The Ghost of Danny McGee, page 17
She has to close one eye and squint to read her watch screen. “Five fifteen. Ugh.”
“You’re fine,” he mumbles into his pillow. “Campbell comes in around six.”
Sam struggles to lift herself off the mattress and stumbles into her clothes. “Shirt . . . shirt . . .” she mutters; lost, a drunk vagrant, bumbling through the streets of Paris in search of bottles in the gutters. “Where’s my shirt? Hey!” She throws a balled sock at Nick. “I can’t find my shirt.”
He sits upright, blinking, and grabs for something on his shelf. “Here.” He tosses it at her.
Sam holds the shirt up. It’s enormous, navy blue, bold white text printed down the front: GOD IS A LESBIAN. She laughs through a hiccup. “Is this yours?”
“Dress code violation. You can keep it.”
Sam scrambles into the T-shirt. It hangs to the center of her thighs, and the fabric smells musty. She stands in the doorway, holding her shoes, and looks back at him. What is appropriate here? A kiss goodbye? Some intimate words? A middle finger? She gives him a gruff half wave from the doorway, and he waves sleepily back. “See you later, Red.”
She shuts the door as quietly as she can behind her.
At the foot of the office stairs, Sam pauses. She looks up. The human figure standing over the coffeepot is as horrifying and somehow unsurprising as swooping death itself. Richard Byron stands poised mid-step, mug raised halfway to his open mouth. They look at each other. Sam’s head whirls; for a moment she thinks she can talk her way out of this—there has to be an excuse—then she sees herself as he must. Hair tangled, eyes glazed, socks and shoes in hand. There is no mistaking what she is doing here.
The look on Byron’s face shifts seamlessly from shock, to embarrassment, to a shameful sort of delight. “Oh.” His gaping lips curl upward. “Oh, no.”
“Oh no,” Sam echoes. She looks down at the borrowed shirt, then back to him. “Chard. I can—” Explain, she is going to say, but falters. She cannot.
His eyes roll upward, peering through the ceiling slats into the bunk room. Pondering. He sips at his coffee. “Huh. Really?” Watching her thoughtfully, he steps across the room and sits in Campbell’s desk chair. One ankle crosses lightly over the other knee. After another sip, he nods toward the front door. “You were on your way out?”
Sam nods. “Yep. Yes, I was.”
“Miss Red?” She turns, halfway through the screen door. His smile is amused, verging on adoring. “Stay on the trails.”
Sam hurries away from the office porch, then pauses, hesitates, and changes direction. She may as well stock the gold in the creek now and have an excuse in case anyone else catches her out of the cabin. Halfway through her hike up the trail, she stops, dashes into the trees, and hurls herself over a decaying stump to vomit into the pine needles. What comes up is clear and sloshy. Tiny hammers batter behind her eyes. Her nose and throat burn.
At the gold-panning claim, she stands and stares into the bushes across the creek. “Hey!” she calls into the wild. She wants to see the bear again. She hollers for it, begs it to appear, to run to her, to eat her. “Come on!” She picks up a rock at her feet and hurls it across the water. It falls short, landing with a quiet splash. Nothing moves in the bushes. There have been no signs of the bear in weeks. It must have moved on or died. It may never have existed at all.
It’s still early, well before the wake-up bell, when she gets back to her cabin. The campers are sleeping soundly. Sam stoops to put a hand on Poppy’s forehead—warm, safe, full of life—then tiptoes out to the bathroom. Outside, one of the showerheads is already running. The bathroom mirrors are dripping with steam. Rosie’s half-boy, half-girl shirt is piled sloppily on the concrete floor alongside the stitched pair of pants. With another wave of anxiety, Sam wonders what she knows, if she caught her sneaking away last night.
“Rosie?” She steps closer to the running shower, then stops. She can hear a familiar bickering, hushed voices through the splatter. Another pair of the same stitched pants hangs over the edge of a sink. “Rose?”
“Hold still.”
“It’s not working, they’re not going away. Hot water is supposed to help.”
“It’s not hot water, it’s cold water.”
“Stop it, I’m freezing. Don’t make it cold.”
Two pairs of bare feet are visible below the curtain, toe to toe. In a rush of disbelief, Sam strides to them and throws the sheer plastic aside. They both jump. Rosie’s eyes are completely off-kilter. Elias’s blond curls are plastered to the sides of a red face, his neck and chest spotted with tremendous, tennis ball-sized hickeys. He sways and squints at her through the steam.
“Hey.” Elias points a pruned finger at Sam’s chest. “That’s my shirt!”
week seven
Logan
Gold-panning is the worst activity at Camp. The gold is fake. Everyone, even the little kids, knows the gold is fake. They shuffle around in the cool water, slipping on algae, searching for snakes and crawfish in the reeds. A hawk turns circles in the sky overhead, screeching at them. It’s a hot morning. Logan wants to plop down and sit in the creek like in a bathtub, splash the water over her face and armpits and dunk her head to rinse her hair.
“It might be real,” Milly says, hopeful, holding a sparkling nugget up to the sunlight.
“It’s not real.” Logan shakes her head. “The other day, I saw a finch with a chunk this big.” She makes a sizable hole with her thumb and forefinger. “You know how much money that would be worth if it was real? They wouldn’t just let some kid keep it.”
Max slips and stumbles. He grabs her shoulder, nearly pulling her over. Logan grunts.
“Sorry!” He grimaces. “I can’t get my cast wet.”
“Get out of the water, then.”
“But it’s hot.”
“Max, be careful!” Taps shouts. He sits on the creek bank with his sunglasses on, his bare feet in the water. “Anyways.” He turns back to Donna and Mei, who lounge on the rocks beside him, not really listening. “What was I saying? Oh, yeah. In the pioneer days, people came from all over just to get a shot at panning this creek, right here. It’s the richest creek in the world. It all comes from snowmelt, way up in the mountains . . .”
Logan stands still in the water, watching him talk. Next to her, Milly crouches, shifting through the stones and slime. Her clothes are soaked.
“Why do they all do that?” she mutters. “Why do they lie to us like that?”
Max, too, glances toward his counselor. Very carefully, he bends down to scoop up some water in his hand, then sprinkles it over the top of his sweaty head, holding his cast arm up high in the air. He shakes his head, drops flying. “It’s not lies,” he says thoughtfully. “Just . . . stories. Like the Danny McGee story.”
“The Danny McGee story is true.”
“How do you know that?”
Logan frowns. In her head she sees the ghost, the tall shadow hiding in the trees. Looming through the branches in the silvery moonlight. The more she thinks about it, the surer she is that it’s the same ghost from Dane’s story. It has to be. It was too real to be a coincidence. “I just know,” she says.
As Taps tells his story, another counselor comes hiking up the trail to the creek bank: Sam. She has a little cardboard box in her arms, which she places delicately on the ground next to a tree trunk. Then she stands back and waves Taps over to her. She has her sunglasses on, too, and her face is red and haughty. Her hair is in a high, sloppy bun. Logan looks her over. Her stomach twists in a weird way as she watches Sam lay a hand on Taps’s arm.
“I don’t know,” Max carries on. “I don’t know about him being a ghost and all, but I guess the whole thing with the bullies, and him jumping off the dam . . . that could be true.”
Logan ignores him, watching the counselors carefully. Something important is going on. Sam leans in and whispers into Taps’s ear; her expression is serious. Then Taps smiles. “Nice,” he chortles. “Okay.”
Milly stands up in the creek, shaking the slime off of her hands. She looks past Logan at Max. “You really think there could be kids that are mean enough to make another kid jump off the dam?”
Max frowns at her. “You wouldn’t get it. You’re a girl.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She says this too loudly. The counselors snap their heads up from their quiet conversation. Milly draws air through her teeth. “Oops . . .”
“Hey,” says Sam, “watch your language.”
“Okay, sorry.”
Logan waits until Sam has finished her conversation and turned away, disappearing along the trail again. In her bare legs, her T-shirt as long as a dress, she doesn’t look like a counselor. She looks like someone who just rolled out of bed and stumbled into the forest. Logan turns to Milly and whispers, “Sam’s kind of a bitch, right?”
Milly reels back from her. “Jeez, Logan. That’s kind of mean.”
“Yeah, Loges,” says Max. “Since when do you talk like that?”
Logan shrugs. She starts bending down to look through the creek bed again, but something stops her. She turns to Max. “What did you just call me?”
A funny look crosses his face. His hair is wet. Murky droplets trail down his forehead and leave streaks through the dirt on his skin. “I don’t know,” he says. Apparently giving up the search for fake gold, he turns and shuffles his way out of the water.
Hugo catches up with the three of them when they reach the lawn before lunch. He strides across the grass toward them, peppy and smiling. He has a thin, untied friendship bracelet in his hand: white and pink, heart pattern. “You guys have headaches today or what?” he greets them, eyebrows wiggling.
“Why would we have headaches?”
“Because of the beer!”
“Shh. Jesus, Maxie. Keep your voice down.” Hugo bounces lightly on his feet. He thrusts the bracelet in his hand at Logan. “Here, this is for you.”
It isn’t very good. The stitches are crooked and disordered. Still, he—Hugo Baker—went out of his way to make her a bracelet. A pink bracelet, with hearts. Logan squirms with embarrassed glee. She can’t figure out the right response. As her tongue trips numbly over the words, Milly interrupts them, tugging on Logan’s shirt to get her attention.
“Hey, who’s Mr. Campbell talking to?”
They all turn to look. The Camp director stands at the foot of the mess hall steps, not too far from them. He is talking quietly and seriously with another older man, a tall man with a beard and dark gray hair. The man has his arms crossed, one foot propped up on the bottom step.
“I don’t know. I think I’ve seen him before.” Logan shrugs. “He’s in the mess hall sometimes.”
“Yeah,” says Hugo. “He lives in the town, or something. Elias knows him. Why?”
Milly stands still, staring hard. “I don’t know. He looks like someone I know.”
All four of them watch the man and Mr. Campbell quietly. The director shakes his head, the other man nods, and they both roll their necks and shove their hands in their pockets. The man with the beard scans the crowded lawn. He looks right at the four of them, then pauses. He is smiling. He says something to Mr. Campbell and points straight toward them. Logan can’t hear his words, but she could swear she sees her own name on his lips: Logan. She looks away in a hurry.
Max meets her gaze. His eyes flick back toward the steps, then he looks at her again. “Logan,” he says slowly. “What’s your last name?”
“Adler. Why?”
The funny expression shimmers across his face again. He looks like he is trying to dig something out from between his teeth with his tongue. His lips purse and twist, then he shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
The bell rings for lunch and their conversation drops. Hugo reaches out for Logan’s hand, and everything else in the world falls away.
Sam
“I don’t know.” Rosie’s eyes are dead behind her sunglasses. She shakes her head and flops her hands dully at her sides.
They sit on the lifeguard dock in swimsuit tops and shorts, keeping a passive eye on the splashing campers and talking in low voices. The sun beating down over them is relentless, and Sam feels sick, dizzy and uncomfortable in her skin. She feels like she woke up in the wrong body; this one is too big, clumsy, shaped all wrong. Every once in a while, they have to stop their conversation to shout at a rule breaker.
“Henry! No flips off the dock!”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Sam eyes her. “You can’t just not know.”
“I don’t know.” Her hair is wet and loose, clinging in lumps to her suntanned shoulders. She is beautiful and reckless and defeated, a comic book heroine, fed up. “I don’t know, okay? It just happened. We were drunk, and we were walking around, and I don’t know where you disappeared to.” Her attention drifts to the shore. “Sharon! No running!”
“And?”
“And I don’t know, Sam.” Rosie smacks the dock with an open palm. Her lips hang open for a moment, thoughtful. “It definitely happened in the boathouse. Also . . . maybe again, in the shower this morning.” She winces. “I think we were quiet.”
“There’s no way you were quiet.”
“Shut up. Seriously, for the rest of the summer, just shut up. It’s fine. I’m fine.” Rosie rubs at her temples. A gag chokes in her throat; she swallows it, shakes her head, and holds up her index finger at Sam. She scoots forward on the dock and slides into the water, disappearing below the dark surface.
Sam watches her go. Her fingers are trembling. Something about the idea of Rosie and Elias together, hilarious as it is, has her disgusted in a lonely, selfish way. She slaps a palm across her chest and glares at the lakeshore. “Sharon! I see you running one more time, I’m sending you to crafts!”
When Rosie climbs back onto the dock, she wrings out her wet hair, dries her sunglasses on her towel, then turns to her sharply. “Your turn, now. What happened to you last night? How’d you end up with El’s shirt?”
The T-shirt is a damp lump beside them on the dock. Sam has been wearing it all day—changing somehow fell behind in her priorities. She clears her throat and launches into the story she prepared.
Rosie listens, her face inscrutable. Then she laughs. “You and Taps? Where?”
“In the air rifle shed.” It isn’t a difficult lie to come up with. There are only so many people, so many places. The pieces can be shuffled around like a board game. Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlett, in the air rifle shed, with a fifth of vodka. “My shirt got . . . you know, dirty, so we went down to laundry. This was in the lost-and-found pile. Stewart!” She turns back to the water, grateful for a diversion. “Get off the buoy!”
Rosie laughs. Gently, at first, then louder. She lifts her sunglasses to meet Sam’s eyes and unravels, feverish. Sam picks it up. Soon all the campers at the lakeshore are frowning in confusion toward the lifeguard dock. They laugh until tears are streaming from their eyes, until the sky is spinning over Sam’s head and her lungs are aching for air. She feels, despite her headache and the guilt of lying, suddenly gleeful. For a brief, bright moment they could be anyone. Any normal twenty-somethings, at their normal summer job, giggling over the normal antics and regrets.
The ecstatic moment is cut short by the buzz of Sam’s radio. She quits laughing and leaps for it—every buzz could be news about Poppy.
Sam?
“What’s up, boss?”
AD meeting in five. I’ll send someone down to swap you out.
“Oh.” Sam watches Rosie. Her bright look has faded. “Yeah, okay. Be right up.”
They look at each other. Rosie turns to the swimmers in the water.
“Sorry.”
“No, go ahead.” Her voice is strained, the bitterness behind it thinly veiled.
Sam stands and tosses the T-shirt back on, then clips the radio to the waistband of her shorts. As she straps into her sandals, she wishes she had told Rosie the truth about where she was last night. She wants to tell her about him, about them, to pick apart his words and looks with her, to laugh over her mortifying encounter with Richard Byron in the office. How would Rosie look at her then, if she knew? How much stronger would the bitterness get? What would they whisper behind her back each time the radio buzzed? The most she can muster is a weak, sorry smile as she walks off the dock.
She gets to the office just before the start of the meeting. Dane looks up at her when she walks through the screen door, and her anxious heart shudders—he must have found something in his room: a sock, her shirt, a corner of foil wrapper—but he laughs, and says: “Dope shirt, Sam.”
She nods and moves to get herself a cup of coffee from the back of the room.
When Richard Byron walks into the office, he claps her briskly on the shoulder. “Afternoon,” he says without looking at her directly. Campbell comes through the door after him, then Nick—who, to Sam’s dismay, also pats her on the shoulder as he passes in the exact same casual manner.
“Afternoon.”
Byron raises an eyebrow at her over his coffee cup.
“Nicky, you seen your brother today?” Dane snickers. “Looks like he fought an octopus.”
“And lost,” Katie adds.
Nick nods, pouring his own coffee cup. “I did see that.”
“We’re trying to figure out who did it to him. Wait”—Gabe gasps—“was it you, Sam?”
