“It’s only a half-hour drive,” Rachel said, “in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. There’s no one on the road. I’ll drive ten miles under the speed limit.” She put her pinkie out and waited for Fiona to take it.
How did Fiona go from being the one in control—the one who drove them here in the first place, who put her emergencies-only credit card down—to the one being blamed? And how would she explain to her father why there was a charge for almost $350 for one night at a Super 8 in Torrington, Connecticut? This was the underbelly of responsibility: When things went wrong, the fingers turned back at you. Fiona had gotten them to the motel and gotten them the room, but it was a given that she would do that for them: because she had the car; she had the money; she was the reliable one. Now she started to see that reliable people were just the type that more self-respecting people could walk all over.
In the Jeep, Fiona sat in the front seat. She felt totally sober now, and large, and useless. She looked over at Rachel. She told Fiona she loved her in one moment and then turned around and talked shit about her the next. That was just something else that Rachel could do that Fiona couldn’t: be so many steps ahead of the situation that she could remain in control of it. Rachel would not allow herself to be aligned with a narc, even if it meant throwing her best friend under the bus. Sometimes Fiona hated herself for allowing Rachel to do that to her again and again. But in fact, she understood it; she too would have been embarrassed by herself that night.
As they drove, Fiona felt a sort of wounded jealousy of her best friend—if she could be more like Rachel, look more like Rachel, then maybe this wouldn’t hurt so bad. Rachel seemed to know how to do everything that Fiona didn’t: how to flirt; how to gossip in a way you could defend later; how to stay thin; how to drive drunk. She was in awe of the way Rachel could manipulate any situation so that it would end up working out in her favor. Fiona was so envious of Rachel’s compact body that she wanted to dissolve her own and inhabit that one, to be the owner of the thin wrists that capably steered them back to camp.
—
They got into camp and parted ways as they walked back to their respective sections. Fiona lay down in her bunk but couldn’t sleep. She got up after a few minutes, bringing her toiletries with her, and made her way to the Maple girls’ bathroom, walking through the circle of platform tents, every little girl asleep. In the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror above the row of sinks. She looked exactly the same as she had hours ago in the motel: puffy and greasy and ugly. She did not know why she imagined she’d look any different. Mirrors these days were a perpetual and profound disappointment.
She thought about Yonatan, probably asleep by now. What she saw in the mirror was also what he saw, and the reality of that made her cringe and hate herself more.
She ran the water warm and washed her hands. Without thinking about why, she began to turn the cold water valve to the right—turn, turn, turn—until it was all the way off and the water was steaming from the sink, her hands scalding. She closed her eyes and breathed sharply through her nose through the pain. If someone had walked in, she wouldn’t have been able to explain it. It just felt numbing, even good inside the pain, like she was washing away the detestable parts of herself, burning away her mediocrity and powerlessness, her ugliness. She opened her eyes and looked up into the mirror again and was surprised to see herself grimacing.
When she was finished, she pulled paper towels from the dispenser and dried her wrinkled, red hands. She let out a long breath, as if she’d just completed a difficult but worthwhile task. She returned to her tent and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.
5
It was Sheera Jones’s first summer at Camp Marigold. The lake was, so far, her favorite place on the camp grounds, and she signed up for as many activities there as she could. In the South Bronx, there were plenty of trees, a couple of public pools, the Harlem and East Rivers, but no clear, open water—nothing where, if you were standing in the exact right place on the shoreline at the exact right time, you couldn’t see a single person.
During the first week, Sheera had discovered that that exact right time to gain some solitude at the lake was just before the day’s activities started or right after they ended. So on the Monday morning of the second week of camp, She left breakfast the minute the girls were dismissed to get to the beach before anyone else. There were two ways to get there: by road, down a wide gravel drive that rounded the circumference of the hilly camp, or by trail, the more direct but steeper, narrower, and more treacherous of the routes. Sheera always chose the trail. She walked down it enough times that the route became familiar: Here was the fallen log you had to climb over; here was the muddy patch you had to tiptoe around, for it often rained at night; here was where the trail broke for a moment and you walked down twenty man-made steps before you hiked the rest of the way. And here the trail cleared and opened right onto the beach: only a few steps on grass before your toes were in the sand. The lake, she’d learned at the nature lodge, was three miles long—the length of sixty city blocks. The camp used only half of it, mostly for safety reasons. You could see across the width of the lake to the other shore, which was covered in bushy trees, seemingly with not an inch of open space in which to wander; in the distance were the gray-blue outlines of the Berkshire Mountains. But lengthwise, even if you stood at the edge of the beach and craned your neck to the right as far as it could go, you still couldn’t see where the water ended and became land again. Canoes or swimmers could get lost over there.
That morning Sheera was able to get only one or two minutes alone with her toes in the water before she heard steps crunching down the gravel road and then padding in the grass behind her. She turned to see Chad, the boating counselor, pulling canoes from their parking spots on the grass and lining them up in a row along the shoreline, their noses dipping into the shallow water. Chad had a British accent, and he often walked around shirtless, showing off his perpetually sunburned chest. He was unfriendly and played favorites, and Sheera wasn’t one of them.