Her parents were outgoing people—both of them teachers and popular in their respective schools—and she was an introvert in a family of extroverts. But despite her discomfort around her contemporaries, she enjoyed the honesty and transparency of kids. It was like they did the work of being outgoing for her. They were easy to get to know, to understand, because they said what they felt and thus encouraged her to do so too. She became a teacher herself, intent on feeling as if she was doing something more productive and beneficial with her life than just riding horses. And she was good at it.
For seven years now, Mo had taught eight-year-olds at the same Montessori school in York. Every day, she went for a run after work, came home to her studio apartment, made dinner, ate it in front of the television, graded homework and prepped for the next day, and was in bed by ten. On the weekends, she stayed with her parents in the suburbs and went riding at Silvershoe, where she now knew all the horses intimately.
But as the holidays ended, after Benji had long ago apologized, and he and Jade had returned to London, his comment continued to eat at her. Suddenly, when she woke up on a Monday in January and taught the same lesson in long division that she’d taught the year before and the years before that, she saw her life going on this way forever. And the most unbearable part was that, now that she was aware she was likely going to die alone, she realized that everyone else in her life must have been aware of it too. When she went for her run in her neighborhood after work, she felt exposed, as if the shop owners who waved to her as she passed were actually silently judging her for her boring reliability, for the fact that they knew they would see her at five P.M. each day like clockwork. All along, she’d thought her dedication to routine was commendable, but really, it was pitiful. When the parents at Silvershoe were asking about her personal life, they weren’t doing it to make conversation; really, they were curious as to whether her answer would, just once, be different, include an allusion to a man or even a friend, anything other than “I just spent the holidays with my parents.” A woman her age who didn’t seem to have any attachments unnerved people.
All her friends, from work and from university, were married or in serious relationships, and she was growing tired of them trying to fix her up with someone every time they knew of a single man, no matter his intelligence or looks or potential compatibility with Mo.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to meet someone. She just felt like it was too late. A thirty-year-old virgin: Who wanted to deal with that? She wasn’t exactly a knockout—not ugly, but nothing special—and she was shy too. Boys began to come on to her when she was a teenager and continued to through university, but she’d found she was always inexplicably afraid of them. She felt fiercely protective of her body and herself, as if someone coming into her space—literally entering her—would feel violating and wrong. She could not understand why this was. She would develop crushes sometimes, but she rarely had desires beyond kissing. She did not even learn how to properly masturbate until she was twenty-five. It was as if she was so afraid of doing the wrong thing when it came to being naked with someone else that she avoided the prospect entirely. And now it was too late for her. Now if she engaged in anything, she’d only be making a fool of herself.
She finally told her brother her secret about a month after his comment, in a fit of lonely desperation. He had pointed out the bleak nature of her life from the outside, and sarcastic though he was, the petrified look on Jade’s face had confirmed it all. Everyone would continue to pity her unless she made some sort of a change.
“You’re kidding,” he said over the phone.
She hoped that her silence indicated that she wasn’t.
“How does that even happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to for a long time. And then it was too late, and I was embarrassed.”
“Well,” he reasoned, “maybe you’re a lesbian.”
“You can’t just decide to be a lesbian,” she said, although the thought had indeed crossed her mind. Once, in a particular kind of mood, she had sought girl-on-girl porn online and then, immediately afterward, panicked about her sexuality. In a tizzy, she had read online that it was common for straight girls to watch lesbian porn.
It wasn’t like anyone she knew would have a problem with her being gay. The thing was, she didn’t know what sex was like, so how could she know if she liked it with a man, let alone with a woman? One time when she was drunk at uni, a girl had kissed her, but the anxieties about not knowing what to do, the fears of failure, had felt the same as they would have been with a man, and she had gone back to her dormitory alone that night.
This was how, at age thirty, she ended up at a place where no one knew anything about her. A place where people could suspect her life was actually full of excitement and possibility. This was how she came to do the most impulsive thing she had ever done: taking a job as a “section leader” at an American summer camp, the same camp that her brother had worked at years earlier, some five thousand kilometers from home.
—
The girls in the Hemlock section had been preparing all week, sweeping the floorboards of their platform tents, straightening up the belongings in their cubbies, and removing stray socks and bikini bottoms from the clotheslines. As the returning counselors explained, Visitors’ Day meant the girls having free time with the boys while the adults socialized, getting to leave camp, enjoying a meal beyond the dining hall, and most significant, it meant the counselors relinquishing their power for one day to the higher powers: the girls’ parents.
Mo put a wake-up mix in the CD player at seven-fifteen. She’d made dozens of these mixes before coming to camp and agonized over the song choices. Is this song still popular, or is it overdone now? Is this one only big in England, or do they like it in America too? Unlike on most mornings, today she didn’t need to raise the volume at the second song to get the girls out of bed. By the end of the first track, they were already beelining toward the showers in their towels and flip-flops. She sat on the wooden step at the entrance to the head tent, where she and Nell slept, and watched the procession unfold.
Sheera, one of Mo’s favorite campers, stopped in front of the head tent on her way to the showers.
“Mornin’, Mo,” she said, swinging her shower caddy.
“Good morning, Sheera.”
“Mo, what are you going to do while we’re all with our visitors today?”
“I’ll be down with the horses. Helping Nell.”
“Are you going to watch us ride?”
“I hope so,” Mo said. “Also, when all of you are having fun outside camp, I’ll probably rummage through your trunks and eat your new snacks.”
“Mo!” Sheera opened her mouth in faux shock. “Appalling!”
“Where did you learn such big words?”
Sheera rolled her eyes. “My daddy’s coming today,” she said. “He’s bringing me Starbursts and baby 3 Musketeers. Huge bags of them.” She looked hard at Mo. “I’m locking my trunk.” She turned on her heels and sauntered toward the showers.
Mo liked that Sheera could joke with her; the rest of them treated her like she was too old to be fun.