Page 65 of That Summer Feeling

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The sun didn’t wake me. Stevie did, rolling away to get out of our two-mattresses-as-one-bed setup. I opened my eyes and saw her pretty spine, bare, curled away as she pulled a sports bra over her head.

“Going for your morning hike?” I asked her.

She looked over her shoulder. “You know me well.”

After she dressed and left, I felt the dread of the coming day. Tomorrow afternoon, camp would be over, and we’d go down the mountain and return to the lives we’d left behind. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving without Stevie, but I still had no idea how to take her with me.

Michelle sat in the common area, as she so often did. She could see from my open door that my bed and Stevie’s had been made into one. “Is it safe now for me to guess who you like?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, playing coy.

She laughed and went back to working on her laptop. The nudges I gave other people were usually nudges I wanted to receive too. Michelle had told me she needed someone else to stop her from working. That could be me. I could push us both toward something new.

“Do you want to go do archery together?” I asked her.

The way she laughed told me exactly how ridiculous my suggestion sounded. It was barely six thirty in the morning.

“We’re two people who have a habit of committing to our habits,” I explained. “I think we’d be great partners in failing at something random together. And archery is one of the only things I haven’t tried here this week.”

She took mock offense to my words as she put her laptop on the coffee table. “What makes you think I’m not good at archery?” she asked.

“Have you ever done it before?”

“Of course not. But I’m very gifted at focused tasks. I might be a prodigy.” She stood up, revealing the full glory of her lavender utility jumpsuit and platform sneakers.

“We better go find out, then, before anyone else gets there,” I said. “We have to take control of the narrative in case you’re an archery sensation. We don’t know how Marge from my color team will handle it. She’s a big Hunger Games fan. She might be really upset if you’re the real Katniss around here.”

As I initially predicted—like the vision-having prophet I was—Michelle and I were very bad at archery. With much sighing and many words uttered under his breath, our instructortried his damnedest to teach us the proper technique. If nothing else, he had to appreciate our early-morning commitment to the craft.

“I hate this,” Michelle said when her arrow flew well past the target again. It barely even hit the haystack behind it.

The rising sun was already bright. I blocked it out with my hand to be able to see her. “What was it you told me the other day?” I asked. “We miss out on so much life when we hold ourselves back.”

“You are like an elephant with that brain of yours. Sometimes I just put words together and say them. They’re not definitive truths,” she told me. “Nothing is.”

I put my next arrow into the bow and lined up my shot. “Except your newfound hatred for archery.”

“Right,” she said. “That’s fixed. But everything else? Fluid and free.”

“Just like me.” My words slipped out before I could process them. I startled myself so much I accidentally released my arrow.

Naturally, I hit the bull’s-eye.

Our beleaguered instructor burst into hearty applause. He even threw a finger to sky, like God had to be the one who’d orchestrated my success, because I sure hadn’t done it of my own accord.

Michelle slipped into her signature deadpan to contrast the exaggerated reaction of our instructor. “Gender or sexuality? Or both?”

“Sexuality,” I said. “But I don’t feel like I get to really saythat yet. I don’t actually know anything at all about myself. Every morning, it’s like I’m meeting me for the first time.”

Michelle pulled her phone from her pocket. “Do you want a picture with the bull’s-eye?”

“I haven’t taken a picture here all week,” I told her.

She walked around, searching for the best lighting. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“If I take this, the only picture that will exist of my time here is me standing beside the bull’s-eye Iaccidentallyhit when Iaccidentallycame out to you.”