I look at her then and notice she’s wearing makeup on her usually bare face. Her lashes are coated in mascara and her lips are bubblegum pink. Her dirty blonde hair is different, too. Free from its usual ponytail, blown out with a little wave.
“Megan Marie Allen, do you have adate?” I ask.
Meg releases me and looks a little embarrassed. “I’m spending time with Levin,” she says. running her fingers through her hair. “After... you know what he saw.” She clucks her tongue. “We talked a lot today, that’s all.”
“Glad he has you,” I say, and mean it. I don’t want to imagine what it was like to find Heller. To hold his lifeless body and realize what had happened.
Levin must have been so scared.
But I can’t think about that now or I’ll lose it.
I peek out the window and see streams of counselors leaving their cabins, dressed in dark hoodies and sweatpants. They carry backpacks full of marshmallows and graham crackers, unmarked bottles, and portable speakers. Their laughter floats through the air and a calm settles over me.
I shrug off Jordan’s comments, the taunting from the boys at the vigil. I know the truth: Camp is safe. It’s where I belong. It will make everything better.
“I’ll go to the bonfire.”
“That’s the golden girl I know. Come on then.”
I unzip Imo’s black dress and pull on sweats, shoving my head through my coziest Alpine Lake lifeguard hoodie. I stuff my feet in thick socks and sneakers and spray heavy-duty bug spray all over.
“Ready,” I say.
Meg throws an arm around me and practically pushes me out of the cabin.
The air is cold and crisp and I can smell muck and algae and sand floating from the lake through the night wind. It mingles with smoke coming from the bonfire. It smells like possibilities. Like summer.
“Come on, now.” Meg pulls me toward the boys’ side of the camp, where the cabins are closer to each other, tightly packed beneath a grove of weeping willows. It’s shadier over here, hidden. That’s why we always went to the boys’ cabins on raids. It was harder to get caught.
As we get closer, I can hear laughter breaking through the trees. Someone strums an acoustic guitar and there’s a nervous, kinetic energy bouncing in the sky. It’s the final night of maintenance week, the last night it’s just us before the campers get here. Spirits are high. Everyone is on fire, light, like they’ve finally shed the skin they came with only days before. They don’t care that a boy died on camp. They didn’t know Heller.
I clench my jaw. I’m jealous of them all.
“There you are!” Imo bounces toward me and wraps me in a fierce, urgent hug, nuzzling her nose into my hair. “I practically had to fight off that group of Scots to save this for you.” She pressesone of Christina’s cookies, wrapped in a napkin, into the pocket of my sweatshirt.
“Im,” I say, choking on her name. Tears prick my eyes.
She pulls back and looks at me, her face worried. “That bad, huh?”
I nod.
“You’re safe here,” she says. “We got you.” Then she turns around to the bonfire assembled in the middle of the group . “Who here loves Goldie Easton?” she yells, her voice lighter, higher.
A chorus of cheers rings through the night and people stand, holding out beer cans and plastic cups like they’re making a toast. They all sit on logs arranged in a circle and the flames dance across their faces.
“Have a drink.” Levin tosses me a slim can of cheap sparkling wine. His eyes are sunken into his head and his shoulders are hunched. Guess that’s what happens when you find a dead body.
“Aren’t you famously anti–underage drinking?” Last summer he had one of his counselors fired for coming back wasted and throwing up on one of the kids after a night off. Though... that was probably the right call.
Levin shrugs. “Don’t think it really matters right now.” He takes a swig from a red cup and smacks his lips. Levin doesn’t say anything else, but he keeps looking at me, like he wants to.
There are so many questions I want to ask.
How did Heller look when you pulled him out of the water?
How did he feel?
What was he wearing?
