“Comment ça va?”
Camp is over, Becca’s back, and we’re at the bakery we like because it feels French and is not a chain.
“Really,” Becca says. “Tell me how you’re doing.”
I take a sip of my café au lait. “I’m doing.”
“Danielle, I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for you.”
“You were at camp.”
“True, but now that I think about it, I could have gotten permission to come home for a day. That’s what I should have done.”
“You texted every day. That’s being here for me. And you called after the funeral.”
She did, that night, after Adrian went home. I’ve removed those quotation marks I put around our “friendship.” Becca’s been a loyal friend.
“Texting, calling—they’re not really being there. But you are très gentille for not being mad at me.” She bites into her pain au chocolat. “Oh my God. This is to die for.”
Her face freezes.
“I didn’t mean to say that,” she whispers.
I have to laugh.
“Becca, you can use the word ‘die’ in my presence.”
“What I meant,” Becca says, “was that camp food is definitely nothing like this.”
“No,” I say. “I seem to remember that.”
“Bug juice,” she says.
That would be watered-down fruit punch.
“Turds.”
Translated: hamburgers. I know, disgusting, but true. Very hard hamburgers.
“Sticks and stones.”
That’s easy: fish sticks and overbaked macaroni.
“But really, Danielle, I can’t imagine how you must have felt. And still feel.”
There is too much to say. I feel like my head will crack open if I start talking about it. Which is an awful and stupid thing to say, given what happened, and it obviously would be worse to say out loud. So it’s fortunate that I’ve temporarily lost the ability to speak.
“I want to know,” Becca says. “That is, I want to know if you want to tell me.”
I regain control of my voice. “I don’t want to talk—I mean, about it. I’d love to hear about your summer. Being a CIT, being away for the entire eight weeks. Will you go back as a counselor?”
Becca peers at me. “Danielle, really? That’s what you want to talk about? Vraiment?”
I assure her that it is. Vraiment, vraiment.
She rolls her eyes slightly.
“It was great,” she says. “Really great. I had the youngest girls, the seven-year-olds. The counselors I was assigned to were really nice, and didn’t just give me the grunt work.”
“What would be the grunt work?” I ask.
“You know, if a kid needs bathroom help. Or like serving food.”
“Okay.”
“I was also assigned to arts and crafts—I told you that, right?—which was my first choice. Which I loved. So—clay, and beads, and collage, and leather work. Fun, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yeah. It’s fun,” I agree. “Did you have those beads you iron so they melt together into pretty little doodads?”
Becca nodded. “The girls love that! Which is funny, because they all have the bead kits at home, so they ended up doing the same thing at camp arts and crafts that they could do at home. I kept trying to push leather working—you know, because it’s more camp-ish—and they were totally not interested. They just kept wanting to do beads. Making useless little trinkets—les bibelots! I think one girl made twenty-five of them.”
Somehow I’ve become transfixed. I know I’m supposed to laugh or nod or somehow react to the girl who made twenty-five useless little bibelots, but all I can think of is Humphrey. He knew about the bead kits, and he wanted one.
“Danielle. Did I say something?”
I shake my head, which feels like it weighs about a hundred pounds.
“See, I knew I shouldn’t be talking about this. We should be talking about you.”
I shake my head again. “It’s not your fault. I asked about the beads—”
But I can’t go on. Suddenly, I am conscious of the fact that words that begin with b are particularly prone to leading a person to tears. Seriously. Maybe because what you do with your mouth to say b is so close to what you do with your mouth when you burst out blubbering. I am not just trying to change the subject, to get away from thinking about Humphrey. In fact, I can’t help but think of Humphrey, because I am sure he would have enjoyed experimenting with b words to test out my theory.
“These macaroons,” I say, “really are to die for.”