Every Little Thing in the World (9 page)

“No way. Is he really English?”

“I don't think so.”

I turned around in my seat and scanned the milling teenagers. I remembered that character, a ridiculously handsome guest star with a very believable accent. I didn't see any sign of him in the dining hall. Apart from the Youth at Risk kids, who were immediately recognizable, nobody looked remarkable. I turned back to our table, where we exchanged the usual introductions—where we were from, where we went to school. It turned out that every one of us went to private school, and I imagined how I'd feel at moments like this if I ended up going to Bulgar County High, the school that pooled students from Linden Hill, Wallingston, and Halltown.

After dinner, our whole table walked back out to the bulletin board to check the group rosters. None of the guys were in Natalia's and my group, but sure enough, there was the name Brendan Taylor. “Oh my God,” Natalia squealed, elbowing the cutest guy in the stomach. It irked me a little bit that she would already be flirting, as if the grand romance we'd sacrificed so much for didn't mean a thing.

By now dark had settled around the camp, making it about fifteen degrees colder than when we'd gone in for dinner. Natalia shivered in her little shrug, and I unwrapped the fleece jacket from my waist and pulled it over my head. The air smelled woodsy and fresh, full of pine and wildflowers. Above our heads, with no city lights to interfere, stars glowed by the thousands. From the lake, loons trilled to one another, filling the evening with a wonderful, ghostly vibe. I breathed it all in hungrily, like something I didn't know I'd been craving.

We walked down to the dock, where there were about a million bright blue canoes resting on their sides by the river bank. The guys started a rock-skipping contest. They went about it all wrong, hurling tiny round pebbles. I searched the ground for a broad, flat rock, and when I found the right one I sailed it over the top of the water. One, two, three, four, and then a last sailing skip before it plunged into the dark, silky depths. The guys whooped in appreciation. “That was awesome,” one of them said. “What was your name again?”

“Sydney,” Natalia told them.

“Hey, Sydney,” said Cody, the guy who'd sat next to me at dinner. “Do you want to take one of these canoes out?”

“Are we allowed?”

He shrugged. “Probably not. But I haven't seen many counselors around. We'll just take it for a quick spin.”

“Okay,” I said. I could feel Natalia's eyes on my back, probably surprised that even one of the guys was singling me out instead of her. With Natalia around, guys never paid attention to me until it was clear she was taken.

Cody and I pulled one of the canoes from its resting place. I rolled my jeans up to my knees and we waded into the water. When it was deep enough for the canoe to float, we climbed in, me in the front and Cody in the back. Sound carries so well over water, I was sure they could hear the lap, lap of our oars all the way up at the dining hall.

Cody and I didn't speak at first, just drifted out on the water. Obviously he had learned a lot last summer on the lake. He didn't switch oars in that awkward way, but steered with expert J strokes. Up above the water, the night went even crazier with stars. Cody and I both stared up, transfixed.

“Look,” he said. “There's the moon.” I turned toward the bright crescent, nearly hidden in the spectacle of stars.

“It'll be amazing out here when it's full,” I said. “Did you see the northern lights last summer?”

“Once,” he said, “at the end of the trip. But last summer I came for August, so it was nearly September by the time we saw them. That's more the season.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. I stared up at the sky as if I could will the display to appear. Instead of lights there was an explosion of sound. We heard a chorus of bullfrogs in the reeds, and then a booming voice:

“Whoever's got a canoe on the water, you better bring it right back to shore.”

The voice sounded weathered and distinctly adult. I wondered if it was Campbell himself and looked over my shoulder at Cody, who smiled at me. I smiled back. At camp barely three hours and here I was, in trouble again. But what did it matter? My feet felt chilly and wet from wading through the lake, and I could tell the faint breeze and mild exercise had turned my cheeks bright pink. Campbell's instruction letter had said the lake was fresh and bacteria free: The water wouldn't need to be boiled, and we could dunk our Nalgene bottles straight in whenever we wanted a drink. I stopped rowing for a second, cupped my hand, and dipped it into the lake. The water tasted fresh and cold, the purest stuff on Earth.

Whoever had called out didn't bother meeting us onshore for a lecture. Nobody greeted us on the dock, not even Natalia. I wondered where she had gone. Cody and I dragged our canoe to its original spot, then sat on the edge of the dock together, swinging our feet through the water and looking up at the stars. Every once in a while I would sneak a look at his profile. He looked much more grown-up than Tommy had, with a nice manly nose—a bump on the bridge, as if it had been broken playing sports. I resisted the urge to run my finger over it.

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“Sixteen,” he said. “You?”

“Sixteen,” I said.

“It's too bad we're not in the same group,” Cody said. I flushed with the compliment. And then, with a fresh shock, I remembered the baby. As soon as the word formed in my mind, I shook my head.
The baby
. Since when was it a baby? I wondered if Natalia's pro-life moment on the airplane had somehow infected me. But it hit me with monster force, the memory of my pregnancy. It was weird and exciting enough, sitting here in another country, a cold Canadian lake under my dangling feet, and a cute, apparently interested guy beside me. But to remember that I was
pregnant
, that there was this possible other person along for the ride, brought the moment directly into the realm of surreal.

I thought again of Margit, pregnant with Natalia—who would grow into one of the most important people in my life. Where would I be now if Margit had gone the same route I'd mapped out for myself ?

Something inside of me hardened, and I thought that if Natalia had never been born I'd have one less obstacle to ending this pregnancy. Not only that, but I never would have met Tommy, so I wouldn't be pregnant in the first place. Before I could get around to beating myself up for these thoughts, I reminded myself that my circumstances were completely different. Margit had been seventeen. Only a year older, but still—enough to make a difference. And her parents had been
willing to step up to the plate, something my mother would never do. Hadn't she made it clear every day that raising a child was misery? Kerry and my father might take the baby. But I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Kerry was so devoted to her own kids, mine might get lost in the shuffle. And I'd never especially enjoyed being my father's child; in fact, he had given me nightmares. Why would I leave a child in his care?

It felt bizarre to consider the future of this dust speck as if it were an actual person. If I didn't want it to be raised in a less-than-ideal environment, why did I feel fine about scraping it into medical waste?

“What are you thinking about?” Cody asked, a question I would have hated even if I weren't pregnant. I looked directly into his face. His eyes were so pretty, even in this starlit darkness, every possible color flecking and merging. Perversely, I thought that if we had sex this very minute, on the edge of this dock, I wouldn't have to worry about birth control.

“Hmm,” I murmured, borrowing a page from Natalia's flirt book. “Isn't that kind of a personal question for someone you've known forty minutes?”

“Oh,” said Cody, “I think it's been a lot longer than that. Dinner was like, an hour ago. And we shared a brownie. In some Middle Eastern cultures, that would be tantamount to an engagement.”

“Tantamount. Did you bring along your SAT vocab cards?”

He tapped his head. “I've got it all up here, baby,” he said, and I laughed.

From up on the hill—the same direction as the voice that had called us back—a bell sounded.

“You must know the significance of that,” I said.

“Warning for lights-out,” Cody told me. “But believe me, it's not strictly enforced.”

“Still,” I said. “Maybe we should head back.” I stood up and rolled down the cuffs of my jeans, then pulled on my shoes. Cody did the same. I half expected him to try to kiss me before we went up to the dining hall, but he didn't—just thumped me on the back, between my shoulder blades, like I was his little sister.

“That was fun,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Any time.” We walked through the dark in an unfamiliar direction, our hands swinging intimately beside each other, not touching, but still companionable.

Back at our cabin, Natalia had managed to trade beds with the dour, chubby girl who'd claimed the bunk below mine. We lay awake in the dark, crickets madly chirping outside our window. “They don't give us much direction around here,” Natalia said. I hung over the edge of my bed and looked down at her, her long black hair spread across the camp pillow. She'd already complained about the pillow being too flimsy, and I didn't want to tell her that it would be the last one she'd see for four weeks.

“Did you kiss that guy?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “He didn't even hold my hand.”

“That's kind of romantic,” she said, and I wondered if she'd heard me right. “He was cute.”

“You think?” I said.

“I do. Very cute. I love his nose.”

“Me too.”

“Maybe you can hook up tomorrow,” Natalia said. “At least you wouldn't have to worry about birth control.”

Though I'd had exactly the same thought, coming from Natalia it sounded mean. I drew my head back without saying anything. At the same time, a girl from the next bunk shushed us. Natalia blew a light raspberry, and we both laughed before falling into obedient silence. Along with the racket of the crickets, bullfrogs gulped and loons trilled. A mosquito buzzed around my head and I batted at it for several minutes before smashing it, with a squelch of blood, on my forehead.

“Do you like it here?” I whispered to Natalia. But she answered only with a quiet snore, the traveling and the great outdoors working on her like a sleeping pill. In my top bunk I lay awake a long time, thinking about boys, and kisses, and all the appropriate teenage topics.

And then, for no particular reason, I wondered how high from the ground my bunk stood. I wondered what would happen if I rolled myself sideways. I imagined my body flopping to the floor with a loud thwack, a sharp ache in my head, and an instant gush of blood between my legs. I wondered where the nearest hospital was, if they would need to airlift me, and if they would tell my parents.

The next day after breakfast we met with our groups in the wide, bright light of a northern summer. Natalia had woken
up cheerful, more like her usual self than she'd seemed on the plane. I hoped that maybe she'd decided, like me, to leave her troubles back in New Jersey for these weeks we had on the water.

The lake reflected tiny dust particles, dancing like fairies in the air around us. We had to squint through the glare to see one another. Most of us—even the guys—fixed our eyes on the movie star kid. Brendan Taylor was even better dressed than Natalia, in perfectly fitting Gramicci pants and Patagonia fleece. He had tied a kerchief around his neck in a way that could only be described as jaunty. His eyes were robin's-egg blue, so bright and electric that he might have been wearing tinted contacts. He had brown, wavy hair. Not too tall for a guy, about Natalia's height, with a very lean, fit build.

We couldn't look at him directly for too long. Natalia kept elbowing me in the ribs, and we'd giggle and jerk our eyes back toward our feet. On
The New Mill River
Brendan had played someone's cousin visiting from England, an aristocrat with a streak of delinquency. Originally the star of the show had a crush on his character, but then she found out he'd gotten another character pregnant. The next episodes were all about what this girl, Carol Ann, should do about the pregnancy. Of course they never mentioned the
A
word, and eventually Brendan's character was written off the show, along with the girl's. I wondered where that imaginary girl had gone. Where do people in that situation—rejecting abortion and leaving family behind—go?

I turned my attention back to our group. The other two girls seemed to already know each other. They sat together the same way Natalia and I did, giggling and poking each other over Brendan. Their behavior would have made me restrain myself if I thought either of them had any chance of getting his attention. But Meredith was overweight, bespectacled, and baby faced. Poor Lori had short, spiky hair and terrible acne that would definitely not be helped by four weeks camping, no matter how fresh the lake water was.

“I'm voting them off,” Natalia whispered. The night before, she had scrubbed her face clean, then dumped all her Bobbi Brown makeup into the trash can by the sink, where some lucky camper would no doubt scoop it up after we left. “I want to do this wilderness thing whole hog,” Natalia had said, staring resolutely at her naked face.

Without makeup Natalia didn't look less attractive, only younger and more vulnerable, like all her flaws could finally stop apologizing. Her eyes looked huge and wide set, and the gap between her teeth made her look very European. Sitting in the circle with our makeshift family of the next four weeks, I decided I liked her better this way.

We looked over at the guys. Compared to gorgeous, semifamous Brendan, our Youth at Risk kid looked like the biggest delinquent who ever lived. He was white, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a scorpion at the base of his skull. There were more tattoos on his arms, not pretty, colorful ones, but green numbers and symbols that looked amateur and vaguely
satanic. His name was Mick. Throughout the meeting he drew pictures in the dirt with a stick, an activity that was strangely appealing in its boyishness. Mick was also the only one of us—apart from our counselors Jane and Silas—who didn't seem to notice Brendan.
The New Mill River
came on at nine o'clock on Tuesdays. Probably by that time of night Mick was already out committing crimes.