She sometimes wished she had RJ’s logical approach to life; it seemed much simpler than being bogged down by constant feelings. On paper, selling the camp was the right thing to do for her family. If it were up to simple practicality, like her father and brother seemed to think, it would be an easy choice. But being in the same cabin that her mother had spent the last twenty years making a home, seeing shades of her in every acre of woods, it felt impossible to say goodbye.
She didn’t know how long she sat like that, only that it was Alice who eventually found her. She was covered head to toe in dirt, with a cobweb stuck in her ponytail, but, despite the mess, she was grinning wildly.
‘You alright?’ she asked, wiping her hands on her T-shirt and leaving two dark trails in their wake.
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ Briar grumbled, annoyed that Alice seemed to be having a better time than her despite her attempts at sabotage. Alice looked down at herself and shrugged.
‘Oh, I was cleaning out the boathouse,’ she said, her face lighting up again. ‘There was an interesting variety of shelf mushrooms growing off one of the bows –Laetiporus sulphureus– my first time seeing it in the wild! It was an incredible specimen; the color was so rich…’ She visibly collected herself. ‘Anyway, I was just coming in to grab my notebook and sketch it.’
Briar stared at her. It was confusing that this woman who had felt so elusive for so many years, whose life Briar only knew about through social media, could be so similar to the girl she had once loved. This Alice didn’tfeeldifferent, and it would be so simple for Briar to let herself slip back into the comfort of their old dynamic. Being friends might even be easier this time around, since Briar knew better than to fall for her again.
But then came her common sense, telling her that no matter how nice it would be to let Alice fix her life, she’d still leave it in ruins.
‘God, you’re a nerd.’
Alice shrugged again and walked into their bedroom. Briar pulled herself off the floor, not wanting to still be there when Alice returned.
Briar managed to avoid Alice for the rest of the day, volunteering to help Sierra sort through art supplies in the art cabin. She spent nearly an hour testing out every single marker, writingfuckorshitorgoddammitover and over again in vibrant colors. It was juvenile, but it made her feel better. Sierra said it reminded her of a modern art piece she’d seen in a San Francisco gallery and asked to keep it when Briar was finished.
‘So,’ Sierra started, after they had sat in silence for quite some time, ‘how’s it going?’
‘Oh, you know,’ Briar said, tracing over a particularly fancyF. ‘Not great.’
Sierra nodded. ‘Yeah.’
Briar stopped writing. ‘I just don’t get what Alice is doing here, you know?’
‘Oh.’ Sierra blinked at her. ‘Okay, sure, let’s talk aboutthat.’
‘This girl shows up after a decade of silence. Like, not even a word when my mom got cancer, and now all of a sudden she’s here. We’re sharing a bedroom. And it’s soweird,like living with an alien who’s wearing my best friend’s face.’
Sierra shrugged. ‘At least she’s helping, right?’
A small, childish part of Briar wanted to refute her. ‘Yeah, she is,’ she sighed instead, putting down her pen and scrubbing a hand across her face. ‘I’m no good at this.’
‘At what?’ Sierra asked, cocking her head.
Briar chewed on the inside of her cheek, not wanting to talk about it. But she had been the one to bring it up in the first place.
‘Being camp director. I hate logistics and have no attention to detail, and that’s all this job is. And my mom made it look so easy. Alice makes it look so easy,’ she said.
It was hard for Briar to admit that Alice was better than her, especially at something that her mom had expected her to be able to handle on her own. Briar had spent years feeling like she was disappointing her mom when she didn’t go back to college, and she wished this one thing would just come as naturally to her as it seemed to for Alice.
‘Your mom did this for twenty years,’ Sierra reminded her. ‘Cut yourself some slack.’
Briar pursed her lips, not willing to concede. But she didn’t want to think about her mother and how she wasn’t measuring up to her expectations. She’d rather focus on the problems she could control.
‘And now, Alice is a lesbian,’ Briar said, deftly changing the subject.
Sierra gave her a look that made her flush. ‘I think she’s been a lesbian for a while.’
‘Right, yeah, but now she’s a lesbianhere.’
Briar thought back to the night before, when she’d walked in as Alice was getting out of the shower, padding around their bedroom in nothing but a towel. Briar had never turned around so fast in her life. The smell of lavender and Alice’s shampoo had lulled her to sleep that night, the image of Alice’s wet, bare shoulders burned into her retinas.
‘You never struck me as a homophobe,’ Sierra joked.
Briar wasn’t doing a good job of explaining what she meant, that the Alice from high school – the one with the tennis skirts, perfect hair, jock boyfriend – had been completely untouchable in her eyes. She’d spent years in love with a girl she could never have and, suddenly, that girl was sleeping in her room. And she still couldn’t have her, but for completely different reasons.
