Every Little Thing in the World (19 page)

“It's going to be okay,” Mick said, as I sat down next to him. He put his arm around my shoulders. It felt strong and brotherly, like he had faced worse dilemmas than mine and lived to tell the tale. “It's going to be okay, Syd,” he said again. And for that brief moment, knowing my secret was mostly still safe, I could almost believe him.

*   *   *

As we ate breakfast (marshmallows and Wattie's baked beans), Jane made two announcements. One, that because we had been such lazy rowers (she eyed Natalia and me), we were two days behind schedule. We would have to step it up over the next five days if we wanted to arrive at our supply pickup on time. Two, when we got to the supply pickup, Lori would be going home, but Meredith would be staying.

We all looked over at Lori, who stared ferociously at the ground—next to Meredith but several feet away. Her poor skin looked red, ravaged, and inflamed from days of sun and sweat. Jane's visible disgust at Lori's weakness made my own sympathy flare. Poor Lori couldn't stomach the canned food, and she seemed particularly allergic to the Canadian mosquitoes. While the rest of us suffered bites that swelled and itched for half an hour or so, Lori tossed and turned all night, itching. The one thing that appealed to her on this trip was Brendan, and he not only didn't return her crush, he wouldn't even take her seriously as an aspiring actress. She had come to Camp Bell for adventure, to discover something new about herself and the world. What she had discovered was this: She hated the wilderness.

Jane clearly found all of this hateful and inconvenient. She said again that Lori's departure would give us an odd number of campers, so somebody would have to row alone. Portages would be even more difficult. “Maybe somebody from one of the other groups will be going home too,” Jane said. “Then we can take somebody new, or send somebody over.”

“I would go to a different group,” Charlie volunteered. It might have been the first time I'd heard him do anything but mutter. His voice sounded surprisingly adult, deep and gravelly. I don't know why I should have assumed that his silence meant he was content instead of miserable. Here I'd wanted to believe that except for Lori we were a happy tribe, rowing through our peaceful, postapocalyptic world. Now I realized we'd been more like a school cafeteria, with one group laughing at the elite table, and everybody else on the fringe. And now the elite table (Natalia on the other side of Mick, unwilling to meet my eyes) had started to break apart as well.

“Maybe Lori will change her mind,” I volunteered out loud. “Maybe we'll have so much fun in the next five days, she'll feel like she just has to stay.”

First Lori raised her eyes and looked at me, then everyone else did: as if they'd only realized at that exact moment that I was completely insane.

If it hadn't happened naturally, Jane probably would have insisted on it. But that day Brendan and I went in one canoe, Natalia and Mick in another. To preserve Brendan's manliness, he took the stern. He'd actually become fairly good at steering, and the two of us immediately power stroked to the front of the group. Natalia and Mick didn't fare as well, since neither had learned how to steer. Jane had to keep rowing back to them, shouting instructions. Still, we made great time and reached the place they'd planned to camp by lunch. Jane
and Silas were overjoyed, confident that we'd reach our drop-off point on schedule. In three days we'd be eating raw bacon and reading mail from home.

As we headed toward our lunch spot, we passed a fishing boat anchored in the middle of the lake. Two burly, overdressed men ate lunch, taking time out between bites to yell at a small butterscotch pit bull who cowered on the bow. As we floated past, Sam interrupted them. “What time is it?” he yelled up.

“Three o'clock,” the one wearing the baseball cap called back, after consulting his watch.

Jane looked deflated for a second, then perked up. “We still have hours of daylight left,” she said. “We'll have a quick lunch and then get back to rowing.” As we floated toward a sandy, pine-lined campsite, Jane called out to us cheerfully, “Look at this place. Isn't it beautiful?”

Lori must have been made brave by her impending departure, because she said, “It looks exactly the same as the last campground. Everything on this lake looks exactly the same.”

“That's because you have a bad attitude!” Jane barked back at her.

We pulled our canoes ashore and walked to the fire pit. Not that we'd be cooking anything. As Jane lay out the lunch supplies—the last of the whole wheat bread and the jam she'd made the night before by adding sugar to mashed wild blueberries—Natalia walked over to me.

“Hey,” she whispered, as if our earlier argument had never taken place. “What happened with you and Brendan last night?”

I stared at her, not quite willing to accept this olive branch. Her forehead scrunched up, uncharacteristically troubled, and I couldn't help but cave. “Nothing,” I said, in a perfectly normal voice. “We just went swimming.”

She stood, her face sweaty and dusty and difficult to read. In ten days we had rinsed off in the lake regularly, but we had barely washed our hair or soaped up our bodies. Despite liberal application of sunscreen, we were both several shades darker than when we'd begun. With her black hair and dark eyes, Natalia looked almost Native American. Her new sinewy muscles and the lack of makeup made it hard for me to decide whether she looked older or younger. I tried to remember my own face in the mirror, back at base camp. All I'd seen of myself since then was a murky reflection in the water. Sometimes I felt about my face the way Natalia felt about Steve's. I could barely remember what I looked like.

From the water, the two fishermen continued yelling at the dog. We heard a yelp; maybe it had been kicked. One of the men laughed. Ordinarily this would have been something for Natalia and me to discuss, to object to, to exclaim over. But she was too busy waiting for me to ask about what happened between her and Mick. “Nothing happened with Mick and me,” she finally said, as if this must be something I'd been desperate to know. “It wouldn't have anyway. But I've got my period.”

“TMI,” I said.

Natalia blinked back at me, clearly hurt. When had there ever been that possibility, too much information between
the two of us? “God, Sydney,” she said. “Please don't be mad at me.”

I sighed. In the past week, Natalia had deserted my abortion plans when I desperately needed her on board in order to carry them out. By pointing out my inferior financial status, she had broken a taboo that had existed between us since the dawn of time. She had betrayed her boyfriend, the dramatic love of her life. And there was so much more that I didn't even want to be able to put into words.

So maybe to avoid that effort, I lied. “Okay,” I said. “I won't be mad.”

Natalia reached out and touched my arm. “Good,” she said. Then we parted—she into the woods to pee, and me to eat my blueberry sandwich. As I sat down to eat, Silas stood up. The men on the fishing boat continued their haranguing of the poor dog. Silas rooted around in his canoe and then pulled a wad of bills from his pack. He splashed out into the water, holding the money above his head.

“Hey,” he yelled to the fishermen. “I'll give you a hundred bucks for that dog.”

There was a brief moment of silence. Then the one with the hat stood up, picked up the dog, and tossed him into the water. Silas threw the money into the boat. The dog swam past him, toward the shore, without looking back once.

By the time Silas got back to us, Meredith had already fed the dog two pieces of bread. The fishermen had motored off, perhaps worried that Silas would change his mind. I patted my
knees, and the dog wiggled his way over to me. I gave him the rest of my sandwich and scratched his head. He seemed like a nice dog, with a big grin, not affected by the previous abuse other than being very happy to have escaped it. When Natalia emerged from the woods she sat down next to me. The dog thrust his fat nose directly into her crotch. She pushed him away, holding his face firmly in her hands.

“What did I miss?” she said.

“I'm in love,” I told her, loud enough for everyone to hear.

We both laughed. Jane frowned across from us—either unhappy with the new addition to our crew or assuming that I meant Silas and not the dog.

chapter ten

the drop-off point

We reached our drop-off point at dusk, rowing through a light rain. It felt like reaching Avalon, with mist and twilight all around us, the dog perched and wagging in the bow of Jane's canoe. We had all taken turns carrying the dog in our boats, but he seemed to know who had masterminded his rescue. Given a choice he hopped in with Silas every time, and shadowed him closely whenever we reached camp. Two nights before, after much discussion, Silas had christened the dog Bucket Head.

“That's a terrible name,” I said.

“He's a terrible dog,” Silas said, which was true enough. Bucket Head had so far proved himself sweet but stupid. His first night camping with us, he had ripped into the food bag and eaten the last of our bread and marshmallows. Whereas before we had packed up our food halfheartedly, not quite believing in the need to protect it from bears, we now had an inside threat and made sure we sealed the cooler, even though we had almost nothing left but a sad assortment of dented cans.

The two other groups who shared our drop-off point had already arrived. Almost immediately, the three Youth at Risk found one another, which surprised me a little because one of them was African-American. Mick and the other two guys gathered by the edge of the lake, laughing and telling stories. I saw him gesture toward Natalia and then lean in close to whisper something. Three big guffaws erupted jarringly. If Natalia noticed, she didn't say anything. For the past two days she and I had wandered together through an unnaturally silent truce. She had stuck physically close to me in an obvious effort to avoid being alone with Mick, but I think we both felt like any sort of real conversation would just lead back to an argument.

Now we explored the other campsites, looking for the friends we'd met at base camp. I hoped I might find Cody, but no such luck. We roamed among the other kids, everyone looking more or less the same in our unwashed shorts and dirty raincoats. The main thing we learned from brief and passing conversation: the mail and food had not arrived yet, and all the other group leaders had been preparing much more elaborate meals in their reflector ovens. One group we visited was in the middle of devouring a pineapple upside-down cake. They gave us a piece, which Natalia and I immediately took into the woods, not wanting to split it more than two ways.

“I'm glad the mail hasn't come yet,” Natalia said, between glorious sugary bites. “It gives me another night to work on my letter to Margit. Will you help me?”

“Sure,” I said. We licked the last of the cake off our fingers
and went back to our tent. Meredith and Lori were off somewhere else, so we had it to ourselves.

Natalia stared at her sheet of paper. “It's not really a letter at all,” she said. “Just a list of questions. How can I send her this?”

“We could redo it,” I said. “Write a little introduction, then the questions.”

She lifted her pen as if to add a question, then pressed it to the paper and drew a large
X
. It struck me as a meaningless gesture—the words on the paper still visible, nothing really ruined.

“You know what I wonder most,” Natalia said. “I wonder what my father was like.”

“Your father,” I said, carefully testing the new possessive pronoun.

“Yes, my father. I wonder if he was kind of a delinquent, kind of a loser. Like Mick or Steve.”

I didn't like hearing these words attached to Steve, whose only claim to loserdom was public school and some very minor teenage brushes with the law. If I really went to Bulgar County High in the fall, maybe Natalia would start referring to me as a loser too.

“Steve's not a delinquent,” I said. “He's not a loser.”

“Oh, but Mick is?”

“You're the one who said it,” I pointed out. I didn't remind her that Mick had already admitted to the biggest crime a person could commit.

She relaxed her shoulders. “Did you see how those three
guys found each other the second we landed our boats?” she said. “It's like they're from the same tribe or something. What I'm thinking is, maybe my father was like Mick and Steve, some goy from a crappy family. And that's why I'm drawn to these guys, because of my genetic makeup. My DNA. Like, if you had your baby, it would grow up to cruise Overpeck for boys exactly like Tommy.”

I ignored this unpleasant vision of the future and thought of Margit's standard-issue husband—handsome, successful, from a good family. Margit had always seemed like such a prim and obedient person. I couldn't imagine her straying too far from the fold in terms of mate selection. “The father was probably someone from Linden Hill Country Day,” I said. “It was probably her high school sweetheart, a perfectly nice guy.”

Natalia looked down at her list of questions and drew another line through it. “I never heard of her having a high school sweetheart,” she said. “I keep trying to think of her, remember what I know about her. Like, it seems like five minutes ago I would have said we were so close. Now all I think is I don't know her. I don't know her at all.” She pressed down hard with the pen, but still didn't do much damage to the overall legibility.

“It's just weird,” she said, “expecting them to tell me the truth now, when all they've ever told me is lies.” A large tear dribbled to the end of her nose, then plopped onto the paper. I gently eased the pad out of her hands and ripped off the top sheet.

“Dear Margit,” I wrote, on a fresh piece of paper.

“She knows that's not my handwriting,” Natalia said.