“Me too,” Ava says.
“Me three,” Imogen says but then she shrugs. “Who cares about USC anyway.”
We all burst out laughing because she’s right. Imogen brings us all in for a hug and I scootch my butt toward them, letting myself be enveloped by them, my friends, the girls who I should have trusted earlier to catch me.
Ava’s eyes light up and she smacks her knee. “Oh my god, we’re so dumb. The security cameras. The ones at the waterfront. They must have caught everything.”
Hope flickers in my heart until Imogen shakes her head. “Wewent skinny-dipping that night,” she says. “Remember, Goldie? We reset the cameras.”
Shit. Without knowing what we were doing, we erased whatever evidence those cameras could have captured.
Ava chews on her lip, then her mouth drops open. “Studidtry to talk to me about my dad once this summer.”
“When?” I ask.
“The first DJ social,” she says, “when you guys were stoned out your minds.”
Suddenly I remember. Ava and Stu huddled close near the office, the frustrated, almost furious look on his face as he confronted Ava about... something.
“What did he say?” Imogen asks.
“He was bitching about some check my dad was supposed to send.” Ava’s voice gets small. “Honestly, it was kind of weird. Definitely the most stressed I ever saw Stu. He kept saying that in order to be the most exclusive, sought-after camp, they had to make sure parents kept up their donation pledges. I told him to leave me out of it.” She presses her fingers to her temple. “But now... I wonder if my dad already knew about the investigation and was hiding his money.”
“But haven’t you guys noticed that it seems like camp’s been cutting back on some things?” I ask. “There’s no air conditioning in the office. Christina’s spice shipment was delayed. And before the campers got here, Heller’s dad was screaming at Stu about messing up their payment.”
“This place has more money than god,” Ava says, dismissing the idea. “Maybe they were waiting for second session checks or something.”
We listen to the crickets, the sounds of the swaying branches, and the breeze passing through the leaves as we try to digest everything we revealed.
Then Ava looks up to the sky. “Crap. The sun.”
She’s right. Dawn is breaking, which means the kids will be up soon.
We tiptoe back to our cabins in silence, holding hands and squeezing for dear life. When we get there, Ava stops. “We’re going to find out the truth about Heller,” she says. “The three of us.”
Imogen nods solemnly like she’s taking an oath.
I shake my head. “This isn’t your shit to deal with,” I say. “Heller was my mess.”
Ava glances toward the sun, which is now peeking over the horizon. We don’t have much time. “Yeah, well, clearly my fucked-up family is part of it somehow,” she says. “Plus, we’re all we’ve got. We owe it to each other.”
Without another word, she and Imogen break off and we all head into our cabins, equipped with the suspicion that there’s something wrong with Camp Alpine Lake.
CHAPTER 48
Then
The super raid was tradition. So many things here are. There had been a group chat before camp even started, tossing around ideas about what we could do to prank everyone else during our last summer as campers.
One year, the oldest kids turned the gazebo into a ball pit. Another summer, they took one drawer from each dresser and barricaded the dining hall. Another, they made an American flag out of underwear stolen from the laundry. And one year they used yarn to spin a massive spiderweb around the office.
Ours had to be epic. It had to be fresh.
Ava came up with the idea. She had a grand plan to turn the whole camp into a circus. The dining hall would become the main tent, and we’d spend all night decorating it, so when everyone came to breakfast, they would be greeted with a show. We could leave homemade tickets on every dresser, create signs to hang on each of the doors. When everyone woke up, they’d find us sitting outside the dining hall, dressed up as roustabouts and clowns, running on adrenaline and packets of instant coffee.
Ava spent weeks convincing everyone in our group to participate, even the indoor kids who spent all camp buried in their summer reading and were afraid of getting caught. She set thedate and we prepared, making the decorations in secret and hiding them under our beds during Sunday inspection.
When it came time to pull it off, Ava gave everyone tasks and instructions, so we could divide and conquer our beautiful circus.
