Chapter 8

 

EVERYONE’S MILLING AROUND OUTSIDE the main buildings on Friday afternoon when I show up, running and out of breath. I was sure I was going to be late and that the buses were already going to be here—or, worse, that they’d have already been here and left again—but thankfully everyone’s still waiting.

“Dude,” Riley says. “You almost missed the bus.” He’s sitting on a bench in front of the office.

I motion for him to move his crutches so I can sit down next to him. “The buses aren’t even here yet.”

“But they were supposed to be. What if you’d gotten left behind?”

A nightmare situation I’d rather not think about. “Whatever,” I tell Riley. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“Oh, my God,” Amelia says in a choked voice, hugging Melissa. “I’m going to miss you guys so much.”

I roll my eyes. “You’re going to see everyone again on Monday.”

Amelia glares at me. She has tears streaming down her face. They all do.

Actually, now that I look around, a lot of people seem to be crying, and if they’re not actually crying, they still look pretty upset. As if leaving this place is a bad thing.

“For your information,” Amelia says, “we’re meeting up tomorrow for ice cream and maybe a slumber party at our house, if Mom and Dad say it’s okay. But it won’t be the same.”

“You guys,” Jana says, pointing up at the sky, “look at that cloud. It looks just like that rock we saw in the woods!”

They all squint up at it.

“Oh, my God,” one of the other two girls whose names I don’t know says, “you’re so right! It looks exactly like it.”

“It’s a sign,” Amelia tells them. “It means Team Glitter’s going to be together forever.”

“This calls for a cheer.” Hil gets her bunny ears out. “One more shout out for Team Glitter while we’re still at camp.”

They all put on their bunny ears and then clap and shout, “Team Glitter!” a bunch of times like before, except now they’re all crying so hard they can barely get the words out, so the cheer sounds kind of sad and deflated.

I turn to Riley. “I am not going to miss this place.”

He shakes his head. “Me, neither.”

“Though seeing the looks on our cabin mates’ faces when they realized I’d just gotten my revenge on them is a pretty good memory.”

Riley laughs. Then his face falls a little, and he looks like he’s thinking really hard about something.

Probably about how camp was nothing like what he wanted it to be. I clear my throat, almost afraid to bring this up. “Look, Perkins, about your parents’ tree—”

“Don’t worry about it, X. It’s okay.”

“Yeah, but camp really sucked for you. For both of us. But I knew going into it that it was going to suck, and I didn’t have any ties to this place. I wasn’t looking forward to anything, but you were, and… All this was important to your dad, and you should have gotten to at least see some of the sights he did, if not relive some of his experiences.”

“You can’t really have the same experiences as someone else, though. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and even if everything had gone exactly the same way for me as it did for my dad, I still would have experienced it differently. That’s just how it works.”

“Yeah, but you could at least have had a closer experience to what he did. Like actual good memories of this place. Stuff you could tell your kids someday so that they could come here and find out it doesn’t hold up.”

Riley grins at that. Then he takes a deep breath. “Listen, X, this is probably going to sound really stupid after everything that happened, but I feel like maybe I do have some good memories of this place.”

“You what? Since when?” Did his fall the other day rattle his brain? “Name one, and you can’t use the campfire ceremony last night, because I already said that one.” As if there are any others.

“Well, that one was pretty good, but… Okay, I don’t know if it’s any one moment or anything. It’s more like how maybe I didn’t fit in with everyone else here, but if you hadn’t been here, then I wouldn’t have fit in with anyone. So, like, even though this week sucked, and even though it wasn’t the camp experience I was hoping for, I was still here with my best friend, and we got through it. And maybe us not fitting in with everybody and having to do our own thing wasn’t the worst thing in the world.”

I raise my eyebrows at him. “You must be thinking of some other time you and your best friend went to camp for a week, because that’s not how I remember it.”

“I just mean that making our own art projects and stuff while everybody else did something different was kind of cool.”

“You mean like when they were all making anti-lightning signs and Eric kept stealing our markers?”

“No. I mean, kind of? I know how it sounds, and it wasn’t fun at the time or anything, but now that it’s over… I don’t know. I’m glad we did it. That we both came here and that we stuck it out.”

“When they X-ray your leg, make sure they also give you a head scan, because you must be losing it if you think that.”

“I’m just saying that maybe camp not sucking and having good memories about it aren’t mutually exclusive. Like maybe, despite everything that happened—or maybe even because of everything that happened—I’ll still look back on it as something good.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to need longer for my rose-colored glasses to kick in.” If they ever do.

He sighs. “The whole point of the trip was to bond with your friends, and that’s what I did.”

“That’s friends, plural. And we were supposed to make new ones.”

“Whatever. I was just trying to say that maybe it wasn’t a total loss.”

We’re both quiet for a second. And then, because I have to ask, I say, “So, are you still upset that you didn’t make it to your parents’ tree?”

“A little, I guess, but it’s okay.” He says that wistfully, like it’s not really that okay. “And Zach will be here next year. Hopefully without a broken leg. Maybe he can find it and get a picture for me.”

I get out my phone and bring up the most recent picture taken. Then I hand it to Riley.

He stares at it. Then, quietly, he says, “It’s the tree.”

“That’s why I was almost late. Because no matter what you said about only wanting to see it in person, I figured you’d regret not getting a picture of it.”

Riley zooms in on his parents’ initials. There’s a heart carved in the bark with MP + WF inside it. Riley studies it, then glances off in the direction of the tree, as if he’s thinking about actually going there, even though that would be pretty much impossible at this point.

“I’ll send it to you once we have service,” I tell him when he hands me my phone back.

“Thanks, X.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But what if you’d missed the bus? You couldn’t have gone earlier?”

“Uh, no, because I was busy packing and trying to clean up our cabin. I don’t know if you noticed, but the rest of our cabin mates all got sent home last night, and that just left us, and you have a broken leg. So that pretty much just left me to do all the stupid cleaning.” And while normally I wouldn’t care about making sure a place I didn’t even want to go to was spotless, I wanted to show that we didn’t need our cabin mates and that our cabin was obviously better without them. Plus, we weren’t allowed to leave until we passed inspection, and I wasn’t going to stay here even one minute longer than I had to. “So, no, I couldn’t have gone earlier. But I didn’t want to leave without getting that picture for you. And before you say it, I know you told me not to, and I know it’s not the same thing as getting to go see it in person, but—”

“No, X, it’s… Thanks.”

I shrug. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Yeah, it was. It is to me. And you could have missed the bus and gotten stuck here.”

“But I didn’t. And maybe if you’d already told me all that crap about looking back fondly at all the horrible stuff that happened here, I wouldn’t have bothered, since you have so many good memories and everything.”

“That’s not what I said. And I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay, Perkins. I know what you meant. And for what it’s worth, I’m glad you were here, too, and that we both stuck it out.” I say that right as the buses pull up, and I feel a wave of relief that this week is finally over. “And maybe someday I’ll look back and forget how much this place sucked and only remember the good stuff. But for now, let’s just get the hell out of here.”