“Huh. Do you?” Milly raises her eyebrows.

  “Milly! You know I’m going out with Hugo.”

  “Yeah. How could I forget.” Milly makes a face like she smells something rotten. She slumps forward on her stair, her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands.

  There is a little voice in the back of Logan’s head that likes to whisper things, nasty things. Things she shouldn’t be thinking. It has been getting louder. Jealous, it says now.

  She is sick of Milly’s constant need to be different from everyone else. Her dirty clothes and gravelly laugh—Logan wishes, all at once, for a different best friend. A friend whose hair she could practice braiding. Milly’s hair looks like no one else’s in Camp, and she’ll never be able to braid it. She reaches out to touch the short locks and Milly flinches away.

  “Why’s your hair like that?” Logan snaps. She can’t stop herself. “No one else has hair like that.”

  Milly’s look is stabbing. “No one else at Camp has hair like mine,” she says, “because practically no one else at Camp looks like me.”

  Logan rolls her eyes and shifts away on the step. Milly always needs to be so different.

  In afternoon period, she goes by herself to the lakeshore to meet Hugo. He smiles when he sees her and gives her a quick hug, his arms stiff around her shoulders. He wants to take out a fishing pole from the boathouse. Logan decides not to take one herself. It seems more appropriate just to sit on the fishing dock and watch him untangle his line and cast it out, over and over. The lake is calm and mostly empty; a few other boys fish from the shore or in rowboats. A lifeguard looks over them with glossy, disinterested eyes. It’s scorching hot. Flies buzz around them, landing over and over in the sweat on Logan’s forehead.

  “Do you think the ghost is real?” she asks him.

  Hugo shrugs. “Maybe.” He is busy with his line. He talks a lot about fishing, but he doesn’t seem to be too good at it, Logan notes to herself.

  “What about the murderer?”

  He laughs. She likes that bubbly laugh of his.

  After a while, the heat and the flies are too much for her. She gulps down the rest of the water in her bottle and walks off the dock to refill it.

  The faucet is in the boathouse, back behind the sailboat racks where the moldy life jackets get piled. It’s cool and dim inside. Logan watches the clear trickle flow from the faucet into her water bottle. Just as she is thinking about what she should say to Hugo next, an eerie chill creeps over her. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle up and goosebumps spread over her arms. She is sure there is something—someone—standing right behind her.

  “Boo!” Hands close over her throat.

  Logan drops her water bottle. No scream comes out of her; she’s terrified into silence. Someone is laughing, a bubbly, boy’s laugh. “Hugo,” she sighs, turning.

  His hands drop from her throat to her shoulders. “Did you think I was a ghost?”

  “Yeah, actually, I did,” Logan admits. She was fully prepared to see the black shadow looming up behind her—Danny McGee in search of his bullies.

  “Don’t be an idiot. There’s no such thing as ghosts.” Hugo’s smile fades. His hands drop from her shoulders to her hips. He pulls her waist into his. Logan dimly recognizes the look from the barn loft: extremely serious, like something important is about to happen. She isn’t sure she is ready to try kissing him again, but his hands are on her hips and his face is closing in, and he is her boyfriend, after all—this is what they’re supposed to do.

  First, it’s just a quick peck on the lips, like when they were playing Truth or Dare. That makes her smile. Then he looks nervously around the boathouse and tugs her farther behind the sailboat rack toward the life jacket pile, where no one would be able to see them if they came inside. The shadows are deeper back here. Logan lets her body go weightless as he guides her. He presses himself up against her. She panics and reminds herself to open her mouth and breathe through her nose, like she once heard Mei telling the other girls.

  Is this really what everyone is so obsessed with? This is what grown-ups do for fun? Logan despairs behind her closed eyes. Making out is gross and suffocating, and it stinks. If this is adulthood, she wants no part of it. She doesn’t know how to stop him.

  Hugo grips her tight, pushing her backward. They fall clunkily onto the pile of life jackets, damp and reeking of lake water and mildew. He is laughing, like this is a good joke, so she laughs, too. She really does like that laugh of his. Then he lunges for her again, and she falls onto her back. He is on top of her, heavy, holding her down. A spongey cold soaks into the back of her hair and shirt. Hugo grunts in an ugly, animal way. Logan’s eyes scrunch shut. In the shadows of the boathouse, she sees blue waves and anxious red splotches.

  Panic wins. She wants to stop. She tries to pull away from him, but her head is pressed into the wet foam. She shuts her lips tight and clenches her fists and waits for him to stop kissing her. For a moment she thinks he might not stop at all, but then his head is off hers and she is looking up at him in the shadowy light. One bony knee digs into the center of her thigh. He looks confused. He opens his mouth—Logan assumes, to ask her what is wrong—but nothing comes out.

  “Hugo,” she wheezes, “I—I can’t breathe.”

  He moves so his weight is off her, but keeps his arms around her, holding her in place. The life jackets shift and slide, tectonic plates beneath them. Her glasses are crooked. Still so serious, he looks her in the eyes. “Come here.”

  She can’t possibly come any closer than she already is, Logan thinks, but quickly realizes he isn’t talking about all of her. He means her right hand, which he grabs by the wrist and pulls toward him. To his lap. He presses her palm to the front of his shorts.

  “Hey!” Logan snaps her arm back. Sharp fear and hot embarrassment twist through her.

  “It’s all right.” Hugo’s eyes are heavy, half closed. He grabs her wrist again. “Come here.” Logan doesn’t know what to say. She isn’t exactly limp and weightless anymore, but he is so much stronger than her.

  “I don’t know how,” she manages.

  “That’s all right. I’ll show you how.” He wiggles, causing a life jacket to slide to the ground with a sandy flop. Logan looks frantically up at the ceiling. He guides her hand. “It’s okay. You’re my girlfriend. We’re supposed to do this.” His forehead presses into hers. His breath is hot on her face, fogging her lenses. “Come on. Donna did it.”

  It’s ugly and alien and hot against her skin. Logan tumbles in her head. They’re old enough. Donna did it for him. Adults do it. She thinks of Sam—cool and confident, messy hair, skinny arms stretched out against the truck. She does things like this, too, for the boys who touch her back like it’s something to worship. Numb, she lets him steer her hand. The voice in her head is back, but it isn’t whispering anymore. It shouts at her: Grow up. You have to. Donna did it.

  “Wait. Wait—I don’t want to.”

  He ignores her.

  You have to.

  Someone calls Hugo’s name. One of his friends. “Hugo! Dude, come here!” More boys’ voices join the chorus. They’re right outside the boathouse, at a run, their feet stamping. “Hugo! Henry caught a fish!”

  Hugo flinches and lets go of her. In a quick, hopping motion, his shorts are back up and buttoned. It’s like nothing happened at all. He looks at Logan, pink-cheeked and smiling as he catches his breath. The tips of his ears are bright red. Affection and confusion and embarrassment and terror bombard her from that smile. “I love you,” he whispers before he turns and runs out of the boathouse. He says it quick, easy, like a grown-up.

  A minute or two go by before Logan stands up from the life jacket pile. Her legs feel weak and shaky. She holds her right hand awkwardly at her side, like it’s coated in paint or blood and she has to be careful not to touch anything until she washes it. Stepping out into the sunlight, she looks toward the fishing bench and sees him. Hugo Baker is surrounded by a group of boys, all of them crouched with serious faces, like him. “Kill it, dude!” they shout, “kill it!”

  Hugo has a rock in his grip. He kneels in the grass by the dock. Logan sees something flopping, a shimmery tail. He lifts the rock and brings it down hard. The other boys cheer.

  “Hit it again!”

  He slams the rock down again. The fish flops, the boys shout, and he bares his teeth. Hugo holds his trophy up for everyone to see. His arms are slick with guts and scales.

  “You’re the man!” they howl. They shout his name; they can’t get enough of him. “Hugo goddamn Baker!” The lifeguard looks on dully from her rowboat. Logan’s feet begin carrying her away.

  She finds Sam at the Hummingbirds’ cabin before dinner, brushing the tangles out of Poppy’s hair. Logan doesn’t want to be a baby, but Sam said she wouldn’t get her in trouble, or Hugo. Her palm and fingers are still burning, and her mouth feels dry. When she looks at Sam, she feels an intense longing for someone else, someone older, someone who has all the answers. She can’t remember what her mom looked like. They’ve been at Camp for so long.

  At first, she isn’t sure what to say. Boys can be jerks, Sam said; he might do something to hurt her—but he didn’t hurt her, not really. She chews on a fingernail, then says, “I have a question.”

  The counselor nods. It’s like she already knows what she is going to say. She sends Poppy out of the cabin and sits Logan down on her bunk. “Tell me everything,” she says. Logan does.

  Sam

  As the summer drags toward its end, Camp is engulfed in a sweltering heat wave. The afternoons become unbearable. Even her early morning walks to the gold-panning claim have Sam sweating. With the heat comes the bugs: mosquitos in swarms at dusk and dawn, fat flies crawling over skin, wasp nests like land mines waiting to be stumbled upon. Campers and staff swamp the infirmary with bites and bumps and heat rashes. The horizon is growing hazy. There is a fire somewhere on the other side of the mountains, Campbell tells them. Uncontained, and growing.

  The heat has everything running slower, looser. The heat, and the fact that they are passing the seven-week mark, impossibly tired with the finish line still just out of sight. Their tightly knit schedule has begun to fray at the edges. Counselors lounge in the shade, nursing hangovers, and forget where they’re supposed to be. Campers wander lost in the middle of activity periods. Prank wars and food fights erupt, swear words fly unchecked.

  Poppy is as loud and demanding as ever. Sometimes Sam forgets why she is supposed to be keeping such a close eye on her. In the back of her slipping mind she begins to suspect, among other things, that Richard Byron made the whole thing up. She spends her morning walks fantasizing about crossing the lake and sneaking into the facility to see for herself what is really going on behind the door marked Warbler.

  Maybe while she is there, she muses, she can hold a pillow over Hugo Baker’s face.

  Not six hours after their conversation in the truck, Logan Adler-Gill came to her with tears in her eyes. “Made me touch it,” she told her. The conversation made Sam realize she isn’t as far from twelve as she thought; she remembers it—the haunting idea of it, the hilarious, horrifying mystery. She used to look at the Hugo Baker case more or less passively, neutrally, but she has no doubts about it anymore. The kind of boy who does a thing like that becomes the kind of man who believes he can get away with anything.

  She has complained to Nick and Campbell, but the most they will offer is sympathy. There is nothing they can do about it, they tell her. There is no proof of anything inappropriate. Whatever happens between two kids in a boathouse is no one’s business but the kids’.

  In a last-ditch effort, Sam decides to go to the boy’s counselor. She knows Elias is as attached to Hugo as she is to Poppy, and she can’t blame him for that, but he could talk to him. He could try to encourage him to stay away from girls like Logan for the rest of the summer. Maybe, at least, he will listen to her, and Sam will feel a little less powerless.

  During free hour in the afternoon, she asks Rosie to keep an eye on the Hummingbirds and treks across Camp to the boys’ cabins. Their world has gone dead and dry. Spiny bramble pricks at her ankles and lizards skitter across her path. She arrives drenched in sweat and irritable.

  A handful of boys sits sprawled on the Falcons’ porch in cuffed shorts, their scrawny chests bare and sunburnt. They are playing a roulette sort of game: facing each other with spread legs, one at a time tossing a pebble blindly up into the air between them and closing their eyes as it falls back down. “Don’t cover your balls!” they shout, squirming in place. “Nobody cover your balls!”

  “Hello, boys.” Sam leans over their porch railing.

  Hugo Baker flashes her his charming, little boy’s smile. “Hi Sam. You wanna play rock-balls?” He shows her the pebble in his hand.

  “No, thank you. Is your counselor here?”

  “Eli-as!” another boy shouts toward the cabin. “Girl!”

  “Great.” She walks up the steps and wedges her way through them, all too aware of the raised eyebrows and dopey grins behind her back.

  Elias sits on his bunk in the back of the empty cabin, in only his underwear, plucking at his guitar and singing fixedly to himself. When he sees Sam coming through the cabin door, he jolts. His fingers slip and the guitar brays, loud and off-key. “Dude. What are you doing here?”

  Sam steps down a row of cluttered, unmade bunks toward him. The cabin stinks like old socks. Musty towels and pebbles and half-carved wood shanks are scattered over the floor. “I need to talk to you,” she says, “about the murderer.”

  Elias’s eyes narrow, and he lowers the guitar from his lap. “You shouldn’t call him that.”

  Sam sits beside him on the bunk. She tells him, in a low voice, about Hugo and his girlfriend. Elias nods. He isn’t going to care, she knows immediately, watching his expression. He is unimpressed. Bored, if not even a little proud. He scratches at his naked chest and wipes his nose on the back of his wrist.

  “You have to say something to him, El,” she pleads. “I know he looks up to you.”

  “Well, what do you want me to say? Look,” he sighs, “don’t overreact because it’s him, all right? As far as we should think of it, he’s just any other kid.”

  “He’s not just any other kid,” Sam says through her teeth. Outside, the rock thunks to the porch. The boys shout. Sam looks at Elias and knows the conversation is going to be pointless. She is digging for help in all the wrong directions—every man she knows was a boy once.

  “Anyway.” He leans back on his elbow, picking at his fingernails. “You shouldn’t worry. Apparently, she dumped him. He’s actually pretty torn up about it. He wants to sing her a song at the talent show to win her back. It’s kind of cute, honestly.”

  Sam stands from the bunk. The heat is suffocating, heavy, bearing down on her. She can’t think straight. She gazes absentmindedly around the cabin and lifts her shirt hem to dab the sweat from her face. Elias’s stare drills into her back; she turns to see him smirking.

  “Nice rug burn, kiddo. You get that in the air rifle shed?”

  She rakes her eyes over his bare body. Bony kneecaps, scraggly little chest hairs. There is a hole in the elastic of his briefs. She is furious at him, for some reason she can’t quite nail down, as if the heat and the haze in the air is all his fault, radiating from his smug grin. “You’re one to talk,” she snips. “If either of us is getting a slutty reputation this summer, it’s not me.”

  Just before she reaches the cabin door, he stops her. “Hugo has night terrors. You know about that?”

  Sam nods.

  “You know what he says, every time? You know what he wakes up screaming?” Elias’s face swells with emotion—possessive, adoring; a parent’s look. “He says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”

  “Well, he says that all the time, doesn’t he? Out there?” Sam gestures beyond the cabin porch, across the lake. “I guess if you repeat something enough, it gets into your subconscious.”

  “I think he’s innocent, Sam.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She lets the door fall shut behind her, satisfied at having the last word, and steps past the boy murderer sitting on the porch. His cheeks are flushed, his face alight with childish excitement. He whispers a delighted dirty joke to his cabinmates as Sam walks away.

  Campbell calls an emergency meeting after dinner, during evening activity. The assistant directors and Sam gather in the mess hall. Richard Byron is elsewhere, busy. Two pressing issues have come up. The first is that they have been blackmailed. Campbell recites the email he received out loud; it’s short, and so horrendously cheesy that Sam catches Dane biting his lip to keep from laughing.

  I know about the little dead girl. Pay me for the rest of the summer, or I’m telling everyone.

  Phoebe’s threat is not the problem. Even a credible threat would not be a problem, not for Richard Byron, not for Phoenix Genetics. Sam knows that—they all know who they are and what they work for. The problem, according to Campbell, is that Phoebe somehow found out about Poppy. Someone violated the terms of their summer contract to get in touch with her.

  “She was friends with Greg, in the kitchen,” Gabe suggests. “I saw them hanging out a few times. He can get Internet up in town, can’t he?”

  “What about Taps?” asks Katie. “He knew her from home. Right, Sam?”

  Sam shrugs. “Why does it matter? She can’t actually do anything.”

  “Because,” Campbell sighs, exasperated, and runs a hand over his bald head. “Because rules are rules. Poppy isn’t the only high-profile client here. Camp Phoenix is supposed to guarantee confidentiality. We let one thing slip, and next thing you know, something gets out about Rachel Settler, or Hugo Baker—”