Pretty Is

The week at Gilead Baptist Camp had been planned for months, but when the time finally came, I felt like I was being sent to reform school. Mr. Morton had finally assured Daddy that there would be no lawsuit, and that was a big relief. But just the same, I had a feeling my parents had been counting the days as much as I had, eager to get rid of me and the cloud of trouble I’d brought.

I’d spent a week at Gilead in each of the last two summers. I liked going on hikes, finding quartz crystals, singing in the dining hall after supper, swimming in the lake, just being in the mountains. It was a lot more camp than church, even though we did have a Bible reading in our cabins at bedtime and a service on Sunday morning.

Most of the kids were pretty cool, just normal kids, except sometimes you’d get one who was super-religious and wanted extra Bible studies, or told you, if you got mad about something, to think of what Jesus would do. And every year there was at least one preacher’s kid in my group. They always swore a lot and told dirty jokes, and at breakfast they threw scrambled eggs at people.

The day we drove to camp was about the hottest day of the summer. It was Sunday, and we’d gone to church as usual. As soon as we got home I threw off my dress, slipped into shorts and a tank top, and checked the contents of my backpack and duffel bag one last time. After lunch, as soon as the dishes were in the dishwasher, all four of us piled into the car.

The air-conditioning in our old station wagon just barely worked, and the little bit of cool air it put out stayed in the front, where Mama and Daddy sat. It was so bad they finally turned it off and opened all the windows.

Monica sat beside me in the backseat, both of us sweating, with a backpack in the middle as a divider. I read a book most of the way. Monica said she’d get carsick if she read, so she took off her glasses—she had just gotten them the week before—and stared out the window with her Walkman on, fiddling with radio stations.

I was a lot more excited about camp than Monica was. She’d been complaining about going because there weren’t any basketball hoops at Gilead. It was a nature camp—lots of hiking and canoeing but no regular sports.

I already knew that Monica and I wouldn’t be in the same group, and I’d decided not to tell anyone that I had a sister at camp.

We shot through Asheville on the interstate, and I recognized road names on the exit signs and remembered our old house at the edge of the woods. I felt suddenly homesick for the exact shade of green that the back porch was painted, and for the smell of sassafras and the look of white and red trillium deep in the woods in spring.

Mama was homesick too. I could hear it in her voice when she said, “Look, girls, there’s Carver Road. We’d go that way if we were going to our old house.”

Finally, past Asheville and off the interstate, the road started climbing and the air got a little cooler. We were on a narrow, winding highway now, and I closed my book. I couldn’t read with the car swaying heavily around the tight curves, and anyway I liked looking at the trees and steep hillsides with cows and sheep, and the tiny towns with just a gas station and a Tastee Freeze and maybe a Piggly Wiggly market.

Then we turned off on a smaller road, and then a slow, dusty gravel road lined with pine trees, and then around a curve and into the camp’s gravel parking lot. It was full of vans and SUVs and station wagons, and kids running around, and piles of backpacks and sleeping bags. Counselors with name tags stuck to camp T-shirts were walking around with clipboards, checking off the new arrivals and pointing them toward cabins. A few parents and grandparents sat in rockers on the dining-hall porch, fanning themselves with maps or magazines.

I got out first, slamming the car door behind me. Right away I spotted this really gross boy named Tommy who was in my group last year. He was a skinny kid who was always catching daddy longlegs and pulling their legs off, or making fart noises that sounded like the real thing. Half the time they probably were the real thing. He carried around a brown medicine bottle that he said contained essence of fart, and he’d open it up and wave it around after he made the noise. Sometimes you could smell it and sometimes you couldn’t.

Next to the car, Mama and Daddy were talking to a counselor, and Monica was taking her backpack and sleeping bag out of the back. She wore a baggy old white T-shirt with a red cross on it that she’d gotten the summer before, when she helped give swimming lessons to little kids. And now she was wearing the new glasses, which were too big and made her look like a barn owl.

Daddy helped me carry my stuff to cabin five. The girls’ side was empty—just three sets of metal bunk beds and a bare concrete floor—but two of the beds had sleeping bags and backpacks on them. We put my things on one of the top bunks and started out, just in time to see Tommy heading into the boys’ side.

“Hi,” I muttered. I cruised right on out the door, but Daddy of course had to stop and chat with Tommy’s mother, even though he’d never met her before. I scuffed around on the dirty path outside, all alone except for their voices and all the voices floating up from the parking lot, somewhere downhill and beyond the trees.

“That figures,” she said, smiling. I wondered if she was happy to have me and Monica out of the house for a whole week. Probably she was especially happy to get rid of me.

“They still have those creaky metal beds,” I complained. “And that really gross boy—remember the one I told you about last year?—he’s in my group again.”

“Well,” said Mama, “maybe he’s grown up a little by now.” Which was pretty much exactly what I expected her to say.

She hated it when I was sarcastic. For a second she opened her mouth, then closed it firmly. “Anyway. Monica is all settled in cabin seven, and I told her the same thing I’m telling you: I want you two to look out for each other, all right?”

We walked down the path to the dining-hall porch, where my counselors were waiting with a few kids next to a sign that said CABIN 5—BOBCATS.

“Erin, come on over,” the girl counselor called. “I’m Amy.” She had shoulder-length blond hair and an open, cheerful face. On her camp T-shirt was a rainbow pin, with little gold letters under the rainbow that said SMILE, GOD LOVES YOU.

Isabel sat cross-legged on the top bunk across from mine, her head almost touching the ceiling. She was a pale girl with wide blue eyes that always looked slightly surprised. She was from Asheville, so I’d told her right away that I used to live there, but she lived in a different part of town and went to a school I didn’t remember.

It was quiet time after lunch. We had to stay in our bunks, but we could read or draw or write, or even talk if we kept our voices down. In the other room, one of the boys was groaning, “Why don’t they let us have Game Boys?”

“Oh boy, do I have brothers and sisters. Three little brats that drive me crazy. Robbie is eight—he’s in cabin three—and Angela and Andrea are five. They’re twins.”

“Well, it’s not cool to have twin little sisters, believe me,” Isabel answered. “Everybody thinks they’re sooo cute. Most of the time they’re a pain in the butt. At least they’re too little to come to camp.” She drummed her fingers on the railing of the bed. “How old is your sister?”

I shook my head and said quickly, “Hang on, I’ve gotta go to the bathroom.” I scrambled down from the bunk, giving Isabel one quick glance before heading for the door. She looked a little surprised at my abrupt exit. Or maybe that was just the way her big blue eyes always looked.

We got our meals in the camp dining hall, which had a concrete floor and a high roof with no ceiling, just open rafters. We sat on benches at long tables and passed around heavy white bowls and platters, helping ourselves to spaghetti or beans or corn bread or biscuits. When we were finished eating, we had to take our plates to a table near the kitchen and scrape the leftover bits into a revolting bucket.

Every year at the first meal, the camp director, Reverend Mr. Haywood, told us we had to do this; instead of wasting the leftovers, we saved them for a farmer who would pick them up to feed his pigs. Sometimes Mr. Haywood watched, and if you didn’t scrape your plate thoroughly, he’d say, “Mr. Johnson’s pigs are going to be mighty hungry tonight if you don’t do better than that. Give ’em another bite or two.” You’d have to scrape it again, and you’d be embarrassed, too, because Mr. Haywood had a voice like a church organ, and the whole room would hear him telling you to scrape.

After supper—after the tables were cleared and wiped off with sponges—we sat around singing for a while, led by Mr. Haywood. Our “songbooks” were just sheets of paper stapled together, but a lot of us didn’t need them anyway. There were strange old songs with haunting words:

I’ll sing you two ho
Green grow the rushes ho
What is your two ho?
Two, two, the lily-white boys
Clothéd all in green ho
One is one and all alone
and ever more shall be so.

And there were hymns, rousing ones like “Onward Christian Soldiers” and sweet ones like “Shall We Gather at the River.” There were silly songs, too, and rounds, and folk songs.

Three tables over, I could see Monica singing with her group. I was glad I wasn’t sitting next to her; she sang like a bullfrog. And I was glad no one here knew that she was my sister.

Since this was Gilead Baptist Camp, the singing always ended with “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” Tommy and a few others sang a different version, very quietly in the dining hall and louder as we walked back to our cabins:

There is a bomb in Gilead
To blast a great big hole;
There is a bomb in Gilead
Let’s blow the camp to hell.

The lake was cold, and water lilies spread their big floating leaves across part of it, not far from the sandy beach where we waded in. The water was dark—not muddy or dirty, but clear dark in a way that made me think of iron and minerals and mountain streams. It tasted of rock and metal, like drinking from a tin cup.

It was the afternoon of the third day of camp, and my group was going swimming. We all took off our shoes and dropped our towels on the beach, then headed for the water. Tommy and a boy named Kevin ran straight in, yelling, and flopped spread-eagled, smacking the surface. The other boy, Rashad, wasn’t far behind. Isabel waded in, then dived and came up, shaking back a waterfall of hair and gasping.

A plump girl named Zoe and I were the slowest, shivering as each step encircled a few more inches of leg in cold water. “Good Lord,” Zoe said. “This is like an ice-water bath.”

“Just dive in,” said Jeff, the boy counselor. “It’s a lot less painful.” He waded out to the depth of his knees, then dived and swam with long, slow strokes out to the dock, where Amy had already climbed out and lay dripping in the sun.

I watched as Jeff’s head appeared beside the dock, and he hung on to the ladder, talking to Amy. Isabel had told me she’d seen them kissing outside the cabin last night when she got up to pee. I studied them as I stood thigh-deep in the lake, hugging myself, wanting to see if they looked at each other in a special way. Jeff was cute, with big shoulders and hands, and long legs, and kind of a sweet smile. When I thought of him and Amy kissing I felt warm, deep inside, and fascinated. I wished I had seen them.

Isabel had told me about it on the way to breakfast, and she told me not to tell anyone else. “You’re the only one I’m telling,” she said. “Zoe and Tina are a little bit immature. I’m sure Amy wouldn’t want them to know. I don’t think they’d understand about being in love.”

I smiled the same smile back, and then we had to stop talking because Reverend Haywood boomed out, “This is the day the Lord hath made. Let’s give Him thanks.”

At the lake I saw Isabel watching Jeff and Amy, too, but soon, since there wasn’t anything special to see, we just swam. After the first plunge and shriek it was fine. I did a backstroke out toward the dock, looking up at hot blue sky with my mouth and nose just out of the water.

Mama was right, I thought—camp was a fresh start. Jeff and Amy were nice, I liked hanging around with Isabel, and everyone else was at least okay. Even Tommy hadn’t been as gross as I remembered; he hadn’t even brought the essence of fart. In the three days we’d been here, I’d hardly seen Monica, except in the crowded dining hall, several tables away, and no one knew I had a sister at camp. I’d almost forgotten about Kayla’s hair, about being grounded and lonely, about faraway Hannah, my best friend.

Right then I squirmed around to see if I was about to bump into the dock. I wasn’t, but something else was almost on top of me—a canoe, and Monica was in it. “Hey there,” she said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t run over my own sister,” said Monica, blinking owlishly behind her big glasses, and dipped her paddle. The canoe glided by, toward the shore where other canoes in the group were already landing. Each one had GILEAD BAPTIST CAMP stenciled on the side in white letters.

Stupid Monica, I thought. The feeling of starting fresh had vanished. I turned toward the dock, and there was Amy, dangling her feet over the edge. “Erin, that’s your sister?” she said. “I didn’t know you had a sister here.”

Hanging on to the rough boards, I watched as Monica’s group pulled the canoes up on the beach and took off life jackets. A couple of the boys were splashing each other in the shallows, smacking the water with paddles, until a counselor told them to cut it out. The four other girls in the group were paired off, talking and laughing as they waded into the lake. Only Monica stood by herself, still holding the orange life jacket and looking around, as if she’d landed in a foreign country and didn’t know what she was supposed to do there.