Inspired by As You Like It
Lily Anderson
Oliver: Can you tell if Rosalind, the duke’s daughter, be banished with her father?
Charles: O no; for the duke’s daughter, her cousin, so loves her, being ever from their cradles bred together, that she would have followed her exile, or have died to stay behind her. She is at the court, and no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter, and never two ladies loved as they do.
Oliver: Where will the old duke live?
Charles: They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.
—ACT 1, SCENE 1
“It’s worse than I imagined,” I spat.
“But in a good way,” my cousin said.
At a safe distance, behind the redwoods and only halfway up the driveway, we could tell this wasn’t the camp we remembered.
It was horribly, painfully beautiful.
Each of the main buildings had a mural wall painted to reflect its purpose in an explosion of color and bubble letters. The front lawn had grown back—lush green. Along the perimeter, sunflowers stretched toward the sky. The whole place looked brand new.
The sight of it made my blood boil.
“Do you remember when I wanted to buy a plot in the community garden and my dad said it was too expensive?” I pointed beyond the hammocks and horseshoe pit. “That’s an outdoor kitchen! There’s no way I have a college fund left!”
“Stay positive,” Celia chided, shaking my arm the way she did when we were little and she used to try to “wake up my sillies.” “We’re back at camp! We didn’t think we would ever see this place again.”
“I was sort of hoping we’d never have to.” I looked up at the WELCOME TO CAMP ARDEN sign. Repainted and sealed at a sun-reflecting high gloss, it was hard to look at.
“Rosie,” my cousin chided.
“Cece,” I stressed back, crossing my eyes at her. We were at camp, so I was no longer Rosalinda and she was no longer Celia. Camp was for nicknames.
“We wouldn’t be friends if we’d never come here!” she said. She opened her arms and spun in a circle, distance-hugging every tree. “We would be cousins, but we wouldn’t be sisters.”
“And I’d never know how sharp your toenails are,” I said, fake swooning back at her. “Sleeping bag serial killer.”
“Two sleeping bags!” Cece protested as though that was a normal amount of sleeping bags to tear open with one’s toes.
The sound of a car pulling up the gravel drive made both of us turn around.
A silver sedan with multiple ride-share stickers in the window pulled to a stop. The back door opened and out leapt a tall light-skinned Black boy in owlish glasses.
“Thanks, man,” he called back at the driver. “And remember, you swore you’d give Solo another shot. Don’t do it for me. Do it for Bradford Young!”
As the door closed behind him, he swung a backpack on and turned to see us. His face broke into a dimpled smile. “Sorry, I’m late. There’s no clock in the forest.”
The name on his luggage tags was Orlando Cohen-Kersey, but for the first few years we knew him, he’d been the smaller half of Ollie-and-Orly, the bickering brothers whose inane arguments kept their cabin up all night. When Ollie got promoted out of the communal bunks and into a counselor’s twin bed, Orly had emerged as:
“Lando,” I said, too quiet to be heard beneath the sound of the Uber-Lyft crunching its way back toward civilization.
Space buns bobbing, Cece ran to hug our old friend. “Look at you! You got taller again! I told you that you had to warn us when you did that!”
Lando laughed, and it was a rumble, not a wheeze. “You’re just remembering me shorter because we missed a summer.”
I gripped the straps of my overalls. “Aren’t we lucky that summer is extra-long this year?”
Lots of people attempt the camp upgrade. Away from everyone who defines you, it’s easy to show up in the woods with a new name and a statement wardrobe. Camp was the only place where Cece wasn’t under constant parental surveillance and I tried to be a person who wore hats. But Lando had not only upgraded but stayed plused up.
Getting taller had a lot to do with it. Now, there was no mistaking him for a little kid. Instead of curls weighed down with grease, his hair was picked out. It stood up in a halo around his head as round as his tortoiseshell frames. His jeans were tight, and his socks were loud.
After camp ended, Lando had become decisively himself. It was such an unforgivably hot thing to do, I could barely stand it.
Cece beckoned him down to her level. “Come down here and let me admire your mane. I’m obsessed with the volume you’re getting.”
“I just do what you told me,” he said, but he generously bent in half anyway so she could see every angle of his ’fro. Before she was the queen of the quickie hair tutorial, @CeliaCurlz, Cece had been known as the girl at camp with the hair product suitcase. A godsend to the other natural hair campers. Whether you needed shea butter, silicone-free conditioner, or someone with quick hands for a braid down, Cece was the person to know. Following that reputation had brought Lando to the door of Cabin 12, hoping to exchange cookies for cornrows.
We were camp besties ever since.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. To save myself the awkwardness of trying to initiate a hello hug, I patted him on the shoulder. “I didn’t know if you would.”
Before this week, I’d never had to ask him for anything more than a movie recommendation or the finishing knot on a friendship bracelet. We were camp friends. Inseparable in summer, social media mutuals during the school year. We were untested in the off-season.
“My friends needed help,” Lando said. “So I’m here to help.”
“Right,” I said. “Let’s go find my dad.”
I led the way, taking the first step into the wild, drunk yonder.
Dad swore Camp Arden used to be paradise, but every year that I was there, it got a little bit worse. The waterfront cabins were condemned. Canoes were left to rot. An ongoing lawsuit ended the annual capture the flag tournament. And the lake had a dead-thing smell that lingered in everyone’s hair.
“Percy Jackson lied to us,” I told Cece the year the ceramics hut burned down.
“Maybe camp is only good if your parents are gods,” she said.
By our last summer there, camp was barely two weekends. Cece spilled an entire container of homemade flaxseed gel in the woods and cried for three days. Lando recapped the plots of Jordan Peele movies. I never even unpacked my swimsuit.
Not long after that, Dad sat me down, solemn-faced, to tell me that Camp Arden had officially closed. His autopayment bounced back to him. I was sad to know that I might never see Lando in person again. But we started a text thread and promised to keep in touch.
Dad, on the other hand … Dad rallied. He called other Arden alums, tracked down old camp directors, hired aquatic ecology experts and arborists, emptied his savings, cracked into his retirement twenty years early.
Because, to my dad, camp wasn’t some old slice of the woods on the other side of a stomach-churning, two-hour bus ride. Camp wasn’t its stinky mess hall or empty owl sanctuary or weird frozen food concoctions. To him, camp was home. Being a counselor was the first job he ever had, and he came back every summer, even through college. Until he and my mom had me and needed to move closer to family.
Camp Arden reopened, a little over a year after it closed. Except now it was a summer camp for adults.
And summer had been extended indefinitely.
The main office was the only building close to the parking lot. In the nearest space was the junky, old truck my dad had downgraded to when he had been raising the money for the camp renovation. I couldn’t believe he’d traded in our Prius for something with no GPS, no Bluetooth for the stereo, and no backup camera. I was never going to be able to parallel park that behemoth.
Seeing the weeks of dirt accumulated on the windshield only fueled me forward, ready to pound my fist on whatever desk or door got between me and Dad.
But no one was in the office.
“At least they left the air conditioner on,” Lando said, his eyes closed against the cold breeze coming out of the wall.
According to the dry-erase calendar on the wall, the bus had dropped us off in the free hour between lunch and afternoon activities.
I couldn’t resist testing the handle of the camp director’s office. Locked, of course. Through the smoked glass, I could only see the vague outline of a messy desk. I wanted to know what my dad looked like sitting behind it, what photos he kept in the frames on the wall. Had he changed the furniture in there? Everything on this side of the door was so eerily the same. The operations desk even had a bulky, old desktop computer that was way too clean to be disused.
Cece pulled down a printed map from a wall display of brochures and legal release forms. Tracing her index finger in a serpentine trail away from the camp entrance, she said, “If we walk fast, we should be able to do the whole walking trail in less than an hour. I want to run the wishing steps and ride the tree swings…” She gave me a weak smile. “And find Uncle Duke, of course.”
“We’re on a recovery mission, not a walk down memory lane,” I said.
“I know,” Cece said. “I can’t help that I’m also just a tiny bit excited to be back at camp. With my camp friends. And I don’t even have to spend the night! It’s what I always wanted camp to be.”
“I’m so glad that my parental abandonment is working out for you,” I said coolly.
“What if your dad doesn’t want to be found?” Lando asked me. “Didn’t you say he turned off his phone?”
I extended summer by a week or so, Dad’s last message had said. Like he had the power to control the seasons, to stretch weeks into an indefinite or so. Like it was an option to mistake one week for three.
“You know reception is spotty here,” I said, chewing on the inside of my cheek. Spotty reception wouldn’t account for him ignoring my messages. Or the lack of Wi-Fi signal in the office.
“Oh, we are going to find him,” Cece said emphatically. “I did not spend eight summers here for no reason!”
“In a literal sense, you did,” I said. “We didn’t get college credit or learn a skill or anything.”
“But in a figurative sense,” Cece said, stabbing a finger victoriously into the sky, “I could find my way around here blindfolded. All of us could.”
“You’re just describing blackout tag,” I said.
“Blackout tag,” Lando repeated, with all the rough angst and gravitas of a brooding superhero. “That game is way too dangerous for kids! I almost cracked my head open on a tree branch.”
“Must have been a low one,” I teased.
“How are you gonna make short jokes when I’m taller than you now?” he asked, gazing down at me with an intensity that made my hairline sweat. I wanted to tear out my braided pigtails. They had seemed like a good idea when Cece suggested them but now made me feel like a giant toddler in overall shorts and too much lipstick.
“You can be taller than me all you want,” I said, scrunching my nose at my reflection in his glasses. “But I’m here to keep you height humble. I won’t let you forget where you came from. The top of your head used to be my armrest. You started at the bottom. Of my elbow.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, but you must have missed me a little.”
He smiled back. “A little.”
Finding my dad on the first try had been a long shot, and yet we left the office without the gusto we’d entered with.
Outside seemed hotter, the buzzing bugs louder.
Following the signs for the lake, we passed the rebuilt ceramics hut and the health center.
“So, Lando,” I said. “Are you totally loving being an only child?”
Cece sucked in an appalled breath, just like I knew she would. “God, Rosie! It’s not like Oliver died. He went to college.”
“Tomato, potato,” I said, catching Lando’s eye and sharing a private, silent joke through telepathy. Pretending not to know about Cece’s endless crush on Ollie Cohen-Kersey was one of life’s great joys. It was hilarious that she thought people didn’t know when she was physically incapable of not calling him Oliver rather than Ollie.
“Fill us in on real life, Lando,” I prompted.
“As opposed to fake life?” He chuckled.
“Exactly,” I said. “I only know what you put online.”
“Which means we have already heard your favorite movies of the year,” Cece reminded him. “We want to know the fun stuff. Secret stuff. Did you get a girlfriend yet?”
“Your priorities are so specific,” I told her. My cheeks prickled with secondhand embarrassment like she’d blurted out something rude, even though she hadn’t. I tugged on the ends of my pigtails and tried to make my face stay still.
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Let me be nosy!”
Shoulders raised to his ears, Lando grumbled, “No, I did not get a girlfriend.”
“Because you’re too busy still pining over the embodiment of feminine perfection?” I asked him.
“Who?” Lando asked, taking this moment to clean his glasses.
“You know who,” I said. “The Secret Camp Crush.”
I drew out the last syllable so it whispered down the path ahead of us.
“It’s Madison Poffenberger,” Cece guessed. “Wait, no, Tinsley Poffenberger.”
“No way,” Lando scoffed. “Cabin Tenners? Please. The Poffenbergers don’t care about art. I’d prefer someone who didn’t think reality TV counts as cinema verité. Besides, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a secret crush.”
“Two years ago, you said, and I quote!” I said, striking the end of each word like the hammer in a bell. “‘I have always had the same camp crush.’”
Cece wriggled a finger at him, the tips of her fingers still dyed chocolate-cherry red from helping me with my roots last night. “It’s the always that gave you away.”
“You had a crush on one of the twenty-five girls who was here every summer, and you never told us who it was,” I said to Lando.
“I bet it was Rachel,” Cece said. “She was the only person short enough to three-legged race with you for a couple years.”
“And she bullied me for not being fast enough the whole time!” Lando said. “Taking three-legged races too seriously is immediate crush disqualification.”
“We’re at camp for the last time,” I reminded him. “I’m pretty sure that means you have to confess who Camp Crush is.”
He snorted, looking at the trees that were starting to block out the sky. “First of all, she’s Secret Camp Crush. And secondly, I would rather chug lake water than talk about who likes whom.” He whipped his backpack around to the front and unzipped it in one motion. “Let’s stop fishing for secrets. Have some contraband breakfast.”
From within the well-stocked depths of his backpack, the three of us split a meal of 7-11 donuts and Takis. In the shade of the tree canopy, eating convenience store food on the walk from the cabins toward the lake, it was almost like the old days.
“Was junior year everything you wanted it to be, Rosie?” Lando asked.
“Pretty uneventful. Except, you know, my dad bought a summer camp.” I kicked a pinecone off the path. “So far? Less fun than a zoo.”
Lando scoffed. “Uneventful? You skipped another grade!”
“Sort of.” I sucked spicy dust from my fingertips. “I was a sophomore with junior standing.”
“What’s the difference?” he asked.
“I actually did more work than I needed to, so I’m technically still a sophomore—they just ran out of classes for me to take. When I skipped second grade, I didn’t have to do the work.”
It was odd to talk about school here. The sharp, evergreen smell of the forest was the total opposite of the glass-and-cement high school I attended.
Camp used to be the one place I wasn’t constantly reminded that I was younger than everyone else. People asked, shrugged their interest, eventually forgot. It didn’t matter that you skipped a grade when there were no grades. There were only campers and counselors, opposite ends of a spectrum. And I had always clung to Cece, hoping people would assume we were the same age, instead of two years apart, an advantage that I definitely did not have in my regularly scheduled life.
“Who skips two grades?” Lando asked. He patted donut sugar from the front of his shirt. “You’re a year younger than me, but you get to graduate the year before! That’s wild, Rosie. You aren’t even a little bit excited?”
“Sometimes we get to have the same homework now. That’s exciting,” Cece answered for me.
“That’s true,” I said. I fished out my water bottle and took a long drink. “But I’m mostly excited to be done next year. I can’t wait to just work on classes that actually matter.”
“It’s not like it’s all cinchy,” Cece said, frowning at me with a sudden strange seriousness. She snagged the water bottle out of my hands. “You skipped to a grade so that it’d be a challenge. Now you have to study like the rest of us.”
“I never said I didn’t,” I said. “But I’d rather be in college than in high school.”
She thrust the water bottle back into my hands. “Stop wishing your whole life away. You’ll get older just like everybody. You’re rushing.”
“I wonder why,” I snapped back at her. “I don’t see anyone else having to beg their parents to be parents.”
The door to the nearest bath cabin burst open. A middle-aged guy holding a beer can came staggering out. Whether the beer had originated inside the bathroom was worryingly unclear.
“Lookit, some newbies!” shouted the drunk man to no one in particular. “You guys are just in time! They’re tapping the kegs!”
Lando looked affronted. “Dude. We’re underage.”
Surrendering as best as he could without dropping his can, the guy held up his hands and started backing toward the ceramics hut. “Be cool, man, you’re the one trespassing.”
Lando started to speak but couldn’t quite orient his mouth around an entire phrase, so I leapt in front of him, catching the drunk man’s attention.
“We’re looking for Duke,” I said.
“Duke?” the man echoed. He was wearing a Camp Arden T-shirt. Dad hadn’t changed the design, but he had printed them on better-quality shirts than the scratchy, straight-out-of-the-bulk-bag kind we used to get. These were prefaded olive green.
“Duke Castillo,” I said. “The camp director? He’s my—”
“Duke!” the man howled at the sky. It echoed through the pine trees and ricocheted back to us. When no one appeared, he said, “Guess he’s not over here.”
“I guess not,” I said.
Cece and Lando both took a step back. Their eyes screamed at me to do the same. I didn’t.
“The thing is,” I said. “Duke also wasn’t in his office, so—”
“Duke has no office!” the man said, throwing his arms out wide so all of his scraggly pit hair sneaked out of his sleeves. “The world is his office! And the woods are his world!”
“Okay,” Cece said, smiling beatifically. “Thank you so much for all your help. Bye-ee!”
She turned and steered us away, muttering, “Go, go, go.”
Once we were down the first small hill and out of sight, Lando asked, “Have we ruled out the possibility that it’s a cult?”
“Everyone we’ve passed so far is wearing the same shirt,” Cece said. “That’s definitely cultish.”
It seemed like a thousand years ago that I’d texted our group thread asking whether or not they thought my dad could be brainwashing people into paying hundreds of dollars to sleep in communal cabins. At the beginning of summer, it had been funny that Dad was going to camp and we weren’t. When there had still been clothes in his closet. When he answered his phone.
I didn’t find it funny anymore.
“We wore matching shirts when we were campers,” I said. Our matching shirts had been an eye-watering shade of lime green that made us easy for counselors to spot. Half a dozen of them in different sizes lived in a box under my bed. Cece still slept in hers.
“We were children,” Lando said. “We had no choice but to match.”
He had a point.
We were coming up on residence row, where all of the cabins had been upgraded. None of them had tarps covering holey roofs or boards eaten to dust by termites. Even with the cosmetic upgrades, I couldn’t imagine my dad agreeing to sleep in a bunk bed in a room with strangers.
“Let’s go check Cabin Twelve for our initials!” Cece said.
“Okay, but just for a second,” I said.
She was already running off the path, toward the big-kid cabins. They were in the same order. The numbers still skipped unlucky thirteen out of tradition. The cabins themselves had been upgraded, painted barn-door red, and given new wooden railings.
The summer after I turned thirteen, I had done the honors of carving our names on the back of Cabin 12 with the pocketknife Dad thought I wanted for my birthday that year. I’d added Lando’s name as an honorary member of the cabin after first pretending that I hated the idea when Cece presented it because it had seemed very important that no one think I wanted his name there.
And now, all of the boards were repainted or replaced, leaving no hint as to where we had started.
The deeper into the trail we got, the more attention we drew. We passed a group of campers lawn bowling beside a silver keg of beer and another group with a keg and no visible activity.
Like zombies scenting brains on the wind, the campers would stop talking and watch us pass. Near the archery field, a sunburned couple stopped making out long enough for one of them to ask, “Are those kids?”
I would have taken offense at that, but both of them looked to be older than my parents. Or at least more wrinkled.
As we crested the hill behind the archery field, we could see a large group of campers laughing and chasing each other.
Cece squealed and spun away, pushing us back down the hill. “Someone please warn me if I am about to see an orgy because my virgin eyes can’t handle it! My mother said that there was a chance that this place was some kind of sex thing, and I never should have doubted her—”
“What are you talking about?” I interrupted her. “I didn’t see any naked people!”
I started to go back over the hill to get another look, but my cousin stopped me, pulling me out of sight of the people below.
“I saw blindfolds,” Cece whispered loudly. “Haven’t you seen Fifty Shades?”
“No!” I said at the same time Lando said, “Yes!” Then he added, defensively, “It was shot by the same cinematographer as Jurassic World.”
I goggled at him. “And that’s a positive?”
Cece side-eyed us both and sniffed. “I saw a redband trailer. Blindfolds were part of it!”
Sometimes it was hard to believe that I was the baby cousin.
I marched back up the hill, braced to see something life-ruining. Instead, I saw campers, fully clothed in their matching olive-green shirts and bandana blindfolds.
“You guys,” I said to Cece and Lando. “It’s blackout tag.”
Once we got closer, it was easier to tell that there were multiple teams of people playing. The blindfolded people who were “it” were chugging beers before each turn, making their tags lurching swipes that everyone else laughed at, easily dodging out of the way.
It didn’t look fun. It looked mean.
“Do you see your dad?” Lando asked me.
My stomach churned at the idea of my dad being part of the mocking crowd, but I looked carefully as we walked by them. It was almost a relief that he wasn’t there.
“Hey, kids, you’re at the wrong camp!” someone called from the keg.
The product of strict and attentive parents, Cece was momentarily frozen in place by the sound of adult disapproval. To her, rules were rules, even when set in place by strangers at an adult summer camp. But we had practiced for this.
“Go home to your jobs!” I shouted back at them.
It broke the spell. While the campers jeered back at me, Cece burst into motion, running at full speed away from the adults. Lando and I followed, laughing too hard to catch up until we were around the corner and nearly to the arts and crafts pavilion.
“The wishing steps!” Cece said.
“Think of a good one,” I said. “It’s the last wish you’ll get here.”
The path was partially blocked by a huge fallen tree the camp had never paid to have moved. Instead, stairs had been nailed to the trunk so you could climb over it. When we were kids, the stairs were split boards so rickety that the only logical wish was “I hope the stairs don’t break.”
Now, it looked like part of an Aztec pyramid built over the fallen tree. Not only was there a railing and a platform at the top, but the new steps were painted to say, Tell the tree your wish. Running up the sturdy stairs didn’t make you feel like you’d earned a wish. It felt like construction scaffolding redirecting traffic. But we wished anyway.
“I wish to find Uncle Duke,” Cece said dutifully.
“Oh, good,” I said, running up the steps behind her. “Then I can wish to find out who Lando’s Secret Camp Crush is.”
“Secret!” Lando repeated, chasing me down the stairs. “Wait, I missed my wish!”
“Too bad, so sad!” Cece and I giggled.
Lando paused on the bottom step, teetered on the tips of his toes, and swung back around. “Hold on! I’m going back over!”
His long legs took him up two stairs at a time.
“If your wish is to undo my wish, then I’m gonna double-wish it!” I shouted after him.
I followed him, trotting up the stairs and then leaping off the platform.
“You can’t cross back over the wishing tree! It’s a one-way wish!” Cece protested from the other side. And then she gasped. “Oh no.”
“Oh no?” I asked, pushing Lando back up to the top of the platform so I could see the path again.
Lando froze at the top of the platform. “Oh no.”
On the other side of the tree, a deep voice said, “Orlando? Celia?”
Lando’s older brother was standing on the trail. The olive-green camper shirt matched Ollie Cohen-Kersey’s eyes almost as well as it mirrored his little brother’s queasy complexion.
Trotting down the stairs, I waved. “Hi, Ollie. I wonder who wished for you.”
Cece flashed her eyes at me like warning lights.
Ollie didn’t notice. He was pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head. “Of course. You’re all together. None of you can be here!”
“Well, my dad owns the place,” I said. “So, if he wants to throw me out, he can do it himself.”
“Shouldn’t you be at college?” Lando asked his brother.
“Shouldn’t you be at home?” Ollie shot back.
“I’m here to find my dad,” I said. “Camp was supposed to end weeks ago. What the fuck happened here?”
Ollie frowned at me like he was considering giving me a demerit for cursing. Remembering that he no longer had that power, he opened his hands and said, “Your dad gave us a do-over.”
“Like when the whole class fails a quiz?” Cece asked.
“Something like that,” Ollie said. Brushing past the three of us, he moved to sit on one of the new wishing stairs, the king of his little stage. It was the same pose he used to adopt when narrating ghost stories around the fire. “The first week of camp didn’t work. Some people were here to party, some wanted to hike. And to save money, Duke didn’t hire any counselors.”
“Adults are supposed to be in charge of themselves,” Lando said.
“True,” said Ollie. “That means being in charge of hyping themselves up. Getting excited to do the camp stuff. Making bird feeders. Talent night. Playing guitar around the campfire. Capture the flag.” He counted activities on his long fingers. “No one wanted to do everything, so lots of people did nothing.”
“I do not blame them,” I said. “That shit all sucks.”
Cece cocked a hip and crossed her arms. “Rosie. You loved talent night. Remember your one-woman Peter Pan?”
I had been pretty proud of my hand puppets that particular summer. I pretended not to remember them.
“I wouldn’t come back from college in the real world to do it all over again,” I said pointedly.
Oliver’s brow furrowed in offense. “Well, it was your dad who had the great idea to unplug. He bought those phone locks they use so people won’t film concerts anymore. Duke said that anyone who put their phone in a lock sleeve could stay an extra week for free. To soak up the last bit of summer.”
“To avoid going home,” I said. My stomach ached as I imagined my dad feverishly looking for a way to push autumn away. The year of camp restoration had turned him into a shadow person, a ghost whose true self lived in the woods. I sucked my teeth. “So, what? Without your phones you forgot what day it was?”
“I guess they don’t teach you to read the sun anymore,” Lando added, arms folded in judgment. I knew he had a policy of being anti-Ollie, but it still felt nice to have someone on my team.
“No,” Ollie said. “We didn’t forget. It’s just not important. Duke owns the land. There are built-in activities everywhere. We’re hanging out and eating through the freezer. It’s chill.”
“Chill for you,” I spat. “Not for the people you left in the real world. Just because you don’t check doesn’t mean there isn’t news or that people don’t need you!”
My voice broke, and I stared down at the scuffed toes of my hiking boots. Another pair of shoes appeared next to mine. Shoes with loud socks. Lando’s arm wrapped around my shoulder. Hugged to his side, I tilted my face to look up at him.
He ducked his head down so that for one moment, we were temple to temple, his voice a hot hum against my ear.
“Secret crush,” he said simply.
My heart lit up like a lantern.
“Where is Rosie’s dad?” Cece asked.
Ollie stood up and dusted himself off, his ears momentarily blocking the sun. “At the lake. He’s always at the lake.”
I had expected a small water park. Maybe an inflatable slide or tandem Jet Skis. But instead it was just a lake. Albeit no longer a lake that was also an EPA emergency.
Ollie followed us down the waterfront trail.
“You can’t go to the lake without being properly buddied up,” he said. “It’s not safe.”
“Aren’t there people here your age?” Lando asked him.
His lack of an answer was answer enough.
The lake was greenish and still. Some campers splashed on the far shore, but near us, it was empty. There were canoes, but no one was in one. At the end of the dock, I could see my dad fishing. Alone.
Cece skidded to a stop in the middle of the trail. “Are you sure you don’t want to go see the tree swings first? I bet your dad turned them into hammocks or a carousel or something.”
“No, they’re still tires,” Ollie said. “But there are giant hammocks on the other side of the lake.”
“We could do one more fun thing,” Cece said, clutching my arm. She lowered her voice to a sleepover whisper. “Talking to your dad is going to make you sad. Why not do one more happy thing first?”
“Because I can’t put off being sad,” I whispered back. “I’d rather face it.”
I took one more look at Lando and tried to imagine being the object of his constant crush. It filled me with an uncertain glow that brightened the more I believed in it. I tried to hold that feeling of being so impossibly liked as I walked away.
The dock was an untouched slice of camp, the round logs underfoot familiar.
Dad sat back in his chair. The sleeves of his green shirt were rolled up, exposing the pale hills of his shoulders to the sun.
“Evening out your farmer’s tan?” I asked him.
He squinted up at me. “I thought you said you never wanted to come back here.”
“I thought I’d have more of a choice.”
There was an empty chair next to his. A matching Adirondack with a sharply slanted back and a cup holder built into the armrest. I took it without invitation.
A single yellow leaf spun on the green, glass surface of the lake, rippled along by a soft breeze. The horizon was misty white. Silence stretched between us, hammered thin with unsaid apologies and explanations.
“Last day of summer,” I told him.
“Last day of summer,” he agreed. He looked over at me with liquid eyes so like my own. “I’m glad you’re here to see it, Rosalinda.”
“Rosie,” I said, stealing a glance at my camp friends over my shoulder. “At camp, my name is Rosie.”