Sarah had gone from having the smallest chest in their section of girls to the largest over the course of one year. It was only Sarah’s body that had changed; her face remained more or less the same, so she looked like a little girl with a woman’s body, and she had the confusing mix of affectations to match: with boys, the prolonged glances and light touches of a young woman who had just learned of her power, the sudden confidence and claiming of responsibility that came with having to wear bras and change tampons. But she still had girlish tendencies, like the fetishizing of celebrities (Zac Efron was a favorite, and they had tacked up posters of him in the bathroom cabin) and the bouts of homesickness and the fun that came with making skits or playing four square just with the girls, though none of them ever wanted to admit that they often had more fun on single-sex activity nights than they did during the coeds.
On the last night of camp, all the girls from all the age sections made a campfire down by the lake. They sat around it in a “Kumbaya” sort of way with their blankets and their flashlights and their snacks. They sang the same sappy hippie songs every year and mourned the end of the summer and the friendships that would surely fade.
When Helen went to Sarah’s house during the school year, they would stay up late, watch R-rated movies, and steal Bud Lights from the back of the fridge. Sarah was an only child, but her parents never seemed to know where she was, what she was doing, and whom she was doing it with. Mr. and Mrs. Larkin implicitly trusted Sarah’s parents, who were white and well dressed and inhabited a large, clean home. But the specialness of Helen and Sarah’s relationship was never as special when not surrounded by other girls they could exclude or by the lush, endless trails and woods of Camp Marigold. Watching Wedding Crashers with a Bud Light buzz lost its luster after the third time they saw the movie, but getting lost in the forest at night would always be exciting.
By the first chorus of “The Circle Game” (“We can’t return. We can only look behind from where we came”), Helen and Sarah were clutching each other’s hands and letting the tears fall unabashedly down their faces. At these campfires, it wasn’t about fighting your tears; in fact, it was the opposite. The more you cried, the more you cared. Tears were a marker of how feminine, how much of a girl you were.
Fiona led the girls from her tent in singing “In My Life” by the Beatles. Fiona never cried at these things. In two weeks, she would go back to college, and she’d forget all about this summer.
Another group sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” with the sign language that corresponded to the lyrics.
When they all had exhausted their sentimental-song repertoire, Helen’s favorite tradition began: the floating wishes. Each girl was given a paper lantern with a votive candle inside it. As each candle was lit, the girl made a silent wish, then sent the lantern out into the lake where, legend had it, her wish would materialize and eventually come true. When all the candles were lit, the lake glittered with the golden-yellow wishes, floating aimlessly as they burned.
—
“I’m not done with camp,” Helen whispered to Sarah that night in their bunks.
“What do you mean?” Sarah said.
Helen snuck out ten minutes before Sarah did; they met down at the stables. Without saying anything, Helen hopped over the fence and into the horse arena. Sarah didn’t have any choice but to follow.
“Isn’t the barn locked?” Sarah whispered.
Helen wasn’t sure how it was going to go, but in fact, the barn door had been left open, and she acted as if she’d known this all along. Truthfully, if she had known earlier that the barn was never locked, she would have snuck out to ride earlier in the summer.
She opened Dandelion’s stall and then Josie’s. Sarah could ride Fiona’s horse.
They saddled the horses in the dark and crept out into the night. They trotted behind the performing arts building, down the hill to the lakeshore. The paper lanterns were still burning.
“Look,” Helen said. “Our wishes.”
They kept going along the lakeshore until they got to the other side. When they were in a desolate enough area, they turned their electric lanterns on and continued to cross through the trails that traversed camp bounds and began in the foothills of the Berkshires. They stayed up in those hills for an hour or so, climbing up the narrow pathways between the trees.
“Do you know where we are?” Sarah asked, sounding worried.
“Of course,” Helen said, and she did. This wasn’t her first time in this part of the woods; earlier in the summer, she and Mikey had hiked up there one night, just to talk.
Finally, Helen suggested they take a break. They hitched the horses to a tree and then sat on a rock to drink from their water bottles.
“What was your favorite thing about the summer?” Sarah asked her friend.
“Color wars,” Helen said. “No question.”
“That’s a good one.”
Helen took another sip of water. It was a cool night, but she was warm from the ride, and the breeze felt good on her arms. “What was yours?”
Sarah was silent for a moment, thinking. “Well,” she said, giggling, “I think it would have to be hooking up with Danny.”
“What?” Helen swatted her friend on the arm. “You didn’t tell me.”
“He told me to keep it a secret,” she said. “But the summer’s over, so, whatever.”
“Why’d you have to keep it a secret?” Helen asked.
The wind was getting stronger; a heavy gust came over the mountains, and Helen gathered her arms around herself.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sarah said.
Helen was silent.
“Okay, I’m lying,” Sarah said. “It’s because we did it.”
“You did it?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “It was kinda fun.”
“Why wouldn’t you be allowed to tell me that?”
“Well,” Sarah said, “I didn’t want to do it at first. But then he convinced me.”
Helen could hear a rustling sound from farther away, a crunching on the forest floor.
“I was worried that if we were gonna do it, he would go and tell people about it after. So he assured me that wasn’t the case.”
“I’m not just people.”
“But then we made a pact not to say anything, because fair is fair, you know?”
“Do you hear that?” Helen said.
“What?”
She could hear the rustling growing closer, and then she saw two beady eyes, almost at ground level, glaring at them.
Sarah shrieked and jumped off the rock. “What is that?” she shouted.
“Calm down,” Helen said, glancing over at the horses to make sure they weren’t startled. “It’s just a raccoon.”
The raccoon, scared too, turned around and scurried back into the forest, its gray and wiry tail disappearing into the bushes.
“Let’s go,” Sarah said. “I don’t want to know what other sorts of crawly creatures are up here.”
They went back to camp the way they came, down the foothills toward the other side of the lake. When they got back to the lakeshore, all the candles had burned out, and the lake just looked like it was littered with wax paper bags.
—
Back at the stables, they put the horses in their stalls and left the barn unlocked.
“That was fun,” Sarah said, draping her arm over Helen’s shoulders. It wasn’t as fun for Helen as she had thought it was going to be. The raccoon and Sarah’s weird confession had cut it all short. Helen couldn’t explain why, but she felt uneasy now about Danny, about the way he had told Sarah to keep things between them a secret.
“You okay?” Sarah said, stopping and turning to her friend. Helen was starting to get that dizzy feeling again, the one she’d had with Marla in the woods back in the spring, right before she’d fainted.
“I’m fine,” she said, “just tired,” and they walked themselves up to their bunks, tucked themselves in, and whispered good night.