Perennials, page 18
And the tomatoes: The vines were crawling up the trellis he’d built. Was it possible the vines had grown almost a foot since the last time he checked? The fruits were orange and yellow and red, plump, their skin shining. They had multiplied, maybe quadrupled in the last week. They had never looked better.
11
“Do we have to go?” the girls asked Fiona as they reluctantly took their dry bathing suits down from the clothesline.
“It’ll be over before you know it,” Fiona said.
That night was a camp-wide, coed boat race, but her girls were too young to care about coed activities, still in the stage where being with one another was much more fun than anything a boy could provide. She didn’t blame them; at nine years old, the Maple boys ignored the Maple girls entirely, unsure of what to do with the girls’ precociousness and femininity, thinking them too smart or too delicate to appreciate a good fart joke.
Down at the lake, teams were already assembling: one boy and one girl on each, each competing against another coed twosome from the same age section. The competitors for the older sections, the Hemlocks and the Evergreens, were already pairing up, groups that had probably been conceived a week earlier, boy-girl pairs based on whoever was “hanging out” this week. She saw Helen and Sarah standing with Mikey and Danny—tall, magnetic Danny appearing to tell some story bombastically while the other three listened, ready to laugh.
Rachel was standing nearby, chatting with one of her fellow Hemlock counselors.
Yonatan was a counselor for the Maple boys, and he beckoned a group of his boys toward her group of girls.
“Hey,” he said, smiling kindly, as his boys shuffled in the sand behind him. “Are your girls on teams yet?”
“No, they aren’t,” she said, raising her eyebrows at the girls, because she knew that she and Yonatan would have to coordinate this, that these kids were not going to take any initiative themselves.
“Billie,” Fiona said to one of the girls standing behind her, “is there a boy you’d like to be teamed up with?”
Billie shrugged.
Yonatan turned around to survey his group. “Avery,” he said to the lanky boy standing off to the side. “Do you want to be on Billie’s team?”
“I think you guys would make a great pair,” Fiona said, which was true: both were quiet, smart kids. Average in terms of athleticism.
“Okay,” Avery said to his feet, and he walked toward Billie but landed a good foot away from her.
Emily and Marley’s arms were linked—the two did everything together—and it took some cajoling just to get them to separate from each other, let alone pair them up with boys. Fiona and Yonatan continued to create teams, conferring with each other on the matchups. It was fun, this part of working with young kids—the absolute authority one had. They finished the teams with few arguments from the kids and sent them off to the boating staff to get their life jackets and their paddles.
Yonatan was still standing next to Fiona after their kids had gone to the dock. He hadn’t saved that dance for her at the dance like he’d promised. He had seemed more into Rachel that night, which was unsurprising, of course. Fiona never asked Rachel if anything had happened between them—better to leave it alone, considering that was also the night Rachel’s father had died. Besides, she didn’t want to know the answer.
“I think we did good,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, looking over at their groups. Some boys and girls whom they had paired up stood next to each other, awkward and silent, while other campers, like Emily and Marley, gravitated toward their same sex again, refusing to acknowledge their partners until the moment they had to get into the boat.
“Give it three years, and we won’t be able to pull them apart,” he said.
“I like this group for that reason,” she said. “Their innocence is so nice. Refreshing, kind of. I can talk about real things with them: their lives at home and their friends and the things they like to do—ride horses or swim or dance or draw. Rachel says her girls only talk about boys.”
He turned to her. “You’re right. It is refreshing.”
Something about the intensity in his stare made her uncomfortable, and she had to look away.
“You’re very insightful, Fiona,” he said.
She didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Are you blushing?” he asked.
She put a hand to her face.
He very gently pulled her hand away from her cheek. “Don’t hide it,” he said. “It’s cute.”
—
“He was flirting with you!” Rachel exclaimed later that night, beer can in hand, in the staff lodge.
“No, he wasn’t,” said Fiona. “He was making fun of me.”
“Jesus, Fiona,” Rachel said. “You wouldn’t know a come-on if it fucked you in the ass.”
Rachel stumbled away to sit on Chad’s lap. According to Rachel, there was still nothing happening between them, despite the fact that they flirted perpetually. Fiona didn’t understand why anyone would be into him; his nose was always sunburned, and he wore the same army-print bucket hat every day.
Fiona slowly followed Rachel to the couch and sat on the other side of Chad. Rachel slumped farther onto Chad, her body limp. Its whole weight rested on him. He traced the fingers of one hand up and down her spine while he took a hit of a joint with the other.
Fiona put her hand out. “May I?” She let the smoke fill her lungs, and that instantly familiar sense of calm came over her.
Rachel nuzzled her nose into Chad’s neck. He passed the joint to her and then whispered something into her ear.
Fiona sat quietly for a few more minutes, uninvolved in their private conversation, until Chad finally passed the joint to her again. After that second hit, she stood.
“Night, Rach,” she said.
Rachel looked up, as if she’d just noticed Fiona was there.
“Where are you going?” Rachel asked.
“Bed,” Fiona said. “Don’t stay out too late.”
“What are you, her mum?” Chad said, but Fiona was just high enough to not retort.
She left the staff lodge and walked up the hill to girls’ camp. It was almost midnight, and there were few lights on now. After so many summers, she could have made it from any one point to another barefoot and blindfolded. She looked up as she walked. She found the Big Dipper, then the Little. The Milky Way. When one looks up at the stars alone on a quiet night, it’s very easy to feel insignificant. She didn’t know any other constellations and made a resolution to study more of them when she could. Then she made a resolution not to forget to do this just because she was high.
She got back to the Maple section and crept into her tent. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, her girls whimpered and cried, homesick, and she stroked their hair, wiped their tears away. Billie had a lovely voice and sometimes sang to the other girls at night to assuage their sadness.
Fiona lay in her bunk for a few minutes, thinking about her own summer as a nine-year-old, her first summer at Camp Marigold. She remembered the Fourth of July from that summer the best. After the fireworks, they’d gone back to their section, and her tentmates had begun to sob in their bunks, one after another, a domino effect of hysteria. Fiona had tried to make herself cry, but nothing came out. She’d liked the fireworks over the lake; she wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.
Now she was hungry. She couldn’t sleep when she was hungry. As quietly as she could, she got up, opened her trunk, and rifled through her T-shirts to find the bag of granola and the jar of peanut butter she kept in there, raccoons be damned. She took them out, closed her trunk, and walked to the bathroom, a moldy cabin filled with millipedes and spider webs. She sat on the dusty floor and, with her fingers, reached into the bag of granola and dipped the bits into the peanut butter. At the first bite, she made an involuntary groan. The combination of sweet and salty was better than anything else, better than being drunk or high, better even than the one orgasm she’d ever had (in her childhood bed, seventh grade, by accident, and it had been so powerful and unruly that she was afraid to experience it again).
—
At flag raising in the morning, Fiona looked for Rachel but didn’t see her. She wondered if Rachel was hungover and had faked sick to sleep an extra hour or two.
Their friendship was like this. Fiona was reliable and predictable. Rachel knew where she could find her friend in most moments. But about Rachel the opposite was true: She was so often inaccessible, unavailable. Fiona had realized sometime during this summer that they actually liked each other for these reasons; each one fulfilled what the other lacked. Fiona was steady, and Rachel was spontaneous, and for so many summers, they had thrived in their roles.
But this summer, Fiona was beginning to feel that something had shifted and she couldn’t get it back, like being the paragon of steadiness had begun to wear her down. Maybe more of it was required of her now, after Rachel’s father had died, and at first she had thought she was okay with that. But ever since the night at the motel, Fiona had wondered how Rachel would react if Fiona wasn’t there for her. Fiona wondered how good, how freeing it might feel. Even just for one day.
Fiona walked down to the stables after breakfast. Normally she and Rachel groomed and fed the horses before the campers got there, and gossiped about whatever had happened the night before.
She opened the heavy door to the barn and filled a bucket from the supply station with soap and warm water from the hose. She strained to carry the heavy bucket as she walked along the cement floor to Josie’s stall. Josie was the palomino that Fiona’s parents had bought for her for her thirteenth birthday. Both Fiona and Helen kept their horses at camp during the summer. Before the Larkin girls, this had been unprecedented at Camp Marigold.
Josie approached the edge of her stall when she saw Fiona and peeked her head out. Fiona opened the stall and let herself in. She squeezed a sponge onto Josie’s golden-hued coat and let the soapy water drip into the mounds of hay.
When she finished washing Josie, she began working on the other horses. She checked her watch; without Rachel’s help she was running out of time before the campers would get there for the first activity period. She stopped with the washing, even though she’d gotten to only four of the horses, and began to fill the feed buckets.
Nell, the lead horseback-riding counselor, entered the barn and propped the door open to let the light in. When Fiona first met Nell, Fiona thought she was cool and no-nonsense, with her tough exterior and her posh British accent. She loved Nell’s long red hair. But then Fiona and Rachel found out that Nell was a year younger than them, and it bothered Rachel especially that Nell was their boss. She observed that Nell was a “dyke.” “She walks with her legs so far apart,” Rachel had said, “like she has a dick in between them.” After that, Fiona had not been able to think of Nell in any other terms.
Nell peeked into the first stall. “They’re not saddled yet?” she asked.
Fiona shook her head. “I’m on my own right now,” she said, putting a bucket of feed in Firework’s stall.
“They didn’t need to be washed today,” Nell said.
“I haven’t seen Rachel since last night.” Fiona suddenly felt like her friend’s disappearance was her own fault.
Nell didn’t respond to this, though she looked at Fiona curiously. Nell opened her mouth like she was about to say something but then she shook her head, reached down to pick up an armful of saddles, and began to put one on Firework, whose snout was entirely submerged in the feed bucket.
The Hemlock girls came to first-period riding. This included Helen.
She entered the barn with her bevy of friends. Her deceptively angelic blond curls were loose around her face. She walked ahead to Dandelion, her horse, whose stall was next to Josie’s.
“How’s my girl?” Helen said to Dandelion. She kissed her horse on the nose and scratched between her ears.
“You’re so lucky,” one of Helen’s friends said to her, which was what they always said.
Helen looked up at Fiona, suddenly realizing she was right there in front of Josie’s stall.
“Hey,” Helen said to her sister, an unreadable expression on her face. Fiona knew Helen well enough to know how unusual this was.
“Hey,” Fiona said. “Have you seen Rachel?”
Helen’s hand stopped stroking the horse. She looked at the other girls, who looked at Fiona and then back at Helen.
“You didn’t hear?” Helen said.
“Hear what?”
Helen bit her bottom lip.
“Where is she?” Fiona said. “Is she okay?”
“She’s gone, Fee,” Helen said.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean gone. She left before we woke up this morning.”
Fiona looked around at the other girls, hoping someone would contradict her sister. No one did. “What are you talking about?”
“Mo didn’t say why,” Helen said. “She just pulled us all into the middle of the section this morning and said that Rachel had to leave and that we’ll know by the end of the day who our new counselor is.”
“It’s so crazy,” one of the girls chimed in.
“I can’t believe she didn’t say goodbye to you,” Helen said to her sister.
Another Hemlock girl entered the circle. “I just heard Chad’s gone too.”
—
By lunch, it was all anyone was talking about.
“I heard they were caught doing drugs in the oar house,” Fiona heard one Evergreen girl say to another on the salad bar line.
“Like pot?”
“No, like, hard stuff.”
Fiona asked her section leader if she could leave to make a phone call in the office. They weren’t allowed to use their cellphones at camp, but Rachel wasn’t at camp, and hers might be charged and on by now. Fiona went to the front desk and dialed the number she knew by heart, but it went straight to voicemail.
All day, rumors swirled around the camp: “I heard they were skinny-dipping in the lake.” “I heard they left camp when they weren’t supposed to, and Jack found them ordering Chicken McNuggets at the McDonald’s in Salisbury.” “I heard they were caught hooking up in the backseat of someone else’s car.”
Fiona taught riding all afternoon as if she were floating on a cloud above the camp. She watched the girls and gave them orders, but the words felt disconnected from her. All she could think of was the theories about Rachel. Any of them were possible.
When the day was over, Fiona took the saddles off all the horses and fed them again. The campers buzzed at flag lowering. She could sense a seriousness in Jack as he made his evening announcements. At dinner, she picked at the salad on her plastic plate, surprised to find she didn’t have much of an appetite.
At bedtime, she tucked her girls into their bunks.
“Fiona?” asked Billie, who was one of the youngest girls.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“Can I sing us a bedtime song?”
“You want to sing for us?”
“Yeah,” Billie said. “I learned it in music class today.”
“Does everyone want a bedtime song?”
Yes! the girls said. Of course we do! Which was how it came to be that Fiona cried silently in her tent of nine-year-olds while Billie sang, like a prescient little angel, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”
—
At the staff lodge that night, Fiona learned the truth: They were caught. In the woods. They were fucking. Jack had found them.
“But were they obvious?”
“How can you not be obvious when you’re fucking like animals?”
“But how did he find them so late and in the dark?”
“Who cares? Sounds like they were asking for it.”
It felt odd to be at the staff lodge without Rachel, as if Fiona were suddenly naked and on display. She was deeply embarrassed and hurt that she wasn’t the one who had known what had happened first.
“Have you talked to her?” people kept asking.
Fiona lied and said yes. She had.
“How is she?”
“She’s fine,” Fiona told them.
She smoked more than usual that night. She sat in a lounge chair high and watched everyone. Sometimes the right high made her careless and free. This one felt like a swirl of uneasy existential dread. She watched Yonatan pinch Steph and Becca make out with Logan and Nell drink a beer alone, and it was like watching all these people who seemed to know, so much better than Fiona, how to be alive. They were all playing their roles perfectly; weaving in and out of groups seamlessly; saying the right things, making the right quips, at the right times, as if they were performing just for her as an example of What She’s Done Wrong. It felt so at odds with her own existence, fraught with that insecurity that she didn’t get it, didn’t ever know the right thing to say or do in a situation, when it seemed like everyone else did.
And then she remembered! Oh God, that memory. It pricked right at the center of her chest. It was earlier in the summer, on their first day off, the night when they got kicked out of the Super 8. She had been drunk and peeing, and she’d heard Rachel and Chad and Yonatan and Steph talking shit about her.
Chad had called her a “narc.” Rachel had said, in response, something like, “Yeah, but she has a car.”
How the fuck had Fiona forgotten that memory?
She stood, too high and faltering on her feet. Yonatan was talking closely to Steph. Fiona tapped him on the shoulder.
He turned around and beamed at her. “Well, hello, Miss Fiona.”
“I am not a narc,” she said.
Steph looked up at Yonatan with a grin.
“What?” Yonatan said.
“I said. I. Am. Not. A. Narc.”
“A narc?” Yonatan played with the tab on his can of Coors Light. “What’s a narc?”
