Day 16—Sunday

Freddy and I sat by the water and threw pebbles into the lake while we talked. It was sibling visitation at his camp again, and we had fifteen minutes left together. Freddy’s only problem that week had been running out of soap. Except he didn’t exactly run out of it—he lost it.

At Forest Lake, the boys bathed in the lake. They stripped down to nothing and jumped in with special environmentally safe bars of soap and bottles of shampoo and scrubbed themselves right there in the water, dunking under to rinse off. Freddy had been having trouble holding on to his slippery bar of soap while also cleaning himself. Every attempt to grab it from where it was floating in the water made it slink even farther away. He had lost three bars of soap in the last week.

“Can’t you buy more at canteen?” I asked him.

“I don’t like their soap. It smells weird,” Freddy complained.

“All right, I’ll get you soap from my canteen and bring it to you next Sunday, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Will someone share with you till then?”

“Yeah. But not many of us have any soap left. We all keep losing it. It’s harder than it looks, you know, to hold it in the lake.”

“It must be,” I said, and ran my hand through his uncombed hair. He had lots of new highlights from the sun that never showed up in my dark hair no matter how much time I spent outside.

“Are you homesick at all?” I wanted to know.

Freddy was quiet for a minute, rolling a stone back and forth across his palm. Then he said, “I miss the big pillows on the floor by the TV, and I miss TV. And I miss my video games. But that’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“I thought I would miss the pool at home, but the lake is better.”

“The lake is colder,” I pointed out.

“I like it. Camp is fun. I thought it would just be okay here, but it’s better than okay.” He flopped onto his back and gazed up at the blue sky.

I stared at the speckles of sunlight glittering across the lake and repeated Freddy’s answer in my head: better than okay. It seemed like a goal, like something to shoot for. Earl was better than okay when he was working in his garden. Chieko was better than okay when she was shooting at the archery range. Carly was better than okay when she was riding Rowdy. Freddy was better than okay at Forest Lake.

But Freddy didn’t know what I knew. Freddy didn’t know that his dad was gone and his mom was with some guy named Darrin.

And I did.

How was I supposed to be okay with that?