Ava squeals and plants wet, sloppy kisses on my forehead and my cheeks while Imogen squeezes me to her chest. I hold them tight, feeling their bodies mold around mine, remembering how much we’ve grown since we first met. My stomach settles. Nothing has changed.
They release me in a fit of giggles and Ava cups my chin with both her hands. “I’ve never been happier to see you, my golden girl,” she says. Her blue eyes are bright and her cheekbones are high. Her mom wanted her to model, but Ava always said she’d rather die than spend her free time hanging out with a bunch of handsy old guys looking at her every fold. When we finally disentangle ourselves, I notice a crowd is standing around us, watching.
“Never could break these three up!” a woman says in a British accent. I look up to find Meg, who taught archery last summer, rolling her eyes. She has pale, ruddy skin and a tiny gap between her front teeth, which you can only see when she’s laughing for real, like she’s doing right now. Meg’s a few years older than us and was our counselor in our final year as campers. She quickly became my favorite since she shared the Welsh cakes her grandmother sent over from the UK and never told on us when we snuck out for a midnight raid to the boys’ cabins.
Last summer, she was on-again, off-again with Ray Levin, the guy who runs the waterfront, and at the end of camp, she moved to New York to be with him and work at a startup. But last I heard, they broke up and she had to head back home to a shittybartending job where London financiers grabbed her ass without permission.
“Easton, I’m in Bloodroot with you!” Meg says, throwing her bag over her shoulder. “Got promoted to group leader this year, so that makes me your boss.” She sticks out her tongue and wiggles it in my direction.
Imogen grabs my hand. “Wait, you’re in Bloodroot? Jealous!”
“Got any intel about us?” Ava asks.
“Ramblers,” I say, almost breathless. “We’re all next to each other.”
“I knew they’d make it work.” Ava pushes herself to stand. She reaches out her hands and we both take them, pulling ourselves up. “I mean, they had to, after I put in a phone call last month.”
“You did not.” Imogen laughs. I follow them to the bag drop and pick up Ava’s sleek black trunk and Imogen’s bright yellow leather backpack. Together we walk toward the cabins as the rest of the counselors stream by, frenetic energy pumping through the air.
“Ava, what did you do?” I ask, almost not wanting to know.
She shrugs. “I mean, there’s only so much they can deny a girl whose parents were enmeshed in a truly tragic, high-stakes divorce that dominated the New York gossip blogs for almost a decade, right?” Ava turns her head to the sun. She looks amused, with a smirk and a casual hair toss, but her voice is hollow, and Imogen gives me a look that saysdon’t say anything. So I don’t. “It’s not my fault that they desperately wanted Mark Cantor to send his preciousnewbabies to Camp Alpine Lake this summer. He was always going to, obviously. But it doesn’t hurt to remind them that there are other options.”
“You didnot,” I say, blushing at her nerve.
“It’s not like he was ever going to ship those little monsters off to some random camp in Maine where they don’t even have electricity. They’d be laughed out of that stuck-up Palm Beach country club.” She lowers her voice and leans in toward us. “Get this, Mom told me the twins almost didn’t pass the entrance exam.”
Imogen’s eyes go wide in shock.
“I know,” Ava says. “But I guess that didn’t matter. Privilege’s a bitch.”
My skin prickles and I try to readjust the weight in my arms. Ava’s always been blunt. She calls itNew York realness. But her flippancy irks me. Doesn’t she know that not everyone at Alpine Lake gets special treatment like that? That not all of us can pull the rich donor daddy card to get what we want?
Ava dips her designer sunglasses so they’re low on the bridge of her nose. “At least my shithole pops came in handy.” She bumps her butt in both of our directions and Imogen offers a sympathetic look.
“Worked in our favor this time,” Imogen says, and Ava gives her a grateful smile, one that’s intimate and knowing. It throws me off for a sec.
Ava and Imogen have always seemed to speak their own language, one forged out of living an hour away from one another—Ava in Manhattan and Imogen in New Jersey. When we were little, they would call me from one of their houses, saying they were having an impromptu sleepover and they wished I could have come, too, even though Roxwood is a six-hour drive from the tristate area. As we got older, it became obvious they’d merged their friend groups. Ava would share photos from suburban houseparties, posing with the cast of whatever play Imogen was starring in, and Imogen would text me updates from Central Park picnics with Ava’s prep school classmates. I started visiting as often as I could, a few times a year. But that didn’t compare to the way they blended their summer worlds with their real ones. I was left up here, wondering what my life would be like if I was one of them.
If I had grown up in Manhattan, would I still have disappeared into the background of class photos, my head peeking out above pretty girls with shiny hair? Or would I be placed in the front, smiling next to Ava? If I had gone to school with Imogen, who lived in the best public district in the northeast, would I still have felt unmotivated? Or would I have been inspired to excel, earn honors, and gobble up extracurriculars like all of those ambitious, fresh-faced kids who think Big Ten universities are safety schools?
I’d never know, of course, because I had grown up in Roxwood, where the library hasn’t been renovated since the sixties and the cafeteria smells like mildew because there’s never a budget to fix the leaks. Where getting average grades means you’re heading to community college, and the teachers spend more time figuring out how to get the district to pay for their printing costs than finding ways to inspire us. In Roxwood, you’re either Heller McConnell, golden boy, or everyone else, lost cause. There is no in-between.
“God, it feels good to be here,” Ava says, stretching her arms up above her head. “Like I can finally breathe.”
“Seriously.” Imogen pulls at one of her braids. “Mom and Dad have been up myassabout moving to LA. All I said was one year. That’s all I need to see if I can make this wholeactress thingwork. And if it fails, I said I’d go to college. I already got into USC anddeferred for a year. It was all they talked about while I was packing this week.” She rolls her eyes and pouts. “Wait, Goldie, did you decide where you’re going yet?”
I ignore the question, hoping they don’t notice. “I didn’t know you deferred,” I say.
“I decided last week,” she says like it’s no big deal. “But you knew I was thinking about it forever.”
Ava wiggles her fingers like jazz hands. “Our Imo! Trying to be a star. A queen! A viral sensation!”
“You’re already a success, Im,” I say, grateful they don’t push the question of what I’ll be up to come September.
Imogen nuzzles into my side. “God, I’ve missed you, Goldie. Your unbridled optimism.”
Is that how they view me? Optimistic? For a second, I wonder if they know me at all—or if I’ve changed so much that I barely remember myself.
