At the end of the song, the whole Camp stands. The fire has burnt low and red. The counselors sing in a low, swaying tune, and Logan remembers the words; she is singing along.

  Look up to the moon, moon, moon,

  Remember the sunshine bright.

  Breathe in the mountain air, my friend,

  Before we say good night.

  Look up to the moon, moon, moon,

  Hug every rock and tree,

  I will take care of you, my friend,

  If you take care of me.

  Silence falls with the last note. Brand-new stars glint overhead, glitter tossed over black ink. A single chime rings low and clear from the bell tower. It crosses Camp and thrums over the lake and resonates right through Logan’s core.

  When she finally crawls into her sleeping bag, she isn’t thinking about the height of the bunk. She isn’t thinking about anything. The crinkly mattress is a bed of feathers.

  Sam

  It’s easy to get the campers to bed on the first night. The little things are exhausted, still dizzy with drugs and muddled memories, and they pass out on top of their sleeping bags, some of them with their shoes still on. A dense quiet settles over the Hummingbirds’ cabin. Sam sighs with relief. She sits on the edge of her bunk and leans heavily over her knees. It was a long day.

  When the first busload of campers arrived from the facility this morning, most of the staff still had boozy breath and bloodshot eyes behind their sunglasses. They all wore their matching T-shirts: counselors in green, assistant directors in gray, and Campbell in white. Sam zips her jacket over her green T-shirt now. She can smell the sweat and sunscreen caked into it, but the energy to change is beyond her. A sleeping bag rustles, and she pauses to look down the rows of bunks.

  To think of the profiles in her binder now is absurd. When Sam was in high school, she wrote a biographical essay about Rachel Settler, a pioneering political journalist. Today she met Rachel Meyersburg, age seven, who cried through the tour and wet her pants at dinner. Daria Petrovsky, a seventy-five-year-old former diplomat a day ago, didn’t say a word all afternoon until she blinked at Sam and mumbled, “Mama?”

  They aren’t kids to her yet, exactly—only little things. Little aliens, wide-eyed and confused. Camp will mold them into their own people as they settle into the routine.

  At a tap on the cabin window behind her, Sam looks up. Rosie nudges the door open and peers through the crack. “Still awake?” she mouths.

  “Them, or me?”

  “Both.”

  “Neither.”

  Rosie leans around the door, craning her neck to look at the bottom bunk closest to Sam’s. A head of tangled blond hair lies motionless on the pillow. She nods at the camper with a geeky grin, and Sam grimaces.

  Paula Warbler arrived in a bright pink T-shirt and pigtails. She didn’t step off the bus so much as leap, arms raised and toes pointed, a trail of blood running down her shin from a fresh scrape on her knee. A wide, chubby-cheeked smile revealed a missing front tooth. “My name’s not Paula,” she said when Sam greeted her, “it’s Poppy. Everybody calls me Poppy.” Hardly an hour later, she hurled herself into a tantrum over being assigned to a bottom bunk, screaming loud enough to shake spiders from the ceiling beams, scaring the other girls. Poor Deb ran crying to the bathroom with her hands clamped over her ears.

  “I’ll meet you down there,” Sam whispers to Rosie. “Campbell wants to talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m fired.”

  Rosie laughs. “Wishful thinking,” she teases, then pulls the cabin door shut behind her. Sam listens to her footsteps creak away on the porch.

  Campbell asked her to come to the Camp office as soon as her campers were asleep. Sam walks alone over the trails, following her flashlight beam, hugging her jacket close against the night chill. The little A-frame cabin sits nestled between the trees above the mess hall. Inside is a single, gray-carpeted room, two desks overloaded by ancient computer monitors. The shabbiness of the space, the curly-corded landlines and chugging printers and smudged whiteboards, gives it an innocent, vaguely authoritative feel, like a parents’ workplace in a childhood memory. Sam steps cautiously through the open screen door.

  Dane and Nick nod to her from the spiral staircase in the back of the cabin. They’re coming down from their bunk room, both still wearing their gray opening-day T-shirts. “Hanging in there, Red?” Dane teases her, and Sam realizes she must look more frazzled than she thinks. She runs a hand over the frayed hairs beneath her beanie.

  Campbell sits at his desk, distracted by something on his bulbous monitor screen. “Come on in.” He waves at her.

  Sam settles onto the chair at the other desk. Nick, to her surprise, joins them, standing over her chair with folded arms. He clears his throat. They both watch Campbell drag his attention from the screen in silence.

  “We, uh . . .” he begins slowly, then swivels in his seat, blinking at her. “We’ve got a job for you, kid. If you’re interested.”

  “A job?” Sam repeats. In a flash, she imagines herself up at dawn to work in the kitchen or haul manure—she must have complained a little too loudly over her cabin assignment.

  “We’re looking for someone to shadow Nick this summer. It’ll be in the mornings, mostly. You’d help him put the schedule together, learn a little about his job. Run some errands for me. Help us wrangle the rest of the chuckleheads.” Campbell bobs his head at the screen door, gesturing vaguely toward the barnyard, where Sam knows bottles have already been cracked and green shirts abandoned on the Nest floor.

  “Oh.” She glances up at Nick, who nods and offers her a thin smile. “Like an assistant?”

  “Well, a shadow. But that’s the basic idea, yeah. This would replace your regular morning activity.”

  “Okay. Why do you want me to do it?”

  The two of them share a look. Sam catches a whiff of embarrassment in the air, of something unspoken. Campbell clears his throat before saying: “We had you pegged for it by the end of last summer, actually. You’re a good fit.”

  Dane, filling his water bottle at the sink in the back of the room, turns to her with a plain, unblinking look. “Sam. Remember how Amy shadowed me last year?”

  She nods, her head reeling to catch up. Amy followed Dane around Camp all summer, to his girlfriend’s chagrin. Now she is an assistant director. His insinuation doesn’t answer her question, though—Why, of all the counselors, would they pick her to wedge into leadership? Again, Sam looks up at Nick. A glaring answer occurs to her, and she quickly drops her eyes, mortified.

  “Listen,” says Campbell, “it’s up to you. If you want to be on the regular activity schedule, that’s fine. If you do this, though, we’ll want you to take it seriously.” He smiles at her, friendly and fatherly, then stands to stretch his back with a grunt. “Take the night to think about it, okay?”

  “Okay,” Sam says. She waits, swiveling in the desk chair, for more information, more answers, but nothing comes. She is dismissed. Campbell, Nick, and Dane gather in the back of the office, and Sam leaves. Their low voices trail like shadows behind her as she crosses the cabin porch.

  Now that Camp has officially started, the counselors’ free time is restricted. Between the hours of ten and two, a rotating patrol schedule covers the cabins: two male counselors stay behind on the boys’ side of Camp, and two female counselors on the girls’. Everyone else is left to their own whims.

  The rules are simple, passed down year after year from one generation of staff to the next. Campbell turns a deliberately ignorant eye to their free hours as long as the routine is never disrupted. The campers can’t be woken up. No evidence can be left out the next morning. Everyone must wake up in their own beds. Curfew is strict, and working hours resume as soon as the patrols are relieved. These rules are their mantra, adhered to with a sort of religious reverence, and while the assistant directors are technically in charge whenever Campbell is off the property, the counselors manage to govern themselves under the threat of losing their post-bedtime freedom. As long as they stick to the rules, their nights make the summer days livable.

  In later weeks they’ll leave Camp to build a fire somewhere in the forest, or to hang out behind the Smith’s Ridge market, pretend they’re anywhere else in the world. Tonight, they are tired. They cluster in the Nest on the sofas and floor, the barn ceiling beams groaning beneath their weight. Sam stretches out on a scratchy rug. Nursing a warm beer, she feels the day stretching out behind her, the weight of it tugging at her eyelids. They talk about the campers.

  “I used to have a Poppy Warbler poster over my bed,” Phoebe says, “when I was little.”

  “I was her for Halloween once. Twice, actually.” Rosie smiles. There is vodka in the coffee mug at her knees, and Jeremy’s hand is on her lower back, creeping up her shirt, both of them sprawled sloppily against the foot of a couch. They’re drunk enough, Sam can tell, to think they’re being subtle.

  “You?” He laughs at her.

  “Yes, me. Something wrong with that?”

  “No. Just, Poppy’s not . . .”

  “What?” She reels back from him, her face hardened. “Short? Puerto Rican? Go ahead, Germ.”

  “. . . Brunette,” Jeremy finishes weakly, and Rosie rolls her eyes. She pushes herself to her feet and walks off pointedly to refill her mug. He grunts, then wilts against the couch behind him. “Goddamn. Can’t make a joke around that one.”

  Phoebe leans over her crossed legs on the rug. “You don’t have to cover it up by calling it a joke,” she says. “Just think before you say stuff.”

  Sam snickers. Jeremy shrugs and flicks his hair from his eyes, swallowing a belch. Their conversation drifts, and Rosie doesn’t come back to the circle. Sam glances over her shoulder to see her talking with Elias, both leaning against the back of an armchair.

  Phoebe’s eyes, too, linger on Elias. She clears her throat, picking at the label of her beer bottle, then says quietly, “Did you see him?”

  Sam nods. She looks down at her own hands, the splinter in the pad of her pinky, black dirt crusted beneath her fingernails. There will be dirt beneath her fingernails for the next ten weeks, no matter how often she scrapes them clean. “I think so,” she says. “Yellow shirt, right?”

  “Yeah. He looked so normal. Cute.” Phoebe twists her lips thoughtfully toward the rug. “She was his girlfriend, wasn’t she?”

  “Yup. His mistress. They’re calling it a crime of passion.” Jeremy holds up both open palms and glances between the two of them, eyebrows raised. “If he did it,” he adds. It’s a challenge to debate that both Sam and Phoebe let flare and die in front of them. If Rosie had heard him, she would not have ignored it.

  Sam doesn’t want to talk about Hugo Baker anymore, or Poppy Warbler. A little overwhelmed, she excuses herself from the conversation and stands up. Rosie and Elias have fallen into a snippy argument. Taps is asleep on the couch and Sadie wavers in the corner of the room, looking like she might vomit. Sam feels along the top of the fridge for her stashed pack of cigarettes and heads for the ladder, chased by their jeers. The barn below is bigger at night, shadowy and cavernous. Chickens mutter and rustle in their coop. She stands in the broad doorway, looking up, listening to the laughter overhead. Just as she lifts the cigarette to her lips, she hears someone cross the creaking floor slats behind her.

  “Hey, Red.”

  Sam turns. Nick holds an unlit cigarette between his fingers. He gestures for the lighter in her hand and she offers it to him with a nod. “I don’t know whose that is. It was on the fridge.”

  He laughs behind the spark and glow in his palms. “It’s mine.”

  “Ah. Shit.”

  They lean against opposite sides of the doorframe, smoking and looking up. The moon overhead is half full. Pine boughs cast in pale silver shift and rustle in the breeze. The mountain nights here are as cold as the days are hot; Sam shivers and pulls her wool beanie down over her ears. She casts a sideways glance at Nick. His profile is framed in the dim barn light, highlighting the ridge of his nose, the flat plane of a cheek, scraggly curls at the nape of his neck.

  “Listen,” he begins, and Sam’s heart clenches in her chest.

  “We don’t have to do that,” she says quickly.

  “It’s about the shadowing thing.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Sam shrugs. In the flurry of the day, she nearly forgot.

  “We talked about it last summer. It was Chard’s idea, actually. He was saying we should pick a counselor, someone younger, to put on a leadership path. I brought up your name, and he said he liked you. That was before . . .” Nick stiffly flicks the hand holding his cigarette, a flat gesture toward the end of his sentence.

  Sam shifts. Feeling suddenly heavy, she can’t think of anything but the awkward way she has been holding her arms.

  It was the last night of the summer. They stumbled into each other at the bell tower—she’d wanted one last look at the moonlit lake below the lawn. Everyone else had already coupled up and disappeared. He asked if she was too drunk, but he could barely stand in place, and his shoes were on the wrong feet. They woke up to angry sunlight on her bunk in the empty Sparrows’ cabin. Sam hasn’t told anyone. Nick is practically their boss, and Elias’s brother—and her friendship with Elias wasn’t strictly platonic last summer, either. The whole thing was too bizarre to be real. She wishes he hadn’t brought it up.

  Nick straightens in the doorway, one hand in his pocket. “I just want you to know it’s not because of that,” he says.

  “Then why?” Sam asks. The earnestness of the question makes them both laugh in awkward, breathy puffs. “Why me?”

  “Like I said. Chard likes you. So does Gus.” He turns to look at her, and his face is entirely unreadable. “You’re good at your job. Do you not realize that?”

  Sam frowns. Of all the things she knows she is good at—French, algebra, boys—a job has never been one of them. Her cigarette, abandoned, burns near her fingertips. “I don’t really understand what it takes to be good at this job.”

  For a moment, she thinks he isn’t going to say anything. Then Nick shakes his head. “You’re smart. Confident. People like you.”

  “The kids don’t listen to me.”

  “It’s not so much about who they listen to. It’s who they want to be like.” He crouches to ash his cigarette in the mud at their feet. When he stands again, he asks: “What’s Paris like?”

  “Oh. Great, actually.” Sam squints across the barnyard, trying to count the days since she left Paris. “It’s so much more real there.”

  “Real?”

  “Yeah. You know, like, if you go to the store and buy a pack of eggs, they’re all brown. Not white. And people never have to smile at each other. We’re always smiling in the States, for no reason.”

  Nick nods steadily. If he finds her half-drunk musings on Parisian eggs ridiculous, he doesn’t show it. They stub out their cigarettes, and he offers to throw her butt away for her. His fingertips are freezing and calloused against hers when she passes it to him.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He stands in the barn doorway, waiting, allowing Sam to walk toward the trail ahead of him so they aren’t stuck crossing Camp together in the silent moonlight. Chivalrous of him, she thinks. “See you tomorrow, Sam. Stay on the trails.”

  Sam snorts as she starts across the mud. “Yeah. Stay on the trails.”

  She shuts off her flashlight when she reaches the Hummingbirds’ porch and lets the darkness chase her to the door. Inside, the smell of clean sheets and new rubber shoes and the beer on her breath paints a funny picture of the day. Her bunk is just below the front window, as if she is expected to defend her campers from whatever might come slinking in. Sam slides off her shoes and hat and whispers their names to herself as she tiptoes down the row of beds, toward the bathroom.

  “Poppy . . . Deb . . . Lucy . . . Maggie G. . . . Rachel . . . Maggie F. . . . Daria.”

  They are so small, hunkered in their sleeping bags, and Sam is all alone. If a mountain lion came leaping through the window, if a ceiling beam fell or the place suddenly caught on fire, it would be just her with these seven tiny people.

  She brushes her teeth in the outdoor bathroom and tiptoes back to her bunk. Poppy stirs in her sleeping bag. Sam lies on her side and watches her. Her stumpy little fingers twitch on the pillow; her breath catches and releases in her nose. She looks remarkably normal, lying there. Sam can’t help but wonder. Across the lake is a grown-up Poppy Warbler, unconscious in another bed. Are her fingers twitching, too? Does her knee ache where Poppy scraped it? Did her blood rush to her face when Poppy shrieked about the bottom bunk?

  She wonders where exactly Poppy is now, while she sleeps. Here, or there, or somewhere in between. She imagines her suspended high over the lake, a shimmering sliver of human life, caught between two bodies. Is that all Poppy Warbler is—just a sliver, a stream of consciousness? Or is she the grubby kid in the next bunk over? Or the woman in the poster tacked over Phoebe’s childhood bed?

  Sam decides not to wonder. She is tired enough that she can choose not to think about it. That, after all, is the real magic of Camp Phoenix. She rolls onto her back and looks up at the stars through the window. She thinks, instead, about the smell of barnyard mud and cigarette smoke, and calloused fingertips, and brown eggs in Paris. Then she is asleep.

  week three

  Logan

  The wake-up bell chimes when the light through the window is more yellow than blue. The glass is fogged by the cold outside. Logan lies on her stomach, hugging her pillow under her chin, watching the condensation gather and fall in trailing teardrops. Dong . . . dong . . . dong . . . the bell sings from the center of Camp.