Like It Never Happened (5 page)

A
t five in the morning
,
a week after the last day of school, my parents dropped me off in a church parking lot to catch the bus to the Shining Stars Summer Camp for Performing Arts. They were only mildly emotional about the whole thing, which I thought was weird. I had never left home for any real amount of time. After they abandoned me with my bulky duffel bag, I located Charlie in the crowd of soon-to-be-exiled Portland high schoolers. He was all clean and tan and caffeinated.

“Good morning, Rivers!” Charlie bounded up to me.

“Charlie.” I could never call him by his last name. It sounded too much like a term of endearment.

He passed me his travel coffee cup. “Are you ready to nurture young souls? To expose yourself to all the diversity of the world?”

Taking a sip, I winced. Charlie apparently drank his coffee black. “Excuse me?”

“Didn't you read the pamphlet?” He looked genuinely concerned.

“There's no way the pamphlet says that.”

Charlie seized my shoulders. “Did you, or did you not, read the pamphlet?”

“I did not.”

He feigned exasperation. “I need you to remember one thing, Rebecca. At the Shining Stars Summer Camp for Performing Arts, we value community over competition. Ensembles over starlets!”

I nodded earnestly.

“Our mission is to show these children the value of their authentic selves,” Charlie continued.

“I thought it was theater camp,” I said.

“It is.”

A raincoated woman began shouting orders through a megaphone. A kid nearby put a finger to his lips and shushed us, like we were going to miss vital information regarding how to board a bus.

“So nobody's going to learn the value of their authentic selves,” I said. “They're going to learn the value of pretending to be somebody else.” I thought this was pretty deep, for five in the morning anyway. Charlie half bowed, ushering me onto the bus.

“Why are you in such a good mood?” I asked. We chose seats toward the back.

“It's summer. No honor societies. No speeches. No tests. No volunteer hours. No rehearsing every single night.”

I was a little surprised. Charlie did not normally admit the awfulness of his overachiever's schedule. “You're about to spend the entire summer with eight-year-olds,” I pointed out.

“But I'm about to spend the next three hours sitting next to you.” His knee crashed into mine.

The bus pulled out of the parking lot just as the sun was rising. On the highway it didn't take long to get out of the city, but the scenery wouldn't be terribly exciting until we got to the gorge, and even the gorge—with all of its looming cliffs and red rocks—was only as exciting as anything you've seen a thousand times. Most kids plugged into iPods or tried to sleep. For a while, Charlie attempted the same, leaning against my shoulder and closing his eyes. When I glanced down I could see the very top of his head, where his hair grew in a perfect spiral. He smelled like laundry soap and cinnamon gum—smells that made me ache in unmentionable places.

But Charlie had consumed about a pint of coffee. After a few minutes he gave up on sleep and demanded we play a game.

I hesitated. I had never really liked games.

“We will take turns saying things about ourselves, and then the other person has to guess whether the thing is true or false.”

“Are you serious?” I had a pretty good idea of where this was going.

He nodded. “You first.”

“I've never ridden a horse.” It was the most benign truth I could think of.

“Given that you have participated in exactly one extracurricular in your entire life, I'm guessing that's the truth.”

I nodded. “Your turn.”

“I've been to Sally's Club.”

“No you haven't.” Sally's was the oldest, dingiest strip club downtown.

“I really have. With some of the guys from my German class.”

I stared at him, incredulous. “What did you do there?”

Charlie blinked innocently. “Enjoyed the dance stylings of Chastity and Sage. Charming women. A little past their prime.”

I shook my head. I didn't believe him for a second, but if Charlie thought he could shock me so easily, he was wrong. “Fine. When Mr. McFadden gave me a ride home on the last day of school, he put his hand on my thigh.”

Charlie's eyes widened. “False. Completely false.”

I squeezed Charlie's leg to demonstrate.

“Please tell me you're lying,” he begged.

“Yeah,” I admitted, withdrawing my hand. “Didn't happen.”

“I lost my virginity at last year's regional debate championship,” said Charlie.

“False.” I had seen the girls on the debate team, and they weren't Charlie's type. After a beat too long, I said, “I have romantic history with another member of the Essential Five.”

My goal was to trick Charlie into talking about Liane. The two of them rarely referred to their lifelong friendship, which was starting to make me suspicious.

“Romantic history?” He raised an eyebrow. “What does that even mean?”

I shrugged. “It's up for interpretation.”

“You're lying,” Charlie concluded. “Tim's a little out of your league, and you don't seem like the type to—”

“To hook up with Liane?” I suggested.

Charlie's upper lip curled. “I was going to say, to get sexually disoriented.”

Sitting on that bus with Charlie made me all kinds of disoriented. “So have
you
ever hooked up with Liane?” I asked, breaking every unspoken rule of the game.

Charlie flopped back against the seat, like the question amused and exhausted him in equal measure. “Liane Gallagher?” he stalled. “The coldhearted giantess?”

I rolled my eyes. Liane was beautiful, and he knew it.

“No.” Charlie drew out the word, making it sound like a gift. He pressed his knee firmly against mine. “Liane and I are just friends. Always have been.”

I stared out the window, trying to weigh the likelihood of this claim. The Columbia River was peppered with windsurfers, their sails like neon sharks rising from the water. I wanted to believe him.

Charlie put his hand on my thigh. “But Tim and I have shared the occasional vulnerable moment.”

I grinned, relieved to be back in the game. “Liar,” I said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Tim wouldn't break the pact.”

“The pact.” Charlie smiled distantly, as if I had invoked a joke from years ago.

Eventually our game fizzled out and we listened to music, sharing a pair of earbuds, until the bus finally turned down a gravel road. We passed a wooden sign shouting
SHINING
STARS
! in chipped paint. Somebody opened a window and the air smelled different—clean and bottomless. We had traveled a long way, I realized. Even if summer turned out to be terrible, at least it wouldn't be a rerun of last summer.

“I've got one.” Charlie powered off his iPod and pressed his temple against the seat back. His eyelashes were long, his face freckled and so close. “I liked kissing you.”

He was talking about
The Seagull
. Contrary to our excruciating rehearsal, the kiss had felt perfectly natural in front of a real audience. The only problem was that during every performance—for about a second of our three-second embrace—I forgot all about being Nina kissing Trigorin. Very briefly, I was Rebecca kissing Charlie, and completely thrilled. The feeling vanished when the lights went down—two years passed between acts three and four; we had to change costumes fast—but I thought Liane was probably aware of it, somehow.

“False.” I rolled my eyes, like it wasn't even possible.

“Yeah.” He yawned. “No offense, you're gorgeous and everything, but it was still weird.”

Gorgeous and everything.

“I've got one.” I took a deep breath. “When Mr. McFadden made us kiss at rehearsal? That was my first kiss.”

“Onstage?”

“Ever.”

Charlie's lips parted. He blinked rapidly.

“Oh my god!” I shoved him. “I'm lying.”

“I know that.” He laughed nervously. “I didn't believe you.”

“You totally believed me.”

“No.” The bus lumbered to a stop in a dusty parking lot. “It's obvious you've had some, uh, experience.”

I decided not to ask what he meant by that.

From this angle, camp consisted of a lake, an old barn labeled
MESS HALL
, a tented area labeled
STAGE
, and a number of sinewy paths disappearing into the woods. Charlie would never have to know that my last lie had come dangerously close to the truth. Somehow he still believed the rumors about me.

Charlie was staring out the window. “Look at that lake,” he said. “And look at those boats!”

“Yeah?”

He turned to me, all wide-eyed and reverent. “I thought it was theater camp.”

“I guess there's other stuff too. Didn't you read the pamphlet?”

“Boats weren't in the pamphlet!”

Confused by his sudden enthusiasm, I followed Charlie off the bus. Our schedule allowed for an hour of “mingling” with the other counselors before orientation. On the wooden porch of the mess hall, adults in cargo shorts passed out name tags. Coolers were propped open to display shimmering cans of Diet Coke, attracting the majority of female counselors the moment they arrived.

It was hot. Dust disrupted by the bus hung in the air and coated my skin and I already felt disgusting. I turned to ask Charlie what we should do for an hour.

But he had vanished. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I located him standing in a circle of boys wearing elaborate sneakers. They looked like they had dressed for the gym and reached theater camp by mistake.

Abruptly, the boys shed their duffel bags and bounded toward the lake. As they ran, they yanked shirts over their heads, shoes off their feet. Charlie was the first to embrace the water—arms stretched in an arrow, shoulders curling and disappearing. He emerged hollering like a lunatic.

All around me, counselors formed loose circles, clutching backpack straps and sharing cabin assignments. I could have shuffled toward any group of kids. Instead, I kept staring at Charlie, his shoulders bobbing above the surface of the lake as he conversed with a complete stranger.

“This is the life, man!” bellowed the stranger.

Charlie made his voice extra low and gravelly. “Hell yes,” he said. “This is it.”

“I
'm not doing that
,
”
said Annelise
.
she was wearing a bikini top, jean cutoffs, and those bulbous shoes designed for skateboarding. We had been acquainted for approximately two hours but my fear of her was increasing rapidly. She was twelve years old.

“I think you have to,” I apologized. “I mean, it's what we're doing.”

“Are you doing it?” She pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. As cabin mates, zip-lining was our first team event. The threat of imminent death was supposed to help my campers bond. I watched a burly staff member strap a pigtailed girl into a harness and push her off the cliff. She went zooming over the ravine, screaming bloody murder.

“No,” I said. “But it looks really fun.”

“I'm not doing it unless you do it,” said Annelise.

Courtney, Margaret, and Peyton nodded their heads in agreement. They appeared to have already bonded successfully. On the other side of the ravine, somebody pushed Pigtails back to us. The muscly guy—presumably one of those weird lifetime summer campers—caught her by her skinny waist. She looked like she was going to puke.

“Who's next?” The zip-line master shook the empty harness. Annelise pressed her small hands against my shoulder blades.

Incidentally, it's very embarrassing to have a grown man guide your legs through a harness, which resembled one of those swings for infants. For a moment he held me, suspended at the edge. “Ready?” He blew hot breath into my ear.

I made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a dying gasp. The girls snickered. He pushed.

The speed kept me from dwelling on the troubling distance between my butt and the ground. Everything was a blur of green and a blast of dry summer air. On the other side, strange hands pushed back before I could catch my breath. Despite the circumstances, I tried to relish my final seconds of soaring in solitude.

I would not be alone again for a very long time.

My responsibilities began every morning at six: I had to drag the girls from their bunk beds and herd them into the showers. Each girl was allotted two minutes beneath a trickle of lake water. At orientation I had been instructed to preach the practicality of the “triangle wash,” a method that ignored some fairly important body parts. The first time I tried to advise my campers on which regions to scrub, they looked at me with such intense disdain that I never, ever mentioned the triangle wash again.

Surprisingly, the Shining Stars Summer Camp for Performing Arts was not very heavy on the performing arts aspect. In the mornings we attended a rotation of random activities. Either hiking, swimming, the care and keeping of horses, nature identification, or zip-lining.

Once I had proved that zip-lining didn't necessarily lead to death, my campers never wanted to do anything else. When forced to spend the morning identifying poison oak or brushing the knots out of horses' tails, they spoke longingly of zip-lining. On a hike, Annelise declared, “Next summer, I'm not going to acting camp. I'm going to zip-lining camp.”

Courtney, Margaret, and Peyton agreed.

Before dinner, everyone assembled beneath a large canvas tent and that's when we ostensibly rehearsed for our production of
Seussical the Musical.
Really it was absolute chaos: hundreds of kids crowded together, reading from their scripts, shouting to be heard over the din. Periodically I would spot Charlie across the tent, and I had a tendency to forget all about my campers and stand frozen, watching him.

His chorus of eight-year-olds couldn't memorize the songs. When the verse lagged, Charlie belted out the lyrics, looking partly like a little boy himself and partly like somebody's dad. It was endearing, but it also made me nervous. At home Charlie was all about volunteer hours and extra-credit assignments and controlled, ironic smiles. Here, he was inexhaustibly peppy. By the end of the first week he had been named official camp troubadour. He conducted a fireside sing-along, balancing atop a log to strum an acoustic guitar.

Charlie's performance of “This Land Is Your Land” for some reason involved singing the second verse in a drunken Irish accent. Halfway through the song he toppled theatrically from the log and continued to play from the dirt, pretending to be wounded. I felt kind of embarrassed on his behalf. Apparently Camp Charlie had no shame.

When the flames died down, senior staff members escorted the campers to bed. Since it was Friday, the counselors were allotted a few hours of freedom. I made the mistake of following Charlie down to the lake. I had this insane idea that he might miss me, like I missed him.

I found him with his gang of brawny boys, lowering a faded red canoe into the water.

“Hey.” I stood in the sand with my thumbs in my pockets. “What are you doing?”

Charlie barely glanced at me. “Midnight canoe races,” he explained, no time to waste. His friends looked annoyed, like I was interrupting a long-standing tradition.

When I didn't leave immediately, Charlie sighed. “Two men per boat paddle as fast as is humanly possible. Tip your vessel and you lose. Last dry men win the game.”

Only he said this so fast I could barely follow.

And, I mean, we had only been off duty for a few minutes. How had they already invented a sport?

Charlie was climbing into the helm of the canoe. Somebody handed him an oar, which he laid gently across his lap. “You're welcome to stay and watch.” He looked at me like I was a younger sibling, completely unwanted.

So I left, the truth hitting me hard. Charlie was officially ditching me for these new people, who believed he was the wildest of the wild-boy counselors: the most hilarious, high-speed, hell of a cool guy.

How did they think he learned to play those corny songs by ear? How did they think he knew so many Shakespearian insults?

Years of hard work and indoor activities, that was how.

Charlie had abandoned me. He was actually going to make me fend for myself at the Shining Stars Summer Camp for Performing Arts.

I should have known.