Dear Cassie (20 page)

It was too much. All of this was too much. I had to get out of there.

“I should head back,” I said, letting go of his hand.

“So, no hug,” he said, not moving.

I stood. I guess I thought he might say something else so I waited a moment, then another. Maybe I wanted to say something else, or maybe I did want to be near him. Be close to someone who might possibly understand me just because he was as messed up and broken as I was.

I started back toward my cabin.

“Hey, Cassie,” he called.

I turned to look at him, his skin white on the grass.

“You want a rematch, you know where to find me,” he said.

I put my hands on my stomach. I knew our next rematch wouldn’t be at basketball. I knew if we had a rematch, I might not be strong enough to win.

10 Fucking Days to Go

I
woke up this morning trying to scratch my own skin off. I was either allergic to Ben or I had lain in something that had turned my skin to hot needles of itch. Considering the way I was itching, it was possible I’d been cloned with it. I thought back to the night before, Ben and me on the grass, holding hands, staring at the clouds in the sky and smoking.

I guess there was more underneath us than just grass. Fuck me for not listening to Eagan when he was geeking out about poisonous plants on our last hike. Not that I could have seen whatever it was in the dark anyway, but craaaap.

Troyer sat up in her bed and looked at me. Her big, empty face asked,
what?
I itched too badly to answer. My arms and legs were on fire. It felt like oven-baked itch ants were crawling everywhere I had rolled up my uniform.

Stupid Ben.

Stupid me.

This
was not worth two more cigarettes. Not worth being close to him.

I was still in my bed scratching, Troyer staring at me, when Rawe came out of her room. She was morning-ready in her uniform, her face rigid, her braid tight.

“Ten minutes until breakfast,” she said, walking into the middle of the cabin. She bent down to tighten her boots. Her braid fell over her shoulder, a black rope.

Nez stretched in her bed and glanced over at me, her eyes moving from my legs to my arms with each attempt of mine to keep ahead of the itch. I’m sure I must have been hopping around like I was having an epileptic fit, like a piece of bacon in a frying pan.

Nez’s eyes continued to dance in their sockets as she followed the wild thrash on my cot. She mouthed,
Fleas. Sucks to be you
, and stuck out her tongue.

I wanted to get up and punch her in the face, but I couldn’t stop scratching. I couldn’t do anything but S-C-R-A-T-C-H.

Rawe pulled herself back up, taut like a rubber band. She was on me instantly.

“What’s the deal, Wick?” Her expression was pinched.

“Nothing,” I said, stopping my itch-fest for as long as I dared to try to prove my point. Little pin pricks of heat pushed up through my skin. All I wanted to do was douse them in water, flames, cold Greek yogurt,
anything
to make it stop.

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” she said, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“Looks like fleas,” Nez said, laughing.

Troyer jumped out of her bed and ran to Nez’s side of the cabin. I couldn’t blame her. Fleas would have made me do that. If I could have peeled my skin off and left it on my bed, I would have run over to the other side of the cabin, too.

“I don’t even want to say what you look like, Nez,” I said, tightening my mouth and trying not to scratch, but it was clear I was losing that battle.

“Fleas wouldn’t make you itch that much,” Rawe said, shaking her head. “You
are
itchy, aren’t you, Wick?” She stepped closer to my cot.

“No,” I said,
still
not scratching, even though I thought I might pass out from the lack of it.

“Let’s see,” Rawe said, holding out her hand.

“I told you I’m fine,” I said, attempting to sit on my arms. “When’s breakfast?” I guess I was even more stubborn than Ben gave me credit for.

“You going to show me?” Rawe asked, “or are we going to sit here all day watching you try not to turn your skin to confetti?”

I finally held out my arm. There was nothing else I could do. I had lost before our standoff even started.

Rawe held it lightly by the wrist, spun it one way, the other, and dropped it back on my cot.

“Anywhere else?” she asked.

I pulled my legs out of the sleeping bag and showed her. They didn’t look as bad as my arms. Just my luck, the body parts I could scratch simultaneously were in better shape than the ones I had to count on one itchy arm for.

“Poison ivy,” she said.

Fuck me.

Now that my secret was out, that she knew, that everyone knew, I started scratching again, my nails going at my skin with the force of a cheese grater.

“How’d you get it?” Rawe asked, looking at me through the slits of her eyes then looking across the cabin at Troyer and Nez.

“We don’t have it,” Nez said, her voice louder than it needed to be. “Well, at least I don’t.” She eyed Troyer and moved away from her.

Troyer shook her head hard—hard enough that she probably should have been wearing a helmet.

“I don’t know,” I said. My go-to answer for anything I didn’t feel like answering. Well, that and
fuck you.

“You must have come in contact with a plant,” Rawe said, using her world-renowned sleuthing skills. “The question is where, or more accurately, when?” She continued to look at me, waiting for me to tell her more.

Waiting for me to confess to the suspicions she’d been having.

“Maybe I got it while I was up in that tree yesterday,” I said, scratching again. I couldn’t stop scratching even with her watching. Even with Nez beaming from her cot.

“Get dressed,” Rawe said. “We’re going to the infirmary.”

“There’s an infirmary? Like with a nurse?” I asked.

“No,” Rawe said, sounding tired, “like with calamine lotion.”

That was all I needed to hear. I got up. It was totally obvious to anyone with eyes that my arms and a portion of my legs were the only part of me covered with the rash.

“Interesting pattern,” Rawe said.

I got dressed quickly, even though the fabric made everything itch even worse. I didn’t want Rawe to keep staring at my rash waiting for me to admit something. That had to be what she was waiting for, because she had no proof.

“Okay, you two,” Rawe said, turning to Nez and Troyer. “Clean the cabin while I’m gone.”

“I want to go to the infirmary. I want medicine,” Nez whined, pleaded.

“Nez,” Rawe said, her warning shot.

“Why do we have to stay here and clean up this ship hole of a cabin while Cassie gets to lounge around in calamine lotion?” Nez asked. “It’s obvious she got this last night, without us.”

I looked at Nez, trying to squeeze her mouth shut with my stare. “I’ll give you a reason to go to the infirmary,” I mumbled.

Troyer stood with her arms wrapped around herself like she was afraid my skin would fly off and come in contact with her skin.

“I’ll deal with Wick,” Rawe said, looking at me. She held the cabin door open, waiting for me to walk out of it. “Today, Wick,” she added when she felt she’d waited long enough.

I scratched as I followed her out onto the porch. I kept scratching as I followed her to the infirmary—honestly, I couldn’t stop. I wished I could rip her braid off and use it to scratch my skin like a Brillo Pad.

“So,” Rawe said, “do you want to tell me how this happened?”

I guess this was how she was dealing with me. At least she wasn’t yelling, but I knew her voice was soft because she wanted me to talk to her. Really talk to her. I kind of wished she were yelling.

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“You’re lying,” she said, but she didn’t look at me. “I get that you don’t want to open up to me, but you need to understand that each time you choose not to, you make it harder for me to help you.” She kept walking, marching really, like she wanted me to have to struggle to keep up with her. Which I was.

I looked down and scratched at the parts I could as we walked.

We moved up toward the soccer field. I was hoping that Ben had relocked the equipment shed, or I might have had to not answer some questions about that, too. Not like an open equipment shed automatically equaled poison ivy, but it did equal something.

“You don’t want to tell me what happened, fine,” Rawe said. “Just do not do whatever you did again.”

It seemed like I had gotten out of this a little too easily, but maybe Rawe figured that the result of what I had done was punishment enough.

For as much as I itched, it might have even been too much.

We didn’t talk the rest of the walk. It was hard to speak anyway because I was SO ITCHY. The kind of itch where it is all you can feel. Like I felt when I found out I was pregnant—not itchy, exactly, but where it was all I could feel. So consuming that there was nothing else, only that, like a cannonball balanced on my chest.

We reached the infirmary, a building the color of a nurse’s hat with a blood-red cross painted on it. Rawe pulled the key out from around her neck to unlock it, but it was already unlocked. She looked at me like I might have the answer, but my mouth stayed shut.

Rawe pushed open the door. We heard voices inside.

“Not your best day, Claire,” Nerone grumbled.

“Yes, sir,” Ben said.

“Well,” Rawe said, turning to look at me, her eyebrows going up so high they hit her hairline. “Wonder why they’re here?”

She wasn’t asking like she really wondered, she was asking like she knew the answer. Like she knew that Ben was here for the same reason I was.

That we were both here because we had been together.

Nerone turned to us as we entered the room. “Oh, another one, huh?” he asked, seeming far less surprised than Rawe had been.

“Yeah,” Rawe said, stretching out the word. “Some kind of epidemic.” Her words hung in the air like the smoke from a just fired gun.

Ben had the rash on his arms, legs, and back. He was in his boxers—blue plaid—and even though I could tell he was in pain, he also looked pretty pleased with the fact that I had to see him this way. He didn’t seem embarrassed, though I could feel my cheeks light up like fireflies.

Ben had managed to get poison ivy everywhere, which meant he had taken off his whole uniform after I left him last night. Maybe he really was totally fucked up.

Nerone was wearing latex gloves and slathering him with Pepto-colored lotion. If I didn’t want to basically take a potato peeler to my own skin, I might have made a joke about Ben being covered in girlie-pink, but damn I wanted that cream. I wanted to swallow it and have it come out my pores.

“Is there a reason why both of you have poison ivy?” Nerone asked. Even if he wasn’t surprised it didn’t mean he didn’t care.

“I already asked Wick,” Rawe said, like I wasn’t standing in the room with them. Still, she had no proof that we had been together last night, but our seared-red skin was a pretty decent clue.

“The first one of you to speak up is immune from punishment,” Nerone said tightly. It was hard to take him seriously in his gloves covered with pink.

Ben looked at me. I could bust him, but he could also bust me. Both our mouths seemed ready to say something, but neither of us did. I would never do what Amy had done to me. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for what Amy had done to me.

“Uh-huh,” Nerone said, his jaw pulsing.

“What are you going to do with him?” Rawe asked, pointing her chin in Ben’s direction.

“Lock him in one of the exam rooms till he’s no longer contagious. All we need is a real epidemic,” Nerone said.

Rawe went to the medicine cabinet and found another bottle of calamine lotion. There were ten of them, stacked side by side like a grocery store shelf.

“Ben’s already showered,” Nerone said. “Make sure she cleans up first. It’s important to get the resin off or, well . . .
Leprosy
,” he whispered.

I looked at him. My mouth was open wide enough to catch flies.

Nerone laughed long, loud. He might have hit his leg, too, if his hand wasn’t covered in pink lotion.

Asshole.

Rawe pointed to the bathroom. “Don’t even think about locking it,” she said, her face turning as red as the welts on my body.

I walked in and closed the door. Not only was there a shower, but there was a pretty white porcelain toilet. If I’d known poison ivy would have been enough to get me the use of a real bathroom, I’d have gotten it the very first day.

Considering they had enough calamine lotion to paint a little girl’s room, it must have meant they knew poison ivy was an issue. Maybe they should have tried removing it from the camp before we got here. Of course, if you were stupid enough to lie on the ground with no clothes on, I guess you deserved it.

Ben had made me that stupid.

The water hit me, warm, heavenly. My body relaxed. It was too bad my skin felt like it was on fire, or I would have stayed in there for hours.

I got out of the shower, dried off, and put on my bra, underwear, and the robe that was hanging on the hook. The water helped the itching a little bit, but it was still there, wrapped on top of my skin like a web. When I opened the bathroom door, Nerone was
still
slathering Ben with calamine lotion. Either Nerone was really enjoying himself, or Ben was in bad shape.