But when she got to Camp Marigold, very few of the kids did look like her. She’d never been in a place so predominantly white, and she was sure her father hadn’t either. “Watch out for yourself,” he had said to her quietly the day he dropped her off, right before he got into his car to drive back to the Bronx. The girls in her section were nice enough, but they didn’t seem to care to make any new friends; most of them knew one another already. Sheera didn’t know until she got to Marigold that thirteen was considered old for one’s first summer at sleepaway camp.
Mikey turned around now, checking for Chad. They sliced their paddles into the water. “Paddle forward,” Mikey kept saying. As he paddled faster, so, in imitation, did Sheera. Closer ahead now were bushy-leaved trees with wide, imposing bases and a shoreline surrounded by elephantine gray rocks. As they inched forward, Sheera didn’t say, “We’re not allowed to be here,” but she turned around to look at Mikey in a way she hoped conveyed it. If they were to get in trouble, she didn’t want anyone to think it was her idea.
“It’s fine,” he said, and his tone of voice made her believe him.
After they steered toward a narrow space between two rocks, he unbuckled his life vest and threw it onto the bench of the canoe, climbed onto one of rocks, and, once he’d steadied himself on it, told Sheera to throw him the rope from within the canoe. He stood tall on the rock, pulling the canoe in while keeping his balance.
With the weight now upset in the boat, Sheera tipped forward slightly as Mikey bent to tether the rope to the thick branch of a tree. He held his hand out to her. She climbed over the rocks and landed on the soil on her hands and knees. She stood quickly, collecting herself, wiping dirt on her thighs.
“Whose property is this?” she asked, looking around and feeling small. The impressions she’d had of the place from afar were confirmed: The land was dense and overgrown, and there seemed to be no discernible trail.
“It belongs to the state, I think.”
Camp Marigold lay directly across from them now. A few remaining red canoes sat docked at the lakeshore. To the left, in the swimming hole, heads bobbed like beach balls on the surface. Sheera saw the beginnings of the hiking and biking trails—worn-out, rocky paths blazed between the trees—but they disappeared into the hills that held everything else.
Mikey turned away from the lake and led Sheera to a trail she wouldn’t have noticed herself; it was not cleared out like the trails at camp, and was so narrow that the two of them had to walk single file.
“Where are you from, anyway?” Sheera asked, following Mikey through the woods. There were pesky roots and loose stones and untamed branches that scratched her arms as she passed. She wished she weren’t wearing flip-flops.
“I’m an army brat,” he said. “You know what that means?”
She shook her head.
“It means I ain’t from nowhere.” He laughed. “In Alabama, they said ‘ain’t’ and ‘y’all’ a lot. It’s actually pretty useful.”
“But where do you live now?”
“Near Chicago. My dad works at a military school there,” he said. “I guess I could say I’m from there now.”
“You come here all the way from Chicago?”
He shrugged.
They were walking on a steady incline. She was breathing heavily but trying to conceal it because Mikey wasn’t.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“The Bronx.”
“No, I mean…where are you from?”
“The Bronx,” she said louder, thinking he hadn’t heard her.
“But, like…where are your parents from?”
“My dad is from the Bronx too,” she said. “My mom was from the Dominican Republic, but she died.” She forgot until she saw Mikey flinch that this was shocking news every time she told it. “I don’t remember her,” she lied, by way of apology.
“Oh,” he said. “Do you speak Dominican?”
“Spanish?”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
“Not really,” she said, picking up a stick from the ground as she walked. “I understand it sometimes when my grandma comes over ’cause that’s all she speaks, but she doesn’t come over a lot.” That was her other grandma, her abuela. Once Sheera had asked her father why her abuela came over less and less as Sheera got older, and he’d said it was because it was too sad for her to come to the apartment without Sheera’s mom there.
They kept going until the lake was completely out of sight and walked for what felt like a long time. All the elements were starting to beat up Sheera’s body—the mosquitoes that seemed to love to bite her, the prickly tree branches that stuck out too far, the loose rocks she kept tripping over in her flip-flops. She looked at her watch; it was ten-thirty. The activity period ended at ten-fifty.
“Don’t you think we should get back?” she said.
“We’re almost there,” he said, pressing on.
They came upon a steep, rocky incline almost entirely covered in moss. Mikey slowed his walking as they approached it. He cupped a hand dramatically around an ear. “You hear that?” he whispered. When Sheera stopped, and the leaves stopped crunching beneath their feet, she did hear something different: a whirring maybe, like the sound the wind made over the platform tents at night.
Mikey began to climb the hill, and he directed Sheera on how to climb it too as he did so. “Hold on there,” he would say, looking behind himself as he climbed, pointing to a root, a rock, or a trunk as the whirring noise grew and grew. He kept holding a hand out for her, but she didn’t take it; she focused on finding the outcrops in the hill to propel herself up. Mikey stood at the top now, hands on his hips, watching her.
When she got there, he pointed down the other, mossy side of the hill where a waterfall rushed down the rocks and fell into a stream that meandered out of sight. She was surprised that something so small could make so much noise.
“It’s called the Fall of Three Indians,” he said. His pride in leading them there was palpable, and Sheera could almost catch some of it for herself.
They sat down and dangled their feet over the edge.
“Have you ever seen a waterfall before?” he asked.
“Obviously,” she lied.
She kicked a stone and watched it arc and fall into the water below.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he asked her.
“Three brothers.”
“Lucky.”
“I’m the youngest. It’s not that lucky.”
“It’s better than nothin’.” He pointed to himself. “I got nothin’.”
Her brothers beat up on her a lot. It was because it would make her tough, they said, because they loved her.
“I’ve seen you playing four square,” he continued when she didn’t say anything. “You’re really good. And you’re really nice to everyone even when you beat them. And you don’t brag about being good or being nice.”
She was surprised that he had noticed her. She didn’t think that anyone at camp had noticed her.
A little bird, a sparrow or something, flew down and began to peck at the moss between the two of them. Sheera looked down at it. Birds this small, how could you tell the difference between the mother and child? Mikey hovered one finger over the bird as if he was about to pet it. Surprisingly, it didn’t move.
“Aren’t those things dirty?” Sheera asked.
“No. I don’t think so,” he said. Then Sheera too went to tentatively place her pointer finger on the animal, but it flew away before either of them could touch it.