She paused, thinking.
“Another thing,” said Barbara. “Stick together. I mean keep your bodies touching overnight. You’ll be a lot warmer if you do.”
A few of the younger boys groaned.
“Fine,” said Barbara. “Freeze if you want. I don’t care.”
Someone giggled, and they all looked in the direction of her extended arm.
Christopher, the youngest, had curled up into a ball on the ground, his knees inside Barbara’s sweatshirt. He was fast asleep.
Barbara clapped. “Everyone who’s not me, Tracy, Walter, or Lowell,” she said. “Go to your tents. Bedtime.”
• • •
The camp settled. Even T.J., up on her crest, seemed to have retired: she’d let her campfire dwindle, apparently warm enough inside the sleeping bag she’d packed.
When the four oldest campers had finished tidying the site, Walter waved them toward him, toward the tent that had been designated his and Lowell’s.
“I brought something with me,” he whispered. In the dim light of the fire, Tracy could see the glint of his braces as he grinned.
Inside the tent, they sat up in a small circle, shaking with cold. Tracy’s teeth chattered anytime they were not clenched. She could only imagine how Barbara was feeling, down one layer, having donated it to Christopher.
Walter, a wiry, young-looking fourteen, apparently noticed too, for he removed the sweatshirt he was wearing and handed it to Barbara.
“No,” said Barbara.
“Take it,” said Walter. “I’ve still got this shirt on.” He pointed to the long-sleeved shirt he was wearing underneath.
“Besides,” he said, “I can just cuddle with Lowell tonight.”
And he slung an arm over Lowell, who grinned and shoved him off.
“What did you want to show us?” said Barbara.
Walter removed his arm from Lowell’s shoulders and lifted his remaining shirt. Underneath it was a flask he had strapped to his flank.
Tracy recognized what it was immediately. Her own father had a flask that he brought with him to the track. He kept it in an inner pocket of his jacket, nipped from it occasionally with no self-consciousness. Once, after a horse of his had won a race, he had offered it to Tracy, and she had been curious enough to take a sip. She still remembered the burn of it as it went down her throat.
“Impressive,” said Barbara.
“Thanks,” said Walter. He unscrewed the top of it and swigged.
“What’s in it?” asked Barbara.
“Crème de menthe,” said Walter. “It’s the only booze my dad doesn’t keep track of.”
He passed it. All of them drank. Tracy took a small sip at first, and then a larger one. It was sweeter than what her father drank, and also more disgusting.
She coughed.
“Shhhhh,” said Barbara. She grabbed the flask from Tracy and took a long draught, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Within minutes, the tent had become warmer. Tracy grinned in the dark. All the worries she had ever had suddenly seemed several yards farther away.
Barbara was to her right; Lowell was opposite her; Walter was next to him. Tracy inched her foot, inside its sneaker, in what she suspected was the direction of Lowell’s, though she could not see. She was picturing what it would be like to feel his mouth on hers. When her sneaker reached his, she left it there, and it felt like putting a plug inside a socket.
“I’m bored. Let’s play a game,” said Walter.
“It’s pitch black in here,” said Tracy. She was thinking of cards, or checkers, or the pick-up sticks she had created for Christopher.
“Not like that. Truth or dare,” said Walter.
Barbara laughed softly.
Tracy knew what this was only from books and shows. She understood it to be a game that people her age played at things like sleepovers, but the only sleepovers she had had were with her cousins on her mother’s side, or with Debbie Finley, a neighbor girl whose mother worked nights. Those sleepovers hadn’t felt anything like this one.
Part of the feeling came from danger: all of them, Tracy felt certain, had at the back of their mind the image of Jacob Sluiter at the edge of the campsite, recently escaped, hungry and angry. But none of them would say his name: to say it felt disrespectful to Barbara. To the memory of her brother, the rumors that Sluiter was somehow involved in his disappearance.
“I’ll go first,” said Tracy, feeling reckless. She put her hand out for the disgusting crème de menthe.
“Truth or dare?” said Walter. The words felt like an incantation.
“Truth,” said Tracy, drinking.
“Who do you like?” said Walter.
And she understood immediately that she would lie. She thought about all the boys in her grade at her school in Hempstead.
