She got back to the Maple section and crept into her tent. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, her girls whimpered and cried, homesick, and she stroked their hair, wiped their tears away. Billie had a lovely voice and sometimes sang to the other girls at night to assuage their sadness.
Fiona lay in her bunk for a few minutes, thinking about her own summer as a nine-year-old, her first summer at Camp Marigold. She remembered the Fourth of July from that summer the best. After the fireworks, they’d gone back to their section, and her tentmates had begun to sob in their bunks, one after another, a domino effect of hysteria. Fiona had tried to make herself cry, but nothing came out. She’d liked the fireworks over the lake; she wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.
Now she was hungry. She couldn’t sleep when she was hungry. As quietly as she could, she got up, opened her trunk, and rifled through her T-shirts to find the bag of granola and the jar of peanut butter she kept in there, raccoons be damned. She took them out, closed her trunk, and walked to the bathroom, a moldy cabin filled with millipedes and spider webs. She sat on the dusty floor and, with her fingers, reached into the bag of granola and dipped the bits into the peanut butter. At the first bite, she made an involuntary groan. The combination of sweet and salty was better than anything else, better than being drunk or high, better even than the one orgasm she’d ever had (in her childhood bed, seventh grade, by accident, and it had been so powerful and unruly that she was afraid to experience it again).
—
At flag raising in the morning, Fiona looked for Rachel but didn’t see her. She wondered if Rachel was hungover and had faked sick to sleep an extra hour or two.
Their friendship was like this. Fiona was reliable and predictable. Rachel knew where she could find her friend in most moments. But about Rachel the opposite was true: She was so often inaccessible, unavailable. Fiona had realized sometime during this summer that they actually liked each other for these reasons; each one fulfilled what the other lacked. Fiona was steady, and Rachel was spontaneous, and for so many summers, they had thrived in their roles.
But this summer, Fiona was beginning to feel that something had shifted and she couldn’t get it back, like being the paragon of steadiness had begun to wear her down. Maybe more of it was required of her now, after Rachel’s father had died, and at first she had thought she was okay with that. But ever since the night at the motel, Fiona had wondered how Rachel would react if Fiona wasn’t there for her. Fiona wondered how good, how freeing it might feel. Even just for one day.
Fiona walked down to the stables after breakfast. Normally she and Rachel groomed and fed the horses before the campers got there, and gossiped about whatever had happened the night before.
She opened the heavy door to the barn and filled a bucket from the supply station with soap and warm water from the hose. She strained to carry the heavy bucket as she walked along the cement floor to Josie’s stall. Josie was the palomino that Fiona’s parents had bought for her for her thirteenth birthday. Both Fiona and Helen kept their horses at camp during the summer. Before the Larkin girls, this had been unprecedented at Camp Marigold.
Josie approached the edge of her stall when she saw Fiona and peeked her head out. Fiona opened the stall and let herself in. She squeezed a sponge onto Josie’s golden-hued coat and let the soapy water drip into the mounds of hay.
When she finished washing Josie, she began working on the other horses. She checked her watch; without Rachel’s help she was running out of time before the campers would get there for the first activity period. She stopped with the washing, even though she’d gotten to only four of the horses, and began to fill the feed buckets.
Nell, the lead horseback-riding counselor, entered the barn and propped the door open to let the light in. When Fiona first met Nell, Fiona thought she was cool and no-nonsense, with her tough exterior and her posh British accent. She loved Nell’s long red hair. But then Fiona and Rachel found out that Nell was a year younger than them, and it bothered Rachel especially that Nell was their boss. She observed that Nell was a “dyke.” “She walks with her legs so far apart,” Rachel had said, “like she has a dick in between them.” After that, Fiona had not been able to think of Nell in any other terms.
Nell peeked into the first stall. “They’re not saddled yet?” she asked.
Fiona shook her head. “I’m on my own right now,” she said, putting a bucket of feed in Firework’s stall.
“They didn’t need to be washed today,” Nell said.
“I haven’t seen Rachel since last night.” Fiona suddenly felt like her friend’s disappearance was her own fault.
Nell didn’t respond to this, though she looked at Fiona curiously. Nell opened her mouth like she was about to say something but then she shook her head, reached down to pick up an armful of saddles, and began to put one on Firework, whose snout was entirely submerged in the feed bucket.
The Hemlock girls came to first-period riding. This included Helen.
She entered the barn with her bevy of friends. Her deceptively angelic blond curls were loose around her face. She walked ahead to Dandelion, her horse, whose stall was next to Josie’s.
“How’s my girl?” Helen said to Dandelion. She kissed her horse on the nose and scratched between her ears.
“You’re so lucky,” one of Helen’s friends said to her, which was what they always said.
Helen looked up at Fiona, suddenly realizing she was right there in front of Josie’s stall.
“Hey,” Helen said to her sister, an unreadable expression on her face. Fiona knew Helen well enough to know how unusual this was.
“Hey,” Fiona said. “Have you seen Rachel?”
Helen’s hand stopped stroking the horse. She looked at the other girls, who looked at Fiona and then back at Helen.
“You didn’t hear?” Helen said.
“Hear what?”
Helen bit her bottom lip.
“Where is she?” Fiona said. “Is she okay?”
“She’s gone, Fee,” Helen said.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean gone. She left before we woke up this morning.”
Fiona looked around at the other girls, hoping someone would contradict her sister. No one did. “What are you talking about?”
“Mo didn’t say why,” Helen said. “She just pulled us all into the middle of the section this morning and said that Rachel had to leave and that we’ll know by the end of the day who our new counselor is.”
“It’s so crazy,” one of the girls chimed in.
“I can’t believe she didn’t say goodbye to you,” Helen said to her sister.
Another Hemlock girl entered the circle. “I just heard Chad’s gone too.”
—
By lunch, it was all anyone was talking about.
“I heard they were caught doing drugs in the oar house,” Fiona heard one Evergreen girl say to another on the salad bar line.
“Like pot?”
“No, like, hard stuff.”