Page 6 of Given Our History

“You met him. He was”—so many things that would be difficult to summarize, so I settle for—“the tall one, with the glasses. He came to my graduation at UMD, when I got my bachelor’s. You would’ve been, what, ten? Eleven?”

This seems to jar her memory. “We went to get dinner afterward.”

“Right.” I hesitate. I promised myself I wasn’t going to dwell on it. But I also feel the need to tell someone. To acknowledge it out loud, so that the truth of it can calcify, become tangible, and maybe then I can figure out what I’m supposed to do. “We had a sort of falling-out. I haven’t talked to him in probably a decade. And then this morning, I found out that he’s coming here. To teach at Irving.”

“What, were you stalking his LinkedIn or something?”

“No.” I’m slightly offended she thinks I’m enough of a workaholic to have a LinkedIn account. “The chair of the History Department asked me to share an office with him. Share an office with Teddy, I mean, not with the chair. There are chairs in my office. Just not, you know, the chair.” I should really get into the habit of thinking through a whole sentence before speaking, but word vomit is sort of a Fernsby family trait. I’ve just accepted that it’s genetic at this point and given up on trying to change it.

We’re interrupted by an employee in a baseball cap and a bright red Bucky’s polo delivering two plates to the table. “Why are you telling me this?” Reagan asks warily.

“Because,” I say, self-conscious. Little sisters have a way of doing that to you. “I guess I just needed someone to vent to.”

“You could try a life coach. See if they can help you get your priorities straight.”

I flick a french fry across the table at her. “You’re one to talk.”

She deconstructs her burger, peeling slices of mayo-slathered tomato from the bun and setting them on a napkin. “So, is this supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing? Like, are you hoping to reconnect with him, or are we talking more of an ‘avoid him at all costs’ situation?”

“It’s complicated,” I say, picking at the sesame seeds on my own bun. I’m not sure that I’m all that hungry, but I should probably eat. “It’s just—” I shrug. “There’s a lot of history there.”

That doesn’t even begin to cover it.

CHAPTER3

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO

Rain hammered against the tin roof of our cabin, dashing any lingering hopes of playing volleyball or capture the flag today—or the rest of our first week, if our new cabin leader was to be believed. Miss Andrews had parked herself in front of an old television the size of a shoe box in the girls’ common room, watching The Office. There was little to entertain the rest of us, at least not cooped up like this, which left us with one option: braving the storm.

I stood beside the door with Isabel Santos, my cabinmate from the previous summer. She’d grown a couple inches since the last time I saw her, bony ankles poking out from a pair of brown gauchos. “Ready?” she asked, shrugging her lanky arms out of her faded Hollister hoodie so that she could canopy it over both of us.

“Let’s do it.” I ducked beneath the hoodie and we charged out into the gray downpour, squealing in unison when it pattered against our heads.

We sprinted for the cafeteria. The ground was wet and sloshy, rivulets cutting between the cabins, splattering the white off-brand Converse I’d begged Mom to buy me the month before, but what choice did I have? It wasn’t like this last year. Last year it was muggy most of September, hot enough that the camp counselors gave up on wrangling us for educational activities like bird-watching and gardening and instead let us spend most of our time swimming in the lake and pummeling each other with dodgeballs. Socialization is key to childhood development, Mom had told me when she first enrolled me in Appalachian Adventure Camp the previous autumn. That was the real reason we were all here—everyone assumed homeschooled kids couldn’t possibly get enough socialization at home, so the solution was to throw us in a bunch of cabins together and hope we all turned out all right.

But there wasn’t much socialization going on in that stuffy cabin, and I planned to tell Mom exactly that when she asked why my shoes were muddy.

We slipped into the cafeteria in a flurry of laughter, the rain chasing us inside. The scent of warm, dry pine clung to the air, and knotty exposed beams crisscrossed over our heads. Izzy went to hang her now-soaked hoodie on the coatrack near the old gas radiator, her wet hair sticking to her cheeks in slick black tentacles. I stomped my shoes clean on the mat so that the lunch lady wouldn’t yell at us, but the lunch lady was nowhere to be seen. Lunch ended hours ago, and dinner wasn’t until seven o’clock, so the cafeteria was empty except for a group from the boys’ cabins, huddled around a table where they were playing one of those card games like Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic: The Gathering. Heads turned and necks craned at our arrival, but they quickly determined that we weren’t anyone of interest.

“Where are the games?” Izzy asked.

I gestured toward the pine cabinet on the far wall, one of its doors permanently ajar because the hinges were bent. “I saw one of the older girls get them out after dinner the other night.” Inside was a treasure trove of board games: Yahtzee and Life and an edition of Mall Madness that had probably been wedged back in there since the nineties—all games I wasn’t allowed to play at home because my parents didn’t think they were educational enough.

We were in the middle of a heated debate about Mall Madness versus Guess Who? when shouts and pitchy laughter erupted from the boys behind us. Both of us whipped around. Their heads were all bowed around the table, oblivious to our presence.

Izzy exhaled, peeling a tendril of damp hair from her face and tucking it behind her ear as we turned back to the cabinet. We settled on playing Guess Who? first, but with the condition that I owed Izzy a game of Mall Madness. We were barely at our table for five minutes before a boy with a mess of ink-black hair broke off from the rest of the group and swaggered over to us. He was the size of a fourth grader and dressed in cargo pants and a severely oversized Alaska sweatshirt that might’ve been hand-me-down, but he slid into the chair beside Izzy like he was a celebrity gracing us with his presence.

Mohammad Darvish, Izzy’s sworn rival in all things camp-related. Last year she had beaned him so hard with a dodgeball it gave him a black eye, but he kept on taunting her anyway.

“Guess Who? is lame,” he announced to no one in particular.

Izzy didn’t spare him a second glance. “You’re lame, Darvish.”

“Seriously, it’s a silly kids’ game. Just look at the cartoony way they drew all the faces.”

She rolled her eyes so hard they threatened to get stuck. “You’d know all about kids’ games, since that’s probably all you play.”

“No way. Back at home, my family plays trivia every game night. I’m pretty good at it. We watch Jeopardy! all the time and I always know the answers. Because I’m an intellectual,” he emphasized when neither of us showed any signs of interest.