I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to cry. “Does it hurt?”
I nodded, afraid to speak. She was so pretty, with feathered black hair and a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were lined with blue and she wore heavy mascara. She smiled at me, and as soon as our eyes met the tears came. She pulled me into a hug and I rested my head against her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Whatever it is, I promise it will be okay.”
I closed my eyes.
“Can I stay with you?” I asked.
She searched my face, concerned. “For a little while.” She unfolded chairs for us and we sat facing outside toward the horses. She watched them intently.
“Do you ride?” I asked.
Her face lit up. “Yeah. Do you?”
I shrugged. “I’ve never tried.”
“I can teach you.”
“I’d love that.”
She turned to look at me. “What bunk are you in?”
I told her.
“You guys have lessons Thursdays.”
I shook my head, imagining Anastasia here, ruining this, pulling the CIT’s attention from me. “I don’t want to have lessons with everyone else.”
She cocked her head and laughed. “Not sure we can do private lessons.”
“I don’t want to do anything with them,” I said too quickly.
She watched me for a moment. “It gets better,” she said. “It does.”
When I didn’t say anything, she added, “If things get really bad you can come hang out with me.”
Later, the CIT walked me back to the bunk. They were all there, Anastasia and Nina, the girl with the frizzy hair. They all looked up when I walked in. I tried to meet Nina’s eyes, but she looked away.
In the cafeteria, I didn’t bother trying to sit with Nina anymore. Nina was gone, long long gone. She laughed and whispered with Anastasia and their followers. I sat with the CIT who’d been so nice to me, or with the frizzy-haired girl.
One time after lunch I saw Nina outside the dining hall barn vomiting up the red Jell-O we’d had for dessert. She cried, and someone rushed inside to get a counselor. Anastasia came right out, her best friend, there for her. The counselor gestured to everyone to go back inside, to go about their days. I did exactly that. I didn’t even look at Nina. I didn’t care anymore. I wouldn’t. She wasn’t mine to care about.
I don’t know how long I’d been at the camp. All I know is that it hadn’t been that long—maybe a week, maybe two—when I woke in the morning to the feel of something wet and slimy on my pillow. I blinked, confused, staring at the white mess. After a moment I realized the girls had put shaving cream on my face after I fell asleep. I sat up, furious, humiliated. A few of the girls turned to look and laugh. I felt my face grow hot. I reached for a towel and scrubbed, and I yanked my sheets off the cot.
“What happened?” I heard Anastasia’s voice through the laughter. “Did you forget to wash off the shaving cream after shaving your beard?” More laughter.
Tears pressed into my eyes. “Screw you, Anastasia.”
“Come on.” Her voice was close now. She stood right next to me. “We just had a little fun.”
I didn’t say anything. I gathered my sheets and the towel and headed for the door.
“You’re going to tattle?” Anastasia yelled after me. “Like a little baby?” But I was crying too hard to respond.
“Kerry.” Nina’s voice, soft and lilting. I turned around and looked at her, the pain heavy in my chest. Her eyes searched mine, but I gave her nothing. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “It was just a joke.”
I walked away, clutching my linens, out into the commons, where a counselor found me and took me to the main office. After a few minutes I calmed down enough to call my mother.
Four hours later she arrived, harried, annoyed, but also concerned. We piled my belongings into the car and took off down the country road. All around us were grassy meadows and forests. The sky was a blinding blue. My mother didn’t say anything, just turned up the Fleetwood Mac cassette playing on the stereo. I opened the window and let the warm breeze flutter at my face, thankful for my mother’s silence, that she didn’t ask about what happened. I knew she’d been dealing with her own catastrophe this summer, with the impending divorce. And now here we both were, ruined, despairing, hurtling in our silence back home.
Years later, when I was eighteen, I visited a lover at Columbia University. He didn’t love me. I knew this. But I opened myself to him anyway, eager for attention. Eager to feel his breath on my neck, the flutter of his eyelashes on my cheek. Above his desk was a picture of a woman. I moved to get a closer look. Of course I did. To see who he would love, if not me. In the picture, a woman lay supine on a couch, her eyes soft and sad. With shock I saw that it was Nina, grown up now, still unbearably lovely. I brought my hand to my throat, the jealousy and hatred rising as thick and black and unmovable as it had that summer so many years ago.
IT WAS THE LATE SUMMER OF 1982, RIGHT BEFORE I turned twelve, and I had gone with nine other girls and ten boys to a mandatory wilderness program called Dorrs intended to orient us to Horace Mann School, where we would be starting in the fall. We rode on the bus through the heavily forested highways of upstate New York to the camp in Connecticut. Some girls knew one another from elementary school, and they huddled together, giggling and chatting, relieved to have familiar faces nearby. I knew no one. All of these faces were unfamiliar. I didn’t know the bus or the place we were headed. At home my parents were in the midst of an ugly divorce, so I didn’t know that place either. And then there was puberty, which had been ripping through my body for the past year with all its strange physicality and feelings and desires. I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
So when we arrived at the camp and carried our duffels into the cabins, suddenly every move felt sharp and highlighted. Everything mattered: which bed I chose, where I dropped my bag, whether I sat on my bed or started unpacking. The other girls seemed fine. They talked and giggled and did whatever they did without thought. Surely, this was my childish perception, that I was the only one feeling awkward, that I was the only one under a microscope, the only one not right. I wound up with an upper bunk against the wall, close to the door. Then one of the group leaders came in. She clapped her hands.
“Okay, girls. Let’s go. Down to the campfire for a meeting.”
We applied bug spray and readjusted barrettes and headbands in the mottled mirrors in the bathroom, and then tromped down the path to the fire pit. The air was heavy with humidity. The boys were already sitting around the pit on the wooden benches, and some of the girls pulled up their tank tops halfway, revealing their bellies. The boys, of course, looked. One girl, Gaby, asked me my name. She had been in the program since nursery school. She pointed out the girls she knew and told me a little about each.
“That one,” she said, nodding toward a girl named Tiffany who would become my bully that year, the one who would haunt me for years, “is a bitch. And that one,” she referred to the girl next to her, “is a bitch in training. Just stay away from them and you’ll be okay.” The bitch she referred to had curly dishwater hair. She was one of the ones who had raised her tank top. She sat with the other girl, who I’d later learn was Courtney, hanging on her almost, looking to her constantly. We introduced ourselves,