The Lost Summer

• Prologue
  
• Reveille
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Tattoo
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Taps
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Epilogue
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• The Debutante Preview
  
• One
  

For Novella Thérèse Adams

Day is done, gone the sun
From the hills, from the lake,
from the sky.
All is well; safely rest.
God is nigh.
—“Taps”

I
died one summer, or I almost did. Part of me did. I don't say that to be dramatic, only because it's true. It took me a couple years of sifting through memories and reading the journals I wrote while I was laid up in bed after it happened to understand what I lost that summer—what we all lost. Also what we gained.

My best friend, Katie Bell, and I refer to it carefully, reverently, as “that last summer.” Not that it was literally my last summer, not like I'll never again have ice cream on hot August days and Fourth of July parties or swim in a clear green lake. Just that it will never be the same as it was, as it is, at Southpoint. Sometimes it makes me sad. Other times I realize there was nothing I could do. There will always be a last summer.

T
he cabin is dark. The only light filters in through chinks between the gray, graffitied boards—on one side from the floodlight by the bathhouse and on the other from the moon. A few specks on my quilted bedspread of tar-colored soot from the lantern hardly bother me anymore. The mustiness of the lumpy mattress rising through the bleached sheets, the springs that jab at my hips and shoulders and squeak as I turn over in my half-sleep—these things are comforts to be called forward on cold winter nights that will come too soon.

The lake frogs like to sing to me.
Chugawum wump. Chugawum wump.
They've already lullabied my friends to sleep. The girl beneath me is snoring in satisfied slumber. But anticipation of the following day slices through my log-tiredness. There will be games played with no care for a winner; laughter so deep it sharpens your breath; the sweet smell of cut grass that prickles your legs as you roll down a hill; tiny weeds whose stems wrap around their crowns and shoot flowers like fairy cannons; wild daisies in fragile chains; and sun on our backs as we search for four-leaf clovers we've never found.

M
y foot weighed like an anchor on the accelerator as the entrance came, finally, into sight around the bend. “Camp Southpoint” read the rough hand-lettered wood sign.

As I veered onto the dusty country road that would take me home, like that old John Denver song, a growing urgency twisted my stomach. For nine years I'd bumped over this gravel road and under this tunnel of trees to my favorite place on earth. This year, though, would be different. This year I was coming to camp not as a camper. I was coming as a counselor.

I grabbed my cell phone from the empty passenger seat next to me. Only one bar. Worth a try, I thought. Keeping my eyes on the road, I deftly scrolled through my contacts. When I reached “Katie Bell,” I punched send, but a harsh beep informed me there was no service. I typed a quick text instead: im here!!! I pressed send again, hoping the message would somehow find its way through satellite space, and threw my phone back onto the seat.

With nothing to occupy them, my fingers drummed the steering wheel. The music spilled from my car onto the otherwise quiet lane. IPod, not radio. If you're from Nashville—“Music City”—Tennessee, like I am, an appreciation for music is pretty much required by state law. Unfortunately, the only stations on the dial in this neck of the woods played country, and I couldn't stomach the heartsick twang of it since my father left to pursue his “singing career” and Holly, a waitress at the Bluebird Café.

I was thirteen the summer he took off. I'd bawled my head off—puffy red eyes, snot running down my face, the works—through at least four activity periods (even riding and swimming, my favorites) and three Evening Gatherings. One night after the counselor show, Katie Bell joined me on my bunk while everyone else was brushing their teeth before bed. She handed me a ball of wadded-up toilet paper and drawled in her hard-crackle country accent, “All right, Hel, that's enough.”

That's when I knew Katie Bell wasn't just my best camp friend; she was my best friend. My friends from home had tiptoed around my parents' divorce on eggshells. One “friend” had stopped talking to me altogether, probably because her mother thought I was too scandalous to associate with. But Katie Bell had barely blinked an eye. “I'm sorry, Hel,” she'd said when I first told her. She'd listened to me blubber about it for three weeks, asking questions at the right parts and keeping quiet when I just needed to talk. Then she'd decided enough was enough. She followed it up by saying something so funny I actually peed in my pants. Healthy or not, that was the last time I'd cried about my dad.

I remembered that night now as I bumped down the drive. The ancient trees that lined the road into camp were a pulsating electric green. In stark contrast, I passed the rotting black stump of the tree that had been struck by lightning between camp sessions one year, and was now split down the middle. Shortly after the stump, I took a right where the lane forked and followed the gentle rain-furrowed slope of the road exactly 1.3 miles to the metal gate. Its big rusted arms were thrown open in a welcoming hug. As I slowed to bounce over the cattle guard, a smile dawned across my face. Over the low, horse-spotted hill, I could see the gleaming tin roofs of the Mansion and the Mess.

I was asked once by a friend from home “why do you like camp so much anyway.” I remembered because it had annoyed me how she had her hand on her hip as she said it. But as much as I wanted to answer, I couldn't explain the happiness and sense of relief I felt when I entered this place. During the nostalgic phone conversations that got us through the school year, Katie Bell and I often tried to put our camp experience into words. We were never quite satisfied with what came out. Our words never did it justice.

Southpoint was so much more than just a summer camp. It was a part of us that was packed up and put away when the days shortened, and the camp sheets were folded and stored in the back of the closet, and “real life” returned. Real life, with its tests and curfews and cliques and everyday dramas like runaway dads, and mothers with an ever-expanding library of self-help books. Nothing was simple in the real world. Nothing was simple like it was at Southpoint.

Which was why every June, a full two weeks before camp started, I carefully laid out and labeled my T-shirts and shorts, folded my underwear and bathing suits, packed my tennis racket and leaky swim goggles, and, come the first weekend in July, all but skipped off for five uninterrupted weeks of fun with my hundred Southpoint sisters at the southernmost point of a clear, secluded, Tennessee lake.

At camp no one knew what your dad did or if your boyfriend had just dumped you or that you'd won the sixth grade spelling bee. If they
did
know, it didn't matter. Everyone was okay here. You could be crazy or quiet—crazy got you noticed, but quiet was fine too. And shivering at ghost stories or belting out the words to campfire songs was still considered cool. The miracle of it, though, the really cool thing, I thought as I pulled up the long driveway for the first time as a counselor, was that I looked forward to camp as much at seventeen years old as I had at nine.

I pulled my car beside an old truck and climbed out, squinting in the morning sun and pushing my sunglasses from my head to the bridge of my nose. As I crossed the Yard, the large grassy area in front of the Mansion, acorns crunched under my feet. Ribbons of conversation floated out from the house's open screen doors. My pace, at the sound of familiar voices, involuntarily quickened to a trot.

The Mansion was where Southpoint's directors, Fred and Marjorie Knowles, lived during the summer. “Mansion” was a term of endearment, as the house was a pretty normal-size, squat old lodge with a large, wraparound porch. The first floor acted as infirmary, office, post office, social hub, and general Southpoint center. Before meals and Evening Gathering, girls convened in the white Adirondack chairs that populated the Yard like mushroom fairy rings.

The sudden bang of a screen door at the mess hall next door grabbed my attention. A girl appeared. I squinted (in stubborn denial of my need for contacts during the summer) and waved, even though I couldn't tell who it was. It didn't matter; everyone was family here. And I knew it couldn't be the one person I was most excited to see. Katie Bell wouldn't arrive until tomorrow, with the other campers.

With her seventeenth birthday not until September, Katie Bell had just missed the cutoff for being a junior counselor. She'd begged Fred to let her, just like he'd always let her stay in the cabin with us, even though technically she should have been in the cabin below, with the girls a year younger. He had heard her pleas sympathetically, but in the end, for insurance reasons, he explained, had to say no. That Katie Bell would be a camper for one more year, while I was a counselor, had been the agonizing topic of nearly every phone, chat, and e–mail conversation we'd had for the past year. It was my job to assure her nothing would change, but as I arrived for the first day at camp ever that I wouldn't share with Katie Bell, I wondered if I believed it myself.

The metal handle of the Mansion's screen door was cool in my palm as I pulled it open and stepped into the dusty shade of the old house. I pushed my sunglasses back to their perch above my recently bobbed ponytail. My hair stylist (really my mom's hair stylist, whom she had recently forced on me, informing me Super Clips was no longer suitable) had been a little overzealous with my summer cut, chopping the hair I had kept long all those years for a reason, so that it barely grazed my shoulders. I hated it. It made me look six, and if I already felt terminally ordinary in appearance—with brown eyes the same nondescript shade of poo brown as my hair—this did nothing to help me out.

“Hello?” I called out, not sure whether I was on the late or early side, and which counselors might already be there.

A plump, ruddy face below a fringe of hair that reminded me of a salt-and-pepper halo poked out from behind the office door.

“Helena Waite!” Fred hurried from the office to encircle me in a bear hug.

I melted into his suntan-lotion-and-Old-Spice smell. It didn't take a degree in advanced psychology to know that Fred was a father figure to me, as he was to a lot of girls at camp.

“Hi, Fred.” My greeting was muffled in his soft T-shirt.

“We're so glad you're here,” he said, stepping back to take in my one-year-older self. Sometimes I wondered if Fred and Marjorie missed us over the school year. I liked to think they did.

“That makes two of us,” I answered, almost dizzy with the reality that another Southpoint summer was finally here.

“There are some girls who'll be excited to see you. Winn and Lizbeth are working on cabin assignments, if you want to see where they've put you.” He nodded toward the back porch.

Then Fred glanced at his gold watch, the one he'd worn as long as I could remember. “We have a staff meeting in thirty minutes,” he said. “A lot to get done before the campers get here tomorrow—but you probably have time to settle in.”

The word “staff,” applied to me, rang in my ears like the bugle calls that guided us through the camp day: Reveille . . . Flag Raising . . . First Call . . . Soupy . . . Tattoo . . . Taps. I realized with a buzz of excitement that those bugles wouldn't order me from place to place anymore. I was a counselor, and this Southpoint summer wouldn't be like any other.