CHAPTER 24
Dear Mom and Dad,
How are you? How are you really? I keep getting letters about what you’re doing (podcast club still sounds awful by the way), but I can’t tell how you feel. We talk a lot about how we feel here at Camp Padua. My friend, Dori, hates her stepdad. This other girl in my cabin, Hannah, cuts herself because she hates herself. She hasn’t come out and said it, but I think she will. At least that’s what Cassie says. Cassie is my friend here. She literally hates everything in the world, except maybe Grover. Some days I think she doesn’t hate me, too. But then others I think she needs to hate me because it makes her feel better when I don’t give up on her. And that makes me feel good.
I taught her how to swim, too.
I guess what I’m saying is that I hope when I come home we can talk about how we feel. I hope . . .
After the swim meet when I almost drowned, I know why Dad almost hit me. And it’s okay. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.
I’m not sinking anymore.
Z
PS—Grover is a boy here and he’s delightful. Mom, you can tell Cooper I said that the next time you see him in the grocery store.
Cassie moves back into our cabin at the end of the week, after her “solitary” confinement. She bursts through the door.
“I’m back,” she announces in a singsong tone. She walks over to her bed, drops her duffel bag, and picks up the quilt I left there.
“What the hell is this?”
“It was Molly’s.”
“Gross.” She tosses it back down on her bed. “You put your dead sister’s quilt on my bed?”
“I thought you might need it, jerk.”
When I go to take it back, Cassie stops me. “Jerk?”
“It was the first thing that popped into my head.”
“We need to work on your insults, Z.”
And then Cassie spreads the quilt out on her bed. When she goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth, I take a peek inside the duffel bag. The candy is gone. I unzip the pouch that housed all her diet pills on the first day of camp. They’re still there. She’s kept her promise. I put it back exactly how it was.
When Cassie walks out of the bathroom, I can’t help but smile at her.
“What the hell are you staring at, jerk?” she asks me.
I’m glad she’s back. I’ve missed her.
The Circle of Hope is quiet. My eyes focus down at the task at hand. I pull the plastic gimp string tight and then start over with the pattern, crisscrossing the colors and looping the opposite string through the holes. Everyone is hard at work except for Cassie, who’s lying in the grass popping heads off of dandelions. She’s surrounded in a graveyard of broken weeds.
The object of the lesson is simple, so Madison says. Make a colorful key chain out of gimp and present it to a person with a confession about yourself. That person will then carry around a reminder of the courage it takes to be honest about who you are and thus be reminded of the courage inside all of us.
“We need courage to get through the hard times in life,” Madison says as she walks around the group. “When we’re feeling down, when we’re nervous we might fail, when it seems like everything and everyone is against us, we need courage to get back on our feet and start again.”
I twist orange, yellow, and pink gimp one over another, repeating the pattern to make the key chain. When our group share-apy time is almost up, Madison comes around with a lighter to burn the end of the gimp so the plastic melts together.
Hannah walks up to me and holds out her key chain. “For you.”
I try not to look startled, though I’m pretty sure I do a bad job of it.
“Thank you,” I say hesitantly.
“Girls make fun of me,” she blurts out. “The girls at my school. Ever since I was in kindergarten. I don’t know why, but they do, so I figure something must be wrong with me, right? Something must be wrong with me for them to hate me so much.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they just suck.”
“Maybe.” Hannah squints her eyes like she’s thinking hard.
“Is that why you cut yourself?”
She looks down at her long-sleeved shirt. “I can see it then. I can see what’s wrong with me because it’s on my skin.” I nod slowly, an ache in my stomach for her. I take the key chain from Hannah. “Also, I think I might be in love with Kerry,” she says.
“Kerry? Like owner of the camp, Kerry?”
Hannah nods. “He’s gorgeous.”
“He’s also twice your age.”
“I know.” Hannah gets a pensive look on her face. She fidgets with her hands. “Also, I was the one who shut the window.”
“What?”
“I shut the window when Cassie snuck out. Please don’t tell her I did it. She might kill me.”
Hannah’s right. Cassie might kill her. I hold up the key chain. It must have taken some courage for Hannah to shut the window. Courage or insanity. “I won’t say anything.”
Hannah looks relieved of her confession as she walks away. I find Cassie still in the field and sit down next to her.
“Mama had a baby and her head popped off.” Cassie squeezes the dandelion where the stem meets the flower. The yellow head disconnects and flies through the air, landing next to my leg.
I hold out my key chain. “Here.”
Cassie sits up and takes it. “Aren’t you supposed to confess something?”
“I told you everything a few nights ago.”
“That’s impossible. You couldn’t have told me everything.”
I hug my arms around my chest. “Grover kissed me.”
Cassie’s back gets straight and she looks down at the key chain. “Is he a good kisser?” Her voice sounds tight and I wish I could take the words back, but I can’t, so I’m honest.
“He is.”
Cassie stands up and dusts off the back of her shorts but doesn’t look at me. Her eyes focus hard on something invisible across the fire pit. “Bek isn’t a bad kisser either . . . if you get past the fat rolls. And I don’t really give a shit what you and Grover do. You can have his babies for all I care. But I highly recommend you think about that because you two are bound to have insane children.” She looks down at all of the decapitated dandelions.
I pull one from the grass and offer it to her. Maybe she needs to break something. She takes it and finally looks at me. “Just remember who introduced you. I was friends with him first.”
“I could never forget.”
We spend the rest of the afternoon swimming between the shallow and deep end of the H dock with Bek and Grover. When we get down to the beach, Cassie slams Bek against the wooden board and tells him if his lips ever come close to hers again, she’ll cut off his balls.
“If I can even find them,” she snaps, her hands pressing into his chest to hold him still.
Bek just smiles widely. “You’re touching me.”
“Another truth. Seriously, I think Bek is cured,” Grover says.
Cassie grunts, like she’s totally disgusted, and lets him go. She takes her new yellow washer and hangs it up, like a ray of sunlight, on the board.
She asks me to show her how to do more than a lame-looking freestyle stroke, and I spend the afternoon teaching her how to tilt her head and breathe as she swims. And then we work on breaststroke.
“My favorite stroke,” Grover pipes up. “Don’t think I didn’t notice the new suit.” He eyes my two-piece.
“Did someone say breast?” Bek’s head bobs above the water. “And stroke?”
After Cassie’s mini-lesson, Grover and I swim out to the raft and dive off, seeing who can touch the bottom and come back up the quickest with a handful of sand. Cassie watches us as she holds on to the end of the H dock, unable to swim out farther than the buoys that mark the line between yellow and green.
I dive deep into the water and push as fast as I can. When I touch the bottom, I grab sand. I turn fast and slam my feet into the ground to propel myself toward the surface, leaving behind, at the bottom of Lake Kimball, the memory of how easy it was for me to slip under.
“Who came up first?” Grover yells, spitting water out of his mouth.
“I did.” I splash him, still holding my handful of sand.
“Cassie’s the judge.” He points at her while treading water, his arm up.
Cassie seems to examine our raised handfuls of sand, and she says, “Cleve did.”
I push him, smudging my sand on his arm. It drips into the water and dissipates. “She’s a biased judge.”
Grover smiles and comes after me. He pulls on my legs, dragging me closer to him, and under the surface of the water. He wrestles me around as I squirm, my laughs forming bubbles all around my head. We come up gasping for air at the same time.
He smiles at me.
And I smile at him.
We both duck back under the surface. I sink just enough so that my head is less than a foot away from the top. The sun glistens through the greenish-blue water as Grover moves toward me so that his face is inches from mine. My hair floats around me. He runs his fingers through it, making it wave like grass in the wind. I do the same.
Then we kiss for a second time. His lips lightly press to mine, and we just stay there, floating just below the surface.
When the boys go up to shower for dinner, Cassie and I sit on the end of the dock, our hair still wet and our faces upturned toward the sun.
“Before my sister was born, my mom used to take a few days off of work every summer so she could take me to the pool. She’d buy me one of those red, white, and blue popsicles from the snack stand.”
“Those are packed with high-fructose corn syrup.”
“I know. I can’t believe my mom let me have it.” I smile at the memory I’d forgotten until now. “The car would get so hot sitting in the sun, but it felt so good at the end of the day.”
“My mom did nothing for me.” Cassie skims her feet across the water.
“That can’t be true. She had to do something.”
“Other than give me lice?” She looks down at her wrinkled hands. I give Cassie a few seconds and a few more. “She did one thing I guess. She taught me how to braid. Every black girl needs to know how to braid hair.”
“Will you braid my hair?”
Cassie looks at me like the idea is ridiculous. “I don’t know how. I’ve only ever braided my own hair.”
“You can do it.” I nudge her leg—the leg with the scar. And then I take a risk and touch it. Cassie pulls away from me for a second and then eases her leg back to my hand. “Please,” I say.
She groans and stands up. “Wait here.”
Cassie comes back to the dock with a comb and a handful of rubber bands she collected in the cabin.
“How many braids are you going to put in my hair?”
“You’ll see.” Her face puckers into a snarky grin.
Cassie’s fingers run over my scalp, separating hair into sections that she ties into little ponytails. She goes one by one, braiding each all the way to the end.
As she combs and thumbs and touches my hair, I get sleepy and calm. She doesn’t say much as she works. Between the sun and the swimming and this, I could fall asleep.
In a half-dreamy state, I say, “I wish I could have done this with Molly. Sisters are supposed to braid each other’s hair.”
Cassie ties a rubber band around one of the braids. “I’m sorry about your sister, Z.” And judging by Cassie’s soft voice, she means it.
“I’m sorry about your life, Cassie.”
“Me, too.”
When my whole head is in braids, Cassie sits back down next to me on the end of the dock and stares off at Lake Kimball.
“What does the bottom of the lake feel like?”
“You’ve felt it.”
“Not here,” she says and then points out to the raft. “There.”
I nod, finally understanding. “The sand is softer out there and there’s less lake weed.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It is.”
Cassie takes a moment and turns to me. “I want to touch the bottom. I want to jump off the raft. I want to be green,” she says. “Will you help me?”
I run my hands over all the braids on my head. “Of course.”
As Cassie and I are walking off the dock for the day, Hannah comes running up to us with letters in her hands.
“From home.” She hands one to me and one to Cassie. In this moment, I realize I’ve never seen Cassie get a letter before.
“Thanks,” I say.
Cassie holds the letter tight between her fingers. She doesn’t look at me but stares off, her eyes wide.
“Cassie?”
She snaps out of it. “I’ll meet you back at the cabin. I’m gonna hit the bathroom in the mess hall.” When she’s halfway up the stairs, she turns around. “By the way, Hannah, I know it was you.”
Hannah gasps. “You told her!”
I shake my head and stutter over my words.
“No,” Cassie yells, turning back around on the stairs. “You just did.” She flings her towel over her shoulder. I keep my eyes on the letter grasped tightly in Cassie’s hand. She’s holding it like she’s afraid it might blow away in the wind and disappear.