“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I reply.
Somehow, I wind up teaching him the melody line of “Heart and Soul.” He picks it up quickly for someone who’s never played piano.
“This is maddening,” I tell him with a laugh. “You’re such a fast learner!”
“Well, you’re good at explaining it. Plus, I can already read music. But also . . .” He finds a half-step interval and plays it, a trill. He sounds out the first measure of Für Elise—slowly, and in the wrong key. Still. “I am Beethoven.”
The night after, he brings his trumpet.
“You have to try it,” he insists, holding it out to me.
“I’ve never even touched a brass instrument.” But I take it from him, cool metal smooth beneath my fingers.
“Well, now you have! And I didn’t say you had to be good. Just try it.”
“Are you sure?” I hold the silver mouthpiece near my lips. It feels strangely intimate, to use another musician’s instrument. “You don’t mind my germs?”
Oh, cute, self. Honestly.
“We’re camp counselors, Luce. I think we’ve got all the same germs at this point.” I glance down, surprised that he’d call me that. It’s nice, the familiarity. “Okay, so you want to take a big breath, from deep down, and buzz your lips.”
When I try this, the trumpet makes no sound. “I’m a prodigy! Don’t be jealous.”
“Lips tighter.” He demonstrates, away from the mouthpiece. I attempt to do the same, my lips vibrating. We’re sitting across from each other—him on the edge of the coffee table, me on the couch—basically just making middle-school fart noises. It hits us both at the same time, and we nearly fall over laughing.
By week’s end, I get some sounds out. And not just laughter.
***
On Friday night, Jones holds the bottle in one hand. He’s sitting on a fallen log, elbows propped on his knees. Anna leans against his leg from her spot on the red tartan blanket. I wish I could see Jones’s eyes, but his gaze is focused, glasses reflecting the bonfire.
“Low.” There is no laughter in his voice. “JJ’s bio mom pulling him out of camp.”
We add murmurs of agreement and grunts of anger as he takes a long swig. His heavy sigh carries across the circle, over the snapping flames.
“High.” He lifts the bottle and his eyes to me. It’s not the grin that crosses his mouth but something quieter—unspoken and shared. “Lucy.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On Monday, instead of a morning chore, the 3A girls congregate around the bags of clean, folded laundry in our cabin.
“Once you’re in sixth grade, you do your own laundry,” Nadia informs the other girls. All three of us counselors are gently pulling out stacks, trying not to mess them up. “Jones told me. There’s a launder-mat in town, and you get to go, and while it’s washing your clothes, you hang out at the park or go look in the shops.”
Simmons and I exchange glances, too stricken with her cute enthusiasm to tell her it’s “Laundromat.”
“Okay,” Simmons says. “We’ll dole everything out. Make a nice stack in front of you, and when we’re done, you’ll put everything away neatly on your shelf. Anything without a label, we’ll figure out at the end.”
We pass out polka-dot dresses, thin-striped cotton leggings, soft shorts, and T-shirts with every cartoon character under the sun. It’s one thing to see the girls every day, but another to see all their clothes at once. The designs are colorful, patterned, joyous. I tend to like simple outfits, but there’s something fun about childhood clothes that I miss.
“Sofia,” Simmons says, handing over a loose denim dress with a string dangling. She pulls it back to examine the sagging hem. “Uh-oh.”
“It was like that,” Sofia says. “It’s not the launder-mat’s fault.”
“That’s okay.” Simmons leans into her, winking. “I can fix it.”
Sofia perks up. “You can?”
“Yep. With needle and thread. You can even watch me do it later.”
I examine the label on a pair of denim shorts with a white star pattern: T. Anderson.
“Thuy again,” I say, reaching out to hand them over. She accepts them without a word or smile, so I keep hunting for clues. All her clothes seem particularly nice—quality fabrics still bright in color.
“Those are cool shorts,” I say. “Did you pick them out?”
She nods her head. Simmons shoots me a sympathetic look, because she’s been trying too. Thuy does talk—a yes, please or no, thank you. She has a good appetite and seems to brighten up during crafts and cooking class. Sometimes she starts getting really into games; she loved hula-hooping. But it’s like she catches herself, and then she returns to a neutral facial expression.
On our way to lunch, Simmons sidles up to me. “It was a good try, earlier.”
She nods toward Thuy, who is walking ahead of us and listening to Brooklyn and Maya chatter. Saying nothing. “Do you think it’s time?”
We’ve been debating when we’ll ask Rhea for help. Rhea knows most campers’ stories, as they’re often referred by her network of psychiatrist friends. There’s doctor-patient confidentiality, of course, but a lot of the parents and guardians disclose what’s going on so we can help. Rhea prefers that we let the kids tell us in their own time, but I’m about ready to cave.
Simmons sighs, blowing a tight curl off her forehead. “Let’s give it till the end of the week. I want to read them a special story and see if it helps at all.”
“A special story?”
“Yeah, about a fox and a wolf. It can help with—”
“?‘Posy and the Dreaming Tree’?” The only story I know with both a fox and a wolf.
She turns to me fully. “Yeah! How’d you know that?”
“It was one of my favorite fables when I was little.”
Her frown is not displeasure, just genuine confusion. “Huh. I thought it was only a Daybreak thing.”
“Nope.” My mom told me the story some nights before she left for an overnight shift at the hospital. She’d add new details here and there, mixing it up for me. I even begged for fox pajamas one year, which Santa delivered on.
“Huh.” Simmons tilts her head thoughtfully. “So you’ve seen our dreaming tree?”
In the story, Posy finds a tree that grows stars instead of leaves. She lies beneath it and dreams of what she wants for her life. And the tree hears her. Or so I always believed. “You have a . . . dreaming tree?”
“Yeah. Kind of. Around the back of the lodge, near the shed.”
“Seriously?” She nods, looking a little pleased at my awe.
When Thuy sits across from me at lunch, I take another shot. I talk about my mom and dad a little bit, trying to engage the others. Finally, I look right at her. “Thuy, who do you live with at home?”
“Mommy Sheila and Daddy Pete.” She doesn’t look up from her potato salad.