The sun.

Oh, fuck the sun.

It’s suddenly everywhere, under my eyelids, soaking through the crochet blanket bundled around my face. Now that I’m awake, I feel the stiffness of my joints, all knotted on the low, sunken couch in the Cabin H common room. I bolt upright, sending a swarm of floating fibers through the bright morning air.

Late morning, I guess, because the world outside is lit to full radiance.

I remember falling asleep just before sunrise, and being so tired that I didn’t care if I got in trouble for not making the trek back to Hunter Village. How could I, without shoes or even clothes? The Honeys decided I would stay anyway, heaping so many blankets and pillows onto me that it was impossible to leave.

“Oh good, you’re up.”

The voice startles me. I twist to look behind the couch and into the kitchen, and I’m surprised to see not one but many people standing there. Not just standing, moving. Cooking. Now that I see them, I can hear them, too: the scrape of a whisk in a bowl of batter, the thud of a wooden spoon knocking around a French press before the top sinks on with a sucking hiss, the ancient toaster throwing forth toast.

“We didn’t want to wake you,” Mimi says. “OJ, coffee, or tea?”

“Coffee,” I mumble. “What time is it?”

“It’s late. Leena let us sleep in.”

“I should go,” I say, but all at once the girls are full of protest.

Not without breakfast! Coffee first! No one walks out on brunch, dummy!

Bria cuts through the chatter. “Leena radioed to your cabin; they know you’re safe. I bet they’re sleeping, too. No reason to rush back.”

One girl hands me a mug painted with butterflies and beetles, another fills it with fragrant coffee. A third places a claw-footed bowl of sugar on the side table, then a jar of cream that’s sweating in the heat. Yet another hands me a wooden-handled teaspoon. All of this in a few sleepy blinks.

At the same time, several others pull the blankets off the floor and tidy the living room. Girls slide into the cleared couches and chairs, and suddenly plates are being passed around. Forks and rumpled cloth napkins follow. Then, the food. It daisy-chains from the kitchen, simply appearing from the dense clamor of girls at work. They sit in shifts, eating and laughing and teasing one another. More food manifests—scones, and a bowl of blueberries, a questionably gray smoothie, chia seeds in a little clay bowl.

The cabin is small and lively but the girls move among one another in a way that feels cohesive. I realize it reminds me of the bees among their comb. Or maybe I only think this because the spoon I’m using to stir sugar into my coffee pricks my thumb, and I find upon its handle a small metal bee. The napkins are embroidered with small blue-gray bees, too. The knobs on the cabinets are painted ceramic bees, fat and cheerful. Everywhere else, too: the coat hooks, the cross-stitched pillows, even the inlaid design of the hexagonal bathroom tiles. The motif is all I see as I maneuver through the cottage. I find it cute, if not a little cloying. It’s no worse than the profound dankness of Hunter Lodge’s taxidermy animals, or Bear Hut’s carved mascot, Bernard. My mom has a donor whose whole house is full of Santa Claus figurines.

I prefer the bees.

A scream cuts the din, not in terror but in playful warning. Girls rush over me, bounding across sofas to get out to the porch, then rush back in. They’re dragging someone with them. Wyatt, wide eyed, hair mussed, carrying a garbage bag full of clothes.

“Oh, thank you,” the girls say, pulling their discarded uniforms out of the bag and tossing them into the corners. They sit Wyatt down and put a plate on his lap. He looks completely shell-shocked by the business of it all, and it’s a minute before his eyes even settle on me from where I’m watching. When he sees me, he reaches into his bag and pulls out my uniform. He even has my shoes, the socks tucked into them, and wags them at me like a scold.

We head out shortly after, the girls making us promise we’ll come back, as if we’re not scheduled to show up on Monday.

While Wyatt and I walk through the woods, the buzzy glow of Cabin H fades and I start to feel sheepish.

“Am I in trouble?” I ask.

Wyatt shrugs. “You shouldn’t have swum across the lake. It’s not safe.”

“Everyone was swimming.”

“And everyone returned to the correct shore. Except you.”

“I don’t subscribe to binaries like shores.”

Wyatt does that quick-exhale laugh. “So what? You’ll just float forever in the middle?”

“Yes. In my little nonbinary canoe,” I say.

Wyatt tilts back his head and ponders this. Then he asks, “Question, Mars. What’s that like, floating in the middle?”

I wait for him to laugh, or to indicate somehow that he’s not really asking, just continuing our banter. But he wrestles the mischief from his face and replaces it with an almost-academic curiosity.

“Okay. Answer. It’s like …” I pause. My mind is still spinning with the business of Cabin H. My usual explanations slip away. “It’s more like I drift back and forth. Sometimes I’ll get out, stay a while on one shore, but a part of me is always waiting to get back to drifting.”

“You don’t get tired?”

“I don’t,” I say. “Or I guess I do. But it’s not drifting around in the middle that makes me tired. It’s staying too long on either shore. People have these specific ideas of what a boy is, or a girl is, and it’s so exhausting to play along. People make themselves so unhappy trying to get it right. But it’s not even real. So I reject all of it. I’d rather be happy and adrift.”

“What’s do you mean, it’s not even real?”

“Hate to be the one to break this to you, nature boy, but hardly anything is real,” I laugh. “Gender, the idea that there are two shores directly across from each other. The lake has a ton of hidden shores, but you don’t know that if you’re stuck standing on the land.”

“You lost me,” Wyatt laughs. “Back on the subject of actual, non-metaphorical shores, it’s my job to make sure you don’t do that again. You could have drowned.”

I put on a posh voice. “Better to drown as myself than to breathe the air of someone else’s life and drown all the same.”

Wyatt shakes his head; his curls bounce. Exhaustion has deepened his eye sockets. He smiles, though, when he says, “Brayden didn’t even realize you were gone until Leena radioed. Not a good look. I doubt he’ll tell Wendy.”

I relax. Just a little, though.

“You should have come with us,” I tell Wyatt as we walk through the quiet camp.

“Did you have fun?”

“Kinda,” I say, and that’s the truth. I had a great time, but not a fun one. Fun wasn’t the point. “We mostly just talked.”

“About girl stuff?”

“About Caroline, actually. And it was really nice.”

Wyatt gives a thoughtful nod.

“Then I’m glad you broke this one rule. Just don’t do it again, okay?”

I smirk at him. The shadows in his eyes are for sure from staying up all night. I wonder if he slept at all, or if the sunrise found him waiting on the boathouse deck, watching for the moment I stepped out from the covered bridge.

We don’t talk about the night swim. It passes behind the opaque veil of discretion that seems to swallow so many things at Aspen. But at the same time, there’s a twinkling in Wendy’s eyes as she watches us yawn at dinner, a knowing.

I don’t like that. And it’s not that I’m against lying. Trickery is the first defense of people like me, who need to outmaneuver the dangers of telling the whole truth. But when everyone is complicit in a lie, aware of it yet pretending otherwise? I’m suddenly uncomfortable with deceit. Lying should be personal, I think. It shouldn’t be so easy to deceive, at such a large scale. Yet Aspen does it all the time.

I try to think of other examples, but I can’t. That feels off. I know there were other things in my catalog of conspiracies—from both my first stint at camp, and during this redo—but the sunny days have sapped the color from my convictions. I’m left with the impression of suspicion, but no real evidence. For hours at a time, I forget why I’m here. What I’m looking for. And when I remember—usually because something reminds me of Caroline and the low-grade agony turns suddenly stinging—I’m disgusted with myself.

Something happened here, I remind myself, marveling at how I could have forgotten. But then I ask what happened, and I don’t know.

Then I find the photo.

It’s returned to me, actually, on Monday, in a stiff white envelope that’s been pinned to a bag of freshly laundered uniforms. A note says it was found in my pocket. There’s a little smiley face accompanying the anonymous handwriting.

By now I’ve spent so much time with the girls in the cottage that I recognize them in the photo, but there’s one I don’t know. She’s in the middle, giving the camera a peace sign. She looks familiar, but it might just be the Aspen uniform. Maybe the photo was taken last year. That doesn’t explain why I have it, though. Vaguely, I can imagine myself in the Honeys’ cottage, in a hallway upstairs, opening a door into the back bedroom, but I open the door to a bright nothing. The memory, if it’s a memory, goes no further.

No further.

Yet another loose end strung off into the distance. But this thread feels taut, like if I tugged it, something would tug back.

So I don’t tug.

On Tuesday, as Wyatt and I are getting ready to leave the apiary, the Honeys ask us to stay for lunch.

“Oh, sure,” Leena says when Wyatt asks if that’s allowed. “The dining hall doesn’t need more mouths to feed. Besides, it’s about to rain.”

She’s right. Thunder has been grumbling in the distance all morning, small spats of rain peppering the lake. We had to be careful inspecting the hives because the wind dug right into the mounds of bees, carrying a handful away each time. Mimi said they would find their way back, though.

Wyatt and I stay, sitting on the porch as the clouds finally break and rain flushes down the meadow. The other side of the lake vanishes in grayness. Wyatt feels nervous next to me, tapping his foot, eyes boring into the fog, like he mustn’t lose sight of Aspen.

“Leena said it was fine,” I say.

“It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just … never been allowed in Cabin H so much.”

“What, really? Not even during the off-season?”

“Nope.”

I can’t help it. I grin. “Wyatt, are you scared of girls?”

This gets him to relax, even if the sudden nonchalance is an act. “What? No. Why? What does that even mean? Scared of girls.”

But Wyatt proves me right when Bria dashes up the stairs and he stands up, like a soldier at attention. She’s carrying a large basket of red peppers, their waxy skin jeweled by raindrops.

“A job for you both,” she says, handing Wyatt the basket. “Chop these.”

I open the door wide for Wyatt. “After you.”

For some reason I never quite realized that part of living all the way out in Cabin H meant the girls prepared their own meals. There’s no dining pavilion, no staff. Not even Leena makes an appearance in the kitchen. And thank goodness, because it’s a small room. Every inch of the counter is crowded with ingredients, but I’m amazed at how once again the girls fit against one another without jostling or competition. There’s hardly any seams between them.

Wyatt and I are stationed at the kitchen table, wooden cutting boards before us. We chop the peppers in half, extracting the seeds and stems. The peppers are snatched up and thrown on a griddle somewhere, and we’re told to chop red cabbage next. Then green onions, then carrots. The vegetables are misshapen, and I realize they’re not from a store. They must grow all their food here.

“God no,” one of the girls tells me. “Some grows here, but not all. We pick recipes at the beginning of the week and Leena grabs supplies from camp. Whatever Aspen doesn’t have, Leena gets in town.”

I can’t imagine carrying groceries through the hike between Aspen and the meadow.

“Me neither,” says Mimi. “There’s a service road back behind the shed.”

Lunch is ready just as the sun comes out. The peppers we cut have been charred and brushed with spiced oil. There’s a slaw of purple cabbage, ginger, green onions, and carrots, served alongside black-charred barbecued duck. And finally, each of us is given a single fried zucchini blossom drizzled in honey.

We eat on the porch, watching the mist rise off the dripping garden. It’s the best food I’ve had since brunch a few days ago. Wyatt hardly reacts to the feast, but he finishes everything he’s given. Even the blossom.

After, we stay to help clean up. The second I say I don’t mind doing dishes, I’m parked before the deep porcelain sink, up to my elbows in lukewarm suds. Wyatt dries. Mimi and several others put the dishes away. We hardly talk as we work through the mountain of plates. I hum to myself. I notice a few other girls hum, too, just loud enough to notice as they bring more and more for me to scrub. It’s meditative, the way we work together. It’s like falling into a groove made perfectly for your shape. Within that groove I feel safe. Content.

I meditate on this. Contentedness is a party I leave early every time. It’s not often that I feel invited to begin with, and even rarer that I feel welcomed enough to stay. I’ve learned to never test any group’s hospitality. Patience like that is finite for someone like me, and it’s dangerous to indulge in it.

But I don’t feel that here, in the daisy-chain apparatus of Cabin H. The groove I fit within is perfectly my shape, no wishful warps imposed upon me. I feel more than just welcomed. I feel essential. Needed. And instead of running from it, I want to see how long it will last. Maybe it could last forever, so long as I keep doing my job.

The dishes are suddenly done. It feels like a kick to the stomach, to have nothing else to do. The familiar threat of being dismissed is heavy in my empty hands, and like clockwork I hear myself say to Wyatt, “We should go.”

“Yeah,” he says, “the rain stopped, too.”

I don’t know if it’s just an echo of my meditation, or if what I hear in Wyatt’s voice is actually there, but I sense disappointment in him. The same simple pleasure I felt, fading fast.