Perennials, page 5
Helen felt hands pushing into the bottom of the plastic float she was lying on. The float tilted, and she fell into the water, her whole body going under.
“Liam!” she shrieked when she came up for air, splashing her older brother.
He laughed, then picked her up and threw her several feet across the swimming pool into the deep end. Her tiny body floated through the air and landed with a graceful plop.
“Come in, Fee!” she yelled to her sister.
“I’m good,” said Fiona, who was sitting in the shade. She was still wearing her cover-up; she hadn’t swum this entire trip. All she did was read. Sometimes Helen felt like she was missing out on having an older sister: the kind who was supposed to teach you how to paint your nails with your left hand, or how to kiss a boy, or how to shave your legs so you didn’t cut yourself. The kind you were supposed to be able to steal clothes from: You would fight about it, but the fights wouldn’t mean anything, because you lived in the same house and you knew where to find your sweater; it was just in the closet in the room next to yours.
When they were kids, it was different. Fiona used to play. But in the past few years, she’d seemed to stop caring about Helen because she was so preoccupied with her own stuff, always studying and doing as many extracurricular activities as she possibly could. Helen knew that Fiona thought she could become a different person in college, because once she’d said something like “Do you think I should go by my middle name when I get to school?”
“Why would you do that?” Helen had asked.
“I don’t know,” Fiona said. “Just for an experiment. College is all about experimenting, you know? And for finding out who you really are.”
But what if she was really just someone mopey and boring? That’s what college seemed to turn her into, anyway.
—
When Helen got back to school the next week, Marla had disappeared. The rumor was that her family had picked up and moved to Texas. Helen had no reason to believe this was true, but she also didn’t have any reason to believe it wasn’t. She tried calling Marla’s cellphone several times, but it was always off.
April 30 was Helen’s thirteenth birthday. There were fifty-six days until camp and no birthday wishes from Marla. Helen now had no interest in spending time in the woods with the other Mamaroneck girls; Marla was the common thread between them all, and without Marla there, Helen found little to say to them.
For Helen’s thirteenth birthday, she saw a movie at the mall with Kayla, Kelly, and Kim while their moms got frozen margaritas at Chili’s. After the movie, they met their moms at Chili’s for dinner and cake. The cake came, they sang “Happy Birthday,” and Helen cut herself a generous piece.
“God, to have that metabolism again,” Kelly’s mom said.
“I know,” said Helen’s mom. “I can’t feed her enough, and she’s still a beanpole.”
Every other girl at the table, Helen knew, had gotten her period. It didn’t bother Helen; in fact, she dreaded the day she’d have to start wearing an underwire bra. Life was so much easier without curves.
Helen finished her piece and asked for another, just to spite them.
—
When Helen got home, she tried calling Marla again. Once more, it went straight to voicemail. She decided to leave a message this time.
“Hey, Mar,” Helen said. “I hope things are good, wherever you are.” She paused. “It was my birthday today. I wish you could have been here. I’m officially a teenager now. Still no period, though.” She was talking into a void. “I miss you. I wish you said goodbye.” She cleared her throat. “Call me if you get this.”
She hung up and cried for just a few minutes, just enough to get it out of her system. She hadn’t realized how angry she was with Marla for dangling the promise of a friendship in front of her face and pulling it so abruptly away.
Maybe her real life wasn’t meant to be at school after all.
“John, where are you going?” Helen’s mother asked from the front seat.
“I’m taking 684,” Helen’s father said.
“We never take 684. We take the Taconic.”
“Yes we do. We always take 684 to 22.”
“Are you serious? We’ve been taking the Taconic to Marigold for as long as I can remember.”
“Hon, that might have been true when Fee was little, but I can tell you, for the past five years, I have never once taken the Taconic.”
“Helen,” Mrs. Larkin said, turning to look at her daughter in the backseat, “your father has lost it.”
Helen was looking out the window, marveling at the speed at which the scenery was moving by. Recently, she had been feeling a certain fear about being in a car, especially on a highway, where her dad’s speedometer regularly inched past eighty miles per hour. How did all the cars trust the other cars not to crash into one another? They were full of strangers entering into a life-or-death pact every time they got on the road. But there was something about the way that her parents bickered that made her feel a special kind of ease; as they did so, she could disappear into her own thoughts, and that in itself was a relief. More often than not, as someone six years younger than anyone else in the family, she felt like the attention was always on her.
The ride to camp always felt longer than it actually was. Helen was jittery. She wasn’t hungry; she couldn’t nap; she didn’t want to talk to her parents even if they weren’t bickering, because she had too many thoughts. But none of them could be formed into words because what Helen felt was unnamable—a vague sense of waking up to the wild possibilities of that summer and an innate knowledge that camp’s magic, at its core, was unexplainable.
They arrived at camp around ten in the morning, and they parked their SUV on the grassy lot among all the other SUVs. Camp smelled exactly the same, like wet grass and damp soil that was perpetually drying off from the morning dew. She saw some new faces and some old. Then she spotted Fiona in her navy Camp Marigold staff polo, over with the youngest girls, holding their hands and chatting with their parents. She had come separately, driving up with her friend Rachel a week earlier for staff training. Helen’s mom seemed to spot Fiona at the same time, and she lifted her hand to begin to wave to her older daughter, but Helen’s father said to her mother, “I don’t think she’ll want to acknowledge us.”
“Why not?” Helen’s mom asked. “I’m just saying hi.”
Helen caught Fiona’s eye, and Fiona quickly looked down at the girl whose hand she was holding.
“She’s working,” Helen’s father said. “Let her feel independent. It’s good for her.”
“I don’t see how the two things are mutually exclusive,” Helen’s mother said, but she dropped her hand.
When Helen finished checking in, her parents drove her up to the girls’ Hemlock section. She was in tent three; she already knew that Sarah would be in her tent, because they had requested each other, and that Rachel, Fiona’s best friend, would be their counselor. Sarah lived in Simsbury, Connecticut, and the last time the girls had seen each other was over Christmas break. But they were the kind of friends who could pick up exactly where they’d left off.
Helen and her parents entered the tent. The bunks were still about half-empty, and Rachel was helping a new girl and a man Helen presumed to be the girl’s father put up a mosquito net.
“Hi, Rach,” Helen said, grinning. Helen loved Rachel, and she didn’t understand why Rachel was still best friends with Fiona. Maybe when they were younger their personalities had been more alike, but her sister was so negative these days, and Rachel continued to be such an upbeat, confident person. When she was in a group, all the attention was on her, and it wasn’t even like she was asking for it. Fiona just brought that energy down.
“Helen!” Rachel finished fastening a corner of the new girl’s mosquito net to the canvas siding and approached Helen with a wide smile and open arms. “So good to see you!” She gave Helen a tight squeeze. “I was so happy when Fiona told me you’d be in my tent.”
“Me too,” Helen said.
“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Larkin,” Rachel said, climbing over trunks to give both of Helen’s parents equally warm hugs. They responded in kind.
“How are you, sweetheart?” Helen’s mother asked.
“Yes, how’s Michigan?” her father said. Helen found it funny that her father, who was so bad at remembering details about people, remembered this.
“It’s great,” Rachel said. “I’m super overextended between classes and activities, but I guess that’s what I’m there for.”
“Big party school, from what I’ve heard,” Helen’s father said.
“John,” her mother said by way of warning, as if Helen had never heard the word “party.”
Rachel grinned knowingly. “It has its moments.”
Helen looked over at the man and the girl by the back of the tent, who were still waiting politely for Rachel to help them finish the job; the mosquito net was only half-fastened with safety pins, the whole front of it flopping over the bunk.
Rachel followed Helen’s gaze to the pair, remembering she still had work to do. She hurried over and finished fastening the mosquito net like she’d done it a thousand times before. “Helen, this is Sheera. She’s new to camp this year. She’s from the city, like me.”
The two younger girls waved shyly at each other. Sheera was tall and developed; she was wearing a pink T-shirt and oddly fitting khaki shorts, too tight around her waist and hips but then looser at the legs, reaching all the way down to the tops of her knees. She had light brown skin, and her black hair was arranged in tight braids across her scalp, which were fastened at the ends by elastics with baby pink baubles.
“Arthur Jones,” her father said, a man so tall that Helen was sure if he lay down on one of the bunks, his legs would dangle over the edge. He lumbered across the tent and shook the hands of both Mr. and Mrs. Larkin.
“John Larkin,” Helen’s father said in the deep voice he put on when he was talking to other men. “And my wife, Amy.”
Mrs. Larkin looked as if she was about to say something, and Helen knew that she was wondering what Helen herself also was—where was Mrs. Jones? But Helen was glad for the interruption that ensued: Sarah bouncing into the tent and squealing as she engulfed Helen in a hug.
Sarah and Helen had met on the first day of their first summer at camp, when they were nine years old. They were in the Maple section then, the youngest group of campers. Helen didn’t want to be there; she was homesick. Her parents had insisted that she go away to Camp Marigold that summer because Fiona was also nine when she first went. Fiona “could not have been happier that summer,” her mother had explained—so surely for Helen it would be the same. She had tried to fight it at first, but her mother was so sure that Helen—sweet, lighthearted Helen—would have no trouble adjusting. But when her mother gave her one last hug before driving away, Helen whispered, “Don’t go,” which made the both of them tear up with regret.
All day long Helen didn’t talk to anyone in her section. She saw Fiona at the dining hall at dinner, and they ignored each other, Fiona too busy chasing behind Rachel to notice her sister’s sadness. Some counselor got up in front of all of girls’ camp and made a speech about marigolds. They were annual flowers: They grew only throughout the course of one summer, and the following year, they had to be replanted in order to bloom again. The counselor welcomed all the newcomers: all the little seed girls who would soon grow into beautiful marigolds.
After dinner, the counselors organized an icebreaker activity in the Maple section. The thirty girls were arranged in two circles—an inside circle and an outside circle—and one of the counselors posed questions to the group. (“What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?” “Who’s your favorite Disney princess?”) The girls facing each other introduced themselves and discussed their answers. Then the outside circle rotated one person to the right, another question was posed, and this kept going until everyone in each circle met everyone in the other.
The first two girls Helen talked to were shy and quiet like her. They answered the questions quickly and then stared at each other waiting for the next turn. Already Helen was dreading bedtime; she felt there was no doubt that she would cry herself to sleep. What if she wet the bed? She’d done that once, at her first sleepover, earlier in the year.
But the third girl stepped in front of Helen smiling widely, revealing a gap between her two front teeth. They protruded slightly out of her mouth in a V shape. She had a pale face and thick, dark hair parted straight down the middle.
“I’m Sarah,” she said, still smiling wide.
Their section leader said, “What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?”
“You wanna go first?” Sarah said, eager.
“Um,” Helen said. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t have a favorite.”
“Really? I have so many favorites that I’m not sure which to pick!” She had a slight lisp, so that she slurred the s in “so.”
“I guess I like cookies and cream.”
“I love cookies and cream. I also really like chocolate chip cookie dough, and I like strawberry but more in a milkshake. The problem with chocolate chip cookie dough or really anything with chunks like that is they get stuck in my palate expander.” She opened her mouth wide and tipped her head back, pointing to the roof of her mouth and revealing an industrial-looking metal contraption lodged behind her teeth.
Helen giggled a bit, though she hadn’t meant to.
“I know!” Sarah said. “Weird, right?”
“Yeah,” Helen said. “What’s it for?”
“I used to suck my thumb too much,” Sarah said. “Actually, up until last year. Late. It screwed up my teeth.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I have to turn the key.”
“There’s a key?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “I can show you later, if you want.”
“Okay,” Helen said. Then there was an immediate feeling of ease, a feeling that she wouldn’t be alone there.
Helen was shocked now by how much Sarah had developed in the six months since they saw each other over Christmas. Her breasts, which used to be like two golf balls in a bra, had swelled and were straining against the text on a T-shirt that read GIRL POWER in purple bubble letters. Her belly button peeked out from under the shirt’s hem. It seemed as if Sarah’s perceptions of herself hadn’t quite caught up with the realities of her body.
Helen was mortified to notice both of her parents’ glances lingering a beat too long on her friend’s body.
“Hi, Sarah dear,” Mrs. Larkin said, giving the girl a chaste hug and kiss on the cheek. “Are your parents here? We’d love to say hi.”
“No, they left already,” Sarah said. “It was Davey’s first day too.”
“Oh, too bad,” Mrs. Larkin said.
“I saved you a spot,” Sarah said to Helen, patting the top bunk next to her own.
—
When Helen awoke the following morning, the first thing she noticed was the distinct smell of urine.
“Who pissed themselves?” said Jessi, a tomboy who’d been going to Marigold as long as Helen had.
“Not me,” Sarah said.
“Me neither,” said Helen.
Helen noticed Rachel’s face pucker and sour for a brief moment, but then turn quickly toward neutral.
“I don’t smell anything,” Rachel said. “Girls, go take your showers.”
“Must have been the new girl,” Helen heard Jessi mutter to Sarah and the other girls as they all grabbed their towels from their hooks and their shower caddies from their cubbies and made their way out of the tent.
Only Helen, Rachel, and Sheera, the new girl, were left in the tent now. Sheera was pulling herself out of her bunk slowly, but once her entire body was exposed, Helen noticed a distinct wet spot in between the girl’s legs. Then Sheera hurried toward the back of the tent, where her towel hung.
She reemerged a few moments later from behind the cubby with only a towel around herself and her pajamas heaped into a ball in her arms. She approached her bunk again and zipped up the sleeping bag, straightening it neatly over the mattress. She turned and noticed that both Helen and Rachel were looking at her.
Rachel approached Sheera. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Rachel said in a quiet voice, as if Helen couldn’t hear her.
Sheera neither nodded nor said anything to confirm or deny Rachel’s presumption. Instead, she looked away from her counselor and walked straight out of the tent, being careful not to make eye contact with Helen.
Once Sheera had left the tent, Rachel said to Helen, “Please don’t tell the girls about that. She’s probably pretty embarrassed.”
“I won’t,” Helen said.
But later she did find herself telling Sarah during free period. She couldn’t help it. The thing was, friendships were so much sweeter when there were secrets to be kept.
4
Their first night off: a Monday evening in Torrington, Connecticut, a place that felt so void of personality or style that Fiona was embarrassed by it with non-Americans in her presence. Her Jeep was parked in the lot of a strip mall on Route 4. The boys—Chad, who was English, and Yonatan, who was Israeli—were both twenty-one and went into the liquor store while the girls waited in the car.
Steph, whom Fiona knew the least, lit a cigarette from the backseat.
“Could you smoke that outside?” Fiona asked. “I have asthma.”
Steph apologized, got out of the car, and leaned against the parked Jeep while she smoked.
“Liar,” Rachel said in the front seat.
“I don’t want my car smelling like an ashtray.”
Rachel was sitting Indian style, her legs folded into each other. After their first year away at college, Rachel looked the same as she always had: olive skinned, thin limbed, brown hair worn over one shoulder. Fiona did not. She had never been tall or petite; her skin was not terrible but not great; and her face was quite squashed, as if all the features had gathered together too close in the center of it. And now she was twenty pounds heavier. The best she would ever look was average, and this summer she was flirting with ugliness.
