Proof of Forever (5 page)

There's something very “Circle of Life” about the dinner call at Camp Okahatchee: a blaring horn at exactly 6:30 p.m., which sounds like a mix between an enormous trumpet and one of those old-school conch shells, and then the ensuing flood of campers—the seven- to twelve-year-olds herded in organized lines from their bunks by their head counselors; the thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds converging from their afternoon sports and activities; everyone flowing together like tributaries into a larger river, headed toward the chaotic delta of the dining hall's barn-style double-door entrance.

Luce always had dinnertime down to a science: expertly navigating the steady stream of other campers, surging ahead so she could secure a spot at picnic table 17, the one farthest from the bathrooms and the busy food line, the table with the best light in the early evening.

But today, she feels like a leaf pulled along by the
current—undirected and uncertain, unable to stop. Unmoored.
Unmoored, unprecedented, unwitting. Without an anchor, never having happened before, unconscious.

After the relay race was curtailed due to Ricky's injury—a fractured ankle, just like two summers ago (just like
this
summer)—the girls were eventually sent back to their cabin, Bunk Blue Heron. (Nobody knows, not even Luce or her mother, why the girls' bunks are named after animals and the boys' bunks are simply numbered.) Now she shuffles toward the dining hall—wearing the purple and yellow flip-flops she found tucked neatly under the corner of her bottom bunk, waiting for her like a pair of obedient puppies—as though compelled by a malicious force. She feels itchy and antsy, sticky and confined, as though she's been forced to put on an old, still-wet one-piece.

The other girls may be referring to what happened as another one of Okahatchee's reunion night “miracles,” but Luce personally does
not
want to be back, does not want to have to consider the repercussions this could have on the time-space continuum, as Zoe put it. She does not want to pretend to be someone she's not: her former self.

As soon as she steps through the giant entryway, inhaling the smell of limp pizza and squishy, mayonnaise-drenched pasta salad, Andrew calls her name.

“Luce! Hey, Luce!”

The relief is immense; his voice anchors her, finally, and she's so drawn in, she doesn't even bother to scan the crowd for Zoe, Tali, and Joy. Another thing she isn't prepared to do: pretend to
be close again, like they were that summer.
This
summer.

Luce weaves her way through the packed dining hall, careful not to bump into anyone's tray. As she nears table 13—square in the middle of the mayhem—Andrew's grin grows so wide it seems to take over his whole face. He looks almost exactly the same, except for his facial hair, which is basically nonexistent. Luce feels something pull inside her chest. She realizes that in Andrew's mind, they have probably been together for only approximately five weeks. Five weeks! The idea seems crazy to her now, after more than two full years. How is she supposed to act around him?

Will he know something's wrong?

This
Andrew is still getting to know Luce. He has never seen how ridiculous she gets when watching corny old Disney movies. He hasn't yet held her hand while she cries, waiting for Amelia to undergo surgery. He hasn't even seen Luce's boobs. Second base is still a few weeks away, in his dorm room at Brewster. . . .

“Hi, babe—er, Andrew,” she says, trying to seem casual. She's already completely unsure how to behave. Do they call each other babe yet, or did that start later, at some distant point post–second base?

Luckily, he doesn't seem to notice. He slides down on the picnic bench to make more room for her, then immediately throws his arm around her shoulders and kisses her cheek. She leans into him, marveling at how good it feels to be next to him. His smell is a little different—more sunscreen and less of the sharp spice of the deodorant she knows he'll switch to eventually.

“You aren't hungry?” he asks.

She realizes that it didn't even occur to her to get a tray for dinner.

“I guess not. Mind if I just have a bite or two of yours?” She reaches over his tray and grabs his plastic fork, skewering a slice of pepperoni straight off his pizza. It leaves a gooey trail of cheese behind, which Andrew doesn't seem to mind. He never seems to mind.

“They didn't have any pineapple,” he says apologetically. “I know it's your favorite.”

Luce stares at him for a second, midchew. She
still
orders her pizza with extra pineapple. Usually she likes how Andrew tries to take care of her. No one else ever does—people always assume Luciana Cruz doesn't need help.

But this feels wrong—shouldn't there be those heady, crazy sparks between two people when a relationship is just beginning? Shouldn't she be harder to read? What always felt wonderfully comforting and easy now feels
too
easy, like a downshift, or when they make those crappy PSATs that are way too unchallenging to be the real deal.

“So I heard the Orange team would have come in first place, if it hadn't been for the Ricky thing,” Andrew says, going for a giant bite of his pizza.

“Yeah, well, we wouldn't have won anyway, after I botched the whole baton pass. I was pretty, um . . . distracted, I guess.”

Andrew finishes his pizza in one final bite, his Adam's apple bobbing like he's a snake downing a mouse. It always amazes
Luce how quickly boys can put away food.

“Apparently the pain was so bad, Ricky actually started crying,” he says. “It's broken, I think. Jade and Mark had to practically carry him to the infirmary.” Luce knows that Jade will go on to transfer to a performing arts high school for her senior year—she's always had a flair for drama. In fact, she's always had a flair for being at the center of
other
people's drama.

Andrew finishes another bite of pizza. “She got the merit badge right on the spot.”

Luce's heart stops.
Jade got the merit badge.

He registers the look of complete shock on Luce's face. “Hey, what's the matter?” he asks, touching her back lightly. “Should I go get you some salad or something? You probably shouldn't skip dinner after relay day.”

“No, no, I'm fine, it's not that, it's just—” Luce pauses, trying to figure out how much to tell him.

“Just what?”

“Just that I was kind of hoping
I'd
get the merit badge this year, is all. I really,
really
wanted it.”
I need it in order to undo a cursed photo booth incident and bring me back to the present!
“What am I gonna do now?” She starts to feel queasy. Briefly she toys with the idea of telling her mom. After all, if there's one person who understands the mysterious workings of Camp OK better than anyone else, it's her. But then . . . would her mom get mad? Would her mom even
believe
her?

It's too loud in the dining hall; too hot. Zoe said they had to be super careful—they had to act exactly like they did the first
time around, but here she is, failing already.

What can it mean? Will we ever get back to our real lives, or will we be caught in a time loop forever, permanently paused at fifteen? Will we have to start over from here?
The sounds of campers shouting and laughing and the clang of trays being slammed down onto tables and milk cartons being punctured by straws all converge into a single wave of sound, threatening to drown her.

“I'm sure you'll get a different badge, Luce,” he says gently. “You get one every summer. ‘I do what I can to honor the values Okahatchee has taught me'
and all that. Right? So don't put so much pressure on yourself.”

Luce gapes at him. “You remember that?” He just directly quoted her acceptance speech—the one she has repeated three summers in a row, once when she was an Eagle, once as a Hawk, once as a Wolf. And if all was going to happen like it was supposed to, she'd be giving that same exact speech again this year as a Blue Heron. It never struck her before how repetitive summer camp had been for her. Always the same badge, always the same speech, always the same tepid applause, always the mild sense of accomplishment that got quickly washed away like a shell by the tide.

Andrew smiles at her sheepishly. “I remember it all, babe. Everything about
you
,
anyway. Besides, it's one of the things I like most about you.”

“What, how freakishly predictable I am?” she asks, half-wondering if this is in fact what he means.

“No, Goofy,” he says, touching her nose. “How you always
do the right thing.” He touches her chin now, moving her face slightly closer to him, and starts to kiss her. The kiss is sweet—tender and nervous. An early Andrew-Luce kiss. He tastes of salty pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and root beer. She tries to enjoy it. This is Andrew—
her
Andrew. The one she fell in love with two years ago and is still in love with to this day . . . whatever
this
day actually is.

But for some reason, his words bug her.
You always do the right thing
.

She has got to stay focused on her goal. Stay in control. Somehow or another, she must manage to win the badge back from Jade—do something so honorable that it forces her mother to change her mind and reassign the honor to Luce. There's got to be a way to undo this mistake. It can't be that hard. She can still fix this.

Luciana Cruz can fix anything.

Unsurprisingly, Tali takes the longest time to shower, despite the fact that the rickety wooden stall is lined in a faint slippery sheen of green mildew, its corners draped with ancient-looking spiderwebs. By the time she trudges back to her bunk with her plastic shower caddy in hand, wrapped only in a threadbare standard-issue camp towel that feels far too meager for her body, the other girls have gone to dinner without her.

Other than Sarah Hawking, rummaging fruitlessly for a lost sock behind her bed, the rest of the cabin is empty. Even so, Tali feels self-conscious as she towels off and slips into her bra, an A-cup, one strap at a time, trying hard not to look at her young, not-fully-developed-yet boobs and her awkward, bony shape. She misses her subtle curves, her ability to raise one shoulder slightly at a guy or give him a certain look, and know, deep down, that she can have him if she wants him. It's like she's been completely stripped of her superpower, and now she's back to
gangly-skinny-loser Tali. The Tali who doesn't get noticed by boys and doesn't get invited to the best parties and who, when she steals her mom's credit card to buy a new outfit, is then teased for trying too hard and wearing the wrong thing. It took years of effort to
learn
how to be effortless.

And now it's all lost, like some higher being accidentally hit a big fat
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button on the invisible screen of life.

Camp Okahatchee has a serious lack of mirrors, but she can easily tell by touch that her hair is frizzy. Once it dries, it will be
too
frizzy. She rummages through her top cubby, the one filled with all the products she can't cram into her shower caddy, looking for her magic hair balm. Her heart starts racing. She can't even
remember
the last time she was seen in public with her hair like this. She removes every bottle and tube from the cubby, lining them along her top-bunk blanket.
It's not here. It's not here. It's not here.
Was it really fewer than two years ago that she discovered the best product to civilize her pre-straightening locks? This cannot be happening. The panic that's been hovering like a dark cloud threatens to break into a full-on storm.

And then, with a whoosh of relief, she locates the pink and black tube. As she pulls it out, a delicate gold chain comes unloosed and clinks to the floor. She stoops to pick it up. It's the necklace her dad gave her for her tenth birthday, a tiny Taurus symbol. He always called her his stubborn Taurus. She hasn't seen it in years; she lost it here at camp that last summer, doing something or other—maybe she took it off to swim or it came off in the sand or broke during a run or who knows what. Maybe it
just got lost at the very back of her cubby and she forgot to look for it.

As she clasps it around her neck, the phone conversation she had with her mother right before heading to reunion floods back to her, filling her chest with anxiety all over again. Her dad. Fraud. Investigation. Their assets frozen, at least for the moment. None of it made any sense at all. Tali's dad is one of the best people she knows—he always talks about how important it is to treat everyone equally, and he shows kindness in small ways that others would never think of, whether it's bringing home surprise gifts or remembering details of a story you told him years before, or just going out of his way to make you comfortable. No matter how bad things got at school, during her gawky, ugly, miserable phase, she always felt safe at home. Her dad believed in her, said she could do anything she put her mind to—anything she put that bullheaded spirit into, more like it. She even used to joke sometimes that his unconditional love and support was going to make her soft. But she meant it—not everyone sees her the way her parents do. In the real world, she's had to work for it.

For the first time, she wonders if her dad ever had to work for it, for the way people just gravitated toward his big, warm smile and generous spirit. She can't believe he'd ever lie about anything. Sure, he traveled a lot for business and would sometimes tell her that things were rocky or that his company was taking big risks . . . most of it would fly over her head. But anyway, she trusted him implicitly. It simply never occurred to her that he could ever do anything wrong.

Thinking about it now sends her spinning. She
can't
think about it. Because the only word she can come up with to describe how she feels is cold, harsh, and definite:
betrayed
—a word that lands hard as a rock at the pit of her stomach.

When she arrives at the big barn-style dining hall entryway, she's struck by the familiarity of the scene: the clatter, the crowdedness, the unmistakable scent of aging wood, and the rubbery tang of lumpy food kept warm in metal chafing dishes. Tali navigates the circus of pre-sixth-grade boys jockeying for the attention of their female counterparts (the Bunk Fox girls), the chatter of pre-third-graders (the Chipmunks) writing messages in washable marker on one another's arms, all the way through to the circling Hawks, prowling Wolves, and, finally, the Blue Herons.

Joy and Zoe are bent toward each other in a distinctly intense-looking huddle over table 17, Joy's long, brown hair and Zoe's matching blond—both of which Tali always envied—tucked behind their respective ears.

Tali plops down next to Zoe; Joy smiles and nods at her tray. “I see you've found the Camp OK dinner just as they've left it for us,” she says, not feeling particularly hungry.

“The only question is whether the food's from two days ago or two years ago, right? Not sure I'd be able to tell,” Zoe adds, poking at her noodles, then giving up and going for her slice of pizza instead.

“I vote two years ago,” Joy says with a slight smirk.

“Whatever,” Tali says, forking a bit of salad. “It's a far cry
from fantastic, but it's edible.”

“I wonder if this pasta would stick to the walls if we threw it,” Zoe says.

“I bet I could find out,” Joy says, and reaches over to pick up a noodle from Zoe's plate.

Zoe's face gets serious, and she puts up her hand to stop Joy, then leans in closer. “Wait. We should be more careful. Remember? We don't want to do anything out of the ordinary. What if we accidentally caused a food fight or something?”

Tali looks at her skeptically. “Aren't we basically doomed to screw up?” She stabs a meatball. “There's no way we can perfectly replicate everything we did two years ago. I can't even
remember
most of that summer.”

Zoe nods her head seriously, like she has already anticipated Tali's skepticism. “We just have to do the best we can. Camp ends in only four days. We have to focus on getting all of the objects we need for our date with the photo booth. For Joy, that means getting the talent-show tiara. For me, it means winning the fencing tournament again. And for you . . .” She trails off and looks at Tali. “Well, you have it the easiest.”

“I do?” Tali asks, popping the meatball into her mouth.

“Sure. All you have to do is explore Blake's nether regions, like you did two summers ago—aka
this
summer,” Zoe says, smirking.

Tali coughs, regretting the meatball. She grabs her Diet Coke, taking a long sip.

“What she means is you need to get his boxers from him
again,” Joy clarifies, as if Tali doesn't get it.

“I know what she means,” Tali replies quickly. “You're right. It's no problem.” She forces a big smile. Inside, her heart is beating fast. For a moment, she debates telling her former friends the truth.

But maybe, she thinks, Zoe is wrong. Maybe it's never too late to change the past.

Tali can smell the smoke from the bonfire before she can see the flames. Isn't that what they always say of fire? Funny how from afar it looks so pretty. Harmless, even.

Tali may not really be the rustic type, but bonfires always remind her of the large beach fires her aunt and uncle in Rhode Island would build on their private strip of sand, back when she was too tiny to even be allowed within five feet of the flames. The Safety Point, they called it. Back when things were simpler, when security could be counted in child-size steps.

Back when she believed people were exactly as they seemed. People like her own father.

“You guys,” Luce says beside her, pulling Tali out of a dangerous spiral of thoughts. “For the first time since whatever the hell happened to us this afternoon, I just . . . I don't know. I got an incredible feeling. I think it's all this.” She gestures toward the bonfire, its flickering light dancing on her golden-brown skin.

Joy smiles, toying with her side braid. “I know what you mean. Being back here. It almost seems like it wasn't an accident. It's kind of . . . exciting.”

Tali has to admit, through the thick layers of stress hovering in her mind like smog—the lies, the unanswered questions, the tasks ahead of them, the utter surrealness of it all—somewhere amid that she can feel what Luce and Joy are talking about: that spark. That Okahatchee magic.

Zoe shrugs as the four of them cross the rest of the grassy field toward the barren, cleared-out area where the fire roars, surrounded by a thick crowd. “I still think I should be practicing for the tournament, rather than, ya know, basking in the weird time warp—”

“Sh!” Luce turns to Zoe with a finger to her lips.

“Sorry, sorry,” Zoe mutters, and Tali can't help but crack a tiny smile. Despite all her convictions about this time travel business, there's one area in which Zoe Albright could never follow her own advice—subtlety. Zoe simply cannot keep her mouth shut. It's one of her most annoying, and lovable, traits. Back in middle school, Zoe and Tali could wander the streets of Liberty for hours, getting lost and eating ice cream and rambling about nothing and everything. Once, in eighth grade, they bought a fifty-cent bottle of red glitter and decided to sprinkle it all over the benches along Main Street, so that anyone who sat down would have glitter on their butts. It was dumb, but the two of them cracked up about it all afternoon, despite the fact that Zoe kept giving away their secret and apologizing to various people with sparkly rear ends.

It's crowded enough around the bonfire that Tali can't really get a grasp at first of who's there and who isn't. All the
thirteen-year-olds are vying for the best s'mores angle, their roasting sticks clashing like they're at one of Zoe's fencing tournaments. She takes a step backward to avoid getting skewered by one of them.

“Hey,” a male voice says, touching her arm. “Careful.” It's Jacob, broad and built like a jock, one of Blake's closest friends. Tali's heart thrums in her chest. Blake
must
have come if Jacob's here.

And all at once, she spots him, directly across the fire, laughing broad and easy while pounding another guy on the back, his dirty blond hair tousled and damp as though he's come directly from a shower, his white T-shirt accenting his deeply tanned skin.

Tali realizes she's sweating.

“Thanks,” she says distractedly to Jacob. He has barely registered her—this is the curse of the twin As—and is already about to make his way over to Blake and the rest of his friends. “Hey, where'd you get that?” she asks, her voice sounding awkward even to her as she nods toward what
appears
to be a Dixie cup full of something very likely spiked.

Jacob raises an eyebrow. “Blue cooler behind the sprinklers. Blake brought a stash. Benefits of being a day camper. Help yourself, if you want. Just don't tell anyone.”

Before she has a chance to thank him, he's gone. But it doesn't matter. This is her
in
.

“Come on, guys,” she says, turning back to her crew. “We are going to need some liquid courage.”

Tali tries not to catch Joy's eye, but it happens, and what passes between them wordlessly makes Tali's pulse still for a second. It's like Joy
knows
, just from a look. She knows Tali's nervous. It's possible she knows even more than that; knows about Blake. But in that same moment, it's also completely understood that Joy won't say a word.

Tali always used to take this quality of Joy's for granted—that she understood people in a way no one else did. That she would keep your secrets for you even when you didn't realize you had them. But now Tali wonders how Joy does it, how she can hold so much of other people's dirty laundry. She wonders what happens to
Joy's
emotional hamper.

She wonders why Joy left them. But part of her doesn't want to know the answer.

The four of them find the barely concealed blue cooler, and Tali gives a silent prayer of gratitude to whatever gods control underage drinking at camp. They always seemed to take a particularly lenient view of Okahatchee. Inside the cooler, melting ice sloshes from side to side as she plunges her hand into the achingly cold water and retrieves a three-quarters-empty liter of Russian vodka. She sees a bottle of cranberry juice as well, but upon further inspection discovers it to be empty. Straight vodka it is, then. She pulls four flimsy Dixie cups apart from the rest and begins to fill them each to a centimeter below the top, but Luce makes a face. “I'm not drinking that without a mixer.”

Tali shrugs and keeps the fourth cup in her hand—she can bring it to Blake. “Suit yourself!”

Then she swivels the cap onto the bottle and stashes it back in the cooler, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she hasn't been spotted by any of the counselors.

Zoe takes a sip, winces, coughs, and laughs.

Tali rolls her eyes. “Can we
try
to play it cool? You may recall I'm on a mission to seduce someone.” She didn't mean to sound so bitchy, but Zoe shakes her head, like she's not surprised.

“Whatever,” Zoe says, pouring out the rest of her drink. “I need to practice fencing anyway. I don't need to be parading around with you on a quest to get some ass.” She starts to march off.