Five Summers Read online

  “I’ll be glad to help you,” Maddie said with a wink. “Just tell me where he is.”

  Okay, scratch that. A spoken subtext. Because on my last night at Camp Nedoba, I was trying to make a very specific dream come true.

  I was trying to finally gather the courage to tell Adam Loring that I loved him.

  But first, we had to seal the pact.

  I reached into my backpack and took out the necessary tools: a Thermos full of “bug juice” that Maddie had siphoned off from the coolers in the back of the cafeteria, along with a plastic cup; four stumpy, misshapen candles Skylar and I had made in the arts and crafts cabin; and a pack of matches—an illegal item that Jo had lifted from Mack’s office, where he kept confiscated goods like cell phones, Swiss Army knives, and paperbacks with half-naked musclemen on the cover.

  “Quickly,” Jo urged. Off in the woods, leaves were rustling. We wouldn’t be alone for long.

  It was only the second year we had done the candle part, so we weren’t particularly coordinated, but we made it through without setting anyone’s hair on fire. I lit my candle and held it out into the center of the circle, and the other three used the flame to light their candles while we recited a little vow we composed our second summer: “You are my rose, never my thorn, and through these pledges, friendship is sworn.” (Not exactly Yeats, but give us a break—we were eleven.) Then we passed around the bug juice and each drank a gulp. That detail was from a Celtic ritual Maddie had read about online. Or her aunt’s Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony—she couldn’t remember which.

  We blew out our candles and looked around at one another in the darkness.

  “Thank goodness this is the last year,” Maddie finally said. “The only way to top that would be a virgin sacrifice.”

  “Not it!” Jo cried, touching a finger to her nose.

  “Not it!” Maddie seconded.

  Skylar and I touched our hands to our noses at the exact same time, locked eyes, and started to laugh. And then I looked up at the sky and saw a shooting star. I knew it was a sign. It had to be.

  But half an hour later, I was less convinced. “He’s not coming back,” I said to Skylar. By that point a bunch of other senior campers had wandered down to the shore and were sneaking off, two by two, into the surrounding trees. There were smacking noises, giggles, and whispers that ricocheted off the water. Most of the counselors were ushering the younger campers back to their beds, and the few that remained were out on the lake, loudly arguing about how best to set off the fireworks without blowing themselves up.

  “He is,” Skylar said.

  Jo rolled her eyes. Jo rolled her eyes every time we talked about Adam. She liked him—everyone did, it was basically impossible not to—but she hated boy talk. As far as I knew, Jo had never had a crush on anyone but Michael Phelps, and even that stopped when the picture of him smoking that bong hit the Internet. She didn’t understand my thing for Adam, but I knew she didn’t exactly disapprove, either. After all, she was the one who had begged her dad to let her chaperone the campers on the shore while he cleaned up the fire pit, knowing it would buy me some time.

  But I wasn’t the only one hoping for a last chance. Zeke emerged from the shadows, his white-blond hair falling over one eye like he was a boy-band backup dancer, and whispered something to Skylar that made her giggle.

  “Can I meet up with you guys later?” she asked, already on her feet, not waiting for an answer.

  “Don’t forget: slumber party in the bunk!” Jo called.

  Maddie threw her arms around Jo’s shoulders. “Don’t worry—I’ll be there,” she said. “Unlike some people I have no handsome prince to whisk me off into the woods for a romantic tryst.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “I might as well be wearing a shirt that says ‘I Had a Crush on Adam Loring for Five Summers and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.’”

  “That would certainly break the ice,” Maddie said, this time throwing her arms around me. “But he likes you. I know it.”

  “Then where is he?” I groaned into my hands. He had left the bonfire to retrieve a hoodie for me but hadn’t been seen since. If Adam did like me, wouldn’t he be just as eager to find me, to take his shot, to squire me off to a moonlit clearing like Zeke had done to Skylar? He’d probably forgotten about the hoodie. Maybe it had just been an excuse to ditch me.

  Jo’s head popped up like a bloodhound’s, her spine suddenly as straight as her jet-black ponytail, which reached almost to the waistband of her shorts. She held a finger to her lips. “I think I just heard a zipper,” she said, horrified. Then: “This was a bad idea.”

  “Oh, relax,” Maddie said. “It’s probably just some guy, you know, watering the wildflowers.” I smiled, but Jo didn’t seem to get the joke. She leaped up and marched off toward the tree line brandishing her whistle.

  “Go get ’em, Sarge!” Maddie called after her. Under her breath, she said, “We have got to get that girl another hobby.”

  A few minutes later, Maddie took my backpack full of pact paraphernalia back to Cocheco. Jo was still busy refereeing the backwoods bacchanal, so I was by myself. Sitting alone in public usually makes me cringe, but that night it felt right. It gave me a minute to say good-bye to the place that felt more like home to me than my own room in my own house. I could see lights on the other side of the lake out in the darkness, like fireflies skimming the blue-black water, and heard the pines rattling overhead like wind chimes. I remember thinking that I’d never want to forget the sounds of camp: the creaking of the storm-battered planks of the dock, the flat smack of rain on the tarp roofs of the cabins. I convinced myself I would even be nostalgic for the famous Nedoba wake-up bell, which sounded to the untrained ear like a toddler banging on a cast-iron skillet with a golf club; or Mack playing taps on the dented pocket trumpet he’d bought at a pawn shop in town for twenty dollars. (He was self-taught, so sometimes it was hard to tell if he was playing taps or if someone was branding a steer at the farm next door, but he kept practicing and generally got a little better every year.)

  I knew I should just head back to the bunk and hang out with Maddie, focus on my friends. I don’t know why I thought I was going to get some fairy-tale ending that night. Nothing left to the last minute ever turns out the way you want it to; that’s when the most mistakes get made.

  Adam and I had been friends since the end of our first summer, when we’d gotten trapped under an overturned canoe during my first and last Camp Nedoba boating lesson. And we’d been flirting pretty heavily since the beginning of our fourth summer, probably since I’d just gotten my braces off and he wasn’t left with anything to tease me mercilessly about. Adam flirted with everyone, so I knew I could be wrong, but I swore there was something there that wasn’t just in my head. The way he looked at me sometimes—staring, without even a trace of his ever-present, lopsided grin—made me want to throw up, in a good way. I’d never had the nerve to actually tell him how I felt, but then again the stakes had never been particularly high. I would always see him the next day, or the next summer. But it was depressing to think about leaving camp without knowing if he felt something, too. I was reluctantly slipping back into my flip-flops, summoning my resolve to surrender, when I heard his voice.

  “Emma!” The sand was uneven under my feet and adrenaline shot through my system so fast I was afraid for a second I might lose my balance. But I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw him, walking down the path from the fire pit, holding up a red hoodie with a triumphant smile. His best friend, Nate Hartner, shuffled after him about ten feet behind, trying to keep up in shower shoes while carrying an armful of leftover graham crackers and sodas. Nate’s belly spilled over the elastic waist of his basketball shorts and his face was pinched in concentration. Poor Nate. He was so nice, everyone treated him like a lapdog.

  I managed to get my shoes on and make my legs work a
nd walked out to meet them halfway, in front of a crowd of campers who were playing spin the bottle with an empty Sprite can. Adam presented me with the grungy sweatshirt like he was wrapping me in furs. His reddish-brown hair was a little shaggy after eight weeks, and it curled up on the ends. He smelled like cedar and sunblock.

  “Sorry it took so long,” he said. “Someone had to, ahem, take care of business.”

  Nate furrowed his brow. “Dude! That is not cool. This is the last time I’m helping you get snacks for your girlfriend.”

  My breath caught in my throat. I knew I was a girl and that Adam was my friend, but the compound word hung in the air between us, introducing a thrilling new world of possibility. Adam stuck his hands in his pockets and looked down at the sand as Nate stalked off, and I prayed he couldn’t see the flush of color flooding my cheeks.

  “I, uh—” He cleared his throat. Oh my God, I thought. This was it. He was going to ask me to go somewhere and talk and something was actually going to happen. I pressed my lips together to check if they were too dry, knowing it was dark enough that I could always swipe some lip balm on while we walked through the woods. I was so glad I let Skylar talk me into wearing my hair down, so that if I were, hypothetically, to be on my back at some point in the near future, it would spread out on the leaves and I wouldn’t have a hard bump of ponytail behind my head. I felt positively giddy. I had played the scene over and over in my mind, and I knew exactly how I wanted it to go.

  “I, um, didn’t tell him you were my girlfriend,” Adam said finally, looking sheepish. “He knows we’re just friends. He’s being a jerk.”

  Wait, that wasn’t in the script. But it was too late. The spin the bottle crowd noticed us talking close and someone wolf whistled and then everyone started making that obnoxious, slow-building “Oooooooooooooh” sound that always reminds me of a car alarm you can’t turn off.

  “What’s going on over here?” chirped Sunny Sherman, the self-appointed camp gossip, who had the unfortunate combination of being incredibly nosy both figuratively and literally. (Adam used to call her Beak in private, and I always told him to stop, but right then I wanted to punch her in it.)

  Mark Slotkin, one half of Nedoba’s only set of identical twins and Sunny’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, sidled up beside her, saying, “Hey, Loring, you finally gonna hit that?”

  Someone squeezed my hand. For a second I let myself hope that it was Adam, but it was Skylar, having materialized from somewhere in the nearby trees, the half-rotten leaf caught in her hair looking like fall’s must-have accessory.

  “Leave them alone,” she said evenly. “Shouldn’t you be off someplace showing Sunny that pencil in your pants?” Adam laughed, and even though I knew there was no way Skylar could be speaking from experience, I was shocked by her fearlessness. Then again, she’d hooked up with about ten times as many people as I had. Except that the multiplication doesn’t really work out, seeing as how my number was actually zero.

  “You’re a bitch,” Mark said bitterly, and Jo stomped over from her post by the woods, waving away gnats.

  “There a problem here?” she asked, resting one hand on her hip, the other fondling the whistle.

  “No, ma’am,” Mark said. “I just found some virginity over by the outhouse and thought someone might have lost it. But Loring’s got his, don’tcha buddy?” He snorted and walked away, Sunny bouncing behind.

  “Well, that was humiliating,” Adam said once Mark was out of earshot.

  “I don’t think so,” Jo said. “I mean, who’s not a virgin? Anyway, sex isn’t allowed on camp property, and getting caught doing it is grounds for expulsion.”

  Skylar bristled, and for the first time I noticed that her big green eyes were red and bloodshot.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered. She bit her lip and shook her head. I tried to make please-come-with-me-without-saying-anything- obvious eyes at Jo, but she was immune to subtle body language.

  “What?” she asked blankly after I’d stared at her for a good ten seconds.

  “Give us one minute,” I said to Adam, pulling Jo with me. “Seriously, I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

  I linked elbows with Skylar as we walked down toward the water, its soft, rhythmic lapping muffling our voices from prying ears.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Something happened?” Jo parroted. “See, I knew this was a bad idea.”

  Skylar looked out at the lake, the moonlight casting a soft glow onto her tear-streaked face.

  “He broke it off,” she said, her voice wavering.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t, really, but I hated seeing Skylar in pain. For someone so outwardly confident, she has always had thin skin. My personal theory is that she never had an awkward phase—no glasses, no braces, no acne, no body odor, none of the stuff that hardens you through middle school, the emotional equivalent of walking on hot coals with bare feet.

  “It’s probably because it’s the last night of camp,” I said. “It’s a breakup of convenience. Obviously he’s crazy.”

  “No,” she said. “He said he couldn’t ever see us working out because . . . he doesn’t find me . . . interesting.” Fresh tears spilled over onto her cheeks, and she wiped them away shakily with the back of one hand.

  “Oh, please,” Jo cried. “Was this before or after you wouldn’t touch his crotch?”

  “Shhhhh!” Skylar hushed.

  “He’s a loser,” I said, taking the leaf out of her hair and smoothing it behind her ear. “A pretentious loser.”

  “Yeah,” Skylar sniffed. “I really liked him, though. And I thought”—her voice cracked again—“he really liked me.”

  We stood there for a minute just comforting her, and I tried not to let my eyes drift over to Adam, to see if he was looking at me.

  “Listen,” Jo said. “I need to go check in with my dad. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll walk you back to the bunk? There’s a bag of Cheetos with your name on it.”

  Skylar smiled weakly. “Thanks,” she said. “But I think I just need to be by myself for awhile.”

  “Okay, but if you change your mind, you know where to find me.” Jo started to jog off and then turned, tossing her whistle to Skylar. “Don’t be afraid to use it!” she called.

  “Nothing says love like a panic whistle,” I muttered, patting Skylar’s back. “But will you really be okay? I don’t want to leave you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “And besides, you’ve got Adam waiting for you.”

  “It’s not like we . . .” I struggled to finish the sentence. “It’s not a big deal.” I said, hoping she couldn’t tell I was lying.

  “It is!” Skylar leaned in and hugged me. “It is a big deal, Emma. Adam genuinely likes you. And you’ve been waiting for this. You’re lucky.” She pulled back and managed a wan smile. “Now go get him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Go,” she said.

  I turned back once before I reached Adam, and saw Skylar in silhouette against the stars, her hair spilling messily down her back in a tousled waterfall. I wouldn’t see her again until the next morning.

  “I can’t believe it’s our last night,” I said to Adam as we walked down the beach, each step taking us further and further from what was starting to seem like a foregone conclusion: my hope, my wish, my chance, gaining momentum like a snowball of hormones that compelled me to do things like flip my hair over my shoulder and push my lips out ever so slightly when I wasn’t talking, sort of like I was sucking an invisible straw. All it had taken, it turned out, was asking him to go for a walk. It had been so easy: I’d asked, he had said yes. Well, actually, to be technical, he had said “Sure,” but it had seemed enthusiastic. Why hadn’t I done that ages ago? Why hadn’t anyone told me?

  “Yeah, crazy,” Adam said, but he was kind of frowning, looking at the grou
nd. Not at my lips. His mind seemed someplace else. I spit out the invisible straw.

  “Mark’s an idiot,” I said, rubbing the worn cuff sleeve of the hoodie between my thumb and forefinger. “I think it’s nice.”

  “What is?”

  “That you’re . . . you know. A virgin.” I instantly regretted saying it. “I mean, it’s nice when guys are virgins,” I hedged. “Because . . . I don’t know, it’s just sweet.” Now I was really digging myself into a hole. “Or, what I mean is, girls want a guy who thinks they’re special and who’s . . . waited for them. You know?” He relaxed a little bit, looked at me, and smiled softly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I guess I can’t speak for other girls, but I want to feel special.”

  “You are special, Emma,” he said, looking so earnest it was all I could do to keep from kissing him right then and there. My heart pounded in my ears. I could barely see straight.

  “So what was all that with Skylar back there?” he asked as we rounded the bend that led out to the big rocks where counselors sometimes led low-tide explorations during the day.

  “Oh. Um . . .” It felt like breaking her trust to tell him, but I figured he’d find out soon anyway. Adam and Zeke were sort of friends. “She and Zeke broke up.”

  Adam shook his head. “She could have any guy she wants,” he said. “I never understood why she picked that douche.”

  “My feelings exactly.” I brushed his hand with mine, accidentally on purpose. “But I think all the adoration can go to her head sometimes. You know what that’s like.” Adam wasn’t classically handsome, like Superman or Brad Pitt—his nose was a little big, not that I’m one to talk—but he had a nice face, twinkling eyes, and an amazing smile. Plus he was funny, with that almost imperceptible edge of sadness that’s like catnip to anyone with a double-X chromosome. Throughout our years of friendship, Adam always had some not-quite-thing going on with some not-quite-right girl. He had a knack for making everyone feel close to him, when no one really was.