I was watching the television that morning, which I like to do sometimes when I wake up and drink my tea, and the anchorman was talking about a young girl who had committed suicide. She was fourteen years old, he said, an eighth-grader at D------- Middle School. They showed her school picture, and she looked like they all look at that age, you know, hair sort of wiry and burnt from using the hair straighteners too much, with braces and a heavy, clunky smile. At that age, those girls want so much and its tough for them to figure out how to get it. The way I’ve seen it, they end up two different ways: they end up nasty and on the inside or they end up crying and on the outside.
Anyways, they were saying that the girl had cut up her wrists. I could imagine her poor parents coming home and finding her little bedroom at the top of the stairs covered in blood. First the mother came home from work, then the father. Mom was in too great of a shock to call Dad and warn him. Neither of them cried, not until later.
Such a great shame, it really was.
I turned off the television at a quarter to eight, put on my coat and got in the car. It had been one of the worst winters Massachusetts had seen in quite some time, and the cold made my lower back ache. The arthritis and the cold worked together in my fingers that morning and I winced as I gripped the steering wheel. It was a long drive out to Pembroke.
It was that time of year again where my co-Head Counselor Linda and I headed up to camp to inspect how the bunks and other sites around camp were faring in the winter. It’s one of the duller parts of my job. It can also get quite nostalgic and depressing, because in some cases nothing can be worse than seeing one’s summer haven buried in snow.
When I got out of the car, Linda was already there. We made the annual jokes about how we’re too old to be doing this now that we’ve got grandchildren and arthritis and why don’t we hire those nice European maintenance men sooner so they can do this instead of us. Once we were done with that we divvy up sections of camp to inspect. Linda headed off to the tennis courts and I drove down to the horseshoe-shaped group of cabins in the middle of camp.
The dead girl from the news was sitting on the porch railing of Bunk 10. I remembered that the weather app on my new iPhone had said that it was twenty-three degrees out, yet she was wearing shorts and a tank-top. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she swung her legs back and forth as she sucked on a cherry red double-stick popsicle, the kind that we give out for evening snack in the summer. “You’re wearing inappropriate shoes, you know,” I said to her. The words slipped out of my mouth without my even having to think about them. Flip-flops, like the pink ones she was wearing, were only allowed to be worn to and from the pool or waterfront.
“I know,” she said back, slurping the popsicle juice, “I left my sneakers somewhere else.” She quickly stuck most of the popsicle into her mouth to avoid dropping a bitten-off chunk into the snow below her feet. The slurping noise continued. I hated that noise.
She was wearing many frayed bracelets over the cuts on her wrists. Some were string bracelets, with a candy-cane or diamond stitch, some were beaded bracelets with sayings on them like “luv boyz” or “summer sisters”, and some were made of rainbow-colored elastic bands.
I wasn’t in the mood for talking quite yet, so I left the dead girl on the porch of Bunk 10 to finish her popsicle and went around the back of the horseshoe to inspect bunks 9A and 9B, where the older girls lived. When I came back, she had finished the popsicle and was chewing on the sticks. She looked up at me and I swear I could hear the wood splinter between her molars.
“Have any of your girls ever ended up like me?” she asked, muffled through the popsicle sticks. I wasn’t surprised that she asked the question so soon after turning up, or that she even asked it at all.
Your girls…my girls. And they were. It was a strange kind of ownership I felt I had over the girls I worked with. It took my old brain gears a few seconds to get churning, but I began to flip through names and years and age groups in my head. Over the years, some girls had stayed in touch with camp, but many had dropped away. I couldn’t help but start to sweat and fidget when I wondered whether any of them hadn’t just dropped away, but dropped out of life altogether. At least I knew that none of my girls had ended up on the news.
“Hello? Did you hear my question?”? “Yes, yes I did. And to answer it, no, not that I can think of.” The dead girl gave the tiniest chuckle and hopped off the porch railing.“Have any of them come close?” she tried.
A harder question to answer. I stayed silent, which I suppose really ended up being an answer in and of itself. “That’s what I thought,” said the dead girl. “But lucky them I guess, if they’re still alive.”
“They’ll come back next summer.” I said, thinking of opening day at the end of June. With the little ones, it was apparent if they were sad within the first few days of camp. They always cried openly. With the big girls, you didn’t see their sadness start to unfold for weeks sometimes. It had become a fairly obvious fact that they were just better at hiding it.
I went into the Head Counselor’s cabin to do inventory there and found a little pair of pink goggles that had fallen behind a shelf. They read “E. Feinstein”, and I tucked them away in my purse for later. I would call Esther Feinstein’s mother when I got back to the office on Monday.
When I came back outside, the dead girl had disappeared, and the first wild thought I had was that she must have gone to first period. I rubbed my temples and sighed. Then I took off my gloves and picked up some snow with my bare hands to remind of what time of the year I was really in. It stung and my hands shook.
Next I walked down to the boat shed and mind-numbingly counted every life jacket, kayak paddle, and canoe oar. Names of girls who had worked on the waterfront covered the old wooden walls, which always made me smile. We were required to tell the girls at the beginning of every summer that they were absolutely not permitted to sign any piece of camp, but it was a rule that always went (happily) disregarded.
When I came out of the boat shed, the dead girl was standing there wrapped in a towel, goggles tangled in her hair and goggle imprints on her forehead. She was chewing on the wet ends of her ponytail as snowflakes began to fall on her exposed shoulders. She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. I asked her if she wanted to walk with me to the gymnasium, and she nodded.
“Did you mean to do it?” I asked. ? “Sorta yes and sorta no.” Her flip-flops, which now I couldn’t scold her for wearing, alternately crunched and squelched against the slush covering the paved road.
“Do you wish someone had stopped you?”? “Sorta yes and sorta no to that one too.” Infuriatingly ambivalent answers were common among girls her age. I shook it off and tried a different question.
“Did you ever go to camp?”? “No,” the dead girl shook her head, “my parents didn’t have the money.”? “We do offer financial- “ I stopped myself as I realized how ridiculous I sounded, giving a sales pitch to a figment of my own imagination. The dead girl chuckled.
“Thanks for the offer, but I was never into the whole camp thing much anyway. B----- girls, no air conditioning, no TV…”
“You seem to like it now,” I rebutted, putting what I hoped was a reassuring hand on her toweled back. “When in Rome,” she said, arching away from me.
I was then overcome by a sudden and extreme dislike for the dead girl. It felt as though her presence was a judgement, her outfit and demeanor a mask that she had stolen from someone who it rightfully belonged to. She was selfish. My girls were not. My girls struggled, of course they did, but they always came back. This girl did not come back, or really she hadn’t come at all, not in the right time or the right place.
I began to walk quickly ahead of her towards the gym. “Hey, wait! Come back! Talk to me!” yelled the dead girl. I didn’t listen, and I went into the gym without her. You can always choose not to listen to dead girls, after all.
The gym was massive, and my steps echoed. I imagined how it looked on the first night of camp during counselor skits, and I felt three hundred pairs of eyes smiling at me. I struck a pose. They loved it when I did that. They loved seeing someone who looked and spoke like their grandmother trying to be like them. When I imagined them, they were always smiling.
When I left the gym, the dead girl wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere along the path back to the horseshoe, not on the beach or in the pool, not getting water at the dining hall. With every step, I realized her absence was far more unnerving to me than her presence had been. I felt angry, I worried, I felt almost laughably crazy. But underneath it all was a remarkable feeling of self-doubt.
I ended up back in the horseshoe, and gravitated towards the Head Counselors cabin. I pulled out the phone from inside the closet doors painted yellow, blue, purple and green for color war, and I plugged it into the wall. I dialed zero zero seven into the phone, the number that activated the camp-wide intercom system. “Listen, listen up!” I heard my voice echo outside the cabin. I knew that if I had been standing on the shore of the frozen lake I would have heard it, or if I had been in the athletics field, or on the ropes course, or in the lodge. I could feel the shadows of three-hundred and some-odd girls heads turn to listen to the sound of my voice. Outside, the snow kept falling. “Everybody should be headed to flag! Everybody should be headed out to flag.” I had said the words so many times they required almost no thought at all. The shepherd was calling to the sheep to come out of their cabins to line up by bunk on the hill so the flag could be lowered for the day.
“You’ll all be okay, you know that right?” Right? Right? Right?  “You’ll all be okay.” The echo died, and the camp was silent.
When Linda and I returned to our cars just past lunch-time, she asked me if I was okay.
“You look awful, Sue, I’m sorry to say. There’s a minute clinic down the road, you know. Maybe it’s just from the cold. We really shouldn’t be doing this anymore.” She smiled and I think I forgot to return the favor. I handed her my inspection sheets and drove off, ending up in a Panera somewhere off the highway.
I nursed a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup for almost two hours. A little girl came in with her mother and I recognized her from one of our new camper orientation meetings. I waved at her and she waved back. She pointed me out to her mother and we chatted for a bit and then the two left and the girl smiled at me from the door with chunks of chocolate-chip cookie stuck in her teeth. That night I dreamed I saw her on the news.