Fiona asked her section leader if she could leave to make a phone call in the office. They weren’t allowed to use their cellphones at camp, but Rachel wasn’t at camp, and hers might be charged and on by now. Fiona went to the front desk and dialed the number she knew by heart, but it went straight to voicemail.
All day, rumors swirled around the camp: “I heard they were skinny-dipping in the lake.” “I heard they left camp when they weren’t supposed to, and Jack found them ordering Chicken McNuggets at the McDonald’s in Salisbury.” “I heard they were caught hooking up in the backseat of someone else’s car.”
Fiona taught riding all afternoon as if she were floating on a cloud above the camp. She watched the girls and gave them orders, but the words felt disconnected from her. All she could think of was the theories about Rachel. Any of them were possible.
When the day was over, Fiona took the saddles off all the horses and fed them again. The campers buzzed at flag lowering. She could sense a seriousness in Jack as he made his evening announcements. At dinner, she picked at the salad on her plastic plate, surprised to find she didn’t have much of an appetite.
At bedtime, she tucked her girls into their bunks.
“Fiona?” asked Billie, who was one of the youngest girls.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“Can I sing us a bedtime song?”
“You want to sing for us?”
“Yeah,” Billie said. “I learned it in music class today.”
“Does everyone want a bedtime song?”
Yes! the girls said. Of course we do! Which was how it came to be that Fiona cried silently in her tent of nine-year-olds while Billie sang, like a prescient little angel, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”
—
At the staff lodge that night, Fiona learned the truth: They were caught. In the woods. They were fucking. Jack had found them.
“But were they obvious?”
“How can you not be obvious when you’re fucking like animals?”
“But how did he find them so late and in the dark?”
“Who cares? Sounds like they were asking for it.”
It felt odd to be at the staff lodge without Rachel, as if Fiona were suddenly naked and on display. She was deeply embarrassed and hurt that she wasn’t the one who had known what had happened first.
“Have you talked to her?” people kept asking.
Fiona lied and said yes. She had.
“How is she?”
“She’s fine,” Fiona told them.
She smoked more than usual that night. She sat in a lounge chair high and watched everyone. Sometimes the right high made her careless and free. This one felt like a swirl of uneasy existential dread. She watched Yonatan pinch Steph and Becca make out with Logan and Nell drink a beer alone, and it was like watching all these people who seemed to know, so much better than Fiona, how to be alive. They were all playing their roles perfectly; weaving in and out of groups seamlessly; saying the right things, making the right quips, at the right times, as if they were performing just for her as an example of What She’s Done Wrong. It felt so at odds with her own existence, fraught with that insecurity that she didn’t get it, didn’t ever know the right thing to say or do in a situation, when it seemed like everyone else did.
And then she remembered! Oh God, that memory. It pricked right at the center of her chest. It was earlier in the summer, on their first day off, the night when they got kicked out of the Super 8. She had been drunk and peeing, and she’d heard Rachel and Chad and Yonatan and Steph talking shit about her.
Chad had called her a “narc.” Rachel had said, in response, something like, “Yeah, but she has a car.”
How the fuck had Fiona forgotten that memory?
She stood, too high and faltering on her feet. Yonatan was talking closely to Steph. Fiona tapped him on the shoulder.
He turned around and beamed at her. “Well, hello, Miss Fiona.”
“I am not a narc,” she said.
Steph looked up at Yonatan with a grin.
“What?” Yonatan said.
“I said. I. Am. Not. A. Narc.”
“A narc?” Yonatan played with the tab on his can of Coors Light. “What’s a narc?”
“It’s, like, someone who’s kind of lame and who tells on people,” Steph explained to him.
“Yeah,” Fiona said. “That. That’s what you guys called me.”
“I don’t know what—”
“At the Super 8,” Fiona said. “I heard you.” She shoved Yonatan now, and he stumbled backward a few steps, not from force but from surprise. “I heard you!”
Now a crowd was forming around them. Steph put her arm on Fiona’s shoulder. “Fee, I know you’re upset that Rachel’s gone, but you don’t have to go making up things.”
“No.” Fiona pushed Steph’s hand away. “Don’t call me Fee.”
Jack approached the commotion.
“Maybe someone should walk you up to your bunk, Fiona,” he said. “You seem a tad worn out.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
She stormed out of the staff lodge anyway and up to her section without her flashlight. She got to her tent and opened the flaps. Inside, it was quiet. Billie was asleep in the bunk above Fiona’s.
Fiona touched the top of the girl’s head.
“Billie,” Fiona said quietly, stroking the child’s hair. “Billie.”
The girl whimpered.
“Billie, can you sing that song again?” Fiona asked.
“What?” the girl asked, still half-asleep.
“That song. The lonely song.”
“Do I have to?” Billie asked.
“Yes, sweetie,” Fiona said. “You have to.”
12
By the eighth and final week of camp, Helen still had not gotten her period, which was just fine with her.
That last week was always a sad one for Helen. Camp was so much better than her life at home and her boring house and her boring friends, especially now that Marla was gone. But the summer had been a good one. She had been a color wars captain, and her team had won. She had kissed Mikey Bombowski underneath an oak tree. She had gotten really good at waterskiing. Sarah had suddenly become mischievous and brought pot that summer, and they had smoked it in the woods behind their tent at night without getting caught. They spent the following two hours giggling on a mossy log.