“Must’ve been Germ,” says Rosie’s voice. “He’s wasted.”

  Logan gasps. Milly was right—they are alcoholics. They get wasted during the Camp dance. This is shocking and somehow wonderful news, the very grimiest of gossip. Logan raises her eyebrows at Hugo, who smiles. He wiggles just the tiniest bit closer to her. Dust motes dance in the sparse yellow light between them.

  “Whatever.” The refrigerator door opens with a soft suction sound. There is a heavy clink of glass, a slosh of liquid. “Here. Cheers.”

  Hugo squirms closer. His breath is hot on Logan’s face. From what she can make out, his expression is serious. From below them comes a gulp and a gasp, a clunk. Hugo rolls forward and plants his lips on hers. It isn’t a gentle, quick kiss, like before—this is something else entirely. His entire mouth engulfs her, his nose knocking against her glasses. Logan can hardly breathe through the rusty straw taste of beer. She lies frozen in surprise and sudden panic.

  “I’m not done making my point, by the way. I mean, if you need to think he’s innocent just to get through this summer, fine. Whatever. But that’s a garbage opinion in the real world, and you know it.”

  “You’re still not hearing me! He’s a good kid. He is. If he’s a good kid, is it that crazy to think he might be a good person?”

  Hugo’s body weight shifts over Logan, pinning her down. The only thought that manages to shove its way through her buzzing head is that she should try to kiss him back, but she doesn’t know how. His tongue—his tongue—squirms like a slug against her teeth.

  “I don’t care if he’s a good person or not! He’s a murderer!”

  They both freeze. Hugo lifts his head and frowns down at her. Logan shifts away, frantic to catch her breath, and the sleeping bags rustle beneath her. Silence falls in the loft. She stiffens and sucks in her lips.

  “Oh, hang on. Is someone in here?”

  “Hey!” Elias shouts. “Someone up there?” A thud makes them both jump; he has thrown something at the bottom of their crawlspace.

  They stare at each other. Hugo clears his throat. He makes his voice very deep. “Uh. Yeah.” Logan closes her eyes and shakes her head. This is it, she thinks—they’re done for.

  A pause stretches, then the counselors laugh. “All right,” says Elias. “We’re out.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Probably Datie and Kane. I mean, Katie and Dane.” Elias laughs coarsely. “It’s still working hours, you animals!” he shouts. Hugo opens his mouth to reply again, but Logan throws a hand over it, silently begging him not to push their luck.

  “Here, give me that,” says Rosie’s voice below them. Another gulp, another clunk, then the fridge opens again. “Let’s go.”

  Logan slides farther away from him on the sleeping bags. They wait in silence until Rosie and Elias’s voices have left the loft, tracking them back down the ladder and across the barn floor. They are still arguing.

  When Logan drops down from the rope ladder, Max and Milly are already standing. They both look stunned. Milly’s jaw falls slack. “You guys,” she laughs, “what the shit was that?”

  Logan tenses. She wishes everyone would stop swearing so much.

  “Did you hear that?” Max asks. His fingers are digging anxiously at his left wrist under the fading blue plaster. “She said ‘murderer.’ Who do you think they were talking about?”

  Hugo Baker lands on the loft floor next to Logan. His hair is all askew. The ball gown has fallen to the middle of his stomach, twisted around backwards like on a cheap plastic princess doll. His lips and chin are smeared with black eyeliner. Mortified, Logan quickly reaches to wipe her own mouth. Max cracks a smile; Milly yelps with laughter.

  They walk back to the dance as quickly as they can without running and reenter the crowd in pairs: first Hugo and Max, then Milly and Logan behind them. No one seems to have noticed they were gone. The rest of the Ravens are clustered in the crowd, dancing goofily with a group of boys.

  Logan feels sick. The lingering taste of beer and Hugo’s mouth are a sticky, pasty goop under her tongue, churning in her stomach. As they stand at the edge of the party, watching their friends dance, Milly leans toward her. She still looks so funny in her tie and mustache. “You know what?” she asks through the side of her mouth.

  “What?”

  “Beer kind of tastes like farts, doesn’t it?”

  The two girls look at each other and gradually crumble into giggles. Logan can hardly believe what they have gotten away with.

  •••

  There is a tradition at Camp: every summer, after the dance, the oldest cabins listen to a scary story on the lawn. Tonight, Dane is telling it.

  Logan, Milly, Hugo, and Max sit at the back of the group apart from the rest. They share smug smiles—they know things no one else knows now. Dane is probably drunk, they whisper. After this, he’ll be somewhere with Katie. They snicker. It’s like the four of them own the world.

  Everyone asks for the same story. They’ve all heard different versions over the course of the summer, and they want the full thing, the real deal. Dane agrees reluctantly. He asks them if they are sure, if they won’t be too scared. This story is especially scary, he says, because it’s true. Girls in their boy costumes whimper and slink together; boys in their girl costumes sniff and straighten their backs.

  “Danny McGee was a camper here at this camp, just like all of you,” Dane begins, “a long, long time ago . . .”

  Logan looks at Hugo, who is listening fixedly. She looks at Max, who looks back at her. He gives her a crooked smile.

  In the last version of the story she heard, Danny McGee wandered off the trails and simply disappeared. Dane’s version is clearer on what happened. It wasn’t a bear or a beast that got to him, but other campers.

  “Danny was a little different from most kids. The other campers picked on him.”

  He has a good voice for storytelling, low and broody. The story plays out in detail. One night near the end of the summer, at a campout at Lobster Point, some boys tried to play a prank on Danny. They chased him onto the dam, then built a campfire on either side. He was afraid of heights. They thought it would be funny to make him stay the night out there. When he begged them to let him come down, they shouted, So, jump! Jump, Danny, jump! So, Danny jumped.

  Dane pauses for a long time. The warm twinkle lights have gone out behind him. In the darkness, the forest creaks and groans. “A lot of people say Danny McGee never really left Camp Phoenix. Sometimes, late at night, you can still see his shadow walking around, just off the trails.”

  Logan leans forward, clasping her chin between her knees.

  “Sometimes you’ll hear him coming up behind you. You’ll feel him, right over your shoulder. But when you turn around . . . there’s no one there. We can’t really be sure what he wants. If you ask me, I’d say he’s still looking for the kids that bullied him. They’re all old men by now, but Danny doesn’t know that. He’s just watching, waiting until he finds someone that fits the mold.”

  “Then what?”

  Dane shrugs. The moonlight rolls on his shoulders. “I don’t know. If you were Danny, what would you do?”

  Hugo squeezes the back of Logan’s hand. He looks past her, down the line of them. “Make them jump,” he whispers.

  Sam

  Poppy lies curled in her sleeping bag. Her eyelids are heavy, sinking downward. Magic marker smudges, the shadows of a button nose and whiskers, streak gray across her flushed face. Regardless of the theme, the Hummingbirds decided they would dress as kittens for the dance. Katie helped them make felt ears and tails in crafts and Sam colored their faces. Poppy’s tail, the glued seams ripped and bleeding fluffed white cotton, lies next to her on the pillow.

  “What was your favorite part of the day?” Sam kneels at her bunk. She reaches out to smooth a wisp of hair behind her ear.

  “Dancing,” Poppy whispers.

  “You had fun at the dance?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “I saw you out there. You’re a good dancer.”

  “I’m gonna be a dancer when I grow up. And a singer, too.”

  Sam laughs. She lets her face fall to the flannel sheet, her hand resting on Poppy’s hair. “Yeah,” she says when she lifts her head, “I bet you are.”

  The rest of the girls are asleep already, snoring into their pillowcases. They are greasy and dirty, dry and chapped and sunburnt. They are happy. No one has cried all week, not even Rachel. Sam pats Poppy’s cheek as she stands up. She flicks off the light switch and is sitting on her bunk, tying her shoes in the dark, when she hears Poppy rustle and turn in her sleeping bag.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  Sam drops her shoelace. “Good night, Poppy.”

  Rosie and Elias are already waiting on the trail outside. The two of them are bickering about something; they have been bickering about something all night. Their matching costumes cut bizarre, puppet-like silhouettes in the moonlight. With tools from the crafts shack, they managed to splice together a pair of each of their shirts and sweatpants, vertically, so they are both wearing half-and-half: girl on one side, boy on the other. Elias has one side of his hair up in a taut pigtail and Rosie has half of hers tucked into a low bun. The full effect is honestly remarkable.

  “God help me,” Rosie had sighed as she posed in their bathroom mirror. “Promoting the gender binary like it’s the nineties.”

  “But you look good,” Sam told her.

  Rosie sighed again, defeated. “I do look good.”

  Between her office work and meetings with Richard Byron and her preoccupation with Poppy, Sam had no time to put together a costume. She wound up dressing all in orange and hanging an old warning sign from the boathouse over her neck: DEEP WATER: No Swimming Beyond This Point. “Are you a girl or a boy?” campers asked her. She answered: “Boy? I thought it was girls versus buoys!” The joke went largely underappreciated, though it got a hearty laugh out of Gus Campbell.

  “You’re such a pig,” Rosie is saying as Sam comes toward them on the trail. “No one even sounds like that. Name one girl who sounds like that.”

  Elias, squinting up at the sky, carries on with his embarrassingly pornographic impersonation until Rosie smacks him and he chokes on his own laughter. “You do,” he taunts her.

  “I do not. Who told you that?”

  “Small camp,” Sam says, butting between them. “Sound travels.”

  “Shut up, Sam.”

  They’re all a little drunk already. The midsummer dance, for one reason or another, is more of an event for the counselors than the campers. It’s the one night of the summer that stands out from the rest—a milestone, in a way, a night worth celebrating. No one wants to drive, so they stay in the parking lot, sprawled on tailgates and hoods, drinking and gossiping like teens after prom.

  Sam’s place at Camp is changing. Tonight is another brutal reminder of it. Since the news about Poppy spread, the other counselors treat her differently. They look at her differently: with pity, sometimes, and sometimes with something like contempt. Despite herself, she feels like she’s somehow at the root of the tragedy. Not the cause of it, exactly, but the epicenter; while everyone else can look away, Poppy Warbler’s death revolves around her. Her special treatment this summer doesn’t help—the private meetings, the radio on her hip. If only they knew, she thinks, that Richard Byron specifically asked her to spy on them. If only they knew about Nick, the secrets he whispers in her ear. They look at her like they do.

  Rosie would tell her to stop feeling sorry for herself. Sam shakes herself out of a sleepy trance and sits up on the hood of her car, ignoring their chatter across the windshield behind her. Fishing for an escape, she glances across the lot. Nick is leaning against a bumper with Dane and Katie, picking at his beer label. Sam attempts to catch his eye but realizes she is far beyond the borders of his attention. She slides off the hood, mumbles about needing to pee, and stumbles toward the barnyard.

  There is a smelly little outhouse behind the barn. When Sam steps out of it, she sniffs and wipes at her eyes, choking back the lump in her throat. She walks back around to the front of the barn and jolts, surprised to see someone sitting alone in the doorway. He appears surprised by her, too.

  “Oh. Hey.” Taps frowns at her. His back is to the light, his shadow stretching across the mud in front of him. He has a beer can in one hand and the bulge of another in his sweatshirt pocket. He squints, looking her up and down. “Having a bathroom cry?”

  Sam nods. At the moment, she can’t find a reason to be embarrassed. Taps gestures for her to sit beside him in the doorway. He offers her the beer in his pocket with an impish little smile. Sam takes it gratefully. She blinks and dabs at her eyes with her sweatshirt sleeve.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” Sam laughs, reaching down to peel a fleck of dried mud off the toe of her shoe. It’s the truth; she can’t point to anything in particular that drove the tears, just the stink of the outhouse and a drink too many. “Really. It’s just, like, a weekly thing, now.” She snorts.

  “I get that.” Taps nods. “You sure you don’t need me to beat someone up for you? I mean, I know Nicky can be kind of a jackass.”

  She freezes, unsure how to react. At his knowing smile, she breaks and winces. “How do you . . . ?”

  “I saw you guys going into the guest cabin today. Wasn’t snooping,” he clarifies quickly. “I was on my way to meet someone there myself, actually. You guys beat me to it.”

  Sam sucks her teeth and shrugs. Of all the people to know, she supposes Taps is not the worst. He has never been much of a gossip. She opens her beer with a crack and a fizzle and looks out across the barnyard. Then she turns on him, frowning. “Wait. You were meeting someone at the guest cabin?”

  He smiles wryly. One hand taps out a gentle beat on the wood slats beneath them.

  “So, someone with keys to the guest cabin?” Sam prods him when he doesn’t answer. “Come on. You know mine. Tell me yours.”

  Taps shrugs. “Well, you’re not dumb. Figure it out. There are five ADs. You’re banging one, and two of them are banging each other.”

  “Oh.” Sam understands thickly. She runs a quick count on your fingertips. That leaves only Gabe and Amy. “Huh. I wouldn’t have thought she’s your type.”

  Taps chuckles. “She’s not,” he says around the mouth of his beer.

  “Oh.” She looks back at her open fingers and manages to catch his point just before it sails over her head. “Oh. Shit. I mean, I didn’t know that.” It’s a pleasant surprise, actually, that there are secrets at Camp she knows nothing about, still some gossip that can shock her. “How come no one knows that?”

  His sleeves are tugged up over the palms of his hands, the beer can clasped between them. It crinkles as he fidgets. “We don’t talk about it. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  Taps sighs. “Honestly . . . he says Chard wouldn’t like it if it got around to him.”

  Rosie’s outrage rings in Sam’s head. Like it’s the nineties, she groaned. “So what? What’s he going to do? He can’t fire you for who you’re with.”

  The beer can crunches louder. Taps’s fingers clench. “He owns the Camp. He owns the town. He can fire whoever he wants for whatever he wants.” He pauses, and they both drink in gulps. Then he goes on. “Phoebe and I went to the same high school. Did you know that?”

  Sam shakes her head.

  “Yup. Grew up together. She was always a weirdo. I mean, blue hair, anime, rainbow high-tops . . . the whole thing. She changed her whole vibe to come to Camp. But she was still kind of off. I mean, didn’t you notice? Then, soon as something goes a little wrong, whoosh.” Taps runs his hand through the air like a soaring bomb. “Guess who’s gone? I’d bet you anything, if he knew, it’d be the same thing with me. Gabe would probably be all right, since he’s an AD—he’s, you know, in the inner circle. But I’m still replaceable.” He brushes off her gaze with a forced shrug. “He wants the kids to think everything’s normal, you know? And he gets to decide what normal means.”

  His frankness settles heavy around them, thick as snow. Quiet and dense. “You sound so . . .” Sam laughs. She has no reason to be laughing. “. . . Chill about that. Aren’t you mad? Don’t you want to be able to be yourself?”

  Taps shakes his head. “Richard Byron,” he says, speaking up to the moon, “is from another generation. The dudes from the other generations make the rules.” He drains his beer and twists the can between his hands, clamping it down to the size of a hockey puck. Then he nods, satisfied with his work. “That’s the way it’s always been.”

  Another minute of quiet commiseration passes between them. Sam finishes her beer. She wipes at her eyes and nose again, and he helps her to her feet to rejoin the party.

  •••

  She wakes up to the sound of birds. Before her eyes open, still half in a dream, she is thinking of Poppy. The sharp pain of her splitting lips drives her into consciousness.

  Sam blinks and sees daylight. She looks up at a bare wood ceiling—not the ceiling of the Hummingbirds’ cabin. She sits up and finds herself in a bed, in a cramped attic bunk room. Gray, early morning sunlight streams through the windows.

  “Oh, God. Oh, no.” Her head is swimming, the creeping tendrils of an intense hangover blooming behind her eyes.

  “Hmm?” Nick rolls over beneath the single flannel blanket beside her. The sheets are peeling off the corners of his mattress. “What time is it?”

  The other bed in the room, Sam sees with relief, is empty. Fuzzily, she remembers: at the bottom of a bottle, she caught him by the back pocket and they snuck off. Dane, Nick’s roommate in the office bunk room, was sleeping with Katie in the guest cabin, so they came back here. The room is stuffy, heavy with the smell of men and dirty laundry and sleeping bodies. Nick’s guitar is propped against the wall, his clothes folded neatly on his shelf. He is shockingly vulnerable sleeping next to her, naked and crusty-eyed. For a bitter, blaring moment, she looks at him and lands somewhere between love and repulsion—they aren’t actually so far apart, she thinks.