Page 2 of That Summer Feeling

My childhood bracelet in one hand and my shoes in the other, I took off, not bothering to linger for a goodbye with the stranger I somehowknew. My heart pounded as hard as my bare heels did against the airport floor.

This is just your imagination trying to psych you out, I told myself as my chest heaved from the exertion.Heart promises aren’t real.They were a childhood coping mechanism, and you are on your way to your honeymoon with the man you love.

I made it onto our flight with a few minutes to spare. Ethan arrived right before they closed the gate. It all worked out, just like he’d said it would.

We had a lovely trip together.

Day One of Summer Camp

1

Dara and I followed a winding dirt road through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia, cutting sharp corners and losing our cell phone reception in the process. A ways up, the trees parted to make room for a massive overhead sign that readWelcome to Camp Carl Cove. The dirt road widened until it transformed into a parking lot, where rows of cars had already begun lining up.

“Are we really doing this?” I asked, nervous.

“We’re absolutely doing this,” Dara confirmed, no trace of hesitation in her voice.

As kids, Dara and I had always wanted to live the camp life, where for a few weeks of each summer, you left your home behind and hid away in the woods to become someone new. There was a show about summer camp on Disney Channel that we were obsessed with,Bug Juice, that only fueled the fantasy. We spent night after night dreaming of that kind ofescape, sleeping in log cabins and cannonballing into a cold lake, free from our everyday problems. If there was mold in the corners of those cabins, it wouldn’t be our job to scrub it. If the adults there were angry at one another, we wouldn’t be the ones tasked with lightening their moods or offering them advice. We would be kids in the most wholesome sense. The kind of kids you only saw on TV.

Our parents never entertained the idea of sending Dara and me away, though by the way they treated us, constantly frustrated by our mere presence, they should have been eager for a chance to be child-free for a while. We’d grown up in hot, dry Arizona, and the closest Dara and I ever got to the escape we longed for was when our oldest sister, Bess—who turned sixteen the year I was born and moved out when I was two—would come around the house and take us to a lumberjack-themed mini-golf place.

Now Dara and I were in our thirties, and we’d finally made it to a real summer camp after all. It was the exact kind of impossible-seeming thing that had come to overwhelm me, because it felt too good to be true. In my experience, if life had indeed brought me a nice thing, something bad would inevitably arrive to balance it all out. I had come to depend on living in the middle. The middle didn’t crush my spirit as thoroughly as the lows did.

In the distance, a pear-shaped lake glistened in the sunlight. It was the heartbeat of the campgrounds, with dirt paths spreading out around it like veins, leading to more than a dozen idyllic wooden cabins and buildings. The scene looked serene in the way vintage oil paintings did—gentle waterglistening under the watchful sun, with the soft greens and browns of the trees hugging the edges.

“It looks fake,” I said. “Like an art piece that would be hanging in the living room of happily retired grandparents or something.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Dara responded. “Except I think it would belong to someone young and cool.”

“You’re right. This is a painting for a hot girl who lives alone in a cottage surrounded by woodland animals.”

Dara nodded, pleased. “My destiny.”

A wooden sign staked in front saidHello Campers!in a crisp white font. Tim and Tommy framed either side, waving at cars as they pulled up.

One sunny afternoon back in February—exactly a year to the day after love had failed me and I’d started crashing on a blow-up mattress at Dara’s apartment in Asheville and working as a rideshare driver—twin men had crawled in through the back door of my lime-green Mazda and said hello to me in a joyous singsong tone. Then they asked in perfect synchronicity how I was doing, making all of us crack up within three seconds of knowing one another. I knew then that their story would stay with me somehow.

Never could I have guessed how much.

The twins were fraternal. They made sure to clarify that when they said their names were Tim and Tommy. According to them, nearly everyone got them mixed up. Their differences had seemed immediately obvious to me, even as I clocked them through quick glances in my rearview mirror.

Tim, the slightly taller twin, had longer features and amore outgoing personality. Tommy, the shorter one, was more aloof. He’d laughed and beamed like Tim, but he had a reservation about him that was wholly his own. He said he’d experimented with going by Thomas for a while. Recently he’d come around to using Tommy again. They were Vietnamese, and they’d been adopted at birth by a white Christian couple they did not have a relationship with anymore. They’d grown up right outside Asheville, but they lived in New York City now. They were both gay. They’d been flying into town a few times a month for a big project.

I had learned all that within five minutes of knowing them, which made for my dream ride—willing conversationalists in my back seat, eagerly sharing their hearts with me for no real reason other than that we were in the car together and we might as well chat along the way. They were so openhearted that my cheeks ached from grinning, even though our conversation veered between intense and playful at speeds far faster than my car was driving.

“What’s the big project?” I’d finally asked them.

“Oh, you know. The usual. We bought a summer camp,” Tim told me, bursting into laughter as he said it.

I’d heard a lot of random things over the several months I’d spent driving strangers around town. Purchasing a summer camp ranked up there among the randomest. Right behind the woman who went to different morgues asking for dead people’s teeth so she could make jewelry.

The twins were very handsome, and they’d smelled fantastic. Their elegant cologne wafted up to me as the aircirculated in the car. It reminded me of the pricy candles Dara liked to burn in the living room.Musky wealth, I called it. They both had on fitted tees that showed their penchant for exercise, and Tommy had hung a pair of expensive sunglasses on the neckline of his. Tim wore a watch that might have been worth more than my life savings. I could only imagine what kind of money they needed to purchase an entire camp.

Now I was driving my car up to the entrance of that very summer camp, and there stood the twins, beaming the same way they had four months earlier when they’d first told me about this place.

“Garland Moore!” Tim cheered when he recognized my Mazda.

Tommy gestured for us to turn left.