“I’m not wearing that, you fucking fascist.”
I scowl at the Jack LaLanne look-alike. He’s holding out a green T-shirt. It’s got the words Fairy Falls printed on it in thick block letters. Along with an illustration of a pixie that could have been drawn by Andy Warhol on crystal meth.
Even better. There’s a pair of sweatpants in the same pukey hue.
“Then I hope you like hiking naked, Miss Vonn. We’re heading out at nine o’clock. Participation is not optional.” The crusty camp owner has dull gray hair. When he was young he probably had dull brown hair. His mouth extends into a dull, thin line. His bulging muscles want to bust out of the weathered camp tee he wears.
I glance around the small cabin. Some upbeat person would probably describe it as rustic, but I’d call it a wooden shack. There are two narrow, steel-framed bunks on opposite sides of the room, and a whiteboard hangs on one wall. Someone has written “Juniper Cabin. Bunk 1: Cookie Vonn. Bunk 2: Piper Saunders.” There’s no sign of my roomie. She arrived before I did and was apparently happy to join the Fairy Fucking Falls group activities.
“Walking around naked is actually illegal, Mr. Getty,” I say. “And I want the clothes I packed.” The ones I made. The ones that fit me perfectly. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to precisely tailor a pair of chinos? Or coordinate three different floral print separates? And I have a Moschino bag I almost lost an eye for during a fight at a sample sale.”
“If we’re going to have a problem here, Miss Vonn, I can always call your mother.” Menace laces Getty’s voice. He thinks he’s delivered the ultimate threat.
“You could,” I agree with a sweet smile. “And if, by some miracle, she comes to the phone, please tell her I would very much like to speak with her.”
Getty presses his lips into an even thinner, whiter line. “It’s simple, Miss Vonn. No uniform, no hike. No hike, no lunch.”
He comes back at nine to find me sitting on my bunk. Still wearing the chevron sweater I knitted and the midi skirt Grandma made from a hand-dyed jersey.
I’m reading a fantasy novel. Wishing I could jump into the pages and become a princess with a unicorn. Getty stands in front of me. He casts a gloomy shadow over me and onto the wooden wall of the cabin.
“Why did your parents send you here?” he asks. He flips through papers attached to the clipboard he carries.
“Chad Tate sent me here,” I say, “because he likes to fuck my mother. And fuck her over. So this is perfect. I’m here. And he’s spending Christmas getting laid on an all-expense-paid trip to a five-star resort.”
Getty ignores me. “They chose this camp because I get results. Ten pounds in three weeks. No exceptions.”
“There is no they,” I say. “My dad’s a doctor. He’s in Ghana as part of a Catholic medical mission. He would never have agreed to send me here.” I wrap my arms around myself. Truthfully, I have no idea what my dad would agree to. He’s been nothing more than a voice on the phone or bland messages in my email inbox for almost ten years now.
I stopped replying last summer.
Again the old man ignores me. “And the way I get results is simple. Calories out exceed calories in. That’s it. I don’t get involved in this Freudian, psychobabble, ‘food is your friend’ bullshit. I don’t care if Mommy didn’t hug you or if Daddy’s too busy to pay attention.” Deep folds emerge in Getty’s leathery forehead as he squints at his paperwork.
“I want my own clothes,” I say. I have to stay angry. It’s my only defense against Getty’s words, which hit a little too close to home.
He grunts. “And I hope that thought provides adequate consolation when everyone else is eating chocolate pudding at lunch.”
He slams the door behind him, creating a shower of dust that falls from the cabin’s roof. I keep reading.
It’s afternoon when I hear the hikers trudge through the camp. The cabin door opens, and it’s the first time I get to meet my gung ho bunkmate. She and I are about the same size, so it’s pretty easy to imagine what I’d look like in that horrid green uniform Getty is trying to force on me. Piper Saunders’s brownish red hair is tied in a bun on the top of her head.
She tiptoes into the cabin and sees me. Piper opens her mouth, on the verge of saying something, closes it again and spends a couple of minutes rifling through a trunk near her bed. The door smacks behind her when she leaves the cabin. She comes back a little while later, sits on the bunk across from mine in silence and chews a granola bar with deliberation. We’ve done nothing but stare at each other by the time she leaves for dinner.
By then, I’m a celebrity. A crowd gathers outside my cabin. I can hear them through the thin wood walls as they start to argue. Half of them think I’m the leader of a new resistance and they want to join my fat-ass army. Piper speaks for the other half. “She’s a stuck-up bitch. Her mom’s some big-time model in New York, so she thinks she’s too good to wear the uniform. I hope they let her starve.” She has a thick Australian accent.
I kick the door open. Everyone outside jumps back and then they exchange embarrassed glances. “Say that to my face. Say it. To. My. Face.”
My teeth are clenched and my fists are balled up. Piper’s shrinking back from me and I’m sure I can take her. Despite what she thinks, I didn’t grow up in a Fifth Avenue penthouse. In my neighborhood, you watch your back.
The crowd circles around us. I’m seconds away from starting a fight.
Getty pushes his way through the ring and grabs my elbow. He marches me to the camp office. I want to laugh as he tries to contact my mother. I know it’s Cassidy on the other end of the line. “I’m calling about her daughter.” Pause. “Thailand? Did she leave any contact information?” Pause. “Her grandmother?”
Getty turns to me, but I shake my head. “My grandma’s on a trip to the Holy Land. My mom was supposed to...” I trail off. It’s weird to admit that my grandma had to plead with Mom to babysit me. “My grandma had to go. The congregation paid for her trip.” It sounds defensive. Even to me.
Getty’s attention is focused on his call with Cassidy while I’m trying to make sense of how I ended up here. How Mom sent Chad Tate to pick me up. How he dumped me at this camp like a bag of dry cleaning. The tears well up.
But I beat them back as Getty hangs up the wall phone. “Well, well, Miss Vonn. It seems you weren’t exaggerating.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I say. “But my mother won’t be shocked if I refuse to shimmy into those sweatpants you provided.” My mother wouldn’t notice if I ran away and joined the merchant marines.
“No,” he agrees with a humorless smile. “But she also is unlikely to object if you don’t get dinner tonight.” He outright laughs as my stomach grumbles. “See you in the morning, Miss Vonn.”
Piper avoids me. It’s dark when she comes back to the cabin. Until lights out, she lies in her bunk, huddling against the wall. Even from across the room, I can feel her nervous energy. My sweater’s collar scratches my neck. The skirt leaves my legs cold and bare.
At ten, there’s shouts of “lights out.” Piper flips the switch near her bunk.
“Relax,” I call out into the night. “I don’t plan to attack you while you sleep.”
There’s silence.
Sort of silence. Crickets chirp. Outside a dying fire pops and crackles.
Then, “What’s your problem, anyway?”
Piper is asking this. Her voice is soft, girlish.
And I don’t know the answer. “You want me to limit myself to just one?”
She laughs. “I would kill to be you,” she says.
“Yeah, right,” I mutter.
The girlish tone in her voice disappears. “You look like a plus-size model. And if you’d just—”
“—lose weight I’d look just like my mother,” I snap. “I know.”
“You don’t want to look like her? You don’t want to look like Leslie Vonn Tate?” Piper sounds surprised.
“I don’t want to be anything like her,” I say.
“So,” she says slowly. “Why won’t you wear the uniform? It’s not that bad.”
“It’s okay, I guess,” I say. “It’s just that I make my own clothes. And what I wear is the one thing that I can...”
“Control?” Piper finishes.
Another silence.
“How’d you get stuck here?” I ask her, eager to change the subject.
She doesn’t answer right away. I start to think she’s fallen asleep when she almost whispers, “Online contest.”
“Wait. You wanted to come here?” I demand.
“Yeah, Cookie Vonn,” she says. “I wanted to come here. My family. My mum keeps saying we’re all big-boned. My brothers have such big bones, they get tossed from the cinema for taking too many seats. There are five of us. No one’s been asked to a dance.”
I say nothing.
“Coming to this camp is twelve thousand Oz dollars. So you can think I’m pathetic if you want. Maybe I am pathetic. I had to write this whole big thing. ‘How would Fairy Falls change your life?’”
“I don’t think you’re pathetic,” I whisper.
“I want to get married. To hang glide. To surf,” she says. “I want to go to the senior dance. My mum thinks the five food groups are meat pie, lamb leg, fish-and-chips, chocolate biscuits and lamingtons. This is my only chance.”
I should say something. I know it. About how life has to be about more than just one chance. How there has to be more to life than how we look on the outside. How happy endings can’t be reserved for the thin.
But there’s a knock at the door. A soft knock.
“Cookie? Cookie Vonn?”
I open the door a crack. That dickhead Getty called lights out a while ago, but the guy outside the cabin holds a small, battery-powered camping lantern.
“I thought you might want some dinner,” the guy says. Piper leans forward on her bunk, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s happening.
“Who’re you? And why do you care if I get dinner?” I ask.
He shakes the lantern next to his head of blond, curly hair. “It’s me. Tommy.” He says this like I should recognize him. Like we’ve been bosom buddies all our lives.
“Tommy who?”
He lowers the lamp and his shoulders slump. His camp tee is a couple sizes too big. It’d be a stretch to say the guy has twenty pounds of extra weight on him. Whoever shipped him off to fat camp is more evil than Chad Tate.
“Tommy Weston.”
The name doesn’t ring a bell.
“My mom works for the Cards. We met at the Cards versus Giants game.”
I think about that game. The only thing I remember is Chad Tate spilling beer on my new pair of oxford loafers.
“I see you at Donutville every Sunday when I pick up a dozen for church.”
Yeah, you and every other Catholic within a five-mile radius.
“Oh, come on! I sit behind you in Trig.”
That sort of rings a bell. Like maybe I’ve seen his poofy mop as I pass back quiz copies or something.
“Yeah, okay. Hi. What do you want?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Piper recoiling in horror. I’m pretty sure I’m losing whatever ground we gained during our heart-to-heart.
“I heard about the thing with Mr. Getty. And, well...my mom knows your dad... I thought you might be hungry... I thought maybe I should—”
I put my hands on my hips. “Chad Tate’s not my dad.”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry.” He holds up the lantern again. He’s like the blond boy from the cover of The Little Prince. Hopeful. And a bit lost. “So you don’t want to go on a picnic? See Fairy Falls?”
I bite my lower lip. “Fairy Falls is a real thing? Not just some bizarre-o marketing gimmick from the mind of Herbert Getty?”
“It’s real. We went up there this morning. It’s more of a walk. Took about forty-five minutes. Come see it.” He smiles and his teeth glow green.
I know I can’t hike in my skirt and wedges. “Did he put you up to this? Did Getty send you over here to trick me into wearing that Hulk costume?”
His mouth clamps shut and he shrugs. “Wear whatever you want. I’m just offering you a sandwich.”
Sandwich. I have no idea when Getty will let me eat, and that’s enough to motivate me. “Okay. Hang on.” I shut the door and tug on the oversize green sweats. Piper gives me a smile and a wave as I lace up my Converse and leave the cabin.
“Hey! Don’t hurt me, Hulk,” Tommy whispers as I join him outside.
“Ha ha. I’m wearing the sweats. Now, where’s my sandwich, Pavlov?” I experiment with the placement of the sweatshirt’s ribbed edge, trying to figure out which option makes me look less fat. No one option seems better than any other. And the green color is such a crime against humanity that it probably doesn’t matter anyway.
He dims the light and motions for me to follow him up the path. “You know, it doesn’t look that bad. Why did you make such a big deal out of it?”
I have to stay close to keep from tripping in the darkness. And I don’t say anything. Partially because the land has started to rise in an incline and I’m having trouble breathing. Partially because I no longer know the answer. Something about Piper got to me. Made me think that camp wouldn’t be all bad.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just go with the flow once in a while?” he asks.
“That’s what Churchill...said when the Nazis...invaded Poland.” I hope the panting isn’t too obvious.
“Ah, so you’re comparing me to Hitler now?”
The moon rises higher and higher in the sky and it feels like we’ve been walking all night. We finally come to a stop and Tommy turns the lantern to full brightness. He holds it up, illuminating the rocky edge of a water hole. White steam rises off the surface and sends a rotten-egg smell in our direction.
“The Grand Prismatic Spring,” he says in a booming voice. In a quieter tone, he goes on, “You should see it during the day. It looks like something from another planet. The colors change. Sometimes you see a deep blue, sometimes gold and then red.”
“It’s the algae,” I say. “And bacteria. This place is basically one big infection. And it smells like one too.”
He laughs, and we start walking again. Typical. I just caught my breath. I can hear rushing water ahead in the distance. Tree branches poke into the pathway and with another wave of the lantern, Tommy is saying something about fires and forest thinning. He’s not huffing and puffing like me.
He stops and spreads a camp blanket over a patch of moss, yellowish green in the moonlight. I stand near the edge of a rocky ledge facing into the darkness. Behind me, I hear a thud as Tommy drops his backpack, and in front of me, the patter of water rolling off the cliff. He joins me with his lantern and holds it up over a skinny stream of water.
“It’s not too bad.” I smile. In spite of my hatred for the camp, for Getty, for Chad Tate, there’s something interesting about the gray granite rock formations and the tree trunks that litter the hillside. It’s like the opening sequence of a bad teen horror movie. Or the site of a giant game of pick-up sticks.
“Come on,” Tommy says, grabbing my hand.
We sit on the cold blanket. From inside his backpack Tommy unpacks ham sandwiches, sea salt quinoa chips and apples. And chocolate pudding. It’s pretty gross camp food. But after the day I’ve had, it’s a gourmet feast.
“Look, I know you’re not happy to be here,” he says.
“Um, yeah,” I say in between bites, “is there a reason you find the prospect of eating lettuce wraps and getting up at four in the morning to jog so thrilling?”
Tommy shrugs and opens his pudding cup. “Jogging’s okay. I guess I don’t love salads. And we don’t have to get up at four.”
I put down my sandwich. “Okay. But why are you here? You’re...not fat.”
He smiles. “My mom had a weight problem growing up. She keeps going on and on about genetics and history repeating itself. So here I am.”
“That totally sucks.”
He thinks about this for a minute. “Well. It was either this or visit my grandma and spend the whole break trying to cross-stitch Walt Whitman quotes. And this is fun, right?”
I sigh. I knew he was playing the odds. It happens a lot. Guys will be nice to me in the hopes that I’ll go on the cabbage diet and end up strutting around a catwalk in a bra like my mother. People say we look alike. I’m the image of supermodel Lindsay Vonn Tate as seen in a funhouse mirror.
Before I can tell Tommy Weston to go screw off, he points at a small reddish blob on the horizon. “You ever watch Arcturus?”
I followed his gaze up to the night sky. “What’s that?”
“A star. Fourth brightest, actually. The Bear Watcher.”
I snorted. “Great. Now you’re Bill Nye the Science Guy.”
He ignores me. “My dad used to tell me this story. About how they used the light from Arcturus to open the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.”
I sit cross-legged and stare at the star too. “How did they do that?”
Tommy turns to face me. “Well, they set up photocells and used several large refracting telescopes to—”
“Okay. Forget I asked,” I say, and we both laugh.
“The point is that there’s Arcturus. It can be this impersonal ball of gas floating around thirty-seven light-years away, having nothing to do with anybody or anything. Or we can take a telescope, focus its light and shoot it over a crowd of ten thousand people. And it’s up to us what we do.” He’s watching the dark sky. Wishing on a star.
There’s something sweet about him and this world he’s imagining. “So this is your dad’s version of a motivational speech?” I giggle. It sounds kind of weird.
“My dad’s a physics teacher. He likes to go with what he knows.”
We pack up the garbage and walk back to camp. The walk back is way more pleasant than hiking up, since it’s mostly downhill.
When we arrive at Juniper, he extends his hand. “Friends?” he asks.
“Friends,” I agree.
I watch him go over to the boys’ side of camp. Low, snow-covered mountains billow across the landscape behind him.
Inside my cabin, Piper’s still awake. “Some counselor brought your bag. Don’t worry. I said you were in the toilet. I guess Mr. Getty’s lawyer says, strictly speaking, he can’t refuse to give you food.”
I shrug and pull the bag into the corner near my bunk. “I think I’ll just wear the uniform. I mean, what’s the big deal, right?”
Piper grins at me. “Got anything else in there besides fancy clothes?”
Unzipping the bag, I hold up several magazines. “Can I interest you in a copy of Seventeen? I never leave home without one.”
Fairy Falls sucks.
Not being alone completely rules.