not. I’m horrible. I feel horrible.” She had to run to keep up. She was covered in guilt, like slimy sweat. Worse. You didn’t say stuff about people’s parents. She ought to know. Her parents were pretty awful, too, but she’d be offended if anyone other than her said so, and that was a fact.
But how could she have known? What were the chances? Everyone said Terry Davis didn’t have a family, that no one ever came to see him, so the last thing she was expecting was that he had a son. Still, she should have kept her big fat mouth shut.
Terry Davis had a son. Amazing. In all the years the quiet, melancholy man had worked at the camp, she had never known. All she knew about him was that his father and her granddad had been in the Korean War together. Granddad said they’d met while bombing something called the Han River, and that Mr. Davis had been a hero, and for that reason, he would always have a place at Camp Kioga, no matter what. Even if he was, as she’d so stupidly said, a huge drunk. He’d been a fixture around the place, living alone in one of the staff cottages at the edge of the property. Those cottages provided housing for the cooks, caretakers, groundskeepers, drivers and maintenance crews, all the invisible people who worked around the clock to keep the place looking like a pristine wilderness.
Mr. Davis was a loner. He drove an old work Jeep, and often looked tired, prone to having what she’d heard her grandfather call an “off” day.
“I’m really, really sorry,” she said to Connor.
“Don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t. I’m sorry I said that about your dad. There’s a difference.”
Connor jerked his head, tossing a wave of dark hair out of his eyes. “Good to know.”
“He never said he had a kid.” The minute the words were out, she realized her mistake was getting bigger and bigger, every time she opened her mouth. Her jaw was a backhoe, digging deeper with each movement. “I mean, I never—”
“He didn’t want me coming here for the summer, but my mom got married again and her husband didn’t want a kid around,” Connor said. “Said three’s a crowd in a double-wide.”
Lolly thought about the bruise she’d seen. This time, she remembered to keep her mouth shut.
“A double-wide trailer doesn’t have much space for three people, but I guess you wouldn’t know about that,” he added. “You probably live in a mansion somewhere.”
Two mansions, she thought. One for each parent. Which just proved you could be miserable whether you lived in the 800 block of Fifth Avenue or in a Dumpster. “My parents have been sending me away every summer since I was eight,” she told Connor. “Maybe it was to get me out of the way so they could fight. I never heard them fight.” Perhaps if she had, Lolly reflected, the divorce might not have been such a shock.
“When my mom figured out I could come here for free on account of my dad working here,” Connor explained, “my fate was sealed.”
In her mind, Lolly put together the facts, like a detective. If he was coming here for free, that meant he was a scholarship camper. Each year, under a program her grandparents had founded, needy children were brought to the camp for free. They were kids who had rough family lives and were “at risk” although she wasn’t quite sure what “at risk” meant.
At camp, everybody dressed the same, lived and ate and slept the same. You weren’t supposed to know if the kid beside you was a crack baby or a Saudi prince. Sometimes it was kind of obvious, though. The scholarship kids talked differently and often looked different. Sometimes their bad teeth gave them away. Or their bad attitude. Or sometimes, like with Connor, a kid had this hard, dangerous look about him that warned people he didn’t need a handout. There was nothing needy about him at all, no hint that he was “at risk.” Except the hurt in his eyes when she had called his father a drunk.
“I feel completely cruddy,” she reiterated. “And horrible. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You’re right. You shouldn’t have. Crazy-ass girl, no wonder you go to a shrink.” He stabbed his stick into the ground and sped up. It looked as though he wasn’t going to say another word to her. Ever.
Fine, she thought. She’d blown it, the way she always did with other kids. And he was probably going to make sure the whole world knew it. He’d probably tell everyone she was all freaked out about her parents, in therapy. He would probably say he’d seen her cry. She had made an enemy for life.
She trudged onward, feeling more sweaty and cranky with every step she took. You’re an idiot, Lolly Bellamy, she told herself. Each year, she came to Camp Kioga with ridiculously high expectations. This summer will be different. This summer, I’ll make new friends, learn a sport, live my own life, just for one single season.
But once things got under way, reality set in. Simply leaving the city didn’t mean leaving discontent behind. It came along with her, like a shadow, expanding and contracting with the light.
She and Connor Davis were the last to reach the summit. Everyone else was gathered around the fire pit. There was no fire because it was plenty hot and sunny. The campers sat on huge old logs. Some of the logs had been there so long they had seats worn into them.
The head counselors of Eagle Lodge this year were Rourke McKnight and Gabby Spaulding, who fit the Kioga mold perfectly. They were cute and perky. Each had attended Kioga as a camper. Now in college, they embodied what Nana and Granddad called the Kioga “esprit de corps.” They knew the camp rules, CPR, several key Algonquin words and the tunes of every campfire song known to man. They understood how to talk a camper out of feeling homesick. Among the Fledglings especially, homesickness was a dreaded epidemic.
In the olden days, homesickness wasn’t a problem because the cabins had been rented by families. That was how camp used to work. As soon as the school year ended, the moms and kids would move into the bungalows, and each weekend, the dads would come to join them, taking the train up from the city. That was where the term “bungalow colony” came from. A colony was a group of bungalows set close together. Often, Nana had told her, the same families returned year after year. They became close friends with the other camp families, even though they never got to see each other except in the summer, and they looked forward to camp all year.
Nana had pictures of the olden days, and they looked like happy times, frozen in black-and-white photographs with deckled edges, preserved in the black-paged camp albums that went back to the Beginning of Time. The dads smoked pipes and drank highballs and leaned on their tennis racquets. Nearby were the moms in their kerchiefs and middy blouses, sunning themselves in bent-willow lawn chairs while the kids all played together.
Lolly wished life could really be like that. Nowadays, of course, it couldn’t. Women had careers and a bunch of them didn’t have husbands.
So now the bungalows housed the counselors—scrubbed, enthusiastic college kids by day, party animals by night. Last summer, Lolly and three of her cousins, Ceci, Frankie and Dare, had sneaked off after lights-out and spied on the counselors. First there was the drinking. Then the dancing. A bunch of couples started making out, all over the place—on the porches, in the lawn chairs, even right in the middle of the dance floor. Ceci, who was the eldest of the cousins, had let loose with a fluttery sigh and whispered, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to be a counselor.”
“Yuck,” Lolly and the younger cousins had said in unison, and averted their eyes.
Now it was a year later, and Lolly seemed to understand that fluttery sigh a little better. A kind of electricity danced in the air between Rourke and Gabby. It was hard to explain to herself but easy to recognize. She could totally picture them together in the staff area, dancing and flirting and making out.
As soon as a head count verified all were present, Rourke took out a guitar (there was always a guitar) and they sang songs. Lolly was amazed by Connor’s voice. Most of the boys mumbled the words and sang off-key, but not Connor. He belted out “We Are the World,” not really showing off, but singing with