“And do you think about them?”
“Maybe. I guess you think you were lucky to have had that summer with them.”
You were lucky to have had that summer with them.
As I approached the campfire, Grace’s words were reverberating in my head. I was going to keep in touch with Maiv. I vowed I would make it happen. She didn’t live far from me, and we both had flexible jobs and were single with no kids. It was doable.
But the rest of them? Camp friends, probably. A bittersweet category of human relationship I hadn’t even known existed before I came here. As I approached the fire and saw everyone gathered around it, the flames making their faces glow, I was struck with a longing, a kind of homesickness in reverse, for them, for this place.
Teddy was holding his guitar but not playing, and there was a spot open next to him. It would have been logical for me to sit there. It was right in front of me. But I was afraid we had the chemistry my Lori and Jo did. If people had been gossiping about us earlier in the week, I hated to think what they were saying now.
Also, I was starting to get spooked over how much I liked him. Actuallylikedhim. Beyond the sex. Which I also liked.
Distance seemed prudent for a variety of reasons.
So I stepped over the log, skirted the fire, and sat in the other empty spot, next to Danny, noticing as I did so that the conversation had come to a halt.
“Wow, do I know how to bring down a party or what?” I joked, thinking that if my aim had been to deflect attention from my and Teddy’s… thing, going out of my way to avoid him was probably not the way to do it.
Or I was overthinking this all.
Let’s go with that.
“Jack was telling us about his book,” Maiv said, and I was shocked. By the fact that Jack was talking about his book, but also by the fact that he was here to begin with. I hadn’t noticed him initially, in my angst over where to sit.
“By all means, continue,” I said.
“Eh, I think that’s about it. I’m stuck. Not much more to say.”
“I don’t know anything about writing novels,” Caleb said, “but when I get stuck on a play, I sometimes think about if I can tell that part of the story—or the whole story—through the point of view of a different character.”
I expected Jack to say something snarky, but he just made a vague murmur of acknowledgment. Wow, was this nature-and-artistic-collaboration stuff finally working on Jack Branksome?
For a while, the only sounds were the lapping of the waves and the crackling of the fire, but then my second shock of the evening was delivered in the form of Teddy’s saying, “Anyone want to hear a song I wrote?”
The group’s answers ranged from “Yes” to “Hell yes.” I said nothing because I wanted to hear his song so badly, the wanting opened a pit inside me.
The song wasn’t a ballad per se. It was peppy, but it was acoustic. Well, of course it was acoustic; he only had a guitar with him. But it sounded like it wasmeantto be acoustic.
It was about… well, I wasn’t sure. On the surface of things, it was about a lake, a lake that the narrator originally saw during a storm and found menacing. But then it turned out that the lake had moods, a kind of sweetness beneath the choppy waves. I wondered if this was the song he’d told me about called “Sweet and Sour.” There was a line about lying back in bed atnight and still feeling the waves that, for reasons I couldn’t articulate, choked me up.
There was a moment of silence when he finished, then everyone started clapping and hooting. I kept looking at my feet, trying to stave off tears. The homesick feeling was deepening. I was going to miss these fires. Hearing people’s music. Watching Maiv take a blank canvas and turn it into something breathtaking.
Everything everyone was making here was so beautiful and terrible. It was like watching baby birds hatch and leave the nest. I’d done that once, when a robin had made a nest in a planter on my porch. The things that came out of those eggs hadn’t looked like birds at all; they’d looked like tiny alien reptiles. They were ugly, but I hadn’t been able to stop looking at them, standing there on my tiptoes in my entryway, spying on them through the little window at the top of my front door. Over the next week, they grew feathers and doubled in size and seemed less like creepy miniature aliens and more like proper animals of the sort that belonged on Earth.
And then they were gone. Out in the world somewhere with flimsy new feathers that made actual flight seem like a long shot.
I was on my feet before I even realized it. I had to leave. Something was happening to me. Something was breaking inside me, or about to break.
“I didn’t realize how tired I am,” I managed to say. I heard myself speaking as if listening to a recording of someone impersonating me. “I have to be up early tomorrow,” my impersonator said. “I have some work to do on a piece for the end-of-camp show.”
Everyone said good night, and I was almost free when Teddysaid, “I’m going, too.” He smirked. “Sorry to run off, but I kind of can’t believe I played that song to you guys, and now I’m going to flee.”
He didn’t even try to be subtle about the way he followed me, bypassing his own front door. If anyone was watching us, it would be obvious. I was too freaked out to care. And tired. I hadn’t been lying back there; I’d suddenly become overwhelmed with exhaustion, my limbs made of cement.
“Hey, hey, Miller.”
I stopped, though I didn’t want to. Or maybe I did. Maybe I just didn’t want to want to.
