—
It was late. Counselors were walking out of the staff lodge and back to their sections, some looking curiously at Mo and Nell as they passed. Nell was sure that the counselors gossiped about them because they hadn’t made any other friends.
“Here,” Mo said, and pulled a handful of Laffy Taffys out of her pocket, placing them on the grass in front of them.
Nell unwrapped a yellow one, stuck the candy in her mouth, and read the joke on the inside of the wrapper with the light from her mini LED.
“What did the finger say to the thumb?” Nell asked.
“What?”
“I’m in glove with you.”
Sticky pieces of fake, plasticky banana lodged themselves in her molars.
“I’ve never asked,” Mo said. “Did you leave anyone back home?”
“Leave anyone?”
“You know, like a boyfriend,” Mo said. “Or girlfriend,” she added. This had been, up until then, the unspoken thing. Who do we like? Does it matter?
Nell chewed hard. “Free as a bird.”
“Same here,” Mo said.
Nell unwrapped a strawberry Laffy Taffy. “What’s brown and sticky?”
“A pile of shit?”
“Close,” Nell said. “A stick.”
Nell had not slept with anyone at camp, and neither had Mo. Becca and Logan had been sneaking into the vacant bunk rooms in the nurse’s office for six consecutive evenings. Steph and Brett had apparently fucked in the pool house around two the night before. Four weeks into camp and they had all regressed completely—like they had to act the way the kids did, like they were good only for gossiping and pushing boundaries in the most predictable of ways.
—
The last weeks of the semester, just before Christmas, most girls spent their nights in the library studying for exams. Nell spent hers in the stacks. It was too cold by then to meet in the stables.
She had an appointment with a blond second year late one night in the poetry stacks, authors A–D. The girl was quiet and jumpy, as they always were. Nell performed what was rote by then, the intimacies, if she could even call them that.
The girl’s eyes were shut so tight, presumably to help her forget where she was and whom she was with. Nell looked at the book spines while her hand worked. Baudelaire. Bishop. Blake. Just as the girl’s back started to arch and she started to make the sounds that signaled she was nearing the end, a soft and damp object grazed Nell’s shoulder and landed in her lap.
The blond girl opened her eyes and looked down at Nell’s lap, her face turned ashen. She stood up fast, straightened her skirt, and ran away from Nell, out of the aisle and out of the library.
Nell picked the thing up by its cotton string. It was soaked in blood, still wet. As she looked up, an anonymous hand launched a paper airplane over the bookshelf. She caught it before it landed, staining the paper with the blood on her fingers, and opened it.
“A gift for Red,” it said, “who loves pussy more than anyone we know.”
—
Nell looked at her watch. “We should be getting back.”
Mo was focusing on Nell intently now; she had this crazy look in her eyes and the batting eyelashes of a girl who didn’t know how to flirt. As they walked up the hill to their section, Mo stayed close and let the sides of their pinkies brush against each other, the sides of their knees.
When they got to their tent, Mo sat on the edge of her bed.
“Do you want to sleep in my bunk tonight?” she asked.
Of course, Nell did. She would be lying if she said she hadn’t often thought about the convenience of their living in the same tent and was partly surprised that she hadn’t propositioned Mo much earlier in the summer. But something had always stopped her: this understanding that, despite being much older than Nell, Mo was younger in so many ways. She was inexperienced and na?ve. She needed a teacher.
“No, thank you,” Nell said. “I’m really tired.”
And they lay in their respective bunks, alone.
That morning, Nell had allowed herself to hook up with Mo—she too had been caught up in the drama and the danger of Sheera’s fall. And she had wanted Mo. But something about Mo’s continual closeness now, her transparent desire for intimacy, made Nell recoil. She didn’t want to have to get so close to just be the teacher again, this champion for confused girls. For them, it was a game, an experiment. But for her, it was all too real.
The silence settled uneasily between them.
“I don’t know what you think about me,” Nell said some minutes later—just for good measure, just to get her point across clearly. “But whatever it is, it’s wrong.”
She thought she heard Mo sniffling later that night—it was likely she was crying. Nell herself had trouble sleeping; she felt cruel pushing away her only friend there. But it needed to be done.
—
Early in the morning she left the tent and called her mother on Skype in the computer lab.
“Hello?” Her mother was looking closely into the webcam that Nell had installed on the home computer before she left. She searched Nell’s pixelated image on the other end as if in disbelief that such technology—the ability to see her daughter in real time across the Atlantic Ocean—was possible.
“Hi, Mum,” Nell said. She’d Skyped with her mother only once earlier in the summer, even though she’d originally promised that she would a few times a week.
“I was just sitting down to lunch.” Her mother, delighted, lifted up a salad and a fork to the camera. But when she put the bowl back down and said, “So what’s going on over there?” her face got stuck, mouth ajar and fork aloft.
“Mum?”
The sound came across in unrecognizable tidbits and bleeps, and then those cut out too.
“Mum, they killed a horse last night,” Nell said.
Now her mother’s voice moved in super, undecipherable speed, catching up. Then it stopped. Her face began to move again, peering too closely into the camera.
“Nell? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Nell?”
The face froze again, up close, imploring.
“They killed a horse last night,” Nell repeated to her mother’s motionless, expectant expression.
10
The staff lodge was a decrepit place that hadn’t been refurbished in at least twenty-five years. The felt was coming up at the corners of the pool table downstairs, its wooden sides splintering, and the vending machines were unplugged and unstocked. There were a few plastic tables and folding chairs where the counselors played poker and drinking games, though they never had a full deck of cards to work with. Upstairs, stuffing burst from the seams of secondhand couches.
The counselors cheered when Jack walked in. One of them offered him a Coors Light. He sat down next to Yonatan at the card table and played a couple hands of five-card draw. There was only one air conditioner in the lodge, on the bottom floor next to one of the card tables, and though most evenings grew cool enough for open windows to suffice, that night was so hot that the counselors took turns crowding around the AC.