The Lost Summer (3 page)

Winn waved her hand. “We'll get them tomorrow morning,” she said authoritatively. “I have to be down here to finish name tags at the butt-crack of dawn anyway.”

We all shuffled, exhausted from the day, to the Mess door. Winn, the last one out, flipped the switch, and the dining hall went dark as the screen door slammed behind us. Across camp, the only visible light came from the floodlight by the Bath. Suddenly I noticed the stars above us. They were out in magnificent numbers, a blanket of lights.

Quietly, we filed down the path from the Mansion to the Bath, where we brushed our teeth and washed our faces. As each girl finished, hanging her washcloth on a nail to dry, or clicking her toothbrush against the porcelain sink before putting it up, she whispered “Good night” and made her way up the low hill to the cabins.

As I turned to do the same, something suddenly struck me as odd. It wasn't just being at camp without campers or hanging out in the Mess way after our usual bedtime. It was that there was no Taps to send us to sleep. Obviously Fred wouldn't blow the bugle until the campers arrived. The empty cabins, and horses in the barn, didn't need a bugle to tell them what time of day it was. I smiled to myself when I realized I'd always imagined Fred blew the bugle every day, not just when we were there. I'd seen Reveille and Taps as unstoppable forces of nature. Tonight, though, we would sneak to our cabins in silence, with nothing but the sounds of crickets and lake frogs in our ears.

T
he next morning I sat on the steps of Cabin One with Pookie, the counselor for One East, waiting for our campers to show. A ball of tired, nervous excitement radiated from the pit of my stomach. I searched the line of cars crawling up the road toward the cabins for the Bells' monster of a truck, but saw no sign of Katie Bell. As the girls in my cabin arrived, towing trunks and tennis racquets and parents, I had to give up my post, knowing anyway that Katie Bell was always late on opening day.

By mid-morning, three returning nine-year-olds had laid claim to bunks, expertly showing their parents how to slide their trunks beneath the bed. Two more girls were just arriving, both frys—Southpoint-speak for “first-year camper.” One of them recognized a friend, threw open her car door, and dashed to Two East, leaving her dad to carry her overloaded trunk into the cabin. I apologized when he bumped his head on the low door.

The second girl was small, with white-blond hair that sprouted in a tangle of ringlets around her nervous face. She climbed reluctantly from the backseat of her parents' SUV, cautiously surveying the activity around her. From the name tag she'd been handed at the front gate and had dutifully pinned to her lime green shirt, I was able to identify her as Ruby Standish, turned nine years old this month, from Huntsville, Alabama.

I knelt down in front of her so that our faces were level. “Hi, Ruby. I'm Helena,” I said brightly. “I'll be your counselor this summer.”

Ruby pursed her lips. Fidgeting with a loop on her shorts, she stared at me, wide-eyed and suspicious.

A tanned freckled hand landed on Ruby's shoulder. “Ruby's a little shy,” her mother explained. “But you're excited about your first summer at camp, aren't you, sweetie?” she said to Ruby.

Ruby looked up at her mother and nodded slowly.

“She just needs some time to adjust,” Mrs. Standish whispered.

I smiled in understanding. “Would you like me to show you the cabin?” I asked Ruby.

She nodded and, when I reached for her hand, didn't resist. Glancing back at her parents only once, she followed me into the simple cabin that we'd both call home for the next five weeks.

“It smells funny.” Ruby wrinkled her nose at the smell of wood, dirt, and dust that, try as we might, could never be completely swept out.

For me, the worn plank floors, buckling cubbyholes, sagging bunk beds, and screened windows were comforting. Still, remembering back to my first summer, when Sally McDougal had shown me this same cabin, I could see how foreign and spare it must have looked to Ruby.

I laughed at her pinched expression. “You'll get used to it,” I promised.

I settled Ruby into the bunk next to mine and directed her parents to the Bath, where campers were supposed to take their toiletries. As I watched them walk down the hill, Ruby holding a hand on either side, I had to shield my eyes from the sun. It was directly overhead now, and still no Katie Bell. My eyes swept from the lake, just visible through a stand of trees to the right of the cabins, to a knot of girls hugging each other as they jumped up and down, to two young campers flying down the hill toward the footbridge that led to—

“Ransome.” The sound of a deep male voice stopped my heart. I held my breath as I watched a tan, wiry frame carrying a trunk swing around to reveal
his
face. Ransome. My stomach fluttered.

Abe always sent a few Brownstone counselors over on opening day to help carry trunks. We pretended to resent the implication that we couldn't handle them on our own, but in the oppressive July heat, we were secretly more than happy to watch the boys sweat it out. I'd play damsel in distress any day if it meant seeing Ransome.

The hottest counselors were like Greek gods to us, and our crushes were no less fervent for the fact that they would never be fulfilled. This over-the-top ego boost was probably the only reason Brownies fought tooth and nail over the honor of lugging our eighty-pound trunks in hundred-degree weather and taking giggly screaming girls for inner-tube rides.

Technically, Ransome was only three years and two grades older than I was, but in my mind, he was light-years more mature and equally out of reach. Still, unlike some lucky girls, my improbable crush had not faded over the years. It might have even gotten worse. Watching from Cabin One's porch, my heart beat like a bongo drum in my chest as the sweat beaded below Ransome's close-cropped, copper-brown hair and dripped down his forehead and over the tip of his straight, noble nose. What was cuter than a guy willing to haul a ten-year-old's trunk full of too many T-shirts and a year's supply of socks? I wondered.

I was lost in my favorite dream sequence (all hazy light and slow motion), in which Ransome turns, finally recognizes the goddess of a woman I have become— Aphrodite to his Adonis—tosses the trunk like it weighs no more than a feather, and runs to sweep me off my flip-flops and into his arms, when—

“Hel!” My thoughts were interrupted again. “Hel!”

Before I even turned to see her hanging half out of her parents' car window, waving her arms and beaming, I knew Katie Bell's voice. I launched off the porch steps toward the fire engine–red truck, from which Katie Bell jumped before it had come to a complete stop. When I picked her up to hug her, Katie Bell's feet literally left the ground. At five eight, I'd long ago surpassed her in height. One of our favorite games was for me to fling her across my back and spin in circles until she begged me to stop under threat of vomiting and we both collapsed to the ground in hysterics.

“Where have you been?” I demanded.

Katie Bell jerked her thumb at her four younger brothers spilling out of the truck. “You know how the Bell clan moves.”

Katie Bell's full name was actually Katherine Clarke Bell, but everyone, even her own family, called her Katie Bell, as if it were a double name.

As we hugged again, the second-youngest Bell, Bobby, raced past us, chasing his brother Red. I never understood how “Red” had been saved for the youngest Bell, as every kid in the family, including Katie Bell, had a head of auburn hair and a constellation of freckles just like their mother. I liked to imagine there'd been some kind of family meeting or a drawing of straws.

“Hi, Mrs. Bell,” I said politely as Katie Bell's mom approached. She was a substantial woman in Wrangler jeans and a sleeveless tank top that revealed doughy, white arms.

Mrs. Bell smiled and pulled me in for a hug, the real eye-popping kind that shows you mean it. “Hi, darlin'.”

The Bells were
country
, and it tickled me. Mrs. Bell had always been sweet to me, especially after my parents' divorce, when she started addressing care packages to “Helena Waite and her friend Katie Bell.” That was just the kind of people the Bells were—sugar and spice.

They lived on the family farm outside of Knoxville, where they grew soybeans. I'd seen the Bell farm twice, once when my dad brought me along on a business trip to Knoxville, and the second time the year I'd gotten my driver's license. Katie Bell had been to Nashville too.

Her parents had let her take the Greyhound when she was fourteen, which had scandalized my mother but awed me.

“Katie Bell, which cabin you say you're in?” Mr. Bell was huffing and puffing with her trunk. “Hey there, Miss Helena.”

“Hi, Mr. Bell.”

“Nine, Dad,” Katie Bell grumbled. “Cabin Nine. Again. 'Cause I'm the oldest frikkin' camper known to man.”

Katie Bell had a flair for the dramatic and a habit of throwing out unnecessary superlatives. This time, however, she
was
the oldest camper known to Southpoint, if not the world.

“Katie Bell,” I pleaded, “come on. It's not that bad. It'll be kind of fun.”

She raised an auburn eyebrow and searched my face skeptically. There was no bullshitting Katie Bell. Her stormy blue eyes that she called “gunmetal gray” were disconcerting when they flashed on you unexpectedly. Like they were doing now.

“I still can't believe it,” she drawled, her lip curling at the inhumanity of it all. “After eight years together, they split up Hels Bells.”

“Hel” was what Katie Bell had started calling me the summer I was ten and she was nine, and we thought it was a cool way to say “hell” without ending up there. “Hels Bells” was what we insisted on calling ourselves as a pair. At first it had amused us to no end. Then it was just second nature.

“Katie Bell,” I started, ready to convince her once again that she'd hardly notice the camper-counselor divide, when she interrupted me.

“Hel, there he is!” She dug her fingernails into my arm and nodded over my shoulder.

I didn't have to turn. I knew who she was talking about, and my face flushed instantly.

“Shhh! I know. How hot does he look?” I asked, rhetorically of course.

Katie Bell gave Ransome a slinky once-over with her eyes, and jokingly gnashed her teeth like a hungry puma that had just spotted its prey. Being discreet was not one of her strong points.

I laughed and slapped her across the arm. “Hands off,” I joked. “He's mine.”

“Well, you
are
a counselor now. . . .” she said through a lopsided grin.

“Shut up,” I sighed. “Ransome doesn't even know who I am. He probably thinks I'm still just another camper.”

Katie Bell's jaw tightened. She jerked her shoulder into a shrug, dropping it. Winn and Sarah had strolled up.

“Heeey!” Winn chimed. She locked a stiff Katie Bell in an awkward hug.

“Hey,” Katie Bell replied.

“So you're back in Nine East again!”

“Yeah,” Katie Bell said with markedly less enthusiasm. “I'm thinking about taking up permanent residence.”

“Well, take care of it for me,” said Winn. “I switched to Cabin Five this year.”

“I'll try.” Katie Bell responded to her light tone with a flatness I hoped Winn didn't notice.

Winn turned to me. “When all your girls are here, we're supposed to tell them to meet on the Yard. There should be a bugle soon.”

I nodded, although Winn's reminder was unnecessary. I'd been through this drill every year too, as a camper. “My girls are all down there already, I think.”

“Then do you want to come with us now?” asked Sarah.

I glanced at Katie Bell.

“Go ahead,” she answered. “I still have to find my Bath locker and take my riding stuff to the barn.” Katie Bell rode horses at home and competed during the year. Most of her free activity periods she spent at the barn.

I snapped my fingers. “Oh, that reminds me. Cabin Nine's supposed to put their stuff on top of the lockers this year. We ran out of space.”

Katie Bell nodded, her mouth a strange squiggly line on her pale, lightly freckled face. “Thanks.”

“I'll see you down at the Yard?” I asked, already turning to follow Winn and Sarah down the hill.

“Sure,” Katie Bell called. “Guess I'll see y'all there.”

It was hard for me to pick a favorite day at camp, but opening night was a definite contender for the title. Most of our Evening Gatherings would take place at the Bowl, an amphitheater-shaped grassy area below the Mansion, but opening night took place at the bonfire pit by the lake.

After dinner, Katie Bell and I wandered together down the pine needle–covered path to the lake. Almost all the rough log benches surrounding the fire pit were already occupied when we arrived. Campers and counselors talked excitedly, waiting for Fred and Marjorie's arrival.

Katie Bell and I found a spot between two of the benches and settled into our folding camping chairs. I leaned back, balancing in the chair and tilting my face to the sky. Above us there was nothing but purple sky ringed by pine trees. I filled my lungs with the fresh air and held my breath, imagining the air swirling through my body, around my chest, and down my legs into my toes, clearing out all the cobwebs and breathing into the dark places.

“I love the smell of camp,” said Katie Bell, reading my mind.

“Me too.”

“Oh!” Katie Bell cried suddenly. It startled me. “What happened with John? You didn't e-mail me back the other day.”

“That.” I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, sorry. I was packing and then forgot. He texted to say, ‘Have fun at camp,' but I didn't text him back.”

“Why not?”

“I'm just over it.”

“You never seemed that under it,” Katie Bell observed, fiddling with the strap on her chair.

“I guess 'cause I wasn't.” I laughed. “How did that horse show go last week?”

“Fine. I didn't place, though.”

“That sucks,” I observed brilliantly. Katie Bell normally won her horse shows.

“Eh.” She shrugged.

We settled into a comfortable silence, listening to the girls around us talk and the birds sing in the trees. It was funny to know the ins and outs of each other's lives without ever having laid eyes on most of the people or places we told each other about. Of course Katie Bell knew all about John. He and I had dated for four months that spring—in the pseudo way we dated at home, where “going out” meant hooking up with someone on a regular basis, with the occasional movie thrown in to make it official. But he'd never given me butterflies. Sometimes making out with him felt like kissing my brother —if I'd had a brother. By the end of the school year, I guess we'd both given up. When he just stopped calling, I had a panicky moment of fear that he was the love of my life, which reignited the flame for about a week. It promptly burned out again. I acted pissed when we broke up for good, because my friends made me feel like that's how I was supposed to be, but honestly, it felt almost obligatory. And with camp on the horizon, I'd already resumed my fantasizing about Ransome. Katie Bell knew that too.

Suddenly the sound of a dog barking rose above the talking, and the whole atmosphere in the clearing changed. Fred and Marjorie were coming, trailed by their yellow Lab, Butter. Fred was carrying the bugle and a torch he'd use to light the bonfire. We fell silent in anticipation, the only sound coming from the wind in the trees, until Butter ran and jumped onto a counselor named Caroline, and everyone laughed.