And it can only mean one thing.
I reach the boys’ camp and pass the mess hall—everyone already inside for breakfast. They won’t return to their cabins until after dinner, when they will sneak cigarettes and eat the candy bars they keep hidden under their mattresses, where the counselors won’t find them. But the counselors are lazy. They’ve barely taken notice of my return and then immediate disappearance again. I’ve spent only one day in my bunk since I returned from the woods, and not once did a counselor come to speak to me, to haul me off to the main office where the camp director could ask me questions about where I’ve been. About where I was the night a boy died. They’ve stopped caring.
Or maybe the other boys told them a story, a lie. Said I ran away again. Said I made it down the mountain.
The fresh layer of snowfall from last night dusts the landscape, and I make tracks through the trees until I come to cabin number fourteen, and slip inside.
The room is as unremarkable as it was the last time I was here. But this time I’ve come looking for something: a memory maybe, something to explain the black spots in my mind.
Something to make all the pieces fit together.
The cabin smells of damp earth, and I walk to the bunks, willing my mind to remember the rest, to remember what happened that night. The cemetery. Jasper and Rhett and Lin. And Max was there too—he was there and we were all drinking. We were laughing aboutsomething, our laughter ringing in my ears. A bell that won’t stop.
I climb the wood ladder and lie on my bunk. Lin’s bunk below mine. And on the opposite wall, Jasper’s and Rhett’s.Four boys to a cabin.
But where did Max sleep? Not here with us—somewhere else.
In a different cabin?
I roll onto my back and squeeze my eyes closed.Why does my brain refuse to remember? What is it blotting out?The truth about what happened. About what I did.
A hole is widening in my chest: the place where I have ruined everything. Where I lied to her. Where I have nothing left to lose.
Nothing to go back to.
No one to trust.No one who trusts me.
I open my eyes and peer up at the low ceiling—at all the little knife marks, the divots and slashes that form words and images and meaningless symbols. The face of a rabbit etched into the wood stares back at me. Several trees carved along the lowest, sloping part of the ceiling, crude lines for every branch, create a tiny forest. Every cussword you can think of has been slashed into the boards. Permanently preserved. Boys’ names crisscross the wood beams, a way to mark their time here—a reminder that a hundred boys have slept in this bunk before me.
But a name catches my eye, carved where the ceiling meets the wall, nearly hidden. Each letter is cut deeply, as if in anger. A night when he couldn’t sleep. When the trees felt too close. The air too cold. His home too far away.
The letters spell:MAXCAULFIELD.
Max slept here.In this cabin. In this bunk.
I sit up and touch the wood grain, my finger sliding along the indentation of each letter.Max slept here.
Bursts of filtered moonlight cut across my vision, the memory of snow against my skin. I think of Nora, her hand pressed to mine last night, but I push the memory away. My mind plays tricks on me—always drifting back to her. I try to recall the cemetery, laughter rising from the others’ throats. But I wasn’t laughing with them.They were never my friends, my mind repeats. They were laughing atme.
Taunting me.
I sit up and scramble down the ladder, away from the bunk—from the place where I once slept.But it wasn’t always my bunk.
I arrived at camp late in the season, when the air had already turned sharp and the boys had already been assigned their cabins. I was the new kid. The outsider.
I never belonged.
Max had gotten in trouble before I arrived. I remember it in waves now, breaking against the shore of my mind. Salt and foam, crashing over me. He had been caught sneaking into the counselors’ cabins and rooting through their stuff, caught spiking his morning coffee with whiskey. Offenses that were worse than most of the boys’.
So the counselors moved him to a cabin beside the mess hall, a single room with no other boys. A cabin flanked by the counselors’ cabins, where he couldn’t easily sneak out without being heard.I remember it now, when I arrived at camp and the boys told me that I had been assigned to Max’s old bunk.
He hated me for it—like it was my fault.
I move back away from the bunks, my heels hitting the heavy wood door.
They made me go to the cemetery that night; they laughed and passed around a bottle of booze and I stood rigid, ready for a fight. Ready for them to attack me.
We were never friends.
