“Yowza,” the nurse said, looking first at the blood that had soaked through Mikey’s shirt and then at the gash on the back of Sheera’s leg. “You took quite the spill.”
Sheera nodded wordlessly, afraid that if she said anything she would start crying. Her leg stung intensely, and she realized, for the first time, that she missed home. Something about the muted TV and the air-conditioning and the ugly couch: It felt a lot like her apartment on a summer afternoon.
“How did you do this? You were in boating class?”
“I, um…I scratched it on a rock.”
“Okay,” the nurse said.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” the nurse said.
Sheera was grateful she didn’t have to explain anything further. How tiring it would have been to have to decide all over again if she would tell the truth or not.
“Let’s go into one of the rooms, okay? So I can bandage you up properly.” The nurse stood up from her desk. “You can go to your next activity now, Bobby,” she said to the boy with the beesting, who frowned and slowly got up.
The nurse led Sheera into an examination room, where there was a desk with supplies and a padded table with a clean piece of wax paper over it. The nurse patted it. “Lie down for me, tummy first.”
Sheera got onto the table using a step stool and did as she was told. She watched the nurse pull two plastic gloves from a box on the desk and put them on. Then she took a couple of creams and a large square bandage from a drawer.
The nurse took one of the creams and squeezed some onto her pointer finger.
“Is it gonna hurt?” Sheera asked, surprised by the weak tone of her own voice.
“No, sweetie,” the nurse said, looking Sheera in the eyes. “It’ll feel nice.”
Sheera closed her eyes and let the nurse put the ointment on her. It did feel nice, cooling. The nurse stuck the bandage onto the back of Sheera’s thigh and gave her a note saying she couldn’t swim for a week.
“A week?” The thought of having to sit out at the pool or the lake and everyone looking at her made her want to cry again.
“It’s a big gash, sweetheart. You don’t want it to get infected. And trust me, it wouldn’t feel good. Especially not the chlorine.”
Sheera nodded, holding her tears in. But when the nurse placed her hand maternally on Sheera’s shoulder, she couldn’t help but let all the tears go.
“Oh, sweetheart,” the nurse said. She sat down on the table next to Sheera and put an arm around her. She stroked the top of Sheera’s head and kept saying things like “Shh, that’s it” and “Let it out.”
When Sheera was done crying, she looked up at the nurse.
“Can I stay here?” Sheera managed. “Just for a little longer?”
“You stay as long as you need,” the nurse said. “Do you want to watch TV?”
Sheera nodded. They went back into the waiting room, and Sheera settled on the couch, which was torn up but comfortable, and watched the ladies making important points on the TV, occasionally hiccuping from a leftover sob.
6
“I’ll go first,” Rachel said in the tent that night. She was sitting on one of the girls’ hard-topped trunks, an electric lantern upright in the space between her crossed legs. They were doing roses and thorns, one of her favorite bedtime activities from her own time as a camper.
“My thorn today,” she said, “was hot dogs for dinner.”
“They were, like, raw,” Helen confirmed from her bunk.
“And my rose?” Rachel clapped the heel of her flip-flop against the platform tent’s wooden floorboards, thinking. “Oh, duh. My rose was sticking a reverse off the high dive.”
“She did,” Helen said. Her hay-colored curls bobbed up and down, and the gigantic shadow of her head on the canvas wall behind her moved in tandem. “I saw it.”
“Helen,” Rachel said, “your turn.”
Sheera turned her flashlight toward Helen, whose top bunk was across the tent from hers. There were eight bunks in the tent with a square platform made of cedar planks below them and wooden posts on all four sides to hold up the canvas roof and walls.
Helen threw a freckled forearm over her eyes. “Sheera!”
Sheera tried to figure out where to cast the light, and the white-yellow circle darted around the tent like an unruly moth.
“Chill out,” Sheera said, settling the flashlight on a spot toward the peak of the tent.
“Anyway.” Helen cleared her throat and sat up in her bunk. “My thorn was swimming in the lake. I jumped in from the dock and touched the bottom of the deep end, and it felt like diarrhea.”
The girls shrieked and giggled at this admission. Rachel saw a glimmer of her own younger self in Helen, who had a matter-of-fact way about her that most girls her age did not and a natural interest in pushing buttons.
“And my rose.” Helen put a finger to her mouth. “My rose was getting to play four square with Mikey Bombowski.” Her voice went up on Bombowski like it was a question.
“Oh, Helen,” Rachel said. “He’s cute.” Mikey Bombowski wore long basketball shorts with his boxers showing. He was the sort of boy that Rachel herself would have gone for at that age, only Rachel would not have been excited by something like playing four square with him. She would have known even then not to relish such inanities.
“So cute,” said Sarah. Rachel felt sort of sorry for Helen—still a very young-seeming girl stuck in a woman’s body.
There were whispers now about Mikey and the other Hemlock-section boys: Johnny, Joey, Danny, and Sam. It was a Sunday night in early July; the coed dance was six days away, and Rachel had told the girls in her tent that a boy had up to exactly three days beforehand to ask a girl on a date. After that, she could, and should, make other plans.
Rachel checked her watch: ten P.M. She stood and switched off the lantern. “Time for you girls to sleep. Flashlights off.”
Then she waited at the tent’s entrance until the girls appeared to be swallowed by total darkness.
—
Post-lights-out was usually a good time to check email in the computer lab; most people were already drinking in the staff lodge by then, or sitting around a bonfire, or taking a late-night swim down by the lake, so the computers were unoccupied, and the Internet was relatively fast.
Rachel sat down at one of the desktops, opened the browser, and signed into her email to find some junk—a sale on the Gap’s website, a Facebook invite to a house party in Brooklyn—and a note from her mother with the subject “call me when you get this.” She opened the email; there was no message in the body.
She worried it might be about her grandma. Or maybe Pickles, their aging cat. She picked up the landline phone on the desk and dialed home.
Denise sounded breathless and tired when she answered, as if she had just come home from a long, hard day.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Hi, hon. How’s it going out there?”
“It’s good. I just saw your email.”
Denise let out a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.
“Is it Grandma?” Rachel asked.
“Grandma’s fine,” Denise said.
“Okay,” Rachel said. “What is it?”