Five Summers (4 page)

Some nights, later on, I’d find myself lying in bed spooning my laptop and scrolling through Facebook photos Skylar had posted from camp. In them, she was always mid-laugh, her arm draped over someone else’s shoulder: a tensely smiling Jo wearing what looked like—could it be?—lip gloss; a slimmer, dimpled, surprisingly attractive Nate. There’s one particular photo I always came back to, though, one of her and Adam sitting on the counselors’ porch. It must have been taken at the end of the summer, because they’re both really tan. They’re splayed out in Adirondack chairs, grinning and holding Dixie cups of bug juice. Each drink is topped with one of those miniature cocktail umbrellas, and Skylar captioned the photo “Wish you were here . . . .” It was like she had written it for me.

It was weird seeing my old friends get taller and cycle through different haircuts, but that’s not why the photos kept reeling me back in. It was a little heartbreaking to see snapshots of a new Camp Nedoba that I wasn’t a part of. Something like Halley’s Comet shows up once a century and then disappears again, but camp just kept going without me in it. I knew, deep down, that I could always go back, and that we’d always be friends. But life had obviously gotten in the way. So I was beyond excited when I got the reunion invitation, set for three summers after our graduation. It was an opportunity for us all to be together again, in the place where our story started, away from the stresses and distractions of everyday life.

It felt, in so many ways, like a second chance.

EMMA WAS RUNNING LATE. SHE
HATED
RUNNING LATE. Reunion registration started at eleven, but the girls had set their own pre-reunion for ten thirty, and with the traffic she was hitting as she approached Worcester on the Mass Pike, there was no way she would make it. But she was driving her aunt’s car—without
express
permission, although, Emma reminded herself, Aunt Leila had written “What’s mine is yours” in the two-page memo she had affixed to the fridge, along with instructions on how to water her azaleas and the preferred ratio of wet-to-dry food mix for her obese and ornery cat, Raoul—and so Emma was sticking to the speed limit. She couldn’t afford to pay a ticket, anyway, on her ten-dollar-a-day stipend from what had turned out to be the most disappointing summer job ever.

It had sounded so perfect: an editorial internship at
Miss Demeanor
, a teen-focused literary magazine that featured original essays along with articulate, funny, nonpatronizing advice about issues like sex, drugs, and conflicts with parents. After putting in a long, mind-numbingly boring year editing the op-ed page for the
Reed Memorial High School
Voice
(“The Spork in the Road,” an argument against plastic cafeteria utensils, was a high point), Emma had been ecstatic to start working at a real publication that wrote about real issues that would look amazing on her college applications
and
was based in New York City, where she could get away from what had become a constant, slow-burning battle with her parents over whether she would retake the SATs in the fall. (2100 was 96th percentile, but they felt that was on the low end for the Ivy League.) She’d harbored fantasies about penning Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reports—or at the very least getting to write posts for the magazine’s blog. But after a week spent making lunch runs and refilling the printer ink, Emma had been forced to readjust her expectations.

“
Editorial intern
is just code for
slush pile slave
,” a fellow intern named Jeff had told her on her second day, as they waded through box after box of unsolicited submissions, 99.9 percent of which got transferred directly into the paper shredder, unless the grammatical errors were egregious enough to earn them a place on the conference room bulletin board. Jeff had just finished his first year at NYU, and his blue eyes, brown hair, dimples, and thick black-framed glasses made him look like Clark Kent. Jeff was definitely the best part of
Miss Demeanor
so far, Emma thought with a smile, glancing up at herself in the rearview mirror as traffic slowed to a complete stop.

But work was quickly slipping from her mind the further she got from New York and the closer she got to the exit that would take her off the highway and through the sleepy main street of Onan, New Hampshire, up to the old oak tree adorned with a threadbare blue flag that signaled the discreet right turn onto Nedoba’s private gravel road. Emma couldn’t believe she was finally going back. It seemed physically impossible, like how she used to feel about air travel as a kid, waking up in Boston and going to sleep in California. No matter how many times her dad explained the mechanics of flight, she just couldn’t accept that magic didn’t factor in somehow. That morning, as she’d brushed her teeth in her aunt’s narrow bathroom, with a window that looked out on Central Park, Emma had tried to picture lying down that night on a thin, musty mattress, looking up at the underside of a bunk bed, hearing Skylar, Jo, and Maddie’s voices, and she couldn’t do it. But as she inched the green station wagon down the highway, it was getting more real by the minute, and Emma was equal parts thrilled and terrified.

She’d been texting with Skylar more over the weeks leading up to reunion (
Ten days!
Emma would write, receiving a reply hours later in Sky’s hasty typing—
Duuuude cant wait <3 uuu!
), but it had been at least six months since they’d exchanged any real correspondence. The last time they’d talked, in January, Skylar had been about to leave for a semester abroad in Florence, and she and Skylar had made excited plans to apply to Brown and RISD, respectively, so they could see each other again during college, all the time. At the end of the call, like always, they swore up and down to make a weekly phone date, but then Sky had never replied to Emma’s e-mails asking for her international number, and Emma had gotten swept up in schoolwork, SAT prep, and internship applications, anyway. Skylar had written a mass e-mail to the girls once, from Italy, which focused almost exclusively on a guy named Carlo, a tour guide she had started dating after he’d taken her on a gondola ride along the Arno. Emma didn’t know if he was still in the picture. Skylar’s Facebook relationship status was listed as “It’s complicated.”

Maddie had been even harder to pin down than Skylar. Over the years, she had amassed four different e-mail addresses, and Emma was never really clear on which one she actually checked. Often she would see an e-mail from Maddie in her inbox and get excited only to find out it was a spam ad for diet pills or inflatable underpants to make your butt look shapelier. It was just the sort of prank Maddie would have pulled in their camp days, and it made Emma miss her even more.

Jo was the best at keeping in touch, but her updates were never particularly illuminating. She would e-mail that her team had won the regional volleyball championship or that she was getting certified in ropes course training and was lobbying her dad to set one up at camp. But every time Emma would reply to her with an enthusiastic “How are you??” Jo’s response was always the same: “Good.” She was good. Things were good. Camp was good. Emma had come to hate the word
good
. It was what people said when they couldn’t or didn’t want to talk about what they actually felt.

She looked over at the backpack sitting on the passenger seat. It was the same one she’d brought to camp every summer since she was ten: pink canvas with a fold-over flap at the top painted with black seeds to look like a watermelon slice. Despite the fact that carrying it was now highly embarrassing, Emma had spent two hours cleaning out her closet during a visit back home just to find it so that she could bring it with her to camp again. It wasn’t so much the backpack as what was inside that she needed: the Friendship Pact. Maybe she had just been reading too many sci-fi novels, but it felt like a talisman, something to help make sure reunion brought them back together again—not just for a weekend, but for good.

Emma had spent a lot of time thinking about when things had started to change. Every summer had brought minor shifts, just the natural effects of increased hormones and responsibilities (even though Emma felt like laughing at them now, those twelve- and thirteen-year-old troubles that seemed so monumental, like finishing a summer reading list or passing a swim test). And of course there were their “real world” friends, the ones they saw every day from September through June and who became more important fixtures in their outside lives as they got older. But those things hadn’t made the girls drift apart. Not on their own, anyway. Something had shifted the last night of camp, after Skylar hadn’t come back to the cabin. Emma had felt it the next day—and it wasn’t just Skylar, although she was distant; Jo was unusually touchy-feely, and Maddie could barely get a word out without dissolving into tears. It was almost like there had been a bad storm while they were sleeping, and the next morning they had woken up to find that things just weren’t in the right places anymore.

The traffic wasn’t getting any better, so at the next rest area, Emma pulled over to use the bathroom and check her voicemail. As she pushed through the door to the QuikMart, sounding an electronic bell, she felt the clerk’s eyes on her. He was maybe nineteen or twenty, with a round, boyish face and a sparse red goatee. He nodded and smiled at her as she turned down the aisle of energy bars and snack mixes that led to the ladies’ room. “Morning, gorgeous,” he said. She still wasn’t used to it.

As she washed her hands, Emma looked in the mirror and tried to imagine what her fourteen-year-old self would think of the seventeen-year-old standing there. Without being too cocky, Emma thought she’d cleaned up nicely. Maybe not
gorgeous
, but the awkwardness of adolescence—the nose that felt ever-so-slightly large for her face, the scrawny limbs and nonexistent curves, the crooked smile—had given way to a prettiness that still managed to surprise her. She’d had to work at it a little bit, of course, learning how to blow-dry her hair, which was normally mousy, to a high-gloss sheen, pluck her eyebrows, and take care of her skin (and she still sometimes wore her retainer at night, secretly terrified that her teeth would shift back if she didn’t), but part of it had happened naturally. “You’ve grown into your looks,” was how her grandmother put it. It was a backhanded compliment, but Emma would take it. She put on some lip gloss and smacked her lips together the way Maddie had first showed her when they were eleven. Then she flashed herself a big grin. She thought she looked a lot better, but would they? And—she couldn’t stop herself from wondering—would he?

It had taken her a while to get over Adam Loring, but Emma had eventually convinced herself that what had happened on the rocks that night had been for the best. She’d never been quite sure about him, anyway, even if he had been her first real crush. He was such a chameleon, sincere one minute and distant the next. She knew she needed to stop obsessing, so the second semester of freshman year she had made a beeline for Danny Hoffman during the Model UN’s trip to Washington, DC. Danny was short, dark, and handsome, and extremely well versed in foreign events. They’d ridden on the paddleboats together and made out in the back of the bus on the drive back to Boston. It had lasted a month. Of course, the next year Danny had decided he was actually gay, but still, it felt like progress. Emma even felt good enough to e-mail Adam at the start of sophomore year, extending an electronic olive branch, and they started chatting online from time to time. He was still flirty, but that was just how Adam was. They never talked about the last night of camp. Mostly they commiserated about the Red Sox or traded complaints about school. Sometimes they talked obliquely about dating stuff, but it was harmless. Adam was still juggling girls and Emma still didn’t have a serious relationship. In that respect, nothing had changed, but it didn’t make her jealous anymore. She had only saved one of his instant messages, which had popped up on her laptop screen when she’d been in the shower after she’d first gotten to New York that summer:
Can’t believe I’m going to see you in a month. Canoe?
It was a stupid inside joke, but it had made her laugh.

Emma was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she almost missed the exit, and as she veered sharply off onto the ramp, causing the driver behind her to lean on his horn, she realized that her heart was racing. She pulled up to a stoplight and took a series of deep breaths.

Reunion was going to be awesome, she told herself. Skylar, Maddie, and Jo had been such a huge part of her life for so long, and their history ran so deep, there was no way they wouldn’t be able to pick up more or less where they’d left off. And Camp Nedoba had always felt like a haven—a place she could go to just be herself, where she wasn’t defined by her grades or her letters of recommendation, and where people cared more if she could climb a tree than if she could score an 800 on her SAT verbal. That was why, even after three years, she felt like her camp friends knew her better than anyone.

Emma texted Skylar and waited for the light to turn green. She didn’t know what the weekend had in store, but she couldn’t wait to find out.

SKYLAR SQUINTED INTO THE LATE MORNING SUN and examined her handiwork. She’d painted the reunion welcome banner with the help of her campers (she had the eleven-year-olds that session, in Missiquoi Cabin) the previous weekend, and with the exception of a bright purple
E
that had dripped down to the bottom of the paper, obscuring part of her painstakingly rendered panoramic sunset, she decided it looked pretty good.

“Right there!” she called to Jo, who was standing on a rickety ladder in order to hang it over the entrance to the whitewashed gazebo that separated the camp offices from the infirmary and counselors’ lounge. Jo tacked up the last corner and vaulted down, stepping back and craning her neck to look.

“Is that supposed to be me?” Jo asked, pointing to the bottom left corner of the banner. Skylar replaced her pink Ray-Bans and smiled. She couldn’t resist putting in a nod to the JEMS, and had painted four girls standing hand in hand like paper dolls: a blonde, a redhead, a brunette, and one on the end with a black ponytail who was yelling into a tiny megaphone.

But Jo didn’t have her ever-present ponytail anymore. At the beginning of the summer she’d
finally
let Skylar lop it off—which had been on Skylar’s to-do list, along with “Meet Lou Reed” and “Have a show at MoMA”—since she was twelve. The pixie cut Jo sported now (not half bad, Skylar thought, especially since she’d used nail scissors) brought Jo’s delicate features into stunning relief, even if from the neck down she still wore her usual “You’ve got a ‘friend’ in Camp Nedoba!” T-shirt and beige cargo shorts. Jo had gotten so tall and gorgeous, Skylar sometimes got jealous. But it wasn’t like they were competing over guys; Jo still used them for soccer practice, and Skylar used them for . . . a different kind of practice. Her hand fluttered up to her neck self-consciously, and she wondered if the hickey from last week was still there, hiding beneath the strands of her messy chignon. She’d had to tell her campers it was a bruise from getting smacked with an oar.

“No, it’s just an
impression
of you,” Skylar said, taking a sip from her water bottle. “I tried to use small brush strokes to really capture the changing quality of light glinting off your bullhorn.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” Jo murmured with a smirk. She grabbed the water and took a long gulp. “Come on, Monet, we’ve got work to do.”

Reunion weekend was always a mixed blessing. It took place every year between sessions, after the first four-weekers left and the next set arrived. (The stalwart eight-weekers over the age of twelve had a choice of going home for the changeover days or going on an intense camping trip known as a WOW, or “weekend out in the wilderness.”) Skylar was grateful not to have a bunch of ’tweens harassing her every second of the day for a brief period, but dealing with reunion campers could be even more draining. They were older, rowdier, and much more likely to break the rules. Mack had a strict no-alcohol policy (that admittedly his counselors, Skylar included, sometimes violated), but without fail there was always an incident during reunions, like on one memorable occasion when Gus, the camp handyman, had to clear fifty crushed beer cans out of the old well in the north field. But Skylar knew this reunion would be different. Because it was
her
reunion. And they were all coming back.

Mack popped his head out of the screen door of his office.

“Are you two setting up the food?” he called.

“Yes, Dad,” Jo replied in the globally recognized sing-song of the Annoyed Teenager.

“Good,” he said with a smile. “In my experience, nerves make people hungry.”

Skylar’s stomach rumbled. She’d been so distracted, she’d forgotten to eat breakfast. She was debating whether or not to forage in the cafeteria for a granola bar when her phone buzzed against her hip.

5 mins away. Try not to be jealous of my wheels. XO

Emma was probably winding her way up Granger Hill Road at that very moment, Skylar thought, which meant she was just over four miles away. But somehow, the distance between them felt much farther.

Skylar had been mentally preparing to see Emma again for approximately two years and eleven months, ever since she’d watched her ride away in the Zenewiczes’ pumpkin-colored Prius on the last day of their fifth and final summer. That morning had been one of the worst of Skylar’s entire life.

She’d imagined a few different scenarios for their inevitable reunion. The best option would have been visiting Emma in Boston to spend some time together, just the two of them, but she always talked herself out of actually making the plans. Emma’s parents were super nice (if a little dorky), and Skylar knew they would welcome her like a second daughter, but what if things didn’t go smoothly? Then she’d be stuck, an unaccompanied minor with no driver’s license six hours from home. As year after year passed, even though she missed Emma like crazy, Skylar realized that she was purposefully dragging her feet and that the camp reunion was the only thing that was going to bring them face to face again. On one level it was poignant and fitting—long-lost friends coming back together in the place they first met—but on another, it felt weird, and maybe even a little wrong. So much had happened there. So much Emma didn’t know.

Skylar had been avoiding thinking about what would happen when she finally saw Emma’s face again in three dimensions. Would she cry? Plaster on a fake smile and act like everything was normal? With the uneasiness that had been building steadily since she woke up that morning, Skylar worried that she might actually puke. But to her relief, as soon as the peacock green station wagon turned into the parking lot, her nausea transformed into near-hysterical excitement. She broke into a run, jumping up and down in front of the car until Jo finally had to pull her out of the middle of the lot so Emma wouldn’t run her over.

Just like she had the last time she’d seen Emma, Skylar caught a glimpse of her through the windshield glass. Her hair was sleeker, and her smile, which had always been warm and easy, had reached Julia Roberts proportions, but otherwise Skylar was relieved. It was still Emma. Her Emma.

After some wrestling with her seat belt, Emma threw open the door and grinned.

“Hello, strangers,” she said. Skylar had forgotten how far down she had to bend to hug Emma, and how her hair always smelled sweet and familiar, like some childhood candy Skylar couldn’t quite place.

“Jo, look at your hair!” Emma exclaimed, trying to take everything in.

“Look familiar?” Jo asked with a wink.

“Don’t remind me,” Emma laughed. “And Sky, you look . . .” Skylar glanced down at her slept-in tunic, cutoffs, and fair-trade canvas shoes. She hoped she didn’t look quite as disheveled as she felt. “Amazing,” Emma finished. She stared out at the postcard-perfect scenery, which was framed under the wooden welcome arch with its sun-bleached, twig-lettered sign, and which led from the parking lot to the expanse of rolling lawn everyone at Nedoba called the Green. “I can’t believe I’m here,” Emma finally said. She looked genuinely awestruck.

“I can’t believe you’re driving this car,” Skylar laughed. She traced a finger along the fake wood paneling. “I’m guessing it’s not yours?”

“My aunt’s,” Emma said. “She’s in Spain interviewing flamenco guitarists for her ethnomusicology dissertation, so I’m staying at her place on the Upper West Side.”

“Fancy!” Jo said.

“Well, not really. It’s rent-controlled. She doesn’t have A/C. And I have to share a room with my brother . . .”

“And tell everyone on I-93 that you believe ‘Jesus was a liberal,’” Skylar added, examining the sticker on the rear bumper with a raised eyebrow. She silently vowed never to feel embarrassed by the camp van again.

“Right,” Emma smiled. “But otherwise, yes, my life is impossibly glamorous.” She gestured down at her navy blue tank dress and sandals, which actually did look pretty fancy for the setting.

Skylar tried to remember what Emma was doing in New York. It had been so long since they’d really caught up—before she’d gone to Italy and everything had started to unravel. “Well, you look great,” she hedged, hugging her again. “
And
you have a job that doesn’t involve picking ticks off children. So you win.”

“Hey!” Jo elbowed Skylar, laughing. “That is a
very
important job.”

Emma burst out laughing. “I just remembered that time when Nate got a tick on his . . . um . . .”

“Balls?” Skylar finished.

“Yes, balls!” Emma cried. Mack looked over quizzically from the gazebo, where he had started hanging streamers. The girls cracked up. “And your dad had to use a magnifying mirror to burn it off!” Now Emma was almost crying, and the trademark red flush on her cheeks gave Skylar a rush of nostalgia. She threw her arms around Emma again.

“Can we go back in time, please, and can you just stay here like we planned and squat in the barn?”

“We can
definitely
go back in time,” Emma said. “In fact, look what I brought.” She reached across the front seat, almost dislodging a Frida Kahlo bobble-head doll on the dashboard, and pulled out her old watermelon backpack. “It’s still got all our notebooks,” she added.

“Our six hundred MASH games!” Jo said fondly.

“Yes, where you marry Gus and live in a shack with six children,” Emma said. “Any progress on that?”

“Broken dreams,” Jo sighed.

“Ah, well. There’s still time.” Emma shut the car door and looked at them eagerly. “Speaking of which, I know I’m late, but can we go somewhere and catch up before everyone gets here? I’m dying to hear everything that’s been going on.”

“I would love that,” Skylar said, “but we’re supposed to set up the gazebo for the impending vultures.” In fact, she was grateful for the opportunity to stall the truth-telling portion of the weekend. Now that Emma was actually there, it was real. She would have to tell her. And she had no idea when, or how, to do it.

“You can help, though!” Jo chimed in. “How does arranging butter cookies into concentric circles sound?”

“It sounds fabulous,” Emma said. “As long as we can gossip while we work.”

When they got back to the gazebo, Skylar saw that Mack had
completely
ignored her instructions to braid and gently drape the streamers along the beams, choosing instead to hang individual pieces from the ceiling like strips of flypaper.

“How do they look?” he asked proudly.

“Like a car wash tunnel,” Skylar whispered to Emma. Emma punched her lightly in the arm.

“They look great, Mack,” Emma said.

“Emma Zenewicz!” Mack boomed, setting down his Scotch Tape and giving her a warm hug. He stepped back and looked at the girls, beaming. “It’s so good to see you girls together again. This is what I wanted; I wanted the children at my camp to become a family.” His mustache, now streaked with gray but just as resplendent as always, started to twitch.

“Dad, don’t cry,” Jo warned sharply, and Mack laughed his big, deep cackle that always sounded to Skylar like firewood crackling.

“Where’s Maddie?” he asked when it had died down.

“Stuck at thirty-five thousand feet,” Jo said. “Or, at least, I think she’s still in the air. She said she’d text when she landed at Portsmouth.”

“Okay,” Mack said, patting Jo’s shoulder as he turned to head back to the office. “I won’t cry until she gets here.”

Skylar smiled. Jo hated it when Mack got sentimental, but Skylar thought it was sweet. Her dad was never sentimental. He was whatever the opposite of sentimental was. When she’d unpacked her trunk back in June, she’d found a community college brochure slipped in between the pages of her sketchbook, along with a note that read, in his rigid block print,
We all have dreams. This is for when you wake up.

“Sky, help me with this?” Jo was struggling to stabilize a folding table. Skylar grabbed one end, relieved to have busywork to focus on, as Emma started opening the plastic sleeves of dollar-store shortbread Mack kept stockpiled in the kitchen pantry for all celebratory occasions.

“So . . .” Emma said expectantly, arranging the crumbly squares on a plastic tray, “tell me everything.”