Page 30 of That Summer Feeling

I kept thinking of the story of Stevie’s brothers forgetting her atop the mountain. I’d expected to meet three airheads who didn’t think about anyone other than themselves. Especially when we’d watched them on the campgrounds tour andthey’d stood at the front of the group, towering over everyone, demanding notice.

Now that I knew them a little better, what I found instead were three guys who really loved their sister but did not know how to handle her pain. They were so worried about her, it seemed to immobilize them. Frank could hardly eat, he spent so much of our meal biting his tongue and sighing. Andrew put his hand on Stevie’s back more than once, double pats of support that seemed to be all he could muster. And Mason kept guard. Every time a camper came through the mess hall doors, he made a point to turn his whole body toward them and watch, as if they might morph into Allison at any point.

It was a sweet revelation. I liked seeing how loved Stevie was.

Throughout our meal, I learned that the Magnussons spent most Christmases together in Vermont. I learned that Frank became a firefighter because he wanted to rescue cats from trees. Andrew had never eaten pork before. Stevie collected feathers. Mason hated the sound of paper crinkling. Our conversation had a calculated randomness to it, everyone offering up interesting factoids and details about themselves to keep the mood light, avoiding the subject of Allison at all costs.

Stevie and I walked back to our cabin and discussed how much we enjoyed the breeze that settled over the campgrounds when dusk turned to dark. Allison lingered at the corner of every topic of conversation. So did what Stevie had said to me right before Allison showed up. She’d asked for distance between us. I didn’t agree with that request, so I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up again. Judging by howclosely she stuck to me, strolling campgrounds paths with our shoulders sometimes touching, she didn’t agree either.

By the time we’d showered and started getting ready for the nightly mixer, Stevie hadalmostdefrosted back to her normal self. She rummaged through her luggage for an outfit in a way that involved our whole cabin, shouting for Michelle to come into our room and help out.

“What did you two do after the ropes course?” Michelle asked Stevie and me, standing in our doorframe. She was genuinely oblivious to the whole ex-girlfriend element, so she engaged without any extra layer of caution.

I looked right at Stevie, who shifted gears back to Buckingham guard neutral with impressive ease. “Garland went on the Jet Skis with my brother.”

I was fine with her ignoring the Allison thing in front of her siblings, because I understood better than anyone that sometimes it was hard to talk about relationship issues in front of the people who’d likely had a front-row view to the reasons those problems existed. But I was supposed to be her ally. We had to talk about Allison at some point, and Michelle was a better conversation participant than most. She was a documentarian, after all. Her whole career revolved around getting to the heart of things.

“That is indeed what I did,” I said to Michelle. “I guess Stevie didn’t exist in the hours between the end of the competition and the time she met her brothers and me for dinner.”

“I was attending to some personal matters,” Stevie said.

I cocked my head. “Mm.”

Up to that point, Michelle wore aMona Lisasmirk at alltimes, the kind of buried expression you could spend a lifetime trying to decode. A perfect complement to her declarative fashion sense. But her brows shot up and her eyes widened with full-bloom curiosity as Stevie and I spoke. She cranked her head back and forth between us like she was tracking a tennis match and Stevie and I were smacking the shit out of the ball.

It might have helped that Stevie and I were also elbow-deep in our respective luggage, tossing out clothes with reckless abandon. I’d packed entirely too many adult outfits, all thanks to Dara’s comment. As a result, I’d brought only two of my vintage graphic tees, and I’d already worn one of them yesterday. Nothing I’d brought with me spoke to the energy I wanted to convey at the mixer. It had been such a strange day, living up to the impression I’d made the night before. I enjoyed being liked, but I wanted a more accurate version of me to be seen, and I wasn’t the person I’d packed into this luggage.

“What didyoudo?” I asked Michelle.

“I’m on a tight deadline with the documentary, so I wanted to get some work done on it, but the twins wouldn’t allow it,” she said. “They forced me to color with them.”

Stevie laughed as she threw a shirt over her head, clearly as frustrated with her clothing as I was with mine. I wondered what she wanted to see in her bag that she couldn’t find. She always looked right to me.

“That sounds like Tim and Tommy,” she said to Michelle. “Even when we were kids, they’d ask all of us to pretend like our real life didn’t exist here.”

Michelle gave a sad little laugh. “Probably because their real life wasn’t very easy.”

When I’d first met the twins, they’d told me about their history with a practiced breeziness, hitting all the life milestones without diving very deep into how they’d been affected by them. I thought of Tommy and me high-fiving over our respective divorces. I knew I did that as a coping mechanism. Being loud about my divorce made the quiet, consuming sadness of it harder for people to reach. They couldn’t coax it out over all my yelling and car horn honking. Tommy would understand that better than anyone. What it felt like to carry that kind of public failure with you everywhere you went. How you constantly had to decide who you were in relation to it.

“I guess adults don’t really revive a summer camp unless they’re looking to heal something,” I said.

I knew Dara had come to this camp to let go of her bitterness, and I’d come here for reinvention. I hadn’t considered that everyone here was probably doing something similar. A quiet understanding permeated the room. All of us had come for different reasons, but the heart of them was the same—summer camp was a place for us to heal.

“I shouldn’t say they forced me to color, because I do like to do that,” Michelle said, hinting at earlier regret. “It was a hell of a strong suggestion, though.” She went into her room and returned with a very impressive version of the same coloring sheet Dara had been shading in by the lake. “Lucky for me, I won best picture. I even won a prize.” There was her deadpan demeanor again. The expert flat tone, matched with a perfectly placid expression. “It’s a T-shirt I will never wear.”

“A Camp Carl Cove shirt? Like the ones Tim and Tommy have?” I asked.

“How did you know?” Michelle got the shirt from her room to make sure I knew what she meant. It was a white ringer tee with green trim and green font, and the strange little picture screen-printed onto the front.

“I just—I love the shirt so much,” I admitted. “It was a guess.”

Michelle turned the tee toward her, staring at it with herMona Lisabest, looking for whatever it was I saw in it. “Do you really love it? It’s yours if you want it. I could never pull this off.”

“I’d love to have it. Thank you,” I said. It flattered me that Michelle didn’t believe she could wear my kind of look. She could quite obviously make anything look cool.

This was the kind of everyday magic that awed me even more than the “heart-promise vision, see my future” type of mystique. Michelle had received something I desperately wished for, and she had no desire to keep it. It was a small thing, not so much coincidence as a pure stroke of luck, but the surge of joy in my chest that came from the stars aligning in my favor reminded me of what a gift it was to feel connected to the wonder of life, even if the wonder was a Camp Carl Cove T-shirt. But if I put on that shirt, I’d feel like exactly the person I wanted to be, and that was a gift I’d thought I’d never receive.

Michelle tossed it over. I ran to the bathroom to throw it on and examine myself in the mirror. If I squinted a lot, I almost looked thirteen. I didn’teverwant to be that actual ageagain because it had been absolute hell. I was perfectly thrilled to be thirty-two. But I wanted to do right by thirteen-year-old Garland. To pay tribute to her. Give her the confidence she so desperately needed. Show her that life might have been hard then, but one day she’d grow up and the past would be just that, something that was behind her. Something she had to keep walking away from in order to grow. And in the silly little camp shirt, I could do that for her. For me.