Page 53 of That Summer Feeling

Dara and I were closest to the door, so we ended up at the front of the line. Our conversation had ended before it really began, but we both knew we’d pick it up again.

“Are we gonna like what’s inside?” I asked Tommy.

“Guess you’re about to find out!” he said as he opened the door.

24

The mess hall was filled with people I didn’t recognize, positioned strategically throughout the large room. Each person sat with about five feet of space between them and the next. Being the first to enter the scene probably made it a lot stranger than it should have been.

It was visitors’ day, all right.

Some campers had small children waiting. Some had adult children. Some had lovers with flowers. Some had parents with signs, just liked Dara and I had joked.

A familiar, agonizing lump formed in my throat—a tiny pebble of embarrassed regret that lodged itself in my esophagus. I already knew our parents wouldn’t come. Even in my most fantastical imagined scenario, I’d learned to stop having one where they showed up for me anywhere. It still stung all the same.

“How do we play this?” I asked Dara. “Everyone else has a guest but us.”

“We walk straight out the back exit and into the lake,” she said. “We’re mermaids now. Goodbye to our mortal forms.”

“We had a good run.”

“Legendary. They’ll erect a statue in our honor here.”

“I hope they use a good photo of us for reference,” I said.

“Maybe the one we took last Thanksgiving?”

“I don’t like my smile in that one.”

A voice cut through the crowd. “Dara. Garland.”

It was our older sister, Bess. Her gentle, shy tone—never one to yell—fighting to be heard all the same. She sat all the way on the other side of the mess hall with her fingers laced together, not even picking a hand up to wave. We found her all the same.

The shock of it—the genuine, gut-punching surprise—set us both running. Suddenly Dara and I were kids again, and Bess had shown up at the house to take us mini golfing, and we had our oldest sister around to lend a sturdier roof to the flimsy, makeshift safety net we’d created around ourselves.

Bess was the best of us in every way someone could be the best. The nicest. The most patient. The funniest too, when she let herself be. She was just so much older—sixteen years from me, fourteen from Dara—that she was more like a parent than a sibling. She had a different mom from us, not that it mattered in any real way. She’d also had a completely different life from us. That never stopped her from making as much effort as she could to know Dara and me, though I recognized as an adult how hard it must have been for her to willingly return to our childhood home every so often and extract us from that pit of unhappiness. I’d never resented her for not coming over more. Every moment had been a gift.

I fell all over her, already sobbing in happiness. “I thought you said this wasn’t your idea of a vacation.” It was so good to see her face. I’d loved camp, but I didn’t realize how much of the real world I missed until presented with a taste of it. Bess had always felt not like home but like promise. The potential for something better.

“Those twins are incredibly persuasive,” Bess explained. “A little scary, actually. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a choice about attending. Not that I was going to say no.”

“Are you spending the night here?” Dara asked her.

“No, no. Just the afternoon. Dave and the kids are here too, but the girls got carsick when we started driving up the mountain, so it’s just me at the top.”

Dara and I both hugged her again. Bess was the only person in the world who could make Dara become this emotional this fast.

“It’s so cool that you’re here,” I said.

Bess took a long look around. “This place is... interesting.”

She didn’t understand, which made sense. She really did have a different life from Dara and me. A harder one, I knew, having heard some of the stories. They were hers to reckon with, so maybe she didn’t need to be healed in the same way Dara and I did. Or maybe she didn’t trust herself enough to see that she could want this kind of thing. To revisit her childhood and have a second chance at getting it right.

“It’s honestly great,” I told her.

“Are you in bunk beds and the whole bit?”

“No! Some people are, but Dara and I have our own rooms.I mean, I’m sharing my room with someone else, actually. One person. She’s my—”