Summer at Willow Lake (27 page)

Dare joined Lolly on the porch and lifted a pair of field glasses to her eyes, aiming toward the lake. “God, I love this view.” She wasn’t talking about the lake, though. Lolly knew that. The lenses were trained inexorably on the swimming area. The male counselors and Fledgling boys were already there, doing routine swim tests in order to form skill-level groups.

The three cousins lined up at the porch railing, passing the binoculars between them. The counselors wore shorts, muscle shirts and whistles around their necks. They joked around with the kids, trying to put them at ease.

Even from a distance, and without the binoculars, Lolly felt a thrill of recognition. The tall, dark-haired boy was Connor Davis.

She hadn’t seen him up close yet. The arrival of the campers had been too chaotic, taking up all their time and attention. And when it was her turn with the field glasses, she had to pretend she was giving all the guys equal scrutiny. She wasn’t, of course.

Connor Davis had grown taller than ever, and although he was still skinny, his shoulders were broader. He was tanned already, maybe from working outdoors with his father, and he looked completely at ease with the kids, as though he was born to do this.

Lolly suppressed a sigh, wondering what had changed between them, and what would stay the same, if there was any remnant of their friendship left or if they’d be strangers now. She knew she’d changed in some obvious ways. She was nearly eighteen now, and she’d seen a good bit of the world. She spoke French and had passed five Advanced Placement exams.

The fundamental Lolly hadn’t changed, though. She was still the overweight sidekick to prettier, more popular girls. Instead of going to school dances with boys, she always served on the decoration committee and was almost embarrassingly good at it. During her high-school years, she had magically transformed the gym into a Wild West wonderland, an undersea fantasy, even a scene from the hit movie
Men In Black.
She had grown adept at hiding the fact that she was lonely and unhappy. Her good humor and can-do attitude were a careful facade. People thought she was perfectly content being the gym decorator, the best friend, the brainy but unattractive honor student. Lolly tried to accept herself as such. She tried to be happy—or at least content. Sometimes it even worked and she forgot herself for a while, but then something would happen to remind her.

Like today. She had to put on a swimsuit, possibly the least-flattering garment ever invented. The entire morning was going to be devoted to water-safety skills, a key component of the Kioga experience. It had always been a point of pride with Lolly’s grandparents that every single camper learned water safety, even if it meant the fat ones had to stuff themselves like sausages into skins of spandex.

Frankie propped her elbows on the railing to steady the field glasses. “Is it totally strange to like a guy’s legs?” she asked in a dreamy voice.

“Probably,” Dare replied, equally dreamy. “Hand me the binoculars and I’ll let you know.”

Lolly picked up her clipboard and looked over the day’s schedule, pretending not to listen. Sometimes it was amusing to hear her cousins mooning over various guys. Most of the time it was just tedious. She didn’t understand how they—how every girl their age—could be so totally obsessed with the way people looked. Then, sneaking a glance at the tall, dark-haired boy at the lakeshore, she felt a deep inner tug, and realized maybe she understood, just a little.

“We’d better get going,” Dare said, grabbing her makeup bag. “We’ve got to get the girls in their swim groups, and after morning snack, I want to start on the choral reading for Friday night. I thought maybe a Little Mermaid theme would be fun.” Dare loved making a production of things. She was good at it, the way Lolly was good at transformation and illusion. Together, they’d make a good team this summer.

Frankie put away the field glasses, and they went into the cabin, pulling her T-shirt off over her head as she crossed the room. Lolly felt a familiar twinge of envy. It must be nice, she thought, to be so unself-conscious about your body. Frankie and Dare deserved to be. They were both slender, and Frankie had secretly had her belly button pierced.

Lolly could hear her cousins horsing around in the adjacent room as they got ready. She envied them being sisters, too. Even though the two of them fought, they were loyal about the things that mattered, and shared a bond that would endure all their lives.

Lolly changed in the bathroom. She didn’t bother pretending she wasn’t modest. It was silly, these were her cousins, but all the same, being fat turned her into a very private person. As quickly as possible, she slipped on her camp swimsuit.

Connor. I’m going to see Connor Davis again.
She tried to quell a thrill of anticipation but couldn’t quite manage. She told herself to take it easy. Maybe he wasn’t as cute as she remembered. Maybe he was all bulging from steroids or had a face full of zits, or maybe he’d turned into a skank or an obnoxious jock. Pulling on a heather-gray T-shirt over her swimsuit, Lolly conceded that there was really only one flaw in the otherwise perfect friendship they used to share every summer. And that flaw was such a deeply buried secret that sometimes she even forgot she was keeping it. But something always happened to bring the truth back home to her.

And the awful, piercing, deeply concealed truth was that she was hopelessly in love with Connor Davis.

Of course she was. How could she not be? He was strong and fast and kind, and you always knew where you stood with him because he didn’t play games and he didn’t lie. He was the perfect friend and theirs was the perfect summer friendship—except for that one little problem she had with being completely over-the-top gaga about him.

It didn’t matter that she hadn’t seen him the past three summers. If anything, that made him even more perfect in her mind. Sometimes she tried to figure out the precise moment it had happened. Had there been a tipping point, when she’d shifted from simply liking him to swooning over him as Prince Charming?

If she had to pick a moment, an instant when she knew beyond a doubt that her heart was lost, it would have to be the night of the ear piercing. She hadn’t known it at the time, but it was their last summer together, so perhaps there was something symbolic in the act of marking him permanently. He’d wanted his ear pierced for reasons she suspected had to do with rebelling against a hated stepdad. Connor would have done the piercing himself, except that she knew he’d make a mess of it, maybe even damage himself. She’d stepped in, pretending to be stoic when she wanted to faint the whole time. In the camp infirmary, using a sterile lancet and a rubber reflex mallet, she’d pierced his ear, weeping openly as tears of pain squeezed reluctantly from his clamped-shut eyes.

He’d worn the silver hoop earring all summer, and every time she looked at it, she felt a secret flash of pleasure. She didn’t doubt for a minute that some other girl would be his first love, but in a weird way, Lolly felt as if she’d staked some sort of claim on him.

She liked him so much that when she wrote about him in her diary, her hand shook, and the passage of time since she’d last seen him didn’t diminish her feelings. She was shaking now, getting ready to go down to the swimming dock.

As she headed out the door, she grabbed her windbreaker and tied it by the sleeves around her waist so that it covered her butt. She was fooling no one, of course. Least of all herself.

They hiked down to Saratoga Cabin and rounded up the Fledgling girls.

“Aren’t we supposed to march in a line?” asked one of the campers, a little girl named Flossie.

“Probably.” Dare ruffled the girl’s blond hair. “Think we’ll get in trouble if we don’t?”

Lolly scanned the girls, an excited, giggling mass of all shapes and sizes. “They should definitely walk in a line, at least until I do a head count.”

Despite some grumbling, they lined up two by two and sure enough, someone was missing.

“I’ll go,” Lolly said, heading into the cabin. Its familiar smell enveloped her—shampoo, bubble gum, and the faint but ever-present whiff of mildew. She was always on the lookout for misfits, and she knew right where to look, because she knew all the hiding places. She found the stray camper curled up on a lower bunk, facing a wall from which hung a calendar. The first day of camp had been x-ed out, but the rest of the boxes stretched out in a long, seemingly endless string.

“Ramona?” Lolly asked. “We’re going to the lake now.”

Ramona gave a tragic sniffle. “I have a stomachache.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did you know that in the counselor’s manual, it says that a stomachache is the most common ailment of all campers?”

“It’s the most common ailment of
me,
” she said miserably.

“When I feel scared, that’s usually when my stomach starts to hurt,” Lolly confessed. “The good news is, the bellyache goes away when you quit being scared.”

“That’s not such good news,” Ramona said. “I’m scared of camp and I’m stuck here for the whole summer, so it’s not going away.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Lolly assured her, gently prying the girl’s white-knuckled grip from the edge of the bunk. “There are hundreds of ways to get over being scared. Believe me, I know them all because I’m an expert at being scared of things.”

Ramona looked dubious. “I’m scared to swim.”

“So am I,” Lolly said, “and I do it anyway. And the more I swim the less scared I am. I’ve already decided that when I go away to college in the fall, I’m going to join the intramural swim team.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Why would you want to be on swim team?”

“Because it’s hard. And scary.”

“Then why do it?”

“Good question. I’ve heard you should face your fears. It makes you grow as a person. For me, that would be making swim team.” She offered Ramona a conspiratorial smile. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“I don’t see what’s good about doing something hard.”

Lolly held out her hand. “Let’s get your swimsuit on and go down to the lake and see if we can figure that out.”

The little girl whimpered, and then surrendered, tucking her hand into Lolly’s.

“Will you go in the water with me?” Ramona asked.

“Of course, if you need me.”

“Oh, I know I will.”

Great, thought Lolly. While all the other counselors were high and dry, standing on the dock and flirting with one another, she’d be in the drink with this kid.

She and Ramona were the last to join the swarm of campers, counselors and lifeguards. The long dock was equipped with starting blocks, and the swim course was marked with buoys every twenty-five meters. In the distance was the diving tower, its tallest platform ten meters high. Keeping hold of Ramona’s hand, Lolly scanned the crowd. Counselors were blowing whistles, yelling at the kids to form lines at the starting blocks. And there, supervising a squirming tangle of restless boys, was Connor Davis, looking like something out of a dream.

At first, it was too chaotic to do anything but wave at one another over a sea of little kids. Even so, Lolly felt her bones melt when he looked at her. It was a wonder she was still standing upright. He was far and away the best-looking guy she had ever seen.

The thing about Connor Davis was, he seemed to have no clue that his looks were anything special. Maybe that natural humility was a function of growing up hard and having a father like Terry Davis. Maybe things like that kept him from focusing on appearances.

Girls focused on his looks all the time, Lolly knew. She could see it happening right now. The female counselors were already circling like lipsticked buzzards, checking out his shoulder-length glossy black hair, his sapphire-blue eyes, his big shoulders and easy, attractive grin. Some of them were undoubtedly already plotting ways to seduce him.

By the time he jostled his way through the milling kids and moved close enough to greet Lolly on the dock, it was too late. Girls were nudging one another, pointing, staking their claim. Connor stayed focused on Lolly, though.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was much deeper than she remembered, but still melodic. She wondered if he was still a good singer.

“Hey, yourself.” Lolly knew every bit of delight she was feeling shone on her face, and she didn’t even care.

“I was hoping you’d be here this summer,” he said with his customary blunt honesty.

“Too bad I didn’t have your e-mail address. I would have sent you a note, asking you.”

“I don’t have an e-mail address. I hear you can use the library for that, but I don’t get there too often.”

Lolly was mentally kicking herself. She always did this. Always took it for granted that the whole world had stuff like computers and mobile phones and such at their fingertips.

“E-mail isn’t that reliable, anyway,” she conceded, and much as she hated to admit it, she liked it as a method of communication. E-mail seemed like a hybrid between a paper letter, which was a deliberate act, and a phone call, which presumed a level of intimacy between parties. To Lolly, e-mail would have been the ideal way to contact him. Except he never would have received her note.

A whistle sounded, and the water-safety captain yelled at everyone to form lines along the swimming dock. Ramona Fisher grabbed Lolly’s hand and clung desperately.

Connor flashed another grin. He still didn’t seem to notice that every female counselor in sight was fixated on him. Could he possibly be that clueless, or did he really not know?

“So we’ll catch up later,” he said to Lolly.

“Yeah. Later.” She saw that he still had his pierced ear. Oh, God. He’d kept it. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

“Yo, help me out here,” someone bellowed.

“Julian,” Connor said under his breath, and then he shouted the name as he ran. The small boy named Julian had climbed a tree beside the lake, and he was crawling along a limb that hung out over the water. He was a remarkable-looking boy, wiry and quick and clearly filled with mischief. Balancing on the end of the limb, he thumped his chest, Tarzan style, and let out a bloodcurdling yell before leaping like a frog into the water.