It’s cold. The fire has burned down to coals, and they’re out of sticks. The darkness is getting thicker. A breeze rustles through the trees and seeps into the fibers of Logan’s sleeping bag. She shivers.

  “You think Sam was just trying to freak us out?” Max asks. They lie with their heads together, on their backs, looking up at the stars. Trillions of them. More like dust than pinpoints. Logan still has her glasses on; she nudges them up on her nose and braces her hands behind her head.

  “You mean, the whole thing about how bad things happen to kids that go off the trails?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t believe herself—not fully—but this would be a bad time to admit to being afraid. Somewhere in the darkness, a bird calls. It’s a lonely, musical sound. Logan wonders what kinds of birds are up at night, and who they might be calling to.

  A few minutes go by, and her thoughts have started to wander when Max speaks up again. “Truth or dare?”

  Logan considers. “I don’t want to get out of my sleeping bag. So, truth.”

  “Are you and Hugo going out?”

  “Yes.” Hugo asked her to be his girlfriend two days ago while they were sharing a pedal boat on the lake. Girlfriend is a weird word to describe herself by. It leaves a sticky-sweet taste in her mouth, like cherry lip balm and bubblegum. She likes to whisper it under her breath when no one is listening, getting the feel for it. She doesn’t want to talk about that with Max. “Your turn. Truth?”

  “Yeah, sure, truth.”

  “Okay, umm . . . Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?” Logan pushes herself up to look at him through the dying firelight. She can only see the top of his shaggy head, his bent elbows and wrist brace. “What, you don’t know?”

  There is a pause. Then Max says, “We’ve been at Camp for a long time.” Logan isn’t sure if it’s supposed to be an explanation for his strange answer, but she lets it go. “Truth?” he asks her.

  “Truth.”

  “Where do you think we go when we die?”

  Logan blinks up at the stars. The branches around them shiver. The bird calls again. “Jeez. That’s a big truth.” She closes her eyes, and on the backs of her eyelids she sees the red glow of the coals. She sees Max hitting the branch, and Spark galloping through the trees, and a bloody pair of sneakers half submerged in water. She opens her eyes again. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know, either,” he says. “But what do you think?”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  Max rolls in his sleeping bag. Logan turns, too, and they face each other, braced on their elbows in the dirt and pine needles. His face is streaked with sticky grime and firelight and shadow. He looks like a monster, like he did after his fall. Logan fights the urge to look away. “I think,” Max says slowly. “I think I saw something, once. When I got hurt. Remember, I went to the hospital?”

  Logan nods.

  “I had this dream, when I was there. It’s . . . sort of hard to explain. I was at this hospital, and then I was asleep, and then I was . . . it’s like I was floating. I don’t know. I know it sounds weird. But it was just for a second—I was floating down this hallway. It was really bright. And there were doors on both sides, and every door had a name on it. And I looked over, and I saw my door. My name.”

  “It said Max?”

  “It said, Gill, M. Last name, first letter. Like a roll call.”

  “So . . .” Logan hesitates. “So, what?”

  “So . . . I don’t know. I think that has something to do with it. I think, if I tried to open that door, I’d see where I’m gonna go when I die. But I didn’t. I just kept floating.” Max squirms and folds his arms down. He rests his chin on the top of his braced hand, and his fingers scratch soft, thoughtful patterns into the dirt. “Does that sound crazy?”

  “Yes,” Logan says, and she laughs, even though nothing is funny at all. His words are hard to comprehend. They tap against her brain, trying to burrow in, but she blocks them out. She’d rather talk about ghosts, about the counselors making out, anything else.

  “Well, you want to hear something even crazier?”

  “I don’t know. Are we still playing?”

  “There was another door there, too. Right next to mine. Same last name, different letter. It said, Gill, L. I don’t know who that is.”

  Logan rolls onto her back again. She decides to take her glasses off. The clear view of all the stars in the sky is suddenly too much for her. “It was just a dream,” she tells him. “Anyway, you’re thinking too much. You shouldn’t be thinking about all that stuff. Death and stuff. You’re just a kid.”

  After another long pause, Max asks her, “Are you sure?” His voice is hollow and dreamy.

  Logan isn’t sure what he is asking. She pulls the mouth of her sleeping bag tight to her chin and clamps her eyes shut. “Good night, Max,” she says, just to stop him from talking. She isn’t really going to fall asleep. It’s too cold.

  Max’s sleeping bag rustles as he turns over. He reaches back with one unsteady hand and pats her awkwardly on the top of her head. It feels silly, and it makes Logan smile behind her closed eyes. “Night, Loges.”

  Sam

  They sit at the edge of the ravine, on her sleeping bag, looking down at Pike Falls flowing into the black pool below. They cannot stop laughing. Sam has never seen Nick laugh so hard; his face is crinkled, tears in his eyes, head thrown carelessly back at the stars.

  “We’re being cruel, aren’t we?” she asks through staggering breaths. “Should we go back?”

  Nick shakes his head. His chest trembles as the roar pitters down, carried away on the rush and splatter of the falls below them. He sighs, hiccups, and passes her the wine bottle. Remarkably—endearingly—he had it stowed in his pack all day. “They’re fine,” he says. “Here. Your turn.”

  “Okay.” Sam holds the bottle to her lips and blows into it absentmindedly, producing a hollow, airy ring. “I think you never had a drink until college.”

  He laughs inwardly. “That’s wrong.”

  Sam frowns and tips the bottle back. The wine is cheap and sweet, warm against her lips. “What, after college?”

  Nick reaches out to take the bottle from her. “Before. I was pretty young, actually.” He squints at her. They both have their knees up, legs zippered together, hunched close against the biting chill. “I think you hate your middle name.”

  Sam takes the wine back. “You’re good at this.”

  “Just lucky.”

  They’ve been playing the game for a while now, tossing their guesses back and forth, each a bit heavier than the last. It’s silly, flirtatious. Away from Camp and alone with him for so long, Sam realizes she hardly knows who she is looking at, or how she should feel about him. They abandoned the campers in the forest together to do this, exactly as Richard Byron told her to.

  “What do you think about all this?” she asks Nick presently, nodding toward the trail behind them. “Them, I mean. Why would they do this to themselves? Did they really think meeting as kids was going to make them fall back in . . . or, you know, fix things for them?”

  He reaches distractedly for the wine bottle, looking up at the stars. “I’m not sure that’s why they did it. I don’t know. It’s interesting though, isn’t it? The whole idea of going back in time, to be kids together. Like, fuck it—let’s put your soul and my soul in a jar together, shake it up and see what happens.” He thumbs the neck of the bottle. Sam catches an absent sort of recklessness on his face when he blinks away from the sky. “They’re not the first to try it. We’ve had other couples.”

  “Did it work for them?”

  Nick shrugs. “Who’s to say what ‘working’ means. None of them ever came back.” He takes a swig from the wine and passes it back to her. “He told me he has a crush on her. Max. In the truck. Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but I knew what he meant. He wanted to know why girls always go for the wrong guy.” He snorts. “Poor kid. Wrong guy, indeed.”

  “What did you tell him?” Sam marvels at how simple it is for him to pick the brains of the boy campers. Girls can’t be maneuvered so easily; girls are suspicious, too aware of the world.

  “I told him he should just be himself. Be nice to the girl. I told him, the nice guy always gets the girl, in the end.”

  “You shouldn’t have told him that.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s not fair to her. Girls don’t owe boys anything just for being nice to them.” This is what Rosie would say, Sam knows as she says it. She wonders if she is being honest, if she is speaking her own mind, or just sponging into the personality of someone she admires. She wonders if it makes a difference.

  Nick shifts forward and rests a hand on her thigh. Sam leans into the touch. “Fair enough,” he says after a pause. “But he’s not a boy, remember? And she’s not a girl.” He shrugs. “Anyway, that’s not my choice of words. Chard told me to say that to him, if I had the chance.”

  A breeze picks up, and Sam shivers. She pulls her hood over her head.

  Every trail of thought she goes down lately seems to lead her to Richard Byron. He has his hands in everything she does—even this night, the laughter and the hand on her thigh, the taste of the wine on her tongue and her own curious attraction to him. Byron is there in all of it. They are dolls in his dollhouse, and he is looking over them, picking them up, smashing them together.

  “Why,” she begins, slowly, carefully. “Why did he send us out here, you think? He caught me that morning, and he knows . . . but do you think it actually makes a difference? For them?”

  Nick shrugs. “It might. I’ve always said Chard should’ve been a movie director or something. He does that every summer. Tweaks things, sets up little scenarios to make it all more memorable for the campers.”

  “For the campers.”

  “Yeah, for the campers. What do you mean?”

  “It just feels . . .” Sam chews on her lip, a shred of dry skin. “I don’t know. Like he’s screwing with us. Like he’s setting us up, the same way we’re setting them up.” Again, she nods behind her, toward their campsite down the trail, where she assumes Max and Logan Gill are shivering with cold and fright around the dying fire. “Does that sound crazy?”

  Her words rest between them for a moment. They both sip from the bottle in thoughtful silence. A bird calls somewhere in the trees. Then Nick says, quietly, “Don’t do that to yourself. You can’t start thinking like that. I know it’s tempting. Because we’re so cut off from everything else, and we know what the campers really are, it’s easy to think . . . but you can’t. We’re not like them. If we were, we’d know it.”

  “Are you saying they know it?” In the darkness, away from Camp and brave with wine, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question.

  Nick nods matter-of-factly. “They know it. Of course, they know it. They don’t lose their memories in the transfer, you know. Those kids”—he shrugs toward the trail—“know exactly who they are. Just like they know we didn’t really abandon them back there. Just like they know there’s no such thing as ghosts. The only reason the whole thing works is that they want to look the other way. We make it easy for them.”

  “We keep telling them ghost stories,” Sam whispers.

  “Exactly. And they love them. Because a ghost isn’t as scary as . . . you know.”

  As Poppy Warbler, she wants to say. A ghost isn’t as scary as a washed-up pop star in a hospital bed, empty, living out her final days in a manufactured body. Dead and living, child and adult, here and gone. A constant reminder that they are all going to get old and die sooner than they believe. Nothing is scarier than that.

  Sam drains the bottle in her hand. Despite his warning, she can’t help but let the question spiral. In another life, older, miserable, what would she want? Without a doubt, she knows it would be this: wild air, stars; cold fingertips running along her ribs, making her shiver. She tips into him and they fall back onto the sleeping bag together. It would be easy to look the other way. Goosebumps. Breathy kisses. Little gasps and giggles. The sleeping bag slips beneath them, and Sam’s back scrapes against gritty rock. Clumsy, rough, nothing too serious—when she is older, she thinks, and Camp is far behind, this is what she’ll want to remember of it.

  They zip back into pants and jackets and lie on the sleeping bag for a minute or two, shivering. Sam’s back stings. Nick’s fingers trail over the back of her neck, catch in her tangled hair.

  “What is your middle name?” he asks her.

  “Renée,” she says. “For my aunt.” For a funny half second, she tries to bring her aunt Renée’s face to mind and fails. She can only remember hating the name.

  •••

  Back at the campsite, they find the campers curled on their sides, facing a pile of hot ash in the firepit. It has been fascinating, watching the two of them together. Maybe it’s only because she knows what they are to each other, but Sam could swear they move and speak in similar ways, like twins. They both have sweet, rounded faces and downcast eyes; both ask questions in high, nervous voices and purse their lips while they’re thinking. As Sam stoops to stir the ashes in the pit, Logan Adler-Gill suddenly looks up at her. She blinks blearily. Her red-framed glasses sit beside her in the dirt.

  “You’re back?” Her voice is thin with exhaustion.

  “Yeah.” Sam smiles. “Glad to see you survived.”

  The girl squirms down in her cocoon-like sleeping bag. “You guys are assholes,” she says from behind closed eyes. Sam spits out a shocked laugh.

  The next morning rises sticky and bitterly cold. They are all dirty and sap spotted. The hike back down the mountain takes half the time, and they load up into the truck—girls in the back, boys in the front, like before—with a good chance of making it back to Camp by the end of the morning activity period.

  Sam braces herself against the wall of the truck bed with her knees raised and her arms propped up behind her. She notices Logan copying her, holding herself in the same way. As they begin the bumpy drive, she watches the camper curiously. Logan’s features are soft, endearing: mousy brown hair and ungroomed brows, glasses precariously balanced on a button nose. Cute, Sam thinks of her. Incredibly relatable, too, in the self-conscious way she carries herself, the way she watches and imitates, careful not to cross a line. Sam asks her if she had fun on the trip and she nods sleepily.

  Not wanting to push too hard, she asks, as gently as she can, if she and Max get along. Logan nods and says that they are friends. “Just friends,” she clarifies, as if she can read through Sam’s question. She adds cockily: “I have a boyfriend.”

  “Oh?” Sam steadies herself against the side of the truck bed. They both bounce and rock unorthodoxly with each bump in the road. She knows who Logan’s boyfriend is. “Do you like him?”

  “Mmhmm.” Logan fiddles with the friendship bracelets on her wrist.

  Sam presses on, for no real reason other than fulfilling her own curiosity. “Is he nice to you? Your boyfriend?”

  She nods at her bracelets. When Sam asks if he has ever hurt her, she looks up, surprised. Loose hairs billow across her face in the rushing air. “Why would he hurt me?”

  “Boys can be jerks, sometimes. That’s all.”

  “Hmm.” Logan twists her lips and prods her glasses into place with her index finger. “He pushed me down, once, in Capture the Flag. But that was before we were going out.”

  Sam is struck by how young this girl is, how innocent. With a jolt, she realizes there are as many years between the two of them as there are between her and Nick. Then, with a gentler shock, she remembers that is not true at all.

  She can’t remember what Hugo Baker looked like, exactly. When she thinks of him, she sees Elias’s camper, the thirteen-year-old boy. She has an unsettling image of that kid at the crime scene. Blood-splattered, knife in hand. His childish face turned down in a violent sneer, looking over the body at his feet like he just pushed her down in Capture the Flag. “Can I tell you something, Logan?”

  “What?” The girl looks at her warily.

  Sam flounders. This is none of her business. This is not a kid, not a troubled little girl—this is just another rich, bored woman searching for an escape. “Just be careful. If he ever does anything to you, anything you don’t like, promise me you’ll come tell me about it, okay? I won’t get you in trouble. Either of you.” As she says this, she feels the stinging welt on the small of her back and wonders who she is to tell any girl how to behave with boys.

  Logan gives her a dismissive frown. She has an attitude. “Okay,” she says. She looks at Sam like she wants her to know she has no idea what she’s talking about. She is right about that much.

  week eight

  Logan

  Coming back to Camp Phoenix after the Pike Falls trip is like coming home at the end of a long, exhausting journey. They were only gone for about twenty-four hours, and Camp isn’t really home—but it is home, in a way. Logan’s real home is far away and fuzzy in her memory.

  She sits with Milly on the mess hall steps before lunch and tells her about the trip. She tells her about the way Sam talked about Danny McGee’s ghost, how nervous and careful she was. She tells her about the counselors leaving them at the campsite.

  “They left you alone?” Milly is stunned. “Just you and Maxie?”

  Logan nods. “Yeah—and get this.” Get this is something Donna says a lot. Logan rolls her eyes in the way she has adopted from her, too. She doesn’t care; Donna isn’t around to catch her being a copycat. “This morning, on the way back, Sam was trying to ask me if I like him! Just like Sadie did.”