11

It was the summer after May graduated and went back to Wildwood, where counselors had to work the entire camp term except for two designated “Off-Campus Nights.” Of course May and Kelsey had scheduled their free nights to be together.

For the first, May’s mother had “surprised” her by flying into Portland for the weekend. Instead of spending the night barhopping with Kelsey and a bunch of their Harvard and BC friends who had come up from Boston for the occasion, she had taken a sightseeing bus tour with her mother, followed by dinner at a Cantonese restaurant May had researched online, only to have her mom complain that it was “froufrou” and “overpriced.”

When the second Off-Campus Night came around, May preempted any further visits by making clear to her mother she was going camping with her friends for the night. You’re taking a break from camping to go camping? It was a twenty-minute argument that ended only after May lied and said there would be no boys, even though she was a grown woman who could sleep with whoever she wanted, but of course she didn’t say that.

Nate had brought Ecstasy for the two of them, having heard from friends who had taken it at Tufts that it was the best high—and the best sex—they ever had. After two months of celibacy, May was more than game for the adventure. But they made the mistake of mixing it with alcohol. Instead of spending the night making out and feeling each other up as planned, Nate kept wandering around the woods, and May wound up blacking out at the tail end of the night. She was so wasted she didn’t even remember crawling alone into their tent to crash. She was horrified the next day to realize Nate could barely sleep because of her snoring. It was the first time any man had witnessed Moe in action.

What made that Off-Campus Night traumatic to this day wasn’t her failed drug-fueled sex experiment with Nate, though. It was Marnie’s drowning. Her boyfriend had been at the campsite too. By the time May woke up the next morning, word had spread that he couldn’t find her.

May was the one who insisted they needed to call 911. She had also called Lauren, who had notified the camp owners, who contacted Marnie’s parents. By midafternoon, a full-blown search was underway. Marnie’s body wasn’t found in the lake until the following morning.

Until that night, May and Kelsey had never really had to deal with any serious responsibilities. As burdened as May often felt by expectations, the reality was that she was sheltered. School, piano lessons, camp. Scholarship and loan applications could be stressful, but they were normal kid things. Even once they were at camp as counselors, they were there to camp, too, while providing some gentle oversight to the kind of well-behaved kids who tended to go to art camps.

Marnie’s death changed all that.

Until that final summer, May had despised Marnie. In hindsight, maybe the two of them were too similar, both of them pianists and A-plus students. Marnie was admittedly the more talented musician, but her smugness about that fact could be insufferable.

Only a few weeks before Off-Campus Night, Lauren had lectured May about needing to grow up and stop bickering with Marnie like warring schoolgirls. And so May had followed instructions, setting out to smother Marnie with kindness until she finally cracked. It actually worked. For once, Marnie actually stopped trying to prove that she could one-up everyone else at Wildwood. She told May she had a boyfriend working that summer in Hartford and asked if they could join the Off-Campus Night get-together she’d heard Kelsey was planning. She even confessed that she had always been a little jealous of May—the outsider girl on scholarship who had somehow won over the preternaturally cool girl Kelsey Ellis and seemed to hold a special place in her idol Lauren’s heart.

Marnie told her all kinds of things.

When they first realized Marnie was missing, Kelsey had grilled May on what she and Marnie had been talking about the previous night. According to Kelsey, the two of them had been huddled together near the lakeshore. “Like a couple of little coconspirators.”

May had tried so hard to remember the conversation, wondering if it held some clue as to where Marnie may have wandered off to. But she couldn’t remember a single word. She could picture them next to each other, checking behind them from time to time to make sure no one else was listening. Or she might have made all of that up in the desperate process of trying to remember. For some reason, though, she had a terrible feeling that whatever they were talking about was something May hadn’t wanted to know.

The reality is that Marnie Mann had been so unbelievably cruel to her when they were young, there were times that May had wished her dead. And then she was, and twenty-two-year-old May was still alive.

The campers were terrified when they found out why one of their counselors had not returned from her night off campus. They didn’t understand how she could have drowned when she was such a strong swimmer. No matter how many times they were told that the coroner believed Marnie dove into the water and hit her head on a rock before drowning, several kids refused to go into the lake, certain that they would die too. Parents began to show up, insisting upon the return of their traumatized children and camp fees. How could this have happened? they demanded to know. There was talk of lawsuits.

May and Kelsey had abruptly been forced into adulthood. They shared a collective sense of guilt. Why hadn’t they been watching out for this girl they’d known for years?

And then Lauren announced that it would be her final summer at Wildwood—scapegoated for not monitoring the girls’ conduct while they were off-site for the night. Someone at the camp had to take the fall. Who better than the camp’s music director, the lone Black staff member, who obviously had enough talent and ambition to make a go of it elsewhere?

When they were younger, Lauren had seemed like the bad bitch babysitter in charge. But that summer, she had become more like a friend. With her quiet departure from her position, it felt like she had sacrificed herself for them; and in return, they owed it to her to grow the fuck up.

They never talked about Marnie after the funeral, as if that entire chapter of their lives could be buried along with her corpse, wearing Marnie’s favorite recital dress: a navy blue gown with a jeweled scoop neck.

May remembered now that she had been dreaming about the search for Marnie as she fell asleep by the fire the previous night. How helpless she had felt, yelling to everyone that they needed to search the water, when May herself could barely manage a dog paddle. It had been fifteen years since Marnie’s death, but May still found herself thinking about her at the least predictable moments.