We all looked at each other. “Now there’s a guy who wants to fall in love,” said Gwen. “So who’s going to put him out of his misery?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Doris.
We all turned toward Elizabeth.
“Let’s tell him Elizabeth loves her little brother,” Pamela said.
“Yeah, let’s say that she adores kids and that her greatest wish in life is to be a faithful wife and mother,” said Gwen.
“Hey, guys!” said Elizabeth.
“I’ll say she lets them snuggle up to her in bed,” said Tommie.
“Oh, stop it!” Elizabeth said, swatting at us.
We finished getting ready and probably looked the best we had since we’d come. We’d showered, blow-dried our hair, put on lip gloss and mascara. Two of the paid counselors, Phil and Sue, were going to take us to a restaurant called the White Rooster, and after the mandatory lecture from Jack about none of us going into the bar section, nobody leaving the building and going off alone, we set off in the camp’s minibus.
It felt good to get away for the evening. Everything seemed dark and mysterious on the winding dirt road with no lights other than those on the minibus.
Sue had the radio going, and when we weren’t chattering away, we were humming along with the music—everyone but me, of course. I won’t even hum in public; clearly, I was the only counselor at Camp Overlook who couldn’t carry a tune.
Suddenly Elizabeth leaned against my shoulder and whispered, “So who has them, do you know?”
“Has what?” I whispered back.
“The condoms. Nobody gave them back.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “The last person who had them was Tommie, I think. Or was it Pamela?”
I felt Elizabeth stiffen beside me, but then the lights of the White Rooster came into view, and we soon piled out of the car.
7
* * *
Night Out
“C’mon,” Phil said, and led us over to a table by the dance floor in the restaurant. It was a big high-ceilinged room with bare rafters overhead and old signs decorating the walls—signs advertising Burma-Shave and Ivory Flakes and twenty-five-cent chili dogs. We ordered sodas, and they were brought to our table with a big bowl of peanuts. The band was playing a country song, and couples in western dress were already whirling around out on the floor.
“So how goes it?” Phil asked us over the music. “Think you can stick it out for two more weeks?”
“As long as we get Fridays off,” Ross said.
“Can the kids hold out? That’s the question,” said Tommie.
“I think only a couple of kids have been sent home in the past couple of years,” said Sue. “Most kids are pretty tough.”
“Besides, they’ll all want to go on the Kelpie Hunt,” said Phil, grinning mysteriously.
“Yeah, what is that?” I asked. “I’ve seen it on the schedule.”
“The Kelpie Hunt,” Phil said, “is what we do on the last night. It’s like a ghost walk. We’ll get them psyched up for this two weeks in advance, so they can work up their nerve. Nobody wants to admit he’s scared, so they all stick it out.”
“What’s a kelpie?” I asked.
Richard faked surprise. “You never heard of a kelpie?” I saw him wink at Phil. “Well,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to stick around and find out.”
“Yeah,” said Craig. “We’ll give the girls a sneak preview.”
Sue laughed. “They always do this,” she told us. “A camp tradition.”
Something else to look forward to. I was really beginning to like Camp Overlook. I liked sitting here at a table with a bunch of new friends—old friends, too.
When the music stopped, we saw people getting into position for line dancing. I’d never done any—I don’t know that Elizabeth or Pamela had either—but Elizabeth’s taken all kinds of dance lessons, and she can pick up almost any step. So there we were in three rows in the middle of the floor, sidestepping along and tapping our heels on the beat.
To tell the truth, I never did figure out for sure what we were doing. I managed to pick up a simple step, which I repeated over and over as we moved across the floor. But half the fun was coming in a second late on the scuff or the stomp or the hop or the jump and laughing along with the others. When we finished one sequence, I found we’d turned and were facing a different direction.
The seasoned line dancers put up with us good-naturedly, and when one of the fiddle players called out to me that I was doing fine, I knew immediately that I wasn’t. But I didn’t care, because some of the guys weren’t doing so hot either, and we cast each other funny, sympathetic glances. As the music went from “Whatcha Gonna Do with a Cowboy” to “I Feel Lucky,” and the dance changed from Cowboy Motion to the Freeze, I discovered that it didn’t much matter what I did as long as I could keep from bumping into someone. I was having a great time.
G. E. had positioned himself next to Elizabeth, I noticed, and kept giving her a special smile whenever she looked in his direction. When the music stopped a second time and we took a break, he put one hand on her waist as they left the floor, guiding her back to our table, and I almost laughed out loud.
All us girls trooped to the rest room then, and as soon as we got inside, Elizabeth said, “Somebody else has to dance next to Gerald next time.”
“What’d he do? Paw you?” asked Doris.
“No. He’s a clinger. Pamela, you dance next to him. He’ll be scared of you.”
“Why?”
“Just act normal. Make a pass at him. I’ll bet he’ll run for his life,” Elizabeth said.
“I’ll bet he won’t.”
“Extra-large Coke?” said Tommie. “I’m betting he will too. I’ll bet he’s the kind of guy who would be scared to death if a girl made the first move.”
“Okay. If he doesn’t, what do I do?” said Pamela. “Who can I pass him off on?”
“We’ll think of something,” said Doris.
I began to feel sorry for G. E. Did guys think the same thing about girls who seemed as desperate? I wondered how I’d feel if a guy made a pass at me and I found out later it was on a dare. Still, Gerald did act like a dork at times, and if anybody could discourage him, it was Pamela.
We got back to the table and saw that Phil and Sue were holding hands. And for the first time I noticed Sue wearing an engagement ring. They were our most senior counselors, next to Connie and Jack, and I wondered if they’d met here—if love had blossomed at Camp Overlook. I could see how it could happen.
There was definitely something exciting about being away from home overnight, even for me, the Girl Who Wasn’t Looking for Romance. Just being up here in the mountains with six available guys around, I guess, gave me the feeling that maybe we’d go a little further than we ordinarily would.
When we got back out on the floor for the second set, Ross was dancing between Pamela and Elizabeth, Gerald on the other side of Pamela. The dancing was even more vigorous this time, and I stumbled over my feet a lot. I felt as though everyone else was wearing tap shoes and I was wearing clogs. But when the number was over, Pamela suddenly threw her arms around Gerald’s neck and kissed him, a long hard kiss on the lips, like a dramatic flourish to the end of the dance.
Gerald didn’t move away. He held his hands tentatively on Pamela’s waist, but he didn’t try to prolong the kiss, either. There was an embarrassed, fake smile on his face, and I think we all cringed when we realized that Gerald wasn’t enough of a dork not to know that this was a put-up job.
What Pamela didn’t see, though, was that when she moved away from Ross on one side of her for that dramatic kiss with Gerald, Ross missed it entirely, because he had turned toward Elizabeth, lifted her hair up off the nape of her neck, and was gently blowing on her to cool her down.
Hey, hey! I thought.
Elizabeth looked absolutely radiant.
It was a good night. For everyone but Gerald, I guess. On the way back to camp Richard and Craig ta
ught us a bawdy song the counselors had made up one year, sung to the tune of “Oh, Susannah.”
Oh, she came from south of Overlook,
A virgin tried and true,
She’d saved herself for Billy Boy,
Back in Timbuktu.
But Billy Boy was feeling sad,
And found himself a sheep,
The virgin up in Overlook,
Cried herself to sleep.
Oh, Susannah,
Oh, don’t you cry no more,
The fellas up in Overlook
Will even up the score.
We laughed, and even in the dark of the van I could see the puzzled look on Elizabeth’s face and wondered if I’d have to explain it to her later.
“Too bad we don’t have any sheep up here,” said Joe.
“Yeah,” said Ross. “Even a motherly goat would do.”
“A chicken, even,” said Andy.
“A chicken?” the guys all said, and we laughed.
Elizabeth gave me a questioning look.
“Don’t ask,” I whispered.
The minibus came out of the woods on an open stretch, and Phil suddenly pulled over to the side of the road. “Look at the stars!” he said.
We all piled out. For five or six minutes we stood leaning against the bus, looking up, Sue leaning back against Phil, his arms around her.
“This is where we should come in August when the Perseid meteor shower comes along,” said Sue. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky so bright. There must not be any cloud cover at all.”
I don’t know what made me say what I did or why I was the one to break the silence then, but I heard myself saying, “I wonder if Dad and Sylvia are looking at these stars.”
There was another moment of silence, and then Andy said, “Who?”
“My dad’s getting married next month,” I said.
“Ah!” said Phil.
“To her seventh-grade English teacher,” Elizabeth explained. “They’ve been an item for several years, and it’s been quite a romance. With a little help from Alice.”
Then I had to tell them about how I’d invited Sylvia Summers to the Messiah Sing-Along without Dad knowing and how he’d won her away from our vice principal, Jim Sorringer, by writing such wonderful love letters when she went to England on a teacher-exchange program.
We talked about love all the way back to camp, about how it must feel to be married to the same person for forty or fifty years.
“I don’t know,” Phil said, turning to smile at Sue. “I think I could stand that quite well.”
I realized that Pamela hadn’t said anything for a long time, and I could have kicked myself for bringing up a subject that reminded her of her folks.
And then the bus was pulling into the wooded drive of Camp Overlook, and it was time to go back to our cabins.
When Gwen and I went inside ours to relieve Marsha, another full counselor who was taking over till we got back, we found the Coyotes still awake.
When Marsha had gone, Estelle asked, “So did you kiss?”
“Kiss? Kiss who?” asked Gwen.
“Anybody!” said Estelle. “Did you kiss any boys?”
“Only frogs,” Gwen teased. “Did you?”
“Kiss boys?” Mary asked. And immediately the cabin was filled with cries of denial and disgust.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“Saw a movie and had an ice-cream party,” said Kim.
“And Josephine threw up,” Mary announced.
“On your bed,” Ruby added, looking at me.
Great! I thought as I pulled off the cover and threw it into the corner. Gwen and I took off our clothes in the dark, but I can always sense the girls watching. Latisha noticed the black underwear.
“Why you got on those pants?” she asked Gwen.
“’Cause I felt like it,” Gwen said.
It was like living on stage each night, undressing in front of those girls. Even in the dark.
I don’t know what it was—whether it was because all the junior counselors had gone out the night before so that the usual bedtime ritual was different or what—but Latisha was out of sorts all weekend. Despite the truce they’d made, the promise of friendship, she and Estelle fought constantly, and if Latisha wasn’t arguing with Estelle, then it was anyone who got in her way. Kim seemed afraid of her and kept close to Gwen and me. My idea of having a group of close-knit girls was evaporating day by day.
“Latisha, knock it off!” I scolded her at dinner on Sunday when she kept bumping her arm against Ruby’s, insisting that Ruby was taking up too much room.
“Okay,” Latisha said, and promptly knocked Ruby’s plastic water glass to the floor.
We studied her. “The mop is in the kitchen. Go get it,” Gwen said.
Latisha simply folded her arms over her chest and sat with her lower lip protruding, glaring at us both.
“The mop, Latisha,” I said.
She shook her head and refused. Ruby was all for going to get the mop herself for harmony’s sake, but we wouldn’t let her. Ruby would lie down on the floor and let people walk on her if we allowed it. Don’t-Rock-the-Boat Ruby, we called her in our twice-weekly staff sessions.
When we got back to the cabin later, we held a conference to decide what Latisha’s punishment should be.
“I think she ought to get her black ass whipped,” said Estelle.
Latisha turned her glare on her.
“She shouldn’t have any breakfast,” said Mary.
“Shut your mouth,” said Latisha.
It was obvious that anything we told Latisha she had to do, she would refuse, so we decided that for the remainder of the week, the evening server at the dining table would go to the kitchen to bring back food for everyone but Latisha. She would have to go to the kitchen and get her own unless she apologized to Ruby.
Latisha only shrugged. “So what?” she said.
But by the next night, as food was passed around the table to all but her, she was clearly getting angrier and angrier.
We brought it up at staff session.
“Seems to me you’re handling it okay,” Jack said. “You can’t let her behavior go without consequences.”
But on Tuesday night, when the girls were taking their showers, we realized that Latisha was missing.
“Who was the last one in here tonight?” I asked the other girls. “Mary, did Latisha follow you and Josephine to the showers?”
“I think so,” said Mary.
“Can’t you remember?”
“She was behind us when we left the cabin. I don’t know if she came inside or not.”
“Latisha?” I called over the rush of the water. “Latisha?” I called up at the high open window above.
No answer.
“I’ll go,” I told Gwen. Quickly retracing my steps to the cabin, I half expected to find Latisha sitting defiantly on her bunk, refusing to shower with the rest of the girls. But the cabin was empty.
I immediately headed for the dining hall and the office. Connie was standing in the doorway talking to Richard and his dad.
“I can’t find Latisha,” I said breathlessly, my hair damp on my forehead. I told them how long we thought she’d been missing.
A missing camper at Camp Overlook is a red alert. Jack immediately set out for the overlook with a search lantern and gave another to Richard and me, instructing us to go to the river. Connie said she would check the cabins one by one and get more counselors searching if we didn’t find Latisha right away.
“I’m scared,” I confided to Richard as we headed down to the river. “I just can’t see how she could slip away like that. I’m sure she was with us before we left for the showers.” My voice was shaking.
“She upset about anything?” Richard asked. He’s tall and lanky, very much like his dad. Probably got the longest neck of any boy I ever knew.
“Latisha’s always upset about something. Her nose has been out of joint ever since we went into town
the other night and someone else was in charge of our cabin. Then she was punished for knocking Ruby’s glass on the floor in the dining hall. All you have to do is look at Latisha cross-eyed and she’s mad.”
“Well, we always check the river and the overlook first,” Richard said. “We’ve found that the kids usually go to someplace familiar. She’s not likely to go off in the woods by herself, but you never know. My guess is that she’s hiding out in someone’s cabin. It’s too scary to go very far alone. Unless…” He stopped.
“Unless what?”
“Oh… unless she’s suicidal or something, which I doubt.” He grabbed my hand in the darkness because the path was rough, but I’m sure he knew that my heart was in my mouth. The lanterns they use at night in camp are really strong, and we could make out the riverfront even before we got there.
“No matter what I do for her, it’s never enough,” I said, my words coming fast. “And punishing her the other night must have seemed like proof positive that we don’t like her.”
“We’ve got a kid like that in our cabin,” Richard said. “Kids who grow up without love—well, they can’t get enough, you know? Sometimes I think every kid should have a dog. A dog’ll love you no matter what.”
We walked along the riverbank, up and down, but there was no sign of Latisha, either sitting under a tree or floating in the water. That much, I guess, was fortunate.
“If anything’s happened to her…,” I said, feeling more and more responsible. Then, “You don’t think someone would come into camp and kidnap her, do you? Grab one of the kids?”
“Very unlikely,” Richard said, and gripped my hand all the harder.
When we got back to camp, Connie hadn’t found Latisha either, and the whole camp went on a “missing person alert.” The outdoor lights came on, and all the children were instructed to stay on their bunks and be accounted for. Every full counselor and assistant counselor was given an area to check.
Gwen and I searched the picnic area.
“Do you think she’s trying to walk back home?” I asked finally.
“Don’t go off the deep end, Alice,” Gwen said. “She’s as clever as she is angry. We’ll find her.” We’d been looking now for twenty minutes, however, and no one had found her yet. We went back to our cabin more frightened than ever.