True Blue (6 page)

August 25

Day 4

The chaos begins.

Everything is fine to start with. Stephanie is in her bunk for the wake-up song. She stays with us for breakfast and keeps her mouth shut during Bible study.

But when we go out to the clothesline behind the cabin to get our bathing suits for morning swim, all our suits are gone.

Stephanie’s is the only one hanging there.

“She’s mean but she’s not too bright,” I say to Casey. “No swimming for her today! She’s not swimming for the rest of camp.”

I start to head across the cabin to where Stephanie has already changed into another bathing suit, but Casey puts her hand on my arm to stop me.

“It’s underwear day!” she calls out, all chipper. “Today everyone swims in their t-shirts and underwear.”

And just like that, the other campers stop complaining. They act like swimming in underwear is the most fun thing they’ve ever done. They chatter and screech and laugh at the way their t-shirts balloon up in the water.

I take some pleasure in seeing how annoyed Stephanie looks at being ignored, but that pleasure goes away when Casey draws her into the group and encourages her to play with the others. She ends up having a good time after all.

And I have to swim in my underwear.

Cabin Six finds our bathing suits when they’re out on a nature walk. The suits are in the marsh, floating on water lilies and snagged on cattails.

“This is a bad kid,” I say to Casey. “You’re not seeing her for who she really is. We’ve got to make a plan to handle her or she’ll ruin camp for everyone.”

“She was with us all day,” Casey says. “She must have snuck out of the cabin early in the morning, gathered the suits off the line, and taken them to the marsh. But I’ve been awake since five-thirty. She was in her bunk the whole time.”

Casey wakes up early to work on the correspondence courses she’s taking over the summer so she can take four months off to go to Australia.

“It must have been dark when she did it,” Casey says. “Stephanie’s actually a pretty brave little kid.”

“Brave like Jack the Ripper,” I mutter, but Casey doesn’t hear me. She turns the whole thing into a marshland lesson, helping the girls wade through the marsh, identifying each plant a bathing suit has landed on, pointing out the pond skippers and the shells of dragonfly larvae that have shed their skins.

The kids all have a great time.

Even Stephanie.

“Can I wear your hair clip?” she asks Casey in a sweet voice.

Casey doesn’t much care about her clothes. But she does care about her hair clip. Her father made it for her when he was in rehab after his accident. There’s a drawing of a praying mantis tooled into it.

But before Casey can tell her no, Stephanie’s hand has gone up to the clip. She starts to pull.

Casey yanks her head back but Stephanie keeps a strong grip on the hair clip and yanks it away. Some of Casey’s hair comes out along with it.

“Owww!” Casey cries. “That hurts! Is that a kind way to behave?” She tries to grab the hair clip back, but Stephanie runs off with it, laughing.

I chase after her. I’m a runner and she’s a laughing little kid without a plan. I catch up to her easily and pry the hair clip out of her hand. She doesn’t really fight me for it. But she stares at me, hard, as I hand it back to Casey.

Stephanie has finally targeted Casey.

And Casey at last begins to realize that I am right.

I opened Casey’s letter during history class the next day while Mr. Cloutier was droning on and on about the history of trade unions. Inside the envelope was one sheet of paper.
Foxfire Youth Detention Center
was printed at the top of it.

I know every word of her letters by heart. They are seared in my brain. This one read:

Dear Dragonfly,

Who could have imagined that the summer would end like this? I wish I could take back every angry word I ever said to Stephanie, every time I lost my temper. I feel so bad. I feel so guilty. I’m really the one responsible for her death.

I hate it here. They won’t let me go outside. I get strip-searched every time they move me from one place to another. You’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal, after a whole summer of getting changed in front of campers. But it does bother me.

They keep me in a cell all by myself, away from the other girls. They say I’m a security risk because of my so-called escape attempt from the police station. I didn’t try to escape, you know. They left me sitting on a bench beside an open door. I saw some grasshoppers leaping around in the weeds so I walked outside to get a closer look. Being under arrest didn’t seem real to me until six big cops landed on top of me and ground my face into the sidewalk.

My family is taking this really hard. They say your parents and other people in town are being kind to them, but I know they are lying, although not about your parents. I saw the faces of the people in that courtroom. They’d like to hang me from the Welcome to Galloway sign. I can’t say I’d disagree with them.

I’m allowed only one piece of paper and I’m running out of room. Come on, Dragonfly, swoop on over here and rescue me. Turn the world back to the night of the sleep-out, when Stephanie was still alive and we were just annoyed with her.

With love from your faithful sidekick,

Praying Mantis

I read through the letter over and over, ignoring the history lecture and almost missing the bell at the end of class. I tried to imagine Casey in a cell. I got an image in my head of her locked inside one of her own killing jars.

In my next class, English Lit, I turned to an empty page in my loose-leaf binder. I wrote at the top of the page:
Dear Praying Mantis
. I stared at that for a while, scribbled over it, and wrote,
Dear Casey
in its place.

I scribbled through that, too.

All weekend long, I planned to answer her letter. Homework and chores got in the way. Mom got me a weekend job making beds in the nursing home where she worked. I changed dozens of peed-on sheets, told the old people it didn’t matter, and rejoiced when I got out of there.

There were lots of excuses for not answering her letter, all very good ones.

Late that night, I biked down to Casey’s street and rode around and around in a circle in front of her house.

“Jess?”

I was so startled I nearly fell off my bike. Mrs. White was standing on the edge of her lawn. She was in her bathrobe. Her face looked hollowed-out and her back was stooped. It looked like she was holding herself together with toothpicks.

I got off my bike. “I’m sorry if I woke you up. I didn’t think I was making any noise.”

“You weren’t,” she said. “I just haven’t been able to sleep much. You either, by the looks of it.”

“No,” I admitted. “Not much.” I stared at the ground below my handlebars. I didn’t want to look at Mrs. White.

“Come inside,” she said. “I’ll make some cocoa. Maybe it will make us both sleepy.”

I wanted to go in with her. I wanted to sit in her calm and clean kitchen and drink hot chocolate, then sit in the bug den with her and Mr. White and watch an old black and white movie from their collection.

“I should go home,” I said instead.

“What happened that night?” she whispered.

I didn’t answer her. I think she was asking the universe more than she was asking me.

“Why are they blaming Casey? They know her. She grew up here. They know us. What happened that night?”

“I should go home,” I said again.

Mrs. White reached over the handlebars and gave me a loving, tender hug. It was comforting and familiar, the same hug she had been giving me all my life—the same safe harbor I’d always sailed into when the storms blew inside my mother. I watched her head back across the lawn and slip inside the house. She closed the door and I was shut out.

I biked around Galloway for a while longer and ended up at the bridge. I stood and watched the river flow below me for a long time before I felt tired enough to go back home to bed.

A few days later, I leafed through my history textbook, looking for Casey’s letter, where I thought I’d left it. The letter wasn’t in the book. It had to be in my locker at school.

I thought no more about it until the next morning. The city newspaper had a box in front of our high school. Casey’s hand-written note—printed just as she wrote it and framed in a thick black band—showed clearly through the glass of the newspaper box. I stared at it and could feel myself turning to stone.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. The letter had fallen out of my history book, and whoever had picked it up decided to turn it into a bit of quick cash—or some other advantage.

I looked into the face of every kid heading into the school building. Any one of them could have done it.

And then I stopped looking, because suddenly I didn’t want to know who’d done it. Because if I knew for sure, I’d have to do something.

Why would someone betray
me
? What had I ever done to anybody?

What if Casey thought
I’d
given the letter to the newspaper? Now I’d have to write to her and tell her it wasn’t me.

And then I was angry at Casey. Why would she think I had done it? Where was her sense of loyalty?

“Good morning, Dragonfly,” giggled some girls, bumping into me as they passed by.

Something special, something private, which had remained a secret between us all these years, was now out in the open for the world to see and laugh at.

I leaned against the newspaper box and vomited all over it.

“What is this?”

Mom confronted me at dinner that night. “How did this happen?” She slammed the newspaper down so hard she knocked over my glass of milk.

I got up to get a cloth.

“Leave it!” she shrieked. “Answer me!”

“Her letter must have slipped out of my history book,” I said.

Dad was working late. There was nobody to buffer her.

“You let her letter get away from you? And now look what’s happened!”

“I didn’t plan it,” I protested.

“But you don’t seem very upset about it, either. Why aren’t you angry? Why aren’t you upset? Why aren’t you railing?”

“You don’t know what I’m feeling,” I shot back at her. “Besides, you’re railing enough for the both of us.”

“Is this whole town
crazy
?” Mom threw up her hands and strode about the dining room with dizzying speed. She grabbed the phone and punched in a number. “Gerald, I want you to sue that newspaper! I want you to find out who gave them that letter and have them charged with theft. Hire a detective; get the police on this. You’re a lawyer, you’ll know what to do. I don’t care what it costs. We’ll put up our house, we’ll cash in our insurance—” She slammed down the receiver. “Damn answering machine.”

She went into the living room. I could hear her muttering to herself. I grabbed a wet cloth from the kitchen and wiped up the milk, then cleared the table. Mom never ate when she got like this—the meal she’d prepared was inedible anyway. The potatoes were still raw and the meatloaf barely had a brown tinge to it. I put the food back in the oven to cook properly and made a peanut butter and banana sandwich to take to my room.

Gerald Grey had received calls like that before. He knew better than to act on them. I’d seen Mom go off so many times that it didn’t worry me anymore. Not really. I knew she’d get only just so crazy, then my dad would call the doctor, and the ambulance would come. She’d spend a few weeks in the mental health ward of the city hospital, get zapped with electricity, and have her meds adjusted. Then they’d return her to us—a little shaky, a little forgetful, a little embarrassed, but otherwise all right.

Dad and I had learned to live with it. One year, after Mom went through the savings account in three months and ran up huge debts on the credit cards, he limited her access to their money, so there wasn’t too much damage she could do.

Whenever she started feeling better, she’d go off her meds. She’d get great schemes in her head—landscaping the yard, or getting herself into medical school, or painting the shingles on the roof white to attract better vibes from the universe. Sometimes she made speeches on street corners. The town knew her and tolerated her. That’s something good you can say about Galloway. No one ever made fun of my mom. Not even other kids. That’s because their parents are probably even stranger than mine.

If someone’s parents are a
little
weird—for example if they wear checkered pants and striped shirts at the same time—they’re fair game. But if something is seriously strange, no one says anything. When my mom went crazy, or another kid’s mom went bald from chemotherapy, or Bruce Catskill’s dad beat him with a big jug of orange juice in the parking lot of the grocery store in front of Bruce’s friends, no one laughed. It’s like kids know that’s a heavy thing, that’s off-limits.

Dad reacted to Mom’s condition by becoming so steady to the point of being boring. Over the years, he grew more and more even-tempered. If he were a pencil line, he’d be gray lead, straight across the page, no ups or downs. Mom would be brilliant colors in squiggles and circles, filling up all the blank spaces—and then deep black, running low along the bottom.

“What if I turn out like my mom?” I used to ask Casey. “What if I turn out like my dad?”

“What if you wake up one morning and you’re a giant cockroach?” Casey would answer.

That answer always gave me great comfort. Some things you can control, some things you can’t. For the time being, I wasn’t like either of my parents and I wasn’t a cockroach. I could go on with that.

When I went downstairs to turn the oven off, Mom was sitting in the dark.

“I’ve never had a best friend, Hey Jude,” she said. I heard the chink of glass as she poured herself a drink. I caught a whiff of whiskey. Dad didn’t keep liquor in the house. Mom must have brought it in and hid it from him. “I always wanted one, someone who would be as much a part of me as my breath and my skin. But I never had one. Sit down,” she said, but gently. “Sometimes I pretend I’ve got one. Isn’t that silly? A woman as old as I am, with an imaginary friend? When I’m walking around town, I pretend she’s with me and we laugh at the funny things we see. Everything is funny when you’ve got a best friend. But you know that.”

She said nothing for a long while, just kept sitting and drinking. Thinking she’d forgotten about me, I stood up to go back to my room.

“Be a friend to your friend, Jude,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Be a friend to your friend.”

I went back upstairs to my bedroom.

I went out again that night, waking up as soon as the clock display read 2:00 a.m. I biked around the residential streets, looking at the houses, dark with people sleeping inside. Sometimes a dog would bark. Once I heard someone hollering, his words muffled by the walls of his house.

The pedals moved under my feet and I thought about people yelling at each other in the darkness, about couples lying cold next to each other in bed, distant and lonely. I thought about people crying behind closed doors and the nakedness of nighttime emotion, unprotected by the civilities of the day.

I moved like a ghost through my town.

August 26

Day 5

The campers are at pottery. Casey and I finally have some quiet time without the kids. We’re in the craft hut, looking through the remains of the art supplies. I want to head down the Riverside Trail. There’s a spot where we dangle our feet in the water as it bubbles around the rocks.

“Go ahead,” says Casey. “Go relax. I can do this.”

“I don’t want to go by myself,” I say. “What’s the fun in that?”

She doesn’t say anything. She keeps sorting through boxes and looking in cupboards.

I can just go, I think. She doesn’t need me here.

“This will work,” she says, holding up some packs of clear plastic painters’ drop-sheets. “We can turn these into butterfly wings. What kind of paint is over there?”

“I have an idea,” I say, making a show of looking through the paint. “Camp ends Thursday morning. Let’s stay on a couple of days after everyone goes.”

“The cabins will be locked up.”

“So? We can just sleep out in the meadow.”

“School starts Tuesday,” she says, joining me at the paint cupboard and selecting the paint she wants. “I wanted to get my correspondence courses done before that.”

“So, do them in the meadow,” I say. “Come on—a night or two of camping, no little kids around, before school starts and we get busy again. After all, we don’t know if we’ll be back here next summer. You may fly off to study some weird bug in Bolivia or Mongolia or somewhere.”

“Yeah, sure,” Casey says. “Let’s do it. A couple of days would be good.”

She puts the paints in a shallow box, grabs some brushes, and heads out. I follow her.

“You don’t sound like you want to.”

“Of course I want to. It will be fun.”

“For two nights or for one? One, right? You’ll put up with me for one night.”

She stops. “What are you talking about? We’ll have fun. I can gather up all my insect traps and we can check the trails for tuck-shop trash. It will be like we’re putting the camp to bed—Is that Stephanie?”

It is. I can recognize that damned pink Tinker Bell shirt from across the camp.

She is being marched through the field by Jan, the pottery instructor.

“She’s all yours,” Jan says. “She’s done with pottery.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“She kept throwing clay at people and wrecking their projects.”

“Why did you do that?” Casey asks her.

“Just for fun,” Stephanie says.

“She’s all yours,” Jan says again, and leaves the brat with us.

“You might as well help us get ready for arts and crafts,” Casey says.

“I want to look through your microscope,” Stephanie says.

“You just got thrown out of pottery,” I say. “Why should you get what you want?”

“Because my mother paid a lot of money to send me here so that I could do what I want to do. And I want to look through your microscope.”

“Not now,” Casey says. “Now we are getting ready for arts and crafts.”

“No.”

We don’t answer her. She stops asking. We set up the picnic tables for crafts and the rest of the cabin soon joins us. Casey cuts big butterfly shapes out of the plastic drop cloths and gets the kids to paint designs on them. While the paint is drying, we go on a hunt for long sticks. Two sticks get attached to each butterfly. The kids run and swoop with them across the field, the butterflies blowing behind them, and I have to admit that they look pretty good.

Casey and I sit on the picnic table, tightening paint lids and watching the kids run around.

“What I said before,” I begin, “about you not wanting time later. I know it wasn’t true. It’s just that the summer has gone by so fast. Things are going to change soon. Everything has gone by so fast—”

“How many kids are out there?” Casey asks, interrupting me. “One, two, three, four—I wish they’d hold still…there’s only seven butterflies.” She stands up and raises the whistle to her lips to blow the buddies signal.

“Leave it,” I say. “How many times are we going to chase after her? The kids are having fun. Leave them be.”

“We should go look for her,” Casey says. “Who knows what she’s throwing in the swamp?”

“Maybe she’ll be eaten by a snapping turtle,” I say.

“Or a praying mantis,” says Casey.

We both make our secret signal, and we laugh. Casey is back with me again. I am happy enough to suggest running with the kids, and we race out onto the field.

“We are starlings,” Casey tells them, “and we are hungry for butterflies!”

We play this new game of chase until the bell rings to tell everyone to get cleaned up for supper. We bug-walk back to the cabin, sweaty and happy, to find that Stephanie has wreaked a path of destruction. All the kids’ crafts—their spider webs made from sticks and wool, the dragonfly mobile hanging from the ceiling, the pictures made with stuff they found on nature hikes—are torn and crumpled on the floor.

And the microscope is missing.

“What are you looking at me for?” Stephanie says from her bunk, where she’s reading a Ramona book and eating a contraband Three Musketeers bar. “I didn’t do anything.”

I leave Casey with the kids and go find Mrs. Keefer.

“Stephanie can’t stay with us,” I say. “She’s making everybody miserable. And she stole Casey’s microscope! Casey babysat for six months to buy it.”

What if there are difficult people in Australia? Casey will ask me. How will I manage without you? You’d better come with me.

Mrs. Keefer sighs and shakes her head in defeat. She takes me into her little closet of an office, pulls Stephanie’s file and punches her aunt’s number into the phone. Mrs. Keefer leaves a cautious message, asking Stephanie’s aunt to call back to discuss some issues with Stephanie’s behavior.

“You didn’t make it sound very serious.”

“Stephanie is eight years old,” Mrs. Keefer says. “I know she’s a handful, but she’s not an axe-murderer.”

“Not yet,” I mumble.

“But if the two of you really can’t handle her, I’ll see if Bones will keep her in the infirmary until her aunt can come and get her. I hope I wasn’t wrong in trusting you two with a cabin. Does Casey feel the same as you?”

I haven’t asked her. I didn’t even tell her where I was going when I left her alone, cleaning up the mess and trying to soothe the crying, angry kids.

“Casey and I are in complete agreement,” I say.

Mrs. Keefer doesn’t look like she believes me, but I don’t care. I don’t care if she thinks I’m a bad counselor, either. I don’t need this job next summer. I can get a much better job, one that pays a lot more money, doing things that are much more important than teaching clapping games and Bible verses to a bunch of kids who could care less.