From the center of the group, counselors began making their way outward toward the groups they had been assigned. Tracy scanned them, wondering who would come their way.
But it was T.J. Hewitt herself who approached.
“You’re with me,” she said.
• • •
Five minutes later, they set off.
T.J. was in the lead. Next came the youngest campers in their group. They fell in line like ducklings behind their leader, who looked back at them every so often, as if surprised or annoyed by their presence.
“Pretend I’m invisible,” she kept saying—and they’d drop back next to the rest of the group, only to return to T.J.’s side a moment later.
Barbara and Tracy and Lowell and his friend Walter—the oldest—walked four abreast. Tracy glanced sideways at Lowell from time to time, remembering what it had been like to sing in harmony with him, then blushing furiously at the thought of it.
Walking north, they crossed in front of the main house, Self-Reliance. In the windows, Tracy thought she could see people moving, and she said so to Barbara, who shrugged, looking straight ahead.
“They’re getting ready,” she said.
“For what?”
“They’re having a party. It’s the house’s hundredth birthday.”
“Are you invited?”
Barbara shook her head.
“I don’t want to go anyway,” she said.
• • •
They crossed the main road, and hiked an hour more, until finally T.J. stopped them.
“This is good,” she said. And then she walked away.
It was Barbara who broke the silence. “Open your backpacks,” she said.
Between the twelve of them they had: sixty-two cans of various foods, twelve bags of gorp, twelve water canteens, four small bottles of iodine tincture, nine tarps, four can openers, various knives, a roll of snare wire, ten ropes, and—the last item to come out of the last bag, and the item that drew the biggest sigh of relief—one box of matches.
Barbara stood up, inspecting the goods, making calculations about how to use it all. Then she glanced at T.J., who was leaning against a tree, one knee bent, the sole of her boot resting against its bark.
“Don’t look at me,” said T.J. “I’m invisible. I’m not here.”
She turned and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders, then walked thirty feet up a slight incline, where she found a relatively flat place in the earth and began to set up her tent. In a flash, she’d made her own fire, strung a hammock between two trees, and begun reading a book while boiling water for coffee.
• • •
By noon, the campers had set up too, with Barbara leading the charge. Not for the first time, Tracy marveled at how well she moved, how much she knew about the woods. She was the one to locate running water in the form of a nearby stream, to lead a small group to refill their canteens, with an iodine topper; she was the one to use ropes and tarps to make primitive tents, to clear a patch of ground, to frame a large circle with rocks. Then she sent the children off to find the driest wood they could find, and kindling too.
She was not much older than the rest of them—in fact, she was younger than Walter and Lowell—but to Tracy she seemed, that day, like a grown woman.
On the nearby rise, T.J. glanced up from her book from time to time, watching impassively, saying nothing.
When she was not following Barbara’s orders, Tracy sat on the ground and played a game invented by one of the younger children, a boy named Christopher who seemed sweet-natured and sort of frightened. He was eight years old: the youngest of the bunch. “The youngest in the whole camp,” he noted glumly.
• • •
At night, after dinner, they told ghost stories—avoiding any mention of Jacob Sluiter, or Slitter—who felt too real to be fun. Lowell told the one about Scary Mary, the gray-haired woman, a favorite ghost on the grounds. “Boy in my cabin said he saw her just the other night,” said Lowell—until one of the younger girls began to cry, and Lowell recanted. They sang camp songs instead, and then Lowell sang, a cappella, a beautiful mournful song about a sailor lost at sea.
Something wild was happening: Tracy could feel it. Yes, T.J. was just up the hill, but she was making good on her promise of invisibility. The children were in charge, then: all of them, but Barbara the most. In the absence of adults, they came into themselves in a way that made Tracy proud.
• • •
The tarp tents were assigned by Barbara. Tracy and Barbara would be in the first; Lowell and Walter would be in the second; the four youngest boys would be in the third—when they briefly protested the injustice of this, Barbara stared at them until they quieted—and the four youngest girls would be in the fourth.
At ten in the evening, it was chilly away from the fire.
That morning, following Barbara’s instructions, Tracy had put on sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a heavy sweater over her uniform before running to the flagpole. Most of the campers had also gotten that message from counselors and friends who’d tipped them off, but Christopher, the youngest, was shivering in his shorts and T-shirt.
Spying him, Barbara stripped off her sweatshirt and tossed it to him.
“Put it on,” she commanded.
It looked like a gown on tiny Christopher, but he grinned inside it, comforted.
There would be no sleeping bags on this trip; not a single camper had received one. Part of their job was to survive with a certain amount of discomfort.
“Listen up,” said Barbara. “If you wake up in the night and see that the fire’s getting low, it’s your job to stoke it, or load it with new fuel.” She paused to demonstrate, to point out where the makeshift woodpile was. She’d wrapped it in the one remaining tarp, in case of rain. “But don’t go wandering,” she said. “If you get lost in the dark, that’s bad for everyone.”
