Don't Ever Change (4 page)

“I go to Westlake,” he says. “I
went
to Westlake. A year ago.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Tiffany Lee invited me.”

“That’s not possible.”

“We take guitar lessons at the same place. Tiffany shreds,” he says, and then smiles and plays air guitar in my face.

“But Tiffany’s a bitch,” I say. “According to you.”

“Tiffany’s cool,” he says. “You’re probably cool.”

We’re nearly to the front of the line; there’s only one girl before me. When she finishes and leaves the bathroom, I go in, but this toothpick guy rushes in behind me and shuts the door so we’re crammed in the bathroom together.

“Get out,” I say.

“I won’t look.”

“I don’t care,” I tell him. “Go get a beer from the bathtub and leave.”

“I don’t drink beer. I just want to hang out.”

“We can hang out later.”

“When later?”

I hesitate because I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know if I even want to hang out with this guy later, or ever. Someone pounds on the door and starts chanting, “Do it! Do it!” which somehow amuses me and makes me wonder if maybe high school parties
are
Classic, and maybe if I want to be Classic or have a Classic Moment, I should let this guy stay while I pee.

“Fine,” I say.

“Awesome,” he says, and then flips on the faucet and turns around, even putting his fingers in his ears, which makes me think he might not be such a huge jerk after all.

“What’s your name?” I ask, but apparently he doesn’t hear me because he answers, “I’m in a band.”

“What’s your name?”

“We’re going on tour.”

I wipe and flush and then tap his shoulder, and when he turns around he smiles this pretty unbelievable smile. We leave the bathroom and walk through the house together, while I get texted nonstop by Michelle (where r u) and Steph (whoz that???). Then we go outside on the patio, where everyone’s drunkenly put back on their graduation gowns and are all hugging each other, exchanging really heartfelt good-byes, back-lit by the glittering faraway L.A. skyline. In their gowns everyone sort of looks like little teenage judges, but I know I’ve been judge-y too, for four full years, judging all of them. Foster comes outside to join the group, his tape recorder still in hand, and I wonder if I should also be documenting this, so I reach in my bag and grab a pen and my pocket notebook. “What are you doing?” the guy asks.

“Writing all this down,” I say. “What’s your name?”

“Elliot,” he says. I write down
ELLIOT
.

“I’m Eva.”

We’re not facing each other, we’re facing forward, out at the horizon and the distant palm trees. Suddenly I feel like I’m about to lose it, have a Tiffany Lee crying fit, because here I am on my graduation night with a total stranger (who didn’t even graduate today, who never even went to my
school
), instead of with my friends or with people who at least
could
have been my friends if I hadn’t been so judge-y. The palm trees seem so beautiful rustling in the night, which I know is an L.A. cliché, but what about when it’s just true? And what about when they seem extra beautiful because you know you have to leave them for college in Boston in less than three months?

Then Elliot takes my hand, holds it. “Want to go hang out somewhere?”

“Can a person leave their own high school graduation party without saying good-bye?”

“Duh they can,” he says.

Then we’re at his car and he’s opening my door, and once we’re driving away Elliot turns the radio to K-Earth 101, the oldies station, and they’re playing “Strawberry Letter 23,” a song I used to sing along to with my mother in the car when I was younger. It occurs to me this would be a really perfect song for me and Elliot to have as “our song,” if something like “our song” ever became necessary.

I write
STRAWBERRY LETTER 23
in my notebook as Elliot pulls into the In-N-Out drive-through, the singer singing, “I am free, flying in her arms, over the sea.” I order a bun with only lettuce, tomato, and grilled onions, and Elliot gets a chocolate milk shake with fries and that’s it. We eat quickly and then I’m dying to kiss Elliot and see where that leads but remember I have my camp interview in the morning and it’s late anyway, especially for a school night, even though technically it’s not one.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

STEVEN THE CAMP
director shows me around the Sunny Skies grounds, his hands in his cargo pocket shorts, fidgeting with his keys. I’m wearing a dress because I thought it’d be smart to try and look nice and responsible and clean for an interview, but I realize now this position is more about being outdoorsy and into sports and having a good spirit and a positive attitude. For some reason on this particular day there isn’t a single kid anywhere, so the camp is oddly peaceful, almost idyllic, which makes me know for sure:
I want this job
.

“We loved having Courtney here,” Steven says.

“Oh, thanks.”

“Have you ever babysat?” Steven asks.

“Sure. For one of my neighbor’s daughters, a bunch of times.”

“How’d that go?”

“Okay,” I say. “Though maybe not great. But it wasn’t my fault. The girl was really . . .
antagonistic
.”

“At this camp we as counselors have to have realistic expectations,” Steven says.

“Like how?”

“Well, we
want
the kids to like us, that’s fantastic, but even when they don’t, we’re still here to do a job. And that job is to give them an incredible camp experience.”

“Even if they don’t want one, you mean,” I say.

“Every kid wants it to be incredible,” Steven tells me. “Kids love camp.”

We pass by an archery field, two pools, some volleyball courts, and a muddy lake with canoes docked against a pier. He shows me the nurse’s station and the amphitheater and the kitchen, which has a walk-in refrigerator stacked with thousands of school-size paper milk cartons. There’s a bead-and-feather closet in the craft lodge and a stable with two old Clydesdales and maybe a half mile of grass so green it looks neon where the kids play capture the flag and freeze tag.

That’s when I come up with an idea for a story: a girl who has the power to actually freeze someone during freeze tag, which makes her the most popular and feared girl in camp. It’s kind of like that Stephen King book
Firestarter
mixed with that part in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
where the Queen freezes Mr. Tumnus and the other animals of Narnia. It’s kind of sci-fi, but maybe with sci-fi Mr. Roush would agree that you don’t have to live it first, or really
know
it.

“What would you say you’re best at?” Steven asks.

“Um, in what sense?”

“At Sunny Skies, where do you think you’d shine brightest?”

“Maybe arts and crafts? Or I could be a song leader at assemblies,” I suggest. “Or maybe even just a floater who roams around helping wherever needed?”

“I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit,” Steven says. “Foster Hoyt told me you’re funny and smart and very dependable.”

“Thanks, Foster.”

“Well, it seems like you’d fit in great here. I’d like to give you a group. They’re the nine-year-old girls,” Steven says. “They’re nine really great girls.”

“Nine,” I say. “That sounds like a lot.”

“You’ll have Alyssa for help. She’s your very own CIT—counselor-in-training,” Steven says. “The CITs are a great group of thirteen-year-olds.”

“So I have to watch a thirteen-year-old too.”

Steven laughs. “That’s funny,” he says.

Back in the office, Steven puts together a massive packet of papers for me, running down the basic info. There’s so many rules and guidelines and suggestions I can tell I won’t be able to read them all. It’s not that I think the job is a sleepwalk, but I feel like in each day’s schedule I’d prefer to try and spend as little time as possible managing the girls so I can focus on just absorbing the overall experience, gathering writerly research.

Steven hands me a clipboard with a Sunny Skies pen in the clip (perfect for jotting notes on plot ideas and character stuff). Then he hands me two Sunny Skies Counselor shirts, both size XL, a hat, and my camp songbook, which is also so XL that it comes housed in a fat three-ring binder. I’m so loaded up with booklets and info and embroidered baseball caps I can’t even shake Steven’s hand when I get up to go.

“We had our Counselor Kickoff last weekend,” Steven says. “Just a chance to get to know each other a little better before the kids arrive in two weeks.”

“Trust falls, right? Role-playing,” I say.

Steven laughs.

“I’m sure it’s all here in the Trust Fall and Role-Playing packet,” I say.

“The girls are going to like you,” Steven says, still laughing.

Then Steven tells me I have spunk, whatever that is, and then he gets serious and reminds me it’s always okay to ask for help. He doesn’t seem to be referring to anything specifically, so he must just mean in general. I ask him to help with the door to make sure he knows I
get it
, but as Steven’s walking me to my car I worry that even though I’ve already been given the job, maybe I haven’t impressed him enough, haven’t fully won him over with my spirit and enthusiasm.

“We can do one of those role-playing exercises right now if you want,” I say.

I throw the camp stuff in my backseat and stand up straight and squint my eyes, and not just because I’m not wearing my glasses, but also because it’s my concentrating face.

“I’m ready,” I tell Steven.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, pretend I’m a girl who wants to play prisoner ball when everyone else in the group has decided on TV tag.”

“Does it matter that I don’t know what either of those things are?”

“No,” Steven says, and laughs.

“Listen,” I say, “think about all the times in your life that you’ll be able to play prisoner ball. It’s a long, long life. Think about all the times you’ll be able to play TV tag. Hundreds of times, I bet. Aren’t the differences between them so tiny that in the end it’s more about just playing and having fun and being out in the sunshine and bonding with your friends? So why even attach yourself to any
one
game?”

“But I love prisoner ball, it’s my favorite game,” Steven says.

“Do you know what the word ‘open-minded’ means? You have to be open-minded. Like, what if you play TV tag and then it becomes your favorite game of all time and you forget all about prisoner ball?”

“But can’t the other girls just try prisoner ball for a minute?”

“It’s kind of like mob mentality—have you ever heard of that?”

“No.”

“It’s like how maybe TV tag
isn’t
what all the girls want to play. Maybe it’s only what
one
girl wants to play, but she convinced another girl and then another and by then you have three girls who all want to play TV tag, which makes the other less-sure girls feel nervous because they want to be liked and they want to belong. Does that make sense?”

“Not really.”

“What I’m saying is, good for you for standing out and being super opinionated even if it means you’re an outcast for a minute. Good for you! And you know what, you don’t have to play TV tag if you don’t want to. You can just keep score on my cool clipboard.”

“But the girl wants to play, Eva.”

“Great,” I say. “Problem solved then.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I CAN TELL
Elliot’s not going to ask me out on a
real
date, which is fine, because honestly that’s never how the classic books about romance, love, etc. start off anyway. No stuffy, priggish Victorian novels begin with the sentence, “First he asked her out on a date,” because obviously Darcy or Heathcliff have to be super cagey and repressed about everything. Asking someone out shows
vulnerability
, and apparently a thousand years ago it was considered totally unsexy for a guy to be vulnerable.