grocery store and the KFC and the Applebee’s.
Fiona pulled into the mostly empty parking lot of the motel. The only person in sight was a shirtless fat man smoking outside the front entrance.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Yonatan said.
Chad stayed in the backseat while the rest of them got out of the Jeep.
“You’re not coming in?” Fiona asked.
Rachel and Chad looked at each other. “Only four of us are allowed to stay in a room,” Rachel said to Fiona. “We talked about this.”
Fiona was sure they hadn’t talked about this and that Rachel had withheld this information because she knew that Fiona would not be okay with it. Chad said he would wait in the car and would come to their room—with the alcohol—once they were inside.
Rachel linked her arm in Fiona’s as they walked. “It’s gonna be fine. Just act normal.” She let her gaze linger on the fat man and then turned to Fiona with a disgusted look on her face. Fiona forced a laugh.
As eleven-year-olds, they had become friends riding horses together. They were the best riders at camp. Then they began to tell each other things they’d never told anyone else. Rachel told Fiona that she was the result of an affair; her mom had been a mistress, and her father kept Rachel a secret from his wife of twentysomething years. Fiona told Rachel that she wished her sister, Helen, had never been born.
An overweight twentysomething woman at the front desk typed on a PC with a deadpan look on her acne-scarred face. She was wearing a yellow Super 8 polo that was too small on her, the sleeves cutting into her arm fat. She did not look up at the four of them standing there.
Rachel leaned across the desk and peered at the woman’s name tag. “Hi, Mary Ann,” she said.
Mary Ann looked at Rachel sternly, as if to warn her about crossing too far into her territory. “Can I help you?”
Rachel smiled and told her they needed a room for four.
“How old are you all?” she asked suspiciously.
Yonatan slid his passport across the desk. “We’re twenty-one,” he said.
Mary Ann took the passport and opened it. “You’re twenty-one.”
The girls, all under twenty-one, did not have fake IDs.
“You all from the camp?” Mary Ann asked. “I can’t have any funny business again. Not like last summer.”
“We’re just here to get away for a night,” Rachel said in the voice she put on when she wanted to sound older. “You know how tiring kids can be.”
Rachel was a charming girl, but Mary Ann had yet to be charmed. “Rooms are nonsmoking. I see beer, you’re out. No refund.”
Rachel gave Mary Ann a wink and a thumbs-up.
Mary Ann sighed. She typed into her PC. “I need a credit card on file in case there’s any damage to the room.”
Rachel turned, without hesitation, to her best friend. “Fiona, would you mind?” She knew that Fiona had a family credit card in case of emergencies.
“There won’t be any damage,” Rachel said in response to Fiona’s hesitation. “And we’ll give you cash for the room.”
Rachel had this way of making Fiona feel like certain things were just part of her job as the “responsible” friend: driving the car, putting the credit card down. In a way, Fiona liked it. It made her feel like she had agency, like she was more than just Rachel’s sidekick. Surely Rachel sensed this—that each time she asked Fiona to do something, she was handing over a bit of her own power to Fiona, saying, “Here, hold this. Doesn’t that feel nice?”
Fiona slid her American Express across the table. Rachel took Fiona’s arm again.
“God, what a sad case she was,” Rachel said quietly to Fiona when they had stepped away from the desk, and they took the elevator up to room 304.
—
They could see Chad in the parking lot from their window, and he walked fast with the case of beer. He entered the Super 8 with ease through a side entrance.
The sleeping arrangements were set: Fiona and Steph in one bed, Rachel and Chad in the other (they were “just good friends,” she answered when Fiona had asked about the status of their relationship), and Yonatan on the floor. There were cards, and someone suggested strip poker. It was seven P.M.; Fiona had assumed that, at some point, they’d go out for dinner. She was hungry. But since gaining the weight, she felt as if she could never be the one to bring up the topic of food. It felt like there would be something desperate in that, transparent and obvious. She poured herself a cranberry and vodka and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You’re not playing?” Yonatan asked.
She shook her head. “I hate cards.”