Proof of Forever (3 page)

As they start to move by her, Luce gasps.

Tali recognizes her at the same time. “Holy shit.
Joy?
”

Their old friend smiles with her mouth still around her cigarette. She is even paler up close than she at first appeared, though she was always fair. She looks so much
older
without her long, light brown, wavy hair, which Luce remembers she used to wear in braids, sometimes woven around her head like a crown. Joy looks like a completely different person now: from her extremely short pixie cut, the tiny silver stud in her right nostril, and the dark red lipstick she's wearing—which has left a stain on her cigarette—to her clunky green army boots, faded black jeans, and holey gray sweater. She takes her time dragging on her cigarette, then lets the smoke slip out between her scarlet lips like she's hesitant to let it go.

Only her smile is the same.

“You came,” she says.

Everyone always says it's the little things in life that really matter: a gentle kiss, a just-opened tulip, a half-eaten peach, hearing someone you love laugh openly and freely . . . blah, blah, blah.

Joy has never really gotten that. Sure, life is one jumbled collage of moments that each play their modest role in the greater outcome, just like the body is made up of cells. . . . Nerves, arteries, and veins snake through us like tree branches. Capillaries. Muscle and skin. Marrow. Blood. Bone. Water.

But we don't
experience
things that way. It's the
big
things that matter; that's what Joy believes. Mountains and oceans. Encounters and accidents that forever change us. Ultimatums. Epic fights. Wars, even. Doomed love affairs. Death, especially: its mysterious blackness licking at the edge of existence like a tide creeping in at night, seeping into the sand and slowly taking over.

So when Joy showed up at Camp OK, she wasn't struck by the way the spice from the roasting nuts vendor tickled her throat,
or the way the needles of the tall firs on the outskirts of the lawn pricked the night with a sharp odor of pine just like a car air freshener, or how the paint on the main headquarters was starting to crumble, giving the buildings that look of classic New England rusticity.

Instead, what mattered to her, and what she still can't shake, is the
epicness
of it all: how when she stands back from the crowd, the lights and balloons and the rides twirling around and around all blur together over the Great Lawn in one big mess of sparkle and flail.

For a long time before tonight, Joy worried her old friends would be mad at her, if they came at all—that Tali would ignore her, that Luce would scold her about her absence from their lives over the last two years, that Zoe would have forgotten their secret handshake and inside jokes. Joy has changed a lot since that last summer at camp, but she hasn't forgotten a single thing.

At some point, though, Joy's mind started to clear and all those doubts and worries vanished. Tali could ignore, Luce could scold, Zoe could forget—she simply wanted them to be together again.

This, she thinks, is the whole point of reunion night—putting people together in the same place. It's like reopening one of those dorky, clunky, old puzzle boxes and dumping all the pieces into a pile, like her grandmother does during Sunday visits. Some won't fit together, but that's okay. There's a vision in there, a Big Picture somewhere amid the mess of jigsaw shapes and edges.

That's what she's pondering—the Big Picture—when she sees
them. Tali first: tall, put together, her crisp white clothes accenting her not-quite-ebony skin. Joy is struck by how much she looks like a
woman
now. Behind her is Luce: tiny, perky, in what appears to be an all–L.L.Bean outfit, including a plaid button-down, khaki short shorts, and sandals with a slight wedge. She's holding the hand of a slightly scruffy, well-bred-looking blond guy in a soccer jersey. Andrew. So they
did
stay together all this time. It gives her a small jolt. When Joy shut down her Facebook account, on some level she believed everyone else's lives would shut down with it.

But reunion nights are known for their miracles—the time someone opened a pesky vent and an entire nest of baby birds flew out. The time there was an upside-down rainbow that no one was able to capture on camera. The time, according to legend, that two Camp OK-ers, years ago, walked all the way across the surface of the lake, as though it were frozen, and found themselves safe and dry on the other side. Maybe tonight there'll be a miracle, too.

Maybe this
is
the miracle.

Joy breaks into a smile, even as Tali gasps and squeals and starts toward her.

“You came,” Joy says, an incredible sense of power surging through her: She has done it. She has gathered the elemental forces from the corners of the world together tonight. Or at least, from the corners of New Hampshire and Maine. Close enough.

Now they just need Zoe.

She pushes off the wall with her boot and hugs Tali first, who
smells of Ralph Lauren Romance, then Luce, who smells like strawberries and jojoba—and slightly of lemon surface cleaner.

“Why'd you chop off all your hair?” Luce blurts, at the same time Tali asks, “So how's life in Portland?”

Joy laughs. “Portland's cool—the ocean's right there, which I love. And yeah, the hair,” Joy says, touching her almost-shaved head with a flicker of insecurity. “Believe it or not, it's kind of a popular look in the crowd I hang with these days. You know, moody, artsy types.”

Joy bends down to pick up her shoulder bag, which is heavy.

“Well, you
were
always an art freak,” Tali says.

Luce looks at her skeptically. “Yeah, but more of a make-your-own-lanyard-out-of-hemp artsy, not hack-off-your-own-hair artsy.” She isn't trying to be mean, but Joy can see she's baffled. Of all of them, Luce is the one who handles change the least well. “I mean, it looks cute,” Luce hastens to add. “I was just surprised.”

“It's no big deal,” Joy says. There's an awkward silence. Joy can sense the discomfort between them—not tension, exactly, but not coziness either. Her old instinct kicks in, to try to make it better. Only, for the first time she doesn't know how.

“So.” Luce plasters a smile on her face. “We're all here.”

Joy nods, starting to feel even more self-conscious.

Luce shrugs. “Who wants cotton candy?”

“I could use a beer if we can find any,” Tali announces, her eyes looking cloudy. “I sort of have someone I'm supposed to meet up with, actually.”

Luce is already waving at a figure she recognizes in the distance. Joy is hit with a sudden ache in her chest—it's clear the girls don't really
want
to be here. At least not for the same reasons she does. Already, the powerful feeling is slipping away. She doesn't want everyone to scatter, not yet, not so soon. This used to come to her so easily.

“Wait,” she says. “We have to wait for—”

“HOLY. CRAP. Is that
you
?”
Zoe is jogging downhill in her flip-flops, her messy blond bun coming undone. She's wearing cutoff jean shorts, a loose white men's T-shirt, and an overlarge zip-up hoodie—no makeup.

She fires off a dozen questions at once. “When did you get here? What did you do to your hair? Where have you been all this time? What have I missed? Is that Jason Moran over there with Holly Snegman? Do you think they're hooking up? How gross! Is anyone else
starving
?”

Joy laughs, which feels good. It eases some of the tightness in her chest. “Andrew, can you give us a second? Guys, there's something I kind of need your help with.”

Tali looks up from her phone. “What kind of help?” she says, an edge of impatience in her voice. Joy can only assume the “someone” she's supposed to meet up with later is Blake. Old habits die hard.

“It'll be easy,” Joy says. “You just have to follow me . . . for old times' sake,” she adds.

There's a split second of silence.

“I don't mean to be rude,” Tali blurts, “but I haven't heard
from you in, like, two years.”

Her words land like a pile of rocks at the bottom of the lake.

“Tali,” Zoe spits out, as if her name is a curse.

Luce jumps in to mediate. “Sure, Joy,” she says, with a smile that looks a little too forced. “For old times' sake.” She speaks like she's at a college interview, not talking to her old friends. But it's enough. For now.

As they move down the hill and into the crowd, someone bumps into Joy and she temporarily loses her footing. Disappointment creeps in around her, chilling, like the damp of the grass seeping into her leather boots. Where has all the ancient childhood magic gone, the kind that seemed to keep her, Zoe, Tali, and Luce within its protective netting? It used to seem as if campers would simply part, Red Sea–like, so that the four girls could pass through them. Now she feels like an injured lieutenant, leading troops through the chaos of a battlefield, uncertain about whether they're on the winning side or the losing. Uncertain what a victory would even look like.

The night is humming with activity, the din so loud you can't hear the normally deafening chirp of crickets. When Joy was little, she associated the sound of crickets with stargazing. Her mom would take her out onto the back porch in their old Liberty house, shut off all the lights, and tell her to wait until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. While she waited, watching the stars blink their way into existence, she heard the crickets'
chk-chk
, and believed it was actually the noise stars made when they clicked on at night, one after the other.

But now, with the many floodlights and blinking red and blue bulbs lining the rides, and the smoke from various food vendors filling the air, the night sky just looks like a blackboard, starless, smudged gray with a lifetime's worth of chalk. A little girl runs past Joy, trailing a bunch of streamers, which brush lightly across Joy's face as she pushes her way forward, their damp ends dissolving away like tears.

“So you want to tell us where we're heading?” Tali says, after they've left the crowd behind and crossed down to the sandy part of the shoreline.

“Almost there,” Joy says, wishing she didn't sound so pathetically urgent, wishing she weren't the only one for whom this night
actually
means
something. “Just trust me.”

There's a deep ache in her chest, as if she has just smoked too much, too fast. These girls, with whom she once shared so many of her most significant moments—getting her braces off, learning to ride a bike, that time she almost drowned by Forest River Falls, countless slumber parties, the first time she got her heart broken by a boy, the list could go on and on and on—these girls are barely more than strangers to her now.

Her fault. All her fault.

They finally get to the Wellness Cabin, Okahatchee's optimistic name for its infirmary. Joy pulls them behind the boxy unit, leading them to the small wooden structure tucked into the edge of the woods next to the Agro Club's garden, which is really more of a sad, square patch of rotting squash vines.

“Remember?” Joy says now, turning around to face her
friends. This close to the lake, the air is cooler, the darkness thicker.

Zoe gets down on her knees on the forest side of the shed and overturns the pile of rust-colored rocks next to the leaning birch. From underneath the rocks, she unearths a silver key. “How could we forget?” she says, her face looking ghostly in the darkness.

“The Stevens,” says Luce, laughing softly, placing a hand on the shed wall as though to verify it's still solid. Tali used to sneak in giant bags of the candy Luce's mom kept in the main offices for the younger campers when they inevitably got homesick. Then they'd gather at the shed and tell secrets they didn't want the rest of their bunkmates to hear, and they'd divide up all the candy evenly. Luce would insist that they share “even-stevens,” which became their secret code.

“This is so surreal,” says Zoe, straightening up. “God, I haven't thought about the Stevens since we were, like, Bunk Coyote.”

Tali raises an eyebrow. “I hope you're not going to suggest we gather around on the floor like we used to. I'm wearing white.”

“I think the shed is actually
used
now, for storage,” Luce says thoughtfully. “According to my mom, Agro is actually becoming a
thing
recently. They just got some major funding.”

“Maybe Camp OK is finally becoming Camp Fantastic,” Zoe says wryly.

Joy smiles. It's the thing she always used to say. It never even used to seem optimistic—that things would get better, that those summers at camp were only okay compared to what would come
next, compared to
fantastic.
It always just seemed like a given, a fact of the universe. Things are constantly spinning toward better and better outcomes, is what she thought. Now, as she thinks about the idea of fantastic, she can't help but shake her head, unable to believe she's the same person who once thought that. Unable to believe she was that naive.

She opens her bag, determined not to lose her nerve. “I brought some things . . . you know, things we made, stuff I collected—memories—and I thought we could bury it under that loose floorboard in there where we sometimes stashed notes to each other.” She feels her face heating up and is thankful for the darkness.

“Like a time capsule?” Zoe offers, sounding skeptical.

“Exactly, a time capsule.” Joy takes a deep breath. Even standing so close to the shed, she's hit by the musty smell of old garden gloves and moldy wood—the signature scent of the Stevens. “Let's face it. We've grown apart. We have,” she adds bluntly, when Luce starts to protest. It hurts, but at least it's the truth. “Our camp years are forever behind us. I get that. But I know, deep down, that you guys have to be sad about that, too. That it meant something to you, just like it did to me. And this way, a little piece of our camp experience—of
us
—will live on in the future.”

It isn't exactly an apology. Joy wonders in their silence if the girls resent her, if they will ever
really
forgive her for leaving, for dropping away. If she'll ever be able to admit why she did it.

For a minute, no one speaks. Then Zoe says, “What'd you bring?”

Joy reaches into her bag, into her stockpile of notes, wrappers,
bottle caps, ticket stubs, miniature toys, shells, friendship bracelets, and pictures. She removes a thin envelope and opens it. Tali pulls out her iPhone to see by its light.

Inside the envelope is a narrow strip of photo-booth photos, four in a row. They were taken that last summer of camp. In the photos, all four girls are posing for the camera with huge, goofy grins. In one, Tali is making a sexy-pouty kiss face at the camera while holding up a pair of Batman boxers, and Luce is tilting her chin up in faux indignation. In another, Zoe is sticking her tongue out while waving a gold medal at the camera, and Tali is stealing the tiara Joy is wearing in the two photos above. Luce has her merit badge proudly displayed on her shirt.