The campers kept laughing. These people loved this guy. There was also a group of girls around my age who looked like they loved him. Or at least the part of him I’d been admiring when he’d been walking in front of me. Fine ass alert, as Emerson would have announced.
“What’s your biggest fear, Phoenix?” Callum asked, picking a paddle up from the ground and moving it through the air again like he was instructing.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Your biggest fear?” he repeated slowly. “We’re playing the Getting to Know You game in case you forgot. Or have a short-term-memory issue.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking. It was a personal question. A little too personal to just announce to a crowd of strangers, so I kept it vague. “Failing. I guess that’s my biggest fear.”
He kept slicing the paddle through the air. “Failing what?”
I took some time to think again. I didn’t need it, though. “Anything.” He moved closer, probably about to drop another question, so I beat him to it. “What’s your biggest fear?”
If he was surprised by me firing his question back at him, he didn’t show it. His paddle stroke stayed smooth and even, not even a wobble. “Failing.”
I narrowed my eyes in a question of Really? He shrugged in an answer of Really.
“Failing what?” I asked.
“Everything.” This time, his paddle wobbled. Just for a second, and no one else probably even noticed, but I didn’t miss it. I’d been watching for it. Like me, he had something specific he was afraid of failing. I knew what mine was, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what his could have been. Was he afraid of failing a little brother of his own, too? Failing someone else important? Failing himself? Failing physics? Failing a driving test? Failing his principles?
When it came to failing, the possibilities were endless.
“So what does your name mean, Callum?” Mary Jo’s husband called. I had to shake my head and take a few steps away to clear my mind. All I’d needed to find was a Wi-Fi password and a sack lunch—instead I’d stumbled on everything besides those two things.
Callum answered the guy’s question by clamping his mouth shut.
“You spilled the meaning about her name and made her confirm or deny if it was accurate. In front of a whole group of strangers.” The man in the orange running suit opened his arms up. “Seems only fair you do the same in return.”
Callum kept paddling. “I’m instructing.”
“The life jacket demonstration’s done and you’ve pounded proper paddle stroke and ‘going with the flow’ into our brains.” He circled his finger around the group. “We’re waiting.” Orange Jogging Suit lifted his shaggy gray brows and demonstrated just how ready he was to wait.
A few more shouts of support circled the group, but Callum didn’t look close to caving. At least until he glanced over at me and I crossed my arms over the bulky life jacket. I probably looked like an escaped mental patient in an orange straitjacket.
He shook his head at me, smiling the whole time, before shouting into the crowd, “Dove!”
“I didn’t see it,” shouted one middle-aged camper with the biggest set of binoculars I’d ever seen strung around his neck, his head shooting up toward the sky.
“There are no doves in this part of the country,” added another camper, who had a not-quite-so-impressive set of binoculars around his own neck.
Callum settled his hands on his hips and stared at the group like he couldn’t believe his ears. “My name,” he said slowly. “The meaning of it is ‘dove.’ And you’re wrong about them not being in this part of the country. Doves are a hardy, adaptable breed. They can thrive in any part of the country.”
“Dove?” I felt my forehead pinch together. Callum didn’t sound like it meant “dove” to me.
His expression was of the deadly brand of serious. “Dove.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know, the common bird that’s associated with the pigeon family that people consider an all-around nuisance and pest?” Callum motioned his hands at himself like he was proving something. “So yeah, totally prophetic for the person I grew into.”
This time when the group laughed, I joined them.
It took me by surprise—the laugh. Until this moment, I’d been convinced I’d spend the summer on a laughter strike. An hour into day one and I was already disproving that whole theory.
I could tell he was trying not to laugh, but one slipped out. It was a nice sound. One of the nicest sounds I’d heard in a long time. It wasn’t the fake kind or the dialed-down kind; it was the real kind.
“So I guess we’re just a couple of birds.” I smiled at him, wondering if at the end of the summer, I’d leave this place with more than just enough money for a beater car. Maybe I’d leave with a new friend. Callum had friend material taped all over him: didn’t seem to take himself seriously, had a decent sense of humor, laughed more than he groaned, and he had the whole upfront and honest thing down. A friend. No complications, no added drama, no romance to mess things up…just what I needed. A friend to make the summer more bearable.
Maybe I didn’t need to focus on finding something wrong with him—maybe I could find something right instead. Yes, he was attractive, and sure, he seemed interesting, and hells yeah, I loved the way he laughed, but that didn’t mean I had to either want to hook up with him or pretend he didn’t exist. A friend. I think I could manage that.
Returning my smile, he unsnapped the top strap of my life jacket. He repeated the same with the other two. “Yeah, but you’re a phoenix. I’m a pigeon with a fancy name.”
I didn’t feel like a phoenix. At least not the mythical-bird kind. Rising from the ashes? Yeah, right. I was still dizzy from the fall. No thanks to my parents and with no way to “rise up” from the ashes.
When someone else was responsible for the fall, weren’t they the only ones who knew the way back?
Okay, enough brooding. People were starting to stare, and Harry was watching me. He hadn’t touched his dinner yet, and most of the other campers were already halfway done. A few were already scraping the last few morsels from their trays into the garbage cans before sorting their silverware and cups into the appropriate bus bin.
“If you’re keeping your fingers crossed that this feast is going to taste better cold, you’re going to be disappointed.” I waved my fork at Harry’s tin tray before lowering it to my own. I poked around at the mashed potatoes, but I wasn’t hungry.
“I’m waiting for Dad and Mom.” He sat up straighter on the bench seat, his gaze flickering to the doorway.
“They’re not coming, Harry. Eat your dinner.” I crumpled the napkin in my lap between my fist. I was tired of dishing harsh reality after harsh reality to my little brother in the name of not wanting to fire false hope instead. I was tired of filling the role of parental figure in addition to the one of big sister I already performed with top marks.
“Fine,” he grumbled before stuffing a heaping bite into his mouth. “Mmmm,” he practically moaned. “Good.”
Harry had never been a big eater. Not even a mediocre one. He’d been the kid people had to coax and encourage and practically bribe to get down a few bites. When he was a toddler, it had been like holding hostage negotiations—three hours later and the kid might have rewarded the efforts with a puny bite of his peas.
Tonight, though? He could have kept pace with the football players back home when they started the season pulling daily doubles and inhaling everything in their path.
“Hey, just because they’re mashed doesn’t mean you can’t choke on them.” I clinked my fork against his.
“I’m starving, Phoenix,” Harry mumbled. Hard to articulate with a mouthful of food.
“Clearly.” It only took a small nibble to confirm that he was right—they weren’t bad. I’d been expecting them to be of the powdered, school-cafeteria variety, but these tasted like the real deal. You know, the kind your grandma makes at Thanksgiving—oozing in yellow pools of butter and thick with cream
. My next bite wasn’t a nibble.
“See?” He moved on to one of the ribs he’d stacked on his plate. They were charred, clearly fired on a grill, and dripping with thick caramel-brown barbecue sauce.
“Not bad,” I allowed, trying not to smile as Harry went to work on his first rib. We didn’t do “caveman” meat in the Ainsworth household. You know, the kind that came with sticky fingers, messy faces, and chunks of bone left on china plates. Mom preferred her protein to come in the form of rich-in-omega-3 salmon fillets or tasteless roast chicken breast.
“Why are you so hungry all of a sudden? You’ve gone ten years of your life on some kind of hunger strike and tonight you suddenly decide to make like an American and eat like there’s no tomorrow?” I set my fork down and moved on to the roll at the top of my tray. Still warm from the oven, the roll pulled apart in flaky layers.
“Do you know how much I did today? I’m starving. I need food. I need sustenance. So I can do it all again tomorrow.” Harry was waving his rib around, which made a few drops of sauce fly onto the table and his pale blue polo shirt…joining the half-dozen other stains already there from what looked to be mud, grass, and who knows what else.
“If you played that hard, then you’d better eat mine, too.” I shoved my tray across the table to him, saving half the roll for myself because it was just that good. I hadn’t tormented toads and snakes all day, but I’d unpacked an entire car, gotten a cabin arranged, and given a highly ineffective demonstration on how to put on a life jacket. That was enough to earn me half a roll.
“Can I go sit with my friends?” Harry’s arm stabbed into the air, waving.
The same pack of boys from earlier were flailing their arms at Harry.
I tipped my head at the rowdy table of boys. “Get out of here. Go get into a little trouble.”
Harry was in the middle of scrambling out of his seat and picking up his tray when he paused.
“A little,” I repeated. “The kind of trouble that’s easy to get out of, not the other kind.”
Harry gave that half a moment’s thought. “Deal.”
Bounding across the dining hall as fast as he could without spilling his tray, he came to a screeching halt. When he looked back at me, his face all creased with concern, I shook my head.
“I’m good,” I said, loud enough for him to hear. “Go have fun with your friends. Besides, Mom and Dad will probably show up soon.” I waved my fork at the empty table I was seated at, keeping the optimistic look plastered on my face.
He might have only been ten, but he could see right through me. “Phoenix…”
“Harry,” I said in the firmest tone I had. “Go. Have fun. Play. Carpe diem.”
“Seize the day.” He smiled, then scurried away toward his friends.
Now that Harry was gone, I picked up my brooding right where I’d left off. Instead of my parents, though, I moved on to someone else. I didn’t really know him at all, but I could already tell Callum wasn’t your typical guy. I liked that about him. Or I respected that about him, because—I reminded myself—there was nothing I should “like” when it came to Callum.
Like was a word that came loaded with possibilities. Respect was far more straightforward.
Yeah, because that made a whole lot of no sense.
Sighing to myself, I started picking at what was left of my roll, pretending that being the one person in the whole hall sitting at a table alone wasn’t making me feel like I was under a microscope as it was passed from person to person.
I shifted on the bench and took a look around. Empty across the table. Empty on the left. Empty on the right. So much for a family camp. Not that I cared, but still…if my parents weren’t planning on actually participating, why didn’t we just stay back home where my friends were and I was used to sitting alone at the table?
“Mind if I join you?” A big guy wearing a Camp Kismet shirt took the seat Harry had just slid out of. This shirt wasn’t in the same sky blue or sunny yellow or grass green I’d seen earlier, though; this one was tie-dyed and, from the looks of it, had been washed half a thousand times and was paper-thin. It was the kind of shirt most people would have tossed into the garbage or rag pile several dozen wears ago.
“Go ahead,” I finally said, though he’d made it clear that he was taking a seat whether I invited him or not. At least I wasn’t sitting as the lone camper anymore, though when I gave the guy across from me a quick inspection, I wasn’t sure this was a much better alternative.
Middle-aged, his hair pulled into a low ponytail, and a row of leather bracelets running from his wrist a third of the way up his forearm—I wondered if I’d just come face-to-face with a hippie for the first time. The real kind, not the wannabe kind that California was overrun with.
“I’m glad you and your family finally made it up here, Phoenix. You don’t know how long I’ve been trying to get your dad up to my mountain.” His voice matched his appearance, kind of rough upfront, but gentle around the edges.
I didn’t have to read the name stitched into his shirt to realize who was sitting across from me. “Ben?” My voice sounded as surprised as I felt. I was a little girl the last time I saw him, but the man across from me didn’t look anything like the one I remembered, who used to favor power suits and flashy cars and almost always seemed to have a cell phone to his ear.
“Yeah, I know I look exactly the same as the last time you saw me, right?” He pinched at his shirt and shook his head enough to make his ponytail flick side to side.
I took a bite of my roll. “Why did you leave California and your job in the first place? Dad never really said much about it,” I asked. Actually, Dad had said plenty about it—starting and ending with how mental Ben must have been to go from rolling in seven-figure-income kind of dough to barely scraping by at some family camp in the middle of Nowhere, USA.
Ben looked around the dining hall, like that should have been all the answer I needed. Not quite. “Because I realized life isn’t a dress rehearsal. Better get it right the first time around because there’s no such thing as a do-over.”
“Oh” was all I could manage. I didn’t get it. At least the part about willingly going from civilization to this…whatever Camp Kismet could be classified as.
“Where are your mom and dad?” He spread his arms at the empty table.
“Probably at the cabin.” I shrugged and took a sip of my milk.
“Didn’t they read any of the brochures I’ve been sending them for the past decade?” Ben held his arms out again and looked around the buzzing dining hall. “This is a family camp. The kind where you come together and behave like a family.”
I gave another shrug. Apparently, this was the way our conversation was going to go: He spread his arms; I shrugged. “Actually, this is how we behave as a family.” I waved my fork around the empty table and gave yet another shrug. If I kept going at this rate tonight, my shoulders were going to be sore in the morning.
“This might be how the Ainsworths worked as a family in California, but you’re here now. Time to change things up.”
I felt my eyebrows squeeze together. “What’s so magical about this place that makes you think a family who’s been used to eating meals in separate rooms at different times will suddenly come together to share a meal of ribs and baked beans?”
This time it was Ben who shrugged. “Because you’re at Camp Kismet.”
I closed my eyes to keep the eye roll to myself. “Let me guess. The place where our ‘destiny awaits’?” I quoted the line I’d seen written on the front page of the brochure Harry had worn down to nothing. That line had lame stamped all over it.
Ben watched me for a few moments silently, a small smile on his face. “Our destiny is always waiting for us. It’s right in front of us, all the time. Sometimes we just need a place and a time to be reminded of that.”
I shifted on the bench. “And what if this is my ‘destiny’?” My eyes circled the empty table.
Ben leaned forward. His
eyes were dark brown, but right then they almost looked light. “What if it isn’t?”
I distracted myself by staring at my tray. I probably should have asked my parents the question I was about to ask Ben, but I wasn’t sure they’d tell me the truth. “Why are you letting us stay here the whole summer for free?”
Ben clasped his hands in front of him. “Because I want to. Because I can. Because you guys have had a rough go for a while and I figured you were due a breather. Because you’re doing me a favor staying in that old cabin so a family of raccoons doesn’t move in and take over.” He rapped the table a few times, almost like he was knocking on some door, before he stood up. “Besides, I wouldn’t say it’s totally free, since I managed to get a new counselor out of the deal. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find enough counselors every summer.”
I pulled another chunk from my roll and smashed it flat. “I’m sure it must be really hard to find people willing to get paid to play outside all summer.”
Ben managed to keep a straight face. “You have no idea. You’re actually the one doing me a favor being here.”
I knew who was doing who the favor here, and it wasn’t me and my family. But I gave him credit for wanting to make me feel better about the whole thing. This Ben guy was okay. “You got all my paperwork, right? All my first aid and CPR certifications? If something didn’t make it, I brought a file with everything in it. I can run to the cabin and grab it for you now….”
Ben lifted his hands when I started to stand. I couldn’t jeopardize this job. I needed it to keep busy, as a distraction, and to stow away some money for a car.
“Your paperwork is shipshape.” Ben nodded in acknowledgment when a family passed behind him, the dad clapping him on the shoulder, before continuing. “I just wanted to let you know who your trainer will be for the next few weeks.”
“Trainer?” I repeated.
“You know, someone who shows you the ropes, gets you comfortable with the job before setting you free on your own?”
I shook my head. He’d misunderstood me. “I know what a trainer is, and that I’d have one since I have a whole zero days of camp counselor experience.” I made a big zero with my thumb and index finger. “But I thought that person would be you.”