It’s now two weeks until the Cross Camp game, and our kids are making daisy chains.
I kid you not. As we bring out the cones and nets, Benny gives us a confused shrug from where he stands with the entire group of them, all sitting in the grass, even chaos child Josh, linking together daisies like they’ve got rent to pay.
‘Guys!’ Rod puts his goal nets down and blows his whistle, two sharp tweets. ‘What is this?’
Lyla and the middle-school entourage, Stephanie and Mavis, give us pointed looks. They have makeup on in eighty-degree outdoor weather, these girls, all sparkly eyeshadow and glossy lips. ‘Um, you two would know,’ Lyla says with all the sass in her body.
Rod and I exchange a look of ‘we were not made aware.’ Iplant a hand on my hip. ‘I’m afraid we definitely don’t know, miss girl.’
‘Benny?’ Rod tries. He just throws his hands up in surrender.
‘It’s thecamp wedding,’ emphasizes Mavis, a separate moment in time dedicated to each syllable.
‘Girl, you are in the sixth grade. You know y’all are way too young to get married.’ I stab an incriminating finger her way and totally pretend my head isn’t pounding when I do so. ‘No camp wedding will be happening today.’
‘It’s notourcamp wedding,’ Stephanie corrects me with a royal dose of stink eye. ‘It’syours.’
WHAT.
I’m at a loss for words, so I turn to Rod, but he’s not helping. He tries to talk but words don’t come out, making him look a little too much like a fish out of water. I look to Benny next. Our boss just tugs awkwardly at his blue tie-dyed shirt.
‘Isn’t there some policy against this?’ Both of my hands are now on my hips. If Rod won’t stay on the safe side of the line we seemingly drew, I’ll have to – even if there’s a part of me that screams otherwise.
‘Uh, it usually happens with the kids.’ Benny gestures to the campers with a helpless arm. ‘Coaches … We’ve never really had—’
‘Come on!’ Lyla snaps her fingers, as if she’s a cranky nine-to-fiver with a caffeine addiction. ‘We need to know already!’
Rod and I exchange our second weird look of the day. His face says the same thing I feel: This is not very ‘summer fling’ of us. But whoever came up with the textbook definition of ‘summer fling’ evidently didn’t go to summer camp. Shit justseems to happen here (usually on account of the kids) and we take it in our stride.
With a gentle tug of Rod’s arm, I pull him out of earshot of our campers. ‘We definitely do not have to do this.’
‘We definitely don’t,’ he agrees. What he doesn’t say is what I pick up, though. His eyes search mine, as if for signs of a risk, of a willingness to jump in blindfolded. ‘Lyla seems pretty determined, though.’
‘HURRY UP!’ multiple girls’ voices screech from behind us, followed by the grumbles and ‘Aw, man’s of boys clearly unhappy with their assigned daisy-chain roles.
‘Screw it.’ Some stupid force of nature forces words out of my mouth. Wait, what? ‘I’ll do it.’
Rod blinks. He swallows hard, then he manages to eke out a laugh. ‘Sure. The kids will get a kick out of it.’
‘We’ll do it—’
No sooner have I turned to the girls and said the words that I feel three sets of sparkly-nail-polished hands grip my wrists and whisk me away across the field, towards the shade of the clustered trees in the right corner. I shoot Rod a ‘save me’ plea with my eyes. He just rolls his eyes and mouths, ‘Good luck.’ He proceeds to lean down to the campers with a stern, ‘And this had better be over in the span of half an hour, is that clear?’
Lyla is running on all cylinders. Another gaggle of girls rushes up to us. One of them – Olivia – holds what I believe is a plastic crown purchased via ticket currency from the nearest arcade, painted in silver with a big fat purple heart gem in the middle.
‘For you,’ Olivia says sternly.
I lower my head with an ‘okay’ wrapped in a chuckle, and she pops the thing on my head. Of course, it doesn’t completelyfit, perched more than anything else, but I rise with a big smile. ‘How’s it look?’
‘Good.’ Stephanie grins, dare I say, evilly? No, it’s that scheming middle-schoolgirl face. The face you make when you set your best friend up with the guy she’s been eyeing up in class all year. ‘I know you know why we’re having this camp wedding.’
I arch an eyebrow as the majority of the girls run off to the flower bushes behind the trees, leaving me with Stephanie and Lyla. ‘Why might that be?’
‘We’re done with theinsufferableflirting between you and Coach Rod,’ Lyla says with a glance up and down that feels like an arrow to the chest. Yikes. Pre-teenage judgement stings.
My jaw, for the record, nearly falls to the ground. I’d thought we had done a pretty good job keeping everything neat and tied away with a bow. Honestly, I should’ve known better working with this many kids. They tend to find out. ‘We aren’t—’
‘You are.’ Stephanie points right at me with narrowed, incriminating eyes that contrast jarringly with her curly blonde hair tied by a pink scrunchie. ‘We see the way you look at each other. Like, every movie ever. Like …’
