“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I know you two have history.”
“That’s okay,” I say, a reflex. But I wonder how she knows that. The rumor mill must be working overtime.
“Has Levin said anything?” I can’t help myself. I need to know. “About what it was like? Finding him?”
Meg shakes her head. “Nah,” she says. “I keep telling him to call his therapist back home, but I think he wants to forget all about it.”
I clear my throat. “Glad he has you to talk to.”
“Mm-hmm.” Meg leans her head against the wall and presses the palms of her hands into her eyes. She lets out a big, heavy sigh and her shoulders slump forward. I make a mental note to check in with her more, be a better co-counselor in the coming days. But then I hear Ava’s call from outside the cabin.
“Oy oy oy!” she yells, her hand cupped around her mouth.
I lean out the window and return the call. “Ah-oooga!” Imogen does the same from her cabin and Ava dances in a circle, causing her campers to laugh with big, moony eyes.
“I wish I had those kinds of friendships,” Meg says, coming back to herself. She stretches out in her bed.
“What kind?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’m dumb. “The kind that can’t be broken,” she says. “You three. The weirdest trio. If I saw you girls now, I’d never put you together as a unit. It’s like you grew up and out, away from each other, but refused to let each other go. See that a lot here.”
“Are you close with anyone from growing up?” I ask, realizing I barely know anything about Meg’s life in the UK.
“Nope,” she says. “I never want to go back there. That’s why I came here.”
I want to press her more, but Ava calls again and I know I need to leave. I give myself one last look in the mirror. If I squint hard enough, I can see who I was when I last lived in Bloodroot, when I was so young and when the most important thing in the world was being as close to Ava and Imogen as possible. Maybe that stillisthe most important thing.
“Gotta go,” I say, giving Meg a wave.
“I have no interest in living here alone for the next seven weeks if you get fired, so please don’t do anything stupid,” she says.
“I’ll try!”
When I get outside the cabin, Ava’s standing with Imogen, teetering on sky-high heels. Both of them are wearing denim skirts, their thighs exposed like slabs of meat.
I tug at the bottom of my lacy tank top, suddenly self-conscious, until Imogen looks at me with those wide, sparkling eyes. “You look amazing. Come on.”
She leads us to the bus, where Howie sits in the front seat doing a crossword puzzle. All the other underagers line up, waiting to climb on. The air smells of musky department store cologne and vanilla body wash, and there are murmurs of excitement, hope, and debauchery.
“I cannot believe we’ve been here two weeks and we haven’t been to West Lake yet,” Tommy says. He bounces on the soles of his flip-flops and I wonder for the millionth time what Imogen sees in him.
We board the bus, and I look out the window as we pull out of the traffic circle, away from camp. I push down the sinking feeling in my stomach and turn back to Ava, who’s deep in thought and uncharacteristically quiet.
A frown is plastered on her face, and for a split second I think of seeing Cal the other night in the woods, the ID badge crunching underfoot.
Ava looks up at me then and her face brightens. A smile appears. “Sake bombs on me, okay?” she says.
I nod and rest my head on her shoulder, pushing Cal and Heller from my mind.
Soon we get to Main Street and the bus driver keeps going until he gets to the very edge of town. From here some of the group splits off and heads to the bowling alley, but the majority of us prance down the street for another ten minutes until we arrive at West Lake.
It’s a dumpy, short building that used to be a souvlaki place. But West Lake became notorious among the Alpine Lake crowd soon after it opened. We heard stories about it when we were campers, when the counselors would come back drunk and silly, their tongues dyed blue from boozy tropical punches that were served with paper umbrellas. We would stay up late so we could listen to them barge through the cabin doors, giggling and hiccupping as they tried not to vomit. Ava, Imogen, and I would huddle close together, hoping they wouldn’t notice we were all in the same bed—they never did—and cup our hands over our mouths so we could overhear what the counselors were up to.
It was a game we played, finding out who was hooking up with who, who was fighting, and who would remain friends come September. We studied the counselors, hoping they would give us clues about our futures.Do things get easier when you grow up?
But that’s how I came to know the phrasesake bomband that West Lake is owned by a white lady named Lisa and that oneyear, some volleyball counselor hooked up with a waiter in the bathroom. When I was eleven, once fall came around, I asked Mom if we could go there one night for dinner. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
She and Dad burst out laughing. When they saw my confused expression, they patiently explained that the food at West Lake was absolute trash and, honestly, an abomination to all Japanese food, a claim Imogen backed up when she tried their limp hand rolls last year.
