Death and Love at the Old Summer Camp Read online

  The door squeaked and stuck, but finally, with both of us banging into it, lurched open. A long, plain table was in front, and some stools scattered around. A funny metal thing with a dried up, skinny rubber hose sat on the desk. We would definitely have to explore more later, but for now, it would be a great hiding place for the shirt and the paper!

  Katie said, “Uh-oh! I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “No. You can’t go back to your cabin or the main house now! Sure you’re not just running away from me with that note?”

  “No! I’ve gotta go now. Look for something, Pina.”

  Convinced that Katie wasn’t escaping with the note, I searched the ground. I saw a raised board. “Look,” I said. “A trap door in the floor.”

  We eased the trap, found ourselves looking into the basement. I thought of the other trap door we had just seen…and the poop. Uh huh. Looking at Katie and back at the empty space in the floor, I giggled. “Well, why not? No one will know.”

  “I don’t care, I just gotta go now!”

  Katie lowered her shorts, turning around to see if I was watching. I turned away for a second and then snuck another sheepish glance. She tugged at her panties urgently. I heard her let out a light sigh. Her whole body seemed to ease itself down in a flowing movement when she exhaled.

  “I hope you’re not watching,” she mumbled, as a burpy, gas-passing noise escaped.

  “Hey. It’s just natural. Nothing to be embarrassed about.” I stifled a giggle. I was afraid she would fall through. Now, that would be ugly. That thought made me realize I had to go too.

  Although I was afraid of splinters and spiders, as soon as I squatted over the hole in the floor, I was overcome by the rising smells of damp earth, rotting leaves, dank mushrooms, and mice.

  “Please, no jokes about spiders,” I begged. I did my business, then stood and pulled up my shorts.

  “Umm. What a cute doolie you have.” Katie smirked.

  “Katie!”

  “Hey, sweetie, it is cute. I’m only playing around with you.”

  We had just emerged from some rite of passage. We were now members of a wilder group. Maybe the camp was really drawing us in.

  “Was that like sick?” Katie asked.

  “It was weird. I really felt like a boy, a boy doing what a boy would have done.”

  “You think? Kind of like an initiation?” Katie stroked her chin.

  “Should we put on skins and loin cloths? Like, where are the vines to swing on?” I joked, but I had to admit to myself that I did feel different.

  “Quick, close the hatch,” said Katie.

  As we attempted to cover up the wafting reminder of our brave new world, we returned to the past. “Let’s look at the paper now,” Katie said, handing it over to me. “I promised you, didn’t I?”

  We pulled stools up to the long table and sat. She said, “Unroll it, spread it out. Easy, it might break.”

  “There’s a date, 7-9-39. It’s a calendar page,” I said.

  “It’s a bunch of scribble.” Katie looked at the page and shook her head.

  “Let me see. Um…it’s ripped. I can make out words like ‘all cut’ and ‘square.’ Then, a drawing of a box.” I scratched my head and chewed my nail. “This is wacky. It sounds like it’s a sign, like a secret group tattoo. I mean, when I fell asleep in the bathroom, someone said something about a secret group meeting behind the crafts cabin, like, ‘shush, tonight’s the night. Get the rest.’ Let’s keep thinking on it. But I really have to get outta here. I feel dizzy and sick – something’s bad in here, like cleaning stuff.”

  Katie looked around the room. “I get it now. This is a science lab.” Katie was thrilled. Her eyes were huge. She loved science. “We could come back with gas masks,” she said.

  “You jerk, Katie. You’d look like a turtle.”

  We reverted to poking and tickling, as we left the pungent cabin.

  ****

  Katie had to go for a drive with her parents the next day, which gave me the chance I was waiting for. I grabbed one of my father’s handkerchiefs to wrap around my nose. I got back into the science cabin, snatched the shirt from the cupboard, and headed out to the rec hall. There it was safe; there I knew the feel of the floorboards and the waves in the glass. There, I thought I knew what was real and what was – I don’t know – real, a long time ago, or real in some other world.

  I took off my tennis shirt and put on the worn plaid. I buttoned it slowly and was about to sit down on the floor, back against the benches. Something threw me to the ground. Felt like my legs came out from under me, like the time my parents had to give me that medicine with codeine again. Like I was part dead, my legs useless, then more dead, up to my neck, and then it sucked in my head too, and I was really all dead.

  I heard a rumbling in my ears, like being in the New York City subway, my head speeding through the tunnels with a warm, kind of prickly feeling in my stomach. I guessed that maybe I wasn’t really dead. My left side felt like all these fingers were crawling over it. Then there was a gash, something sharp in my heart, as if I was being stabbed. I put my hand up to the rip in the shirt. Now I was awake and alive but hurting so bad. I felt around and tore the shirt off, sure that blood would cover my chest. Sure enough, there was a thin line, about four inches long, right over my breast. Just as soon as I looked at it, the wound seemed to zip itself up and disappear.

  I screamed. It came back to me from the four walls and the rattling glass doors. The funnel canyon of the hills down to the outlet of the lake also seemed to echo back my cry. I flew to the doors, my real shirt in one hand and holding my heart as though afraid it might fall out. Then I would really, really be dead.

  I cried face down in the grass for a long time. I knew that I was either crazy or something really bad happened with the shirt. I had to put it back. I had to tell Katie. I had a million ideas going on in my head. My mother would sob. My father would blanch and rush me to a doctor to have my head examined.

  No. Katie and I would just figure this out. We could play detective. Only now, it didn’t feel like a game.

  Katie was smart and curious and wouldn’t rat on me. Besides, she was my friend, she made me laugh, and I would trust her. She was tender with me, took care of me. I had even shown her my old diary where I wrote I was ugly. Katie had brushed my bangs back from my forehead and told me she thought I was cute. It was the first time I ever felt like that could be true.

  Thinking about those quiet times with Katie, I felt shivers. My knees got all soupy when she did things like that. I didn’t like girls; I couldn’t. I mean, I knew I liked Katie, but that way? A lesbo?

  I told my head to shut up. I couldn’t think about that stuff now. I had had enough for the day. I’d tell Katie more when she got back. All of it. I really would.

  Chapter Four

  BLOOD SISTERS

  “I needed a break. Couldn’t I just “be” for one day? The morning humidity was heavy on my skin; it matched my mood. In the dining room at breakfast, I gave Katie a lazy jerk of my head in the direction of the camp. She knew to meet me afterwards on the porch of the rec hall.

  We sat on the brown, peeling porch steps, Katie just staring at me. I wanted to tell her just a little about the shirt – just that I had a hunch about it. She looked at me in a way that was becoming more familiar as I told her about the events of the day before. It was a look that said, “I wanna believe, but really?”

  I told her how the shirt took over, and I “became” whoever had worn it. I was stabbed; I was bleeding. That was how it was with my dreams. Sometimes I had no warning they were coming; they snuck up like ether in a dentist’s office. All of me got pulled into that cold, black, ether mask.

  Katie’s eyes roved over me, just for a second. I hoped it was with understanding and maybe something more. But when Katie spoke, she didn’t reassure me, she just wanted to go back to the “science spot.”

  We walked the short distance to the science cabin. Katie pu
lled out some rope she had brought with her and told me to tie it around the big pine next to the science cabin. Little by little, we lowered ourselves to the “basement” level – the space below the trap door we used as a latrine the day before. Underneath the cabin, we found the science storeroom: a smashed-open cupboard and powders all over. We remembered to tie our handkerchiefs around our noses to protect ourselves from the fumes. I looked over at Katie and smiled; we both looked like bandit thieves.

  The colors were beautiful: a bright blue and a soft yellow dusting on a broken bottle marked “Sulphur,” and something like those silver balls you put on cookies. That jar was whole and the little ball of silver rolled back and forth, still magic after all these years. One box had a skull-and-crossbones; we left that one alone. There were also some neat glass jars and small, wooden racks of test tubes. There was a big, dried rust stain, sort of near some—oops, that was where we went to the bathroom. Now that was a bad smell, although apparently heaven to the flies zigzagging all around us. But that rust stain was definitely weird.

  “I’m gonna get a chem set for my birthday.” Katie broke the silence.

  “Creep!” I teased, but I really got stuck on the word birthday.

  “But we can use it together. We could figure out all those chemicals and find out what they did with them.”

  “Far out! I want to analyze the spots on the shirt. When’s your birthday, anyway?” I tossed back as nonchalantly as I could.

  “Oh, crumb. I didn’t want to tell you ‘cause I asked my parents if we could take you, and they’re being jerks. ‘Oh no,’ said my mother, ‘birthdays are for families.’ Why doesn’t she just stay in her own world! She’s always half out of it, anyway! I told her you were like family to me, more maybe.

  “It’s Saturday, my birthday. I’m turning sixteen, and we’re going to Star Island in New Hampshire. It’s an inn right on the beach. It’s got these old-fashioned rockers where I curl up, so no one can tell I’m there. I used to pretend I could rock myself right off the porch and go flying out onto the water. No one would know.” Katie sighed. “Privacy, at last!”

  I heard her say I was “more than family.” So that’s how she thinks of me.

  I was already thinking about what I could make for her birthday and decided on a pine needle basket. I’d need to go down to the library to get a book on old Indian crafts.

  “Hey, where’d you go?” asked Katie when I didn’t respond right away.

  “Nowhere. C’mon. Let’s see if we can get into the crafts cabin. Maybe they’re connected. Or here,” I said as I picked up a small sledgehammer my foot had dislodged from the loose, dried dirt. “We could break the hasp on the front door.”

  We hoisted ourselves up and around to the front of the crafts cabin. I swung the sledge once, the rotten wood let go of its screws, and the lock flew off. We were in.

  Again, the still air, closed off for twenty years, greeted me, but there was a sweetness too, like dried flowers. Lavender, maybe, and berries. A can of rubber cement, all dried up, still held that gasoline-like smell nestled among balls of yarn. Bright yellows, royal blues: the colors of the camp.

  As I started to rub strands of the wool through my fingers, memories of my old childhood blanket, tangerine and green wool, started to flood me. Not for long. Katie burst in, letting out a war hoop, triumphantly waving what appeared to be a six-inch bone.

  “Cool! Look what I got!” She laughed and hooted while baring her teeth like a wild woman. I quickly clapped Katie on the back. Another discovery!

  “My cavewoman!” I teased, but my stomach had started to turn. “What do you think…?”

  I stopped short. I couldn’t tell if I was scared about the bone, jealous, or what. Maybe so lovesick over Katie, this silly, gutsy version of Katie, that it hit me like a club, hard as this bone. I was missing her already, waiting for her to leave for her birthday celebrations.

  Katie let out just one big guffaw. Then she started to chew on her lower lip. “Don’t know, maybe a dog, maybe…Man! Promise to wait till I come back from my birthday to find out?”

  “Like I’m going to be able to analyze it…” My sarcasm came out sharper than I intended. Probably from my lonely place.

  “Shoot, Pin. I wish you were coming with me.” Katie laid the bone aside and gingerly placed her hand on my wrist. She raised her eyes to meet my gaze. “It’ll feel weird without you.”

  My knees were water. I knew I was already missing Katie. We belonged together. I realized we were still holding each other by the wrists, and our smiles were slipping into somewhat sad grimaces.

  “I uh…I uh…I’m gonna miss you,” I managed to get out without totally turning fuchsia.

  Katie turned away as if looking for something to wrap the bone in. Still, I managed to get a quick glimpse of her blushing face. Together, we creaked open a crooked, warped drawer containing some scissors and razor blade-like knives. There were some bits of cloth we could use to wrap the bone. I started to reach in, and then my hand slipped.

  “Ouch!” I screamed.

  Katie spotted the blood pooling on my finger. “Is it deep?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have a hanky?”

  The hanky turned pink and then a deeper red, then brown. No, I wasn’t going to faint.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Hey look, I have color-changing blood.” I tried to stay light and airy, so Katie wouldn’t worry. I was fighting back the hint of nausea I felt. I just couldn’t pass out, not now.

  “You sure?” Katie took my hand and made as if to kiss my boo-boo. “Wanna be blood sisters? It won’t hurt; you’re already fatally wounded.” She smiled a warm smile that reached into my heart and held it tight. Yes, I was fatally wounded!

  “Here, watch!” She pricked her finger and sucked the bead of blood. Katie was humming Everyday by Buddy Holly and bouncing around in rhythm.

  “Yes! I am yours; you are mine in this co-mingling.” I had read that someplace. I was desperately trying to stop myself from blubbering, “I think I love you.”

  “I am yours; you are mine.” Katie gave me an open and vulnerable look that I drank in.

  We squished our bloody fingers together, trying to laugh even though the moment felt serious. We took turns sucking first the other’s finger and then our own. My stomach got all the more squishy. Good squishy, with a little bit of “uh oh” bad.

  I heard the last lyrics to the Buddy Holly song Katie had been humming; “love like yours will surely come my way.”

  Chapter Five

  BIRTHDAY PLANS

  This was going to be a painful day. I knew it from the time I got up. My mother was calling to me from her room on the other side of the cabin bathroom. She was telling me I should wear my “nice plaid pleated skirt” to go to the library with her.

  “Right, Mommy, like the books will care,” I shot back.

  “You listen, miss,” she called back in what she thought was an affectionate voice. “Someday you’ll be happy I made you pay attention to your clothes.”

  “Right, Mommy. What would people say about my pedal pushers?”

  “Don’t be so smart. You know what I mean.”

  I was tired of shouting through walls, but I couldn’t resist, “No, mother, what do you mean?”

  “It’s time…”

  “Eight a.m.?” I thought I’d help her out a bit.

  “It’s time,” she said with an authoritarian edge, “you stopped acting like such a tomboy. Grow up!”

  Ouch! This library jaunt was going to be a real blast. I just couldn’t wait. Sigh.

  My father passed through my room to turn on the radio. Winking at me, he hummed notes of “Sugartime” as the McGuire Sisters drowned out my mother’s complaints.

  After a near-silent breakfast, my mother and I set off. Her litany of complaints started as soon as we were on our way. Chief among them was all the time I spent with Katie.

  “You know I like the McGuilvrys, and Katie’s just lovely, but…”
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  “But what, Mommy?” Oh God, why did I have to bite?

  “People might talk.” She stopped to wave at fellow guests walking on the other side of the road. “Say ‘good morning,’ Pina.”

  “Good morning, Pina,” I said.

  “Stop it this minute,” she snapped, “You’re getting too old. You should be dressing more like your cousin Mary Grace. More, well, lady-like.”

  My guts were churning. Don’t say one dang word, I said to myself.

  She continued to ramble, most of which I tuned out, except for “lovesick puppy dog.”

  We arrived just in the nick of time. Five more minutes and I could have been accused of matricide! I immediately got the book How to Make a Pine-needle Basket, so that I could make my present for Katie. After that, I hung out in a quiet corner of the library and avoided my mother. When I was with her, I could block out the sound of her voice, but it didn’t completely block the sting of her words. By now, I felt as if bees covered me. I was a tomboy. So what! That didn’t mean anything. I knew I couldn’t scream in the blooming library, but dammit!

  So, did my mother think I was ‘that way’? If I…were, I mean I didn’t think so, but…that would go over like World War Three. I remember my schoolteacher aunt’s friend. What was it my father called her? Spinster bulldagger?

  I had to clear my thoughts and be a blank slate so my mother couldn’t read anything on my face. I would have to talk about food or plants lining the road on the walk home. Something boring like that.

  After an uneventful, semi-quiet stroll home along the elm tree-lined road, we arrived back at the cabin before lunchtime. Pleased with our outing, my mother allowed me to change into my blue jeans and my favorite red pointed-collar shirt. I also stashed the library book in my drawer before she could snoop. Yet another thing to hide.

  Lunch came and went. My mother chatted about the food; my father made sure his mouth was full. Apparently, neither of us felt like talking.

  Afterwards, I had a few hours until dinner. I scooped up pine needles on the way to the camp latrine. I had brought a cup to scoop some water from the lake. I made my way back up the slope, trying not to slosh too much water over the sides. I put my pine needles in the water to soak, then slumped against the wall of the latrine. I tried to read the next set of directions in my book, but started to nod off in the stale heat of the latrine. The next thing I knew was the brassy sound of far-away voices.