Page 38 of That Summer Feeling

Now,thiswas a challenge I could do, uniquely catered to my habit of storing little details to cherish and remember. I jittered with excitement, and so did Julianne, who saw this as something puzzle-adjacent and declared “We’ll be winning this” with a genuinely inspiring amount of confidence.

The referees handed out the lists and gave us a few minutes to strategize before we were allowed to begin. Our team of six decided to divide up into three groups of two to maximize our coverage, breaking the list down into pieces and assigning them to each pair. Tommy and Aja chose to work together, picking the most obscure list items to complete. Our leaders, doing the hard stuff. Julianne got partnered with Sky—a wiry young person with a rotating collection of unique eyeglasses and all of twenty-two years old, by my guess—who really loved bugs and therefore told us they’d be very good at “seeing what others could not,” which sparked Julianne’s interest enough to request their partnership. By process of elimination, I got paired with Marge, the brassy older woman who’d sat out yesterday’s round due to her bad knees.

Our last teammate, Laurie, who’d kind of become synonymous with Sky because they’d been everywhere together, told us she’d be the second one to sit out because she wasn’t sure she’d be helpful enough to contribute.

“Thank you for that honesty,” Aja told her.

Laurie said, “That’s what teammates do. We tell each other the truth.”

The referees blew a whistle for us to begin. Marge pulled me by the arm, and off we went. Without cell phone reception to fact-check things, we relied on our individual knowledge to complete our tasks. Marge swore she knew how to fulfill the first item on our section of the list—Find something native to this area.

“I don’t mess around,” she told me as I boosted her up so she could reach into a tree and grab a leaf she promised was indigenous to Georgia.

“Of course not,” I said.

“And I don’t like when people are flighty,” she added. It seemed to be a thinly veiled insult. A bold one, considering I cupped her small, fragile ankle in my hands. “You gotta show up, you know?”

Normally the last thing I’d ever want was a confrontation, and certainly not one with a teammate I barely knew. The crush situation had recalibrated my brain enough to make me newly bold. “If this is your way of telling me I messed up yesterday, I know,” I said.

She plucked the leaf, then looked down at me, where I was literallybowing to the earthto keep her safe. “It is, yeah.”

“I’m not flighty,” I informed her. “I just get scared sometimes.”

She grabbed hold of my shoulder to step off my palms. “The older you get, the more you realize there’s a damn good reason to be afraid of just about every single thing in life. Soyou might as well do it all, because the fear sure doesn’t care either way.”

We continued on to the next item on our list—Collect a gift from the previous owners. All the prompts were brain challenges as much as scavenger hunt items.

“I gotta say, I don’t know shit about the previous owners,” Marge noted, holding her shaky finger over the words. She wore bright red nail polish that didn’t have a single chip, and she smelled like cigarette smoke covered by floral perfume. “I came here back in the seventies. I don’t remember them very well anymore.”

“Those were the Christian camp people,” I said, gazing out at the lake to think. How could we collect a gift from the previous owners? What constituted a gift? “What are things you can collect?” I asked Marge.

“Coins. Feathers. Stamps,” she listed.

“Stevie collects feathers,” I told Marge, who truly could not have cared less.

The water rocked itself to its own gentle lullaby as I turned the prompt over in my mind.

Then it hit me.

“I know what we can do,” I said, tripping over my own words in my excited haste. “I’ll be right back.”

I sprinted to the mess hall. Other color team members watched me with a jealous kind of curiosity, wondering what I’d found on the list that could possibly make me move with such urgency. When I got back to Marge with my supplies, I squatted down and collected lake water in a cup. After I filledit up, I took a hair tie off my wrist and a napkin I’d grabbed from inside, and I covered the top of the water to keep it from spilling.

“Wanna tell me what the hell you’re doing?” Marge asked.

“The original owners built the lake themselves!” I said. “A gift from them! That we can collect!”

Marge took the cup from my hands and held it up to examine the contents. “Hmm. Clever. Good job.”

My cheeks warmed. “Thanks.”

Marge and I proved to be a good team. We completed our tasks long before any other pair returned to our agreed-upon meeting spot, which gave us lots of time to chat. I learned that when Marge had come to Camp Carl Cove back in the seventies, she’d met her current husband here. They’d dated for the week, then gone their separate ways, each marrying other people. They’d found each other again later in life. Now they were grandparents, and they’d come back as an anniversary gift from their children.

“If you wanna hear me talk more about it, I was just on a big podcast,” she told me.

“You were on a podcast?” I asked, sure I’d misunderstood. Marge had the kind of old-school,I don’t mess with the internetenergy that made me think she wouldn’t know what a podcast was, much less be a guest on one. It had to be a word she was misusing. Maybe she’d done a school project for her grandchild and they’d said the wordpodcastand she’d run with it.

“I work part-time as a waitress in Chicago, and this couple that always comes in to see me roped me into it,” she explained.“The girl, Dee, she’s got a big show where you talk about your life and your secrets and all that kind of shit.Did I Forget to Tell You.That’s the name, if you want to look it up.”