Logan’s eyes fly open. The cabin is dark, and she has fallen half asleep. The blackness around her is heavy with sleepy breathing; it must be late. She has been lost in her silly imagination for a long time. Her own thoughts are embarrassing. All the nighttime chatter and gossip is starting to do funny things to the fantasies in her head. She screws her eyes shut again, wishing for sleep, but sleep refuses to come. Instead, she keeps thinking about Hugo Baker. Then she thinks about Max, with his outstretched hand on Spark’s nose, his battered face so quiet and calm. She remembers the panic in that same face when the horse took off running, the blood and the shock as he lay on the ground.

  She wonders what it was like to hit that branch. To lose consciousness and flop to the dirt. He was gone, for a moment—she saw him with his eyes closed and his shoulders trembling. Then he came back. Where did he go, in between? Where did he come back from? The thought stretches on and on, until Logan’s heart is racing. She can’t stop wondering where Max went. Where he would still be, if he hadn’t come back. Where she might—will—go someday.

  Stop, stop, stop! Logan opens her eyes and forces her body upright. The bunk creaks beneath her. These are worse than the embarrassing thoughts about Hugo Baker, much worse. She rubs her eyes and longs for daylight. Dizzy and sick, she climbs down from her top bunk and tiptoes to the bathroom.

  Outside, under the flickering light bulb, Logan stares into her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Messy hair, oily face. She looks strange without her glasses. She feels strange. Off, wrong. Like this is a dream. It’s a cold, horrible feeling, a greasy black weight in the pit of her stomach. A fat, fluttering bug rams itself into the light bulb over her head again and again. The sound is like a rattling drum. Logan shuts off the light and walks back into the cabin. She is standing still in the dark, at the foot of her bunk, when a sharp whisper cuts straight through to her heart and makes it skip a beat.

  “Logan?”

  It’s Milly, hardly a shadow inside her sleeping bag. Logan’s mouth is full of dirt and worms. She can’t say anything back.

  “What are you doing? Are you okay?”

  She swallows, finally. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you sick?” The sleeping bag rustles. Milly’s shadowy shape sits upright.

  “I don’t know.”

  A long pause stretches. “Are you scared?” Milly asks, her voice thick and heavy with sleep. “You want to sit down?”

  Logan nods and shuffles toward her in the dark. She sits at the edge of the crinkly mattress and Milly shifts her legs to sit beside her. They stay like that, side by side, for a long time. Logan’s breaths come out shaky. Her leg is twitching. The bad thoughts are gone, now, but the feeling still lingers, clinging to her like plastic wrap, tight around her chest. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she whispers.

  “Really?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  Milly’s head falls against her shoulder. Her hair is scratchy, tickly on her cheek. A warm, skinny arm wraps around hers. Normally, Milly doesn’t like to be touched. This is a little like the conversations they have when Sadie leaves the cabin: something that would never happen in daylight but feels perfectly fine in the dark. Logan leans into her. They listen to the other girls breathing, the crickets chirping outside. The cabin smells like dirt and sunscreen, like daytime. Remember the sunshine bright, Logan sings in her head. Her leg quits shaking. Her heart slows.

  “It’s okay,” says Milly. “Sometimes I get scared at night, too.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” They sit together for a while longer, then Logan stands and climbs back into her own bed. The awful feeling eventually passes, and she falls asleep.

  In the morning, everything is normal. The weird, suffocating sensation is gone, and the day is bright and happy. It’s Tuesday. Tomorrow, they will pack up their hiking packs and head out to Pike Falls.

  The Ravens go to the lake in morning activity period with the Hawks and the Falcons and Eagles. Milly runs off to hunt for snakes in the reeds. Logan sits on the shore in her white cotton shorts and tank top, sweating beneath the sweltering sun. A circle of boys and girls has gathered on the beach around her. They didn’t invite her into the group, exactly, but she didn’t force her way in, either—she holds her breath and hopes she blends right in, unnoticed.

  “Elias,” Liz says, and the rest of the group nods seriously.

  “Definitely Elias,” Donna agrees. She sits between Hugo Baker’s spread knees, leaning back against his chest. They’re going out. He is the most popular boy in Camp, and she is the most popular girl—it only makes sense. Since they freed Spark last week, Hugo sometimes shoots Logan a cheeky smile across the mess hall or lawn. His smiles feel sneaky, secretive. She pockets each one for careful consideration later.

  Donna knows the way she is sitting with him is scandalous, and she is flaunting it. She smiles up at him, then looks right at Logan. “What about you, Logan?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who do you think is the cutest counselor?”

  “Oh.” Logan considers. “I like Christian.” As soon as the words have left her mouth, she knows she has said the wrong thing.

  “You mean Taps? Oh my God, Logan, you would.”

  Hugo looks bored with the conversation. He raises his head over the top of Donna’s and shouts to his friend on the dock: “Henry, do a flip!”

  Henry flashes him a thumbs-up, sprints, leaps, and tumbles into the water. As soon as he resurfaces, the lifeguard yells at him. Logan looks longingly toward the waves his splash made. She wants to get in the lake, but she isn’t wearing her swimsuit. She told Sadie she couldn’t find it. The truth is the idea of wearing nothing but a swimsuit in front of everyone, Donna and Hugo and all the rest, makes her stomach hurt. She would rather sweat and suffer on the beach in her clothes. Uncomfortable on the hot sand, she shifts so she sits cross-legged and leans back on her palms.

  Everyone in their circle has fallen silent. Logan realizes, with horror, that they are all looking at her. “What?”

  No one says anything. Donna smirks and leans her head up to whisper something into Hugo’s ear. Logan cannot stand to look at them a second longer, sitting like that, pretending to be grown-ups. “What?” she demands again, louder.

  Someone tugs her upward by the arm. It’s Max; like her, he is wearing a shirt and sweating. He leads her away along the beach. Behind them, everyone is giggling.

  “Come here,” Max pleads. “I want to tell you something.”

  “What is it?” Logan snaps. She pulls her arm away from him. Max wasn’t sitting with the group, but awkwardly off to the side, on his own. He has no right to be dragging her out of the circle.

  He hesitates, rubbing the dirty fabric that juts out from his cast between his fingers. Then he leans forward and whispers, stammering, into her ear. Logan sways and looks back at him. “I just thought you should know,” he says.

  Aghast, she looks down. She spreads her legs and tugs the fabric of her shorts forward. Sure enough, there is a tiny, dark red splotch blooming at the white cotton seam. Fear is a cage that falls from the sky; she is trapped like a mouse in it. She begs Max to leave her alone, and he does, nervously. Her panicked eyes scan the lakeshore. Everyone on the beach is watching her—no one is laughing, but everyone is looking.

  Time pauses like that for a long and dreadful moment, an eternity, until eventually a counselor notices her frozen in space. She whispers to two Eagles, who swoop in and bundle Logan under their arms. Voices are buzzing louder behind them as they hurry away from the beach. When they get to the infirmary, Logan stands pigeon-toed on the porch, mumbling. Nurse May looks her up and down, then nods. She shoos the Eagles away and ushers her inside.

  The linoleum floor is chilly against her bare feet. The old nurse gives Logan a ginger ale to sip, claiming it will calm her nerves. It does not. Her throat is choked with threatening sobs. An air conditioner roars in the window, numbingly loud. Nurse May disappears into the back room of the infirmary and returns with a box of wet wipes, sanitary pads, an enormous, billowing pair of underwear, and gray sweatpants. As she talks, Logan wishes she could sink her head between her shoulders and disappear, like a turtle.

  “Do you have any questions, hon?”

  “No.” She wants to scream.

  “You sure?”

  “No. I mean, yes. I’m sure.”

  She shuts herself into the bathroom to change. Despite the grueling list of facts she has just been presented with, she is still not entirely convinced this is something normal. The spot on her underwear doesn’t look like blood at all—it’s dark and gory, like her guts have fallen out. For all she or Nurse May knows, she might have burst some kind of internal organ. She could be dead by campfire. She could become another Camp legend like Danny McGee; they’ll tell horror stories about the girl who popped her kidney and withered away because everyone thought it was just her period.

  Logan realizes she would very much prefer this to be a case of a popped kidney instead of what it is. The sweatpants are too big for her. They hang to the bathroom floor, even when she rolls the waistband. She hates them. Shivering, she plops onto the toilet, takes off her glasses, and holds her face in her hands. She shouts into her palms: “Shit! Shit, shit, shit!”

  •••

  She has to miss the campout. After dinner, Sadie pulls Logan to the counselors’ benches beneath the bell tower. She tells her, gently, that she should stay behind and take the trip later in the summer.

  “You know, there’s a boy in the Hawks group that had to miss his Pike Falls trip because he got hurt,” she says in her most sugary voice. “I talked to his counselor today, and we thought you two could go together. Just the two of you! That would be fun, huh?”

  “I guess,” Logan shrugs. She does not want to go on a trip with Max—especially not after the way he embarrassed her at the beach. In fact, nothing sounds less fun. “It’s not really fair, though,” she adds, hoping to sound spiteful.

  Sadie hugs her. With a heavy hand, she smooths out her ponytail. “I know it doesn’t seem fair, hon. But that’s just part of being a girl. We have to make sacrifices.”

  Logan nods. She hates being called hon. For a hot flash of a second, she hates Sadie. She would like to hate everyone and everything. It would feel good, just to hate.

  “Maybe the two of you will get along. Who knows?”

  She nods again and crosses her legs, adjusting to the ugly weight of the pad between them. This isn’t fair. She wants to go home. Even in her rage, though, she knows that home is too far away.

  The rest of the Ravens leave for Pike Falls the next day, and Logan stays behind. Everyone knows why, but no one says it out loud. Milly gives her a long, sorry, and confused look as she shoulders her hiking pack. It’s like they are standing on opposite sides of a high fence; Logan has suddenly crossed a line she didn’t know existed.

  She spends the night in the infirmary while her group is gone. Nurse May brings her candy and chapter books, and she gets to watch cartoons on a bubbly-faced TV. It’s fun for a while—a weird change from the Camp life she has come to know. She sleeps in a big private room by herself.

  In the middle of the night, Logan jerks awake and tosses aside the blankets. The bed is too big and too soft, and the infirmary is too quiet. She has gotten used to the snores and murmurs and farts of the cabin. She grabs her glasses from the nightstand and drops down to the cold linoleum floor. Three padding footsteps carry her to the window. She leans on her elbows against the windowsill and gazes out. A breeze comes through the screen; carried on it is the smell of daytime, pine trees and lake water, and the cheerful chirp of crickets. The moon is bright and full. The landscape she knows so well now is like an entirely different universe under the moonlight, all aglow in silver. As Logan’s eyes wander along the trail from the infirmary, she catches a sudden, sharp movement.

  She squints through the screen. It’s under the shadow of a tree, not quite definable, but she is sure she sees the form of a person standing on the trail. She blinks, rubs her eyes, and squints again. The shape beneath the tree shifts in a way that is definitely not caused by the breeze, a quick movement, like a swinging arm. The longer she looks, the surer Logan is that she sees two legs and two arms and a tilted human head. She shudders and stares harder, convincing herself it’s real, more than just a trick of her eyes. Then she sees the shadow turn and step forward.

  Logan leaps with fright, stumbles, and crawls back into the infirmary bed. She throws the comforter over her head. In her imagination, she hears footsteps approaching outside the window; she sees a shadowy face stopping, turning, peering in through the screen. She can’t bring herself to roll over and look. Under the cover of the blanket, she smiles from the thrill.

  Sam

  Rosie shakes her head at the fire. She nudges a pinecone with the tip of her boot into the embers. In the red gleam, the satisfaction on her face when it sparks into flame is nearly menacing. “God,” she says, watching the pinecone ignite. “Poor kid.”

  Taps tips his cup in salute to her. “My point is, you were right. Girls definitely have it worse than boys. Even here.”

  “I didn’t think they could get periods.”

  “I can’t believe it’s any of my business, but apparently, they can.”

  Sam sits between them on the log, listening quietly to Taps’s story. She leans forward to poke at the burning pinecone with the butt of her beer bottle. “It’s a choice,” she says out loud. She has learned a lot in her mornings in the office, hovering behind Nick as he talks to Campbell or Nurse May. She knows more about the practicalities of the campers and consciousness transfers now. More than she would like to know, at times. “Physical milestones. Some people want them as a part of the experience. Like Poppy’s teeth.” She falls silent, wondering if she has said too much. It’s clear that not everything she learns is meant to be repeated to the other counselors, but no one has told her where, exactly, to draw the line.

  “Must be nice.” Rosie grimaces. “Choosing your milestones.”

  Taps nods. “Anyway,” he says, drawing their attention back to himself. “Poor kid, I know, but it gave me and Sadie the perfect matchmaking plan. Soon as Max gets his cast off, Katie and Dane will take them up to Pike Falls together. They’ll hang out, roast some ’mallows, get a little cozy . . . maybe do a little making out, if my boy plays his cards right.”

  Everyone around the fire chuckles. “Gross, man,” Elias snorts. “They’re twelve.”

  “Yup. And they paid a trillion dollars to be twelve. Might as well make the most of it, right?” Taps fidgets with the stick in his lap, picking off shreds of bark and tossing them into the flames. “I got to tell Chard about the idea. He called me—and I quote—brilliant. So, you know, I’m basically the new favorite.”

  “Better watch out, Sammy,” Jeremy teases.

  Sam feels her cheeks flush with the heat of the fire. Their laughter rattles over her. It’s a joke, she knows, but not without some meanness, some smoldering resentment. A few days ago, Richard Byron walked into the mess hall during lunchtime. He gave her a grand slap on the shoulder and loudly praised her work with the Hummingbirds. Sometimes she sits in on the assistant directors’ meetings. Some days she carries a radio in case Nick or Campbell needs to contact her. She knows what the counselors are saying. She can hear their whispers about her brown nose behind her back. “Funny,” is all she can think to say.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Back up.” Elias is very obviously drunk—he was pulling from Jeremy’s vodka jug before they left the Nest. He angles his guitar down flat in his lap and holds his palms up over it, frowning defensively around the group. “Why are we saying girls have it worse than boys? My boys are in the middle of puberty, too. It sucks just as much for them.”

  Rosie raises an eyebrow. “One of your boys murdered a woman,” she reminds him coldly.

  “We don’t know that for sure.” Elias raises his voice before she can interrupt, his hands still held up to her. “Anyway, you don’t know what it’s like for boys. They might not get periods, but they’re under a lot more pressure.”

  “Pressure?” Rosie repeats.

  “Yeah. Pressure to be a man. Be tough. Kiss girls, say nasty things. Get in fights. It’s hard to be a boy.”

  The fire spits and crackles. Sam watches Rosie’s spine straighten, leaning across their log like she’s going to swing at him. “Oh, is it? And it’s easy to be a girl—having your whole existence sexualized, having grown men hit on you as soon as you look old enough to assault—that’s easy, right?”

  “Maybe girls wouldn’t be as sexualized if boys weren’t pressured to be that way.”

  “Boys wouldn’t be pressured to be that way if men hadn’t been that way since the beginning of time.”

  “That’s the same point.” Sam interrupts them before either can say anything else. The two of them, she knows, will carry on until they’re screaming, until everyone else in the circle has grown uncomfortable and wandered off. “You’re saying the same thing. It’s the culture that’s the problem.”

  For a moment, they’re quiet. A log snaps in the fire. Taps fidgets with the plastic cup between his knees, tapping along its rim. Then he lifts it, downs its contents, and belches. “Culture,” he grunts, holding the cup upside down over the edge of the fire. Droplets fall and sizzle on the embers. “What’s that?”

  They put out their fire about an hour before curfew and pile into cars to drive back to Camp. Sam and Elias walk together from the parking lot toward the cabins. Rosie, despite her own lengthy insistence that she wouldn’t, has walked off somewhere with Jeremy. It’s a cold, clear night and unusually windy. They walk with their hands in their pockets and their eyes on the moon, both quiet, until Elias clears his throat. “It’s pretty messed up, isn’t it?”