She puts a hand to her face, wiping sweat from her brow, from her upper lip. She doesn’t know what to do next. To wait for T.J. to finish her shower feels incorrect. To pick up the phone and call anyone without T.J.’s guidance feels similarly wrong. Who would she call, anyway? The police? The volunteer fire department? God forbid—the Van Laars themselves? She can see the telephone across the room on T.J.’s desk—the only one on the camp’s premises. The other one in the vicinity is in the main house. Self-Reliance.
Louise tiptoes down the hall toward the bathroom. The door is open. T.J.’s clothes are in a pile on the floor.
She pauses outside it. Should she call out more loudly?
Too late: one high metal squeak, the turning of a knob. The shower goes off. Abruptly, the curtain flies open—and there is T.J., and her short wet hair, and her lean torso, and her small breasts, and the farmer’s tan she sports all summer.
Louise whirls on her heel, but it’s too late. They’ve already locked eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” says Louise, at the same time that T.J. lets out a holler.
“What’n the hell, Louise,” says T.J., after she catches her breath.
“I’m so sorry,” Louise says, again and again. She walks back down the hall, still saying it.
Behind her, she hears T.J. opening drawers.
“What are you doing in here?” calls T.J.
Louise clears her throat. “It’s about Barbara Van Laar,” she says.
“What about her?”
“She wasn’t in her bunk this morning.”
For what feels like a minute: silence.
Then T.J.’s footsteps in the hallway. She enters the office, clothed.
“She’s got a bunkmate, right? Did she notice Barbara leaving?”
“She says she didn’t hear anything. Slept through it.”
There is a good chance, Louise knows, that T.J. will hold Louise accountable. Because a counselor’s job is to hear things: the cruel words spoken by one camper to another. A clap of thunder in the distance: everyone out of the lake.
The screen door—most important. The screen door as it swings open in the night.
Louise waits for T.J. to say something. Anything. At last, she speaks.
“But you were in the cabin last night,” says T.J. “You and Annabel. Right?”
If Louise hesitates, it is only to breathe in. She’s been expecting this question. She’s prepared.
“Yes,” she says, swiftly.
“You’re sure,” says T.J. “You and Annabel both.”
“Both of us,” says Louise.
She is not a habitual liar, but she is a practical one. It has been necessary for Louise to lie periodically throughout her life. A matter of survival. Still, it never feels good: especially when she’s lying to someone she respects. Someone like T.J. Hewitt—to whom she has confessed, on several occasions, certain things that she has never told another soul. To lie to her now gives Louise a sick feeling in her stomach.
But if T.J. is onto her, she doesn’t reveal that now. Instead, she shifts her attention away from Louise, and to the public address system that sits on and under her desk.
She strides across the room. Lifts the microphone. Turns on the system.
“All cabins,” she says. “Please send one counselor to the Director’s Office. CITs, you’re in charge for the morning.”
She switches the system off, turns her back to Louise for a moment. Without pivoting, she asks: “Have you seen him this week?”
John Paul, she means. Louise knows this without asking.
For a second time this morning, she lies to T.J.
“No.”
Tracy
June 1975
The arrival of Barbara Van Laar at Camp Emerson was met mainly with silence. There was silence as the Van Laars’ black town car rolled slowly up the driveway and then across the lawn, conducted by a driver; silence as the girl herself, Barbara, traveled the half mile from the main house on foot, apparently having refused to ride alongside her own possessions.
She came into view at 8:05 a.m., just as breakfast in the commissary was letting out. She saluted unsmilingly as she passed the exiting campers, who bumped into one another as they strained to get a look. She was wearing clothing the likes of which many of them had never seen: cutoff jean shorts that barely covered her bottom, and beneath them black stockings with intentional-looking runs in them, and black army boots, and a T-shirt with a word on it that none of them could quite make out, but presumed to be something rude. Her hair was artificially black, and cut into a stringy bob that ended just below her jaw, and her lips were painted red, and her eyes were rimmed in charcoal. Most surprising were the silver spikes—more than one—that adorned each earlobe, along with what appeared to be a dog collar encircling her neck, and two black leather cuffs on her wrists.
Barbara’s inaugural walk across the lawn would be discussed for months afterward: it was the first time any of the campers had seen her in the flesh, though she’d been talked about for years. Most of the conversation centered on her appearance and attire, which was, to most of Camp Emerson, a shock. The only campers who knew what to call her were the Manhattanites, who used a word that the rest of them had never heard.
Punk.
Any other camper who arrived in Barbara’s clothing would have been immediately shuttled to the bottom of the social heap, met with incredulity or ignored entirely. But Barbara Van Laar was too interesting to ignore, her personal history too intriguing and complex. Though no one said it aloud, the goal of every camper on the grounds was to befriend her.
• • •
