She hears a burst of stifled giggles and reaches for her glasses on the top of her locker. Donna, Joy, and Mei are gathered around Sadie’s bunk in the back of the cabin. The counselor is a heavy sleeper, especially in the mornings. They take turns dangling a loose scrap of yarn from a God’s eye over her open mouth. When she breathes in, the string sucks to her lips and sticks there, then shoots upward again with an ugly snore. The girls hold their hands over their mouths and crinkle up their faces in mean laughter.

  Logan rolls to her back and looks up at the ceiling beams. Today is Saturday. Nearly a week of Camp has gone by already.

  The mornings are always cold. They have to wear long pants and sweatshirts and beanies to breakfast. Logan’s sweatshirt still smells like campfire when she pulls it over her head. She watches the other Ravens through the sides of her eyes. They change quickly and daintily, with their locker doors propped open in the bunk aisles. They tie up their hair in ponytails and braids and crowd each other in the bathroom mirror, smearing on lotion like makeup. When they giggle over each other’s outfits, Logan feels her cheeks burn, like she can’t quite get the joke.

  The first thing she has learned at Camp is that she is missing something. She can’t move the way they move, or see things the way they do, or talk to them the way they talk to each other. The rest of the Ravens have something she must have been born without, some instinct that tells them how to do these things. Milly has it, too—in her own way. She has it, but she doesn’t use it. She wears her pajamas to breakfast and rolls her eyes as she pushes through them to get to the toilet.

  When the bell rings again, they leave the cabin and flood toward the main lawn to wait for breakfast. The area below the mess hall becomes a jungle before mealtimes. It’s divided into three clear sections: lawn, bell tower, announcement benches. These areas have strict borders, and campers have established territory within them. Logan and Milly like to sit halfway up the mess hall steps and watch everything play out.

  Younger kids play on the lawn. The littlest, the Hummingbirds and Chickadees, Finches and Wrens, stick to the edge of the dewy grass, closer to the counselors. Girls build pinecone houses and fill their shirts with acorns. Boys dig for worms. They crawl on their hands and knees and bark like dogs or whinny like horses. Farther out on the lawn the kids are older: Bluebirds, Sparrows, and Magpies; Blackbirds, Pigeons, Crows. They have big, active games, games with names and serious rules. They play Blob Tag and Mafia and sometimes cards, if someone swipes a deck from the game room. They push and shove and stick out their tongues. Boys punch each other and girls pick on each other.

  “I’m rubber and you’re glue,” they recite back and forth. “Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!”

  Or: “Sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me!”

  Some girls stay away from the games. They sit on the ground, under the trees, and weave their friendship bracelets. They talk quietly and seriously, more like grown-ups than the counselors.

  The counselors themselves always gather around the two wooden picnic benches at the base of the bell tower. They hold their coffee cups in both hands while they talk. Sometimes they are hushed, sometimes loud and excited. Behind the bell tower, where they can’t see, is where the oldest kids hang out. Ravens and Eagles, Hawks and Falcons. They sit on the announcement benches in nuclear clusters. Girls with girls and boys with boys. Sometimes they crane their necks to talk across the clusters. They whisper behind their hands, and the way they shout when the secrets touch their ears makes Logan want to hear them, too. Girls weave friendship bracelets and give them to other girls, and sometimes to boys, but for a girl to give a boy a bracelet is a bold and very public event.

  If it weren’t for Milly, Logan would probably sit on the benches, too. She would sit off to the side of the group and try not to look like she was trying too hard to be a part of things. That’s what Annie does. Sometimes she thinks she would like it there, but it’s too late now—they’re a week into Camp life and everyone’s places are set. Her place is glued to Milly’s side.

  “Look,” Milly will say, sweeping her arm out from their perch on the steps. “See, over there they’re playing make-believe, and over here, they’re doing the same thing. At least the little kids know they’re pretending.”

  Milly has a grudge against everyone else their own age. She says she is an old soul. She says a lot of things that Logan can’t quite believe, like that her full name is Millipede Meyer, and her mom is an astronaut, and she is raising three orphaned baby squirrels at home. She talks about these things sincerely, without any effort, as if they’re no big deal at all. She doesn’t seem to mind that she is different from the other girls. As long as she sticks with Milly, Logan doesn’t have to mind much, either.

  The day is measured in bell chimes. A counselor tugs the rope inside the bell tower, and everybody stops what they’re doing to form a trickling line up the steps and into the mess hall. Breakfast is French toast with syrup and powdered sugar, slimy fruit and greasy sausage links. The mess hall is always loud and warm. The walls are covered in faded banners and dusty paintings and black-and-white photos of summers long ago; the counselors say Camp has been around forever, a hundred years, or longer.

  After breakfast, they file back down the steps for announcements. The Falcons sit behind the Ravens, poke them in their backs and pull their braids. The day is warming up. Logan slides her beanie off but then, worried about her hair, puts it back on. She hopes no one noticed.

  Back at the cabin, they put on their sunscreen and do their chores. The bell sends them out to morning activity. They get to choose their activity in the afternoon, but in the mornings, they go to assigned activities as a group. Today they have a nature walk with the Hawks. The Hawks’ counselor leads them. Logan likes him—curly hair, dimpled cheeks, enormous smiles. Sometimes she catches herself looking for him under the bell tower before meals. He says his name is Christian, but the counselors and his cabin call him Taps.

  They start out at the gold-panning claim, way up above the ropes course. Taps leads them along the creek on a bumpy trail. He points out anthills and coyote tracks and termite paths in bark, different species of moss and mushroom and even a raggedy crawfish claw, which he fishes out of the creek and places on the top of Donna’s head while she is distracted, talking. She screams like bloody murder when she realizes. Milly laughs so hard tears run down her cheeks, earning her a glare from Donna and the others.

  “You see,” says the counselor, “that’s why we always have to be alert when we’re out in nature. You never know what’s going to jump out and get you.”

  Logan imagines detached crawfish claws stalking through the trees, jumping out at them, and she laughs, too—not as obviously as Milly.

  They follow the creek up the mountainside as the sun climbs higher and higher. Around the middle of the activity period, they stop in a clearing beside the water. Taps shows them a rocky mound where they can climb up to see the view of Camp below. Anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable climbing, he tells them, should stay on the ground. Logan certainly does not feel comfortable. Her stomach turns just looking at the pebbles that come tumbling down under Taps’s boots. The Hawks all follow him up, and so does Milly.

  Logan crouches at the edge of the creek, watching for scuttling critters down in the stones. She reaches in and lets the cold water run through her fingers. It feels nice. The air is always so hot and dry at Camp. Her lips are chapped and sore, and she left her lip balm in the cabin. She would like to fling her whole body in and let the creek flow over her. Instead, she cups the icy water in her hands and raises it to her mouth, hoping to soothe her splitting lips.

  “You probably shouldn’t drink that.”

  Logan twitches and lets the water fall from her hands. It splatters down the front of her shirt. A boy—apparently the only one who didn’t climb the rocks—has sat down on the bank of the creek behind her.

  “I wasn’t drinking it.” She nudges her glasses up on her nose. “That’d be gross.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “My lips are chapped. I was trying to cool them down.”

  The boy reaches into the pocket of his baggy shorts. He’s a chubby kid, with rich, reddish-tan skin and heavy eyebrows. His hair is black and unwashed and hangs drearily over his forehead. After some fishing, he pulls out a roll of lip balm and offers it to her silently.

  Logan hesitates. She glances toward the rest of the Ravens, sitting on a log in the clearing, chatting. From the top of the rock mound, she can hear everyone else’s voices. “Sure,” she says and stands to take the lip balm from him. Not thinking much about it, she removes the lid and spreads it twice over her top and bottom lips. Before she can thank the boy, an excited squeal pierces through the woods.

  “Oh my God, Logan!”

  Logan looks up. Donna is staring and pointing right at her.

  “Did you just use that kid’s lip balm? That’s disgusting!”

  She looks at the little tube in her hand. Disgusting? Why?

  Joy and Liz and Mei laugh, their noses crinkled behind their hands. Mortified, Logan caps the tube and thrusts it back at the boy.

  “Ew, Logan, you basically just made out with him.”

  “And why are you all wet?” Liz adds.

  Logan looks down at her splattered shirt and can’t see who is speaking. Whoever it is, they say it quietly, just for the other girls but still loud enough for her to hear. “Oh my God, she’s so weird.”

  When she looks up again, they are all rolling their eyes and nodding in agreement. They go back to whatever they were talking about before.

  The boy walks away quickly without saying anything. Logan plops onto the creek bank. So weird, she hears in her head, on repeat like a skipping song. So weird, so weird, so weird.

  She mouths the words to herself until they lose their meaning and sound like nonsense. Gravity has gotten stronger, pulling her downward, the treetops threatening to timber over on top of her. She wishes Milly would come back down from the lookout. Camp is horrible, she thinks in a rush, and everything is ugly. She wants to go home.

  Sam

  She steps onto her porch in wool socks and sandals and a smoky-smelling flannel shirt. The morning light is soft and dewy. Birds twitter busily in the trees. Blinking, her eyes still heavy with sleep, Sam shuts the door behind her. She crosses the trails in solitary silence toward the mess hall, where she hikes up the steps and sneaks into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. It comes from an industrial carafe, burnt and bitter. The cooks have been at work for hours already. They greet her through the sizzle and steam and banter over their blaring music.

  As a part of her new shadowing role in the office, Sam’s job is to walk up the creek to the Camp gold-panning claim every morning, before the wake-up bell, and plant fake gold in the water. It’s a long walk, coming off a few sparse hours of sleep, but she is starting to enjoy it. In the quiet mornings, the forest breathes with life. She watches for squirrels and deer along the trail. Sometimes she spooks herself, catching leering shapes in the dappled shadows, listening to her own crunching footsteps.

  A hand-painted sign marks their imaginary gold-panning claim, where the water in the creek pools deep and slow. The pyrite is hidden in a molding cardboard box, stashed in a burrow under the pine needles. Sam selects a sparkling chunk, places it on a flat rock and brings another rock down hard on top of it, dusting herself with glitter and grime. She scatters the pieces across the pool and watches them sink down into the stones and scum. Later today, greedy little fingers will snatch them up in disbelief. There is something satisfying about the morning chore.

  Crossing the lawn on her way back, Sam pauses and looks out over the lake. The water is still as glass, reflecting the pines and the new blue sky. Dew soaks her toes. Birds chatter. A harsh, vibrant and aesthetic loneliness washes over her. At the Hummingbirds’ porch, she steps loudly and slowly and listens to the clamor of frantic feet inside.

  “She’s back! Hurry, get back in bed!”

  Sam opens the door to find them tucked tight in their sleeping bags, eyes screwed shut.

  The Hummingbirds’ cabin is connected to the Chickadees’ next door by their bathroom, a shielded concrete patio under a narrow awning. They share a set of child-sized toilet stalls, tin sinks, and rusting showerheads. Sam meets Rosie here as a matter of ritual every morning; they shower in side-by-side stalls and discuss the previous night over the splatter of hot water on concrete.

  “Did you hook up with Jaeden?” Rosie asks her through the curtain.

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  Sam scrubs her face in the stream. The water around her toes runs murky brown. “I don’t know.”

  When the wake-up bell rings, Sam and Rosie let the girls scamper ahead of them down the trail. Sam refills her coffee, and they join the rest of the counselors clustered around the picnic tables below the bell tower. Bitter steam rises from the mugs in their grasp. Campers shout and run around them, largely unsupervised.

  “That’s the thing,” Taps is saying as Sam and Rosie take their places in the group. His hands are pattering out a steady ta-da, ta-da, ta-da rhythm on the surface of the table. “He has no clue who she is. But, like, what if he does? What if they recognize each other, you know, subconsciously?”

  “What’s that?” Sam asks from behind her mug.

  Elias, in his sunglasses already—still drunk, for all they know—answers her: “Taps has this kid in his cabin. Came here with his wife.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yup. They’re both here. Same age. No idea.”

  A pair of boys playing tag dashes by the tables. One brushes against Sam’s hip, splattering her coffee. Oblivious to the grown-ups and their droning gossip, they run on. Sam grumbles, wiping her arms clean on the front of her shirt.

  “They did it on purpose, apparently,” Taps adds. “It was in his profile. They thought, like, if they catch a crush on each other as kids, it’ll save their marriage or something.”

  Rosie bursts with laughter. She combs her fingers through Elias’s hair, trying to pick out a clump of sap to his mumbled disgruntlement. “Hold still, I’m trying to help. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” she says to Taps. “People really do some ridiculous things when they’re bored and rich, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what we’re here for.” Taps shrugs. “Anyway, don’t try telling Sadie that. She has the girl, and she thinks it’s just so romantic. She keeps cornering me and trying to scheme ways we can, you know, shove them together.”

  Jeremy’s face lights up in a malicious grin. Before he can get through his joke, he is distracted by a camper out on the grass. “Hey, Brooker!” he shouts. “Get your hand out of your pants, man, come on! Jesus.” His voice drops again, disdainful. “That dude owns my bank, you know that? One of the world’s richest CEOs. Look at him—now he’s sniffing his fingers.”

  They all turn to look at the Pigeon in question. The boy has one shoe untied and his sweatshirt is inside out.

  A sharp whistle from the mess hall steps tears their attention away. “Hey!” Nick waves his watch at them, indignant. “It’s two past eight! Who’s ringing the bell today?”

  “Shit.” Elias shoves himself upright and sprints for the bell tower, hair and sunglasses askew. The rest of them scatter to herd the campers into line.

  Sam counts the Hummingbirds as they enter the mess hall. Sometimes they don’t all make it to a meal—every once in a while, someone will be lost, still wandering around on the lawn or back at the cabin. The room sings with stomping feet and high laughter and the clatter of cheap cutlery banged over plastic plates. Tacked on the wall beside their table, Sam keeps a tally of spills. If they make it through a week with fewer than ten spills, she promised them, she will personally arrange an ice cream party. Today is Monday, the start of a new week. In the first week, their tally reached twenty-four.

  “Two hands,” she shouts over the din. “Two hands!” Lucy tips the jug and hot chocolate topples into Maggie F.’s lap. Tears quickly follow.

  Morning chores are a bigger challenge. Sam limps across the cabin with Daria clinging to one leg, holding a bottle of sunscreen, begging them to shove their messes back into their lockers. “Push the broom, Deb, don’t pull it. Poppy, come here.” She catches her by the arm.

  “I’m bored!” Poppy squirms as Sam slathers sunscreen over her cheeks.

  “Did you make your bed?”

  “Yeah. Look, my tooth is wiggly.” She opens her mouth and jabs at her single front tooth with a dirty fingertip.

  “You didn’t make your bed. I’m looking right at it. Daria, stand up, please, you need to get dressed.”

  “Look at my tooth, Sam!”

  Sam sighs. She lifts a hand to rub her eyes, forgetting that her fingers are still coated in sunscreen, and nearly swears out loud at the sting. “Poppy,” she winces, squinting through tears, “make your bed.”

  When they are finally dressed, Sam sends the Hummingbirds out to their morning sailing lesson. Poor, hungover Kyle, she thinks smugly, will be waiting for them at the boathouse. If not for her new job, she would have a morning activity to run, too. Right now, Elias is saddling horses and Rosie is dividing up volleyball teams. Sam takes her time lingering in the empty cabin, sifting through her dirty laundry and humming to herself, before she slowly makes her way back across Camp to the office.

  Campbell isn’t at his desk. He left a list of chores for her scrawled on the whiteboard in red ink: Sam, pls type & print out 30 copies of new lifeguard policies. Call Steve @ Craft Depot & order lanyard string (3 crate). Check with Ellen in the kitchen about flour stocks. Ur a rockstar! The 3 is written over a cloudy smudge; it was a 2 before he changed his mind.