Five Summers (27 page)

BY THE TIME THE OTHERS CAUGHT UP TO MADDIE, she was already on the dock, her now completely ruined trademark Keds squeaking with each step on the damp planks. Jo appreciated that Maddie had refused to leave the flag behind—it felt much more like a victory to take it with them—but she selfishly didn’t want her to toss it into the lake. Jo knew that she should feel accomplished. She’d made things right, just like she’d promised her father she would. But she still had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite finished yet.

“Wait!” she shouted as Maddie wound up to pitch the flag into the water like a javelin.

“Come on, Jo,” Maddie said, hesitantly lowering her arm and resting the bottom of the stick that served as a makeshift flagpole on the dock. “It’s over. It’s pointless.”

“She’s right,” Emma said, gently squeezing Jo’s hand.

“You can be the one to throw it if you want,” Skylar offered.

“Can’t I just . . . keep it?” Jo asked. “Like a memento?” As soon as the words were out she knew how petty she sounded.

“No,” Maddie said, her normally bright eyes darkening. “I know it might sound stupid, but
I
need to do this.”

“Me, too,” Skylar said.

“Me, three,” Emma said.

Jo thought about what she had said back in the treehouse, that it wasn’t the flag itself that was important, but what it stood for. At the time she’d thought that the flag simply stood for winning the game and lording it over the twins and the rest of the people who’d mocked her for years. But seeing how sad and limp it looked in Maddie’s hands, she realized that it wasn’t a symbol of victory, after all. It was a symbol of everything they needed to leave behind. She looked out the water and immediately spotted the weather vane of the Putnams’ rental cottage, the sun glinting off the brass like a diamond. Maybe Skylar’s Buddhist leanings had finally rubbed off on her, but Jo found herself thinking that it couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s all do it, then. Together.” They stacked their fists one on top of the other and sent the flag sailing into the lake.

“No more secrets,” Maddie said, grinning.

“No more fighting,” Emma said, throwing an arm around Skylar’s waist.

“No more camp,” Jo said, her voice breaking.

“You wish!” Skylar said. “There are four more weeks.”

“Oh,” Jo laughed. “Right.” She had forgotten that within twenty-four hours, the campers would be back for second session.

“And one more night of reunion,” Maddie added, wiggling her eyebrows lasciviously. “Which means you can have another ‘meeting’ with Nate.”

“Thanks, but I’m afraid that boat has capsized,” Jo said glumly.

“You’ll never know until you talk to him,” Emma said.

“And if this is your last summer, you might not have another opportunity,” Skylar said.

“No excuses,” Maddie cried, grabbing Jo by the elbows and beginning to steer her back toward the boys’ camp.

“Hey, why does this conversation feel so familiar?” Jo laughed.

“Because we’re right,” Skylar said.

“Take it from me,” Emma said. “If you get a last chance, you don’t want to waste it.”

Jo didn’t need any more convincing.

She found Nate in the boys’ bathroom washing mud off his face. While her sturdy boots had served Jo well during the game, now they clacked loudly on the tile floor, robbing her of the element of surprise. When he looked up and saw her behind him in the mirror, he shook his head.

“You’re following me into the bathroom?” he asked without turning around. “You ignore me for a whole day, except to publicly humiliate me, and now you show up next to the urinals.”

“I like to set the bar low?” she joked.

He shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t get you, Jo. I mean, I thought I hit the jackpot when you said you’d go out with me. But after you freaked out, I realized you’re mean to me about seventy-five percent of the time.”

“I’m not mean,” she said. “I’m . . . challenging.”

“I’m getting that sense,” he sighed.

“And in my opinion, nothing that’s not a challenge is ever worth it.”

“Is that why you never liked me?” He met her eyes in the mirror and leaned on the sink, and she noticed his triceps flexing underneath the skintight arms of his T-shirt. Jo had been noticing a lot of details like that lately. It seemed like all the girls’ sex talk had finally gotten to her. She took a deep breath of peroxide-scented air to clear her head.

“I do like you,” she said.

“You don’t act like it.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’m trying. This is me trying.”

Nate smiled a little, but he still didn’t turn around. “You know,” he said. “Just a general tip: If you don’t want people to think you’re gay, you probably shouldn’t use the men’s room.”

She crossed her arms. “That’s not funny.”

“Oh, come on,” he said.

“Here’s the thing about me,” she said. “I’m not a lesbian. Not that I haven’t ever thought about it, because you’re not the first person to tell me that. But I’m not. And pigeonholing anyone like that is not okay.”

“Jo—” Nate started, but she cut him off.

“Also, not all lesbians have short hair or play basketball, FYI. Just like not all straight girls like makeup or stupid TV shows about morons who compete with each other to marry some guy who spends all his time running shirtless in slow-motion staring into the middle distance. Some of us are just a little different, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the same feelings.” She swallowed back tears. “It doesn’t mean we don’t stay up at night thinking about kissing the guy we like for the first time, or that when that moment finally happens, we don’t get scared. Because especially for different girls, it’s not always easy for someone to like you for who you are, and not for who they wish you would be.”

Jo spun around and clenched her jaw. She didn’t want him to see how upset she was.

“Are you done?” he asked. She felt like throwing something at him. She’d finally opened up to him and he cared more about scrubbing dirt from his cuticles.

“Yeah,” she said bitterly. “I’m done.” She bolted for the door and had already grabbed the knob when she heard his sneakers squeak on the wet floor, felt his hand on her waist. She turned to tell him where he could put his overly friendly paws and was surprised to find that his face was an inch from hers.

“Good,” he said. “Because I have something to say, too.” He kissed her, pushing her back against the heavy door and reaching his hands up to touch her hair, his thumbs tracing trails down her neck. When he pulled back, he smiled. His face was smeared with sweat and eye black. He looked ridiculous. “Wait—are you crying?” he asked.

She shook her head defiantly, feeling the tears spilling onto her cheeks. “No,” she laughed, wiping a wrist across her nose. “Shut up.”

“See, that’s the thing,” he said. “I like that you tell me off when you’re crying. And that you call me out for making stupid jokes. I like that you work out but eat crap all the time. I like that you’re so strong and don’t apologize for it, and that you’re so beautiful but you don’t define yourself by it.” He reached down and took her hands. “I
do
like you for who you are, Jo,” he said. “I always have. You just haven’t noticed.”

This time, she kissed him.

MADDIE STARED AT HER PHONE AND STEELED herself. She’d been sitting on her bunk for almost ten minutes, scrolling through her contacts and letting the highlighted bar hover over “DO NOT ANSWER!!!!,” never allowing herself to actually hit the call button. She hadn’t spoken to Charlie in months, but after throwing the flag into the lake, she was fired up. She didn’t feel like hiding from him—from anyone—anymore. Escaping wasn’t fixing anything in her life, and being with her friends reminded her how brave she used to be. She’d ended her junior year wandering the halls of Cross Creek High like an outcast, but she refused to play the part of the humiliated ex-girlfriend when she went back in the fall. Her heart may have been broken, but she was still standing. And she would be damned if she let a guy try to knock her down again, much less with a cowardly text.
If I can climb a twelve-foot tree and outrun a quarterback, I can make this call
,
Maddie thought. She pressed her thumb down and held her breath.

She almost couldn’t hear the sound of the ringer over her own heartbeat, but after three and a half rings, Charlie picked up.

“Hello?” He was trying to act like he didn’t know who it was. Maddie rolled her eyes dramatically at the empty cabin. Who didn’t have caller ID on a cell phone?

“It’s Maddie,” she said.

“Oh . . .” She heard some shuffling in the background. “Hey.” She would have bet a hundred dollars he was lying in bed playing video games in his boxers, if there had been anyone around to take the bet. But Jo had gone off to throw herself at Nate, and after the rest of them had showered and changed, Skylar and Emma had headed over to the big end-of-game pizza dinner in the mess hall. To be honest, Maddie had never felt so grateful to be alone. She wasn’t sure she could do this otherwise.

“Listen,” she said. “I want you to not talk and not hang up for sixty seconds while I say something. Can you do that?”

More shuffling. “Okay.”

“Great.” She cleared her mind and willed the right words to come. “First, that was a shitty text you sent. What happens between me and Christina is between me and Christina, and even though I know you’d like to think of yourself as in the middle of us, you’re not. If we want to mend our relationship and be friends again, you have no part in that. No part. So yeah, I knew it was her birthday, and no, I didn’t call, and that is exactly zero of your business.” She paused and listened for some sign that he was still there. He coughed. She dove back in.

“I’m not going to yell at you for sleeping with her, or for lying to me about it, because I know that wouldn’t do anything. What’s done is done, and I hope you feel terrible, honestly, but I’m not looking for an apology anymore. What I
do
take issue with is your letting me become a joke at school, like I was just some girl you screwed, and like you never cared about me. So when I get back in September, I expect that to stop, and I expect you to make sure it stops. And if it doesn’t stop, know that I’m not gonna take it anymore.” Maddie’s heart was racing. She was on a roll.

“What you did to me was horrible and unforgivable,” she said, standing up, trying to picture him right in front of her, with his hair in his face and his hands in his pockets: the Charlie slouch, she used to call it. “And I’ll never regret anything more than I regret sleeping with you. But I’m not your victim any more than you were the love of my life. And if you only remember one thing about me, I want it to be that. Have a nice day now.” She hung up and dropped the phone, her hand was shaking so hard.

Maddie sat back down and stared at her suitcase, which sat in the center of the cabin with its Southwest Airlines tags still attached. In a massive stroke of irony, her baggage had found its way back to her just as she was ready to let it go; the suitcase had been sitting on the steps of Souhegan when she got back from capture the flag. Now that she had taken care of the Charlie business, Maddie felt entitled to a change of clothes that actually fit her, as well as some underwear that didn’t seem to be constructed of dental floss—she had spent the weekend in Skylar’s “emergency thongs” (Maddie didn’t even dare ask).

Showered and dressed and emotionally purged, Maddie decided to take a walk down to the Green. As soon as she stepped outside, the air seemed crisper, the colors looked brighter. It was like Souhegan had been swept up in a tornado and landed in Oz. Maddie smiled. She almost wanted to skip. She’d stood up for herself, she’d been articulate without getting nasty, and she’d said her piece. And even though she hadn’t let Charlie get a word in—because, she reasoned, nothing he could say would make it better, and there were a lot of things he could say that would only make it worse—she finally felt like she had closure. For one of her problems, anyway. She had a list of other people who deserved phone calls—and none of them would be as easy as Charlie’s. It was a literal list, scribbled on the palm of her hand with a Sharpie:

Mom

Christina

Eddie

Bio Dad (?)

The last one was a question mark, for obvious reasons. Maddie didn’t have his phone number. She didn’t know if he had another family. She didn’t even know if he knew she existed. But the main reason he got a question mark was that Maddie didn’t know if she needed to look for him anymore.

Of course, she was still curious. She wanted to know what he was like and whether she was like him, and who on his side had the curly red hair that was both her trademark and, in more humid climates, the bane of her existence. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that her biological father and Camp Nedoba—which were only linked by their location in the state of New Hampshire, as far as she and the Google search bar knew—served a similar purpose.

The year Maddie turned nine was the same year her mother started coming home from work smelling funny. It was also the year Eddie lost his job at the auto shop and settled into his permanent spot on the basement futon, in front of Orioles games. She’d always wondered about her “real” dad, but the forces that drew her to the computer that day in the library had nothing to do with him. She just needed to get away. At that age she was naive enough to think she could just pick up and go live with him, and that he’d welcome her with open arms and endless patience, and maybe a even canopy bed.

She hadn’t found him. But she’d found camp. She’d found Mack. And through a series of events that still seemed unbelievable, she’d gotten the escape she’d so desperately needed.

Maddie didn’t have Mack’s name written on her hand, but she still ended up at the door of his office. It was almost six, so she wasn’t sure if he’d be there, but when she rapped on the screen door, his big, deep voice told her to come in.

“Hello again,” she said as she poked her head into his office. Mack was sitting at his desk, typing on his laptop underneath a framed Abenaki tribal flag, which coincidentally had the same colors as a Girl Scout badge.

“Maddie!” he said. “I heard you were the MVP of capture the flag this afternoon.”

She smiled. “Did Jo tell you?”

“No, I saw Emma and Skylar at the pizza party. It just finished up. Why weren’t you there?”

“I . . . had some cleaning up to do,” she said.

“Well, is there anything you need?” He pushed his laptop away and sat back in his chair.

“No,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to say thank you.”

“For what?”

“For
everything
. For letting me come here, for keeping my secret—which I know put you in a weird position—and for just . . . being there for me.”

“Maddie, it’s been entirely my pleasure.” He smiled, and she ran over to give him a hug.

“I had an okay time, too,” she said with a smile. “Oh! Also, I was wondering, is registration open for next summer?”

“September first,” Mack said. “Why?”

“I want to get my sisters up here,” Maddie said. “Harley just turned eleven, and Mae’ll be ten by next summer. I know they’d love it here. And before you say anything, I want you to know that I’m going to pay for them to go here. Full tuition. I’ve been saving up my paychecks, and by winter I’ll have enough.”

Mack looked at her with a glint in his eye. “That’s fine,” he said. “But you know, relatives of staff members go to camp for free. If you feel like applying.” He tapped his pen on his desk. “Just something to think about.”

“Thanks, I will,” she said, her face breaking into a slow smile.

By the time the screen door banged shut behind her, Maddie had a singular purpose. She ran across the Green and up the hill to the barn, vaulting herself up the beams more sure-handedly than she ever had, not caring that her clean white jeans were getting covered in dust. She crawled through the boxes of junk, back to their corner, and reached into her back pocket for her Sharpie.

After she was done, she stepped back and admired the letters she’d printed in thick black marker, stark and strong against the rough, gray wood:

MADDIE RYLAND WAS HERE.

And even better, she knew she would be back.