Summer at Willow Lake (28 page)

Lolly got busy as well, helping to sort the girls into their skill groups. Ramona stood shivering on the dock, regarding the beautiful, clear water with misery and terror.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“You’re going to amaze yourself with what you can do,” Lolly said.

“I’m not going in.”

“If you put it off today, it’ll only be harder tomorrow.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Ramona said.

“Tell you what, how about if I get in the water first, and you can jump in and swim to me. Think you could do that?”

Ramona shrugged. At least it wasn’t a flat-out refusal.

Wonderful, thought Lolly, dropping her windbreaker, then peeling off her T-shirt. I get to be the first counselor in the water. Ramona looked so grateful that Lolly forgot to be self-conscious, though. She showed her how easy it was to jump in, just a short drop.

“Right here to me,” she urged. “Come on, Ramona. Think how proud of yourself you’ll be.”

“You promise you’ll catch me?”

“Promise.”

Ramona shut her eyes tightly, screwed up her face and hurled herself off the dock. For such a tiny, birdlike girl, she made a huge splash, drenching Lolly. But she succeeded. She went all the way in over her head and came up dog-paddling, bursting with wonder and pride. “I did it! Lolly! I did it!”

And so did I, Lolly thought, seeing Connor on the dock again. He was being checked out and fawned over once again, and appeared to be completely ignoring Lolly. Fine, she thought. She didn’t need or want his attention.

“Let’s swim over to that ladder,” she instructed Ramona, heading for the swim ladder at the end of the dock.

“It’s too far. I’ll drown.”

“I’ll be right by your side the whole time,” Lolly promised.

The wooden ladder attached to the dock had seen better days, and its rungs were slimy and waterlogged. Ramona scrambled out of the lake and did a little jig of triumph. Behind her, Lolly slipped and nearly fell on her face, coming down heavily on the dock.

“Graceful,” someone said, and snickered. Lolly recognized the voice of Jazzy Simmons, one of the other counselors. “Have a nice trip, Lolly?”

Her face burning with humiliation, Lolly ignored her and started to climb to her feet. A large hand took hold of hers and helped her up, and her face burned even hotter when she found herself gaping up at Connor Davis.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine.” She couldn’t bear to look at him. After he walked away, she looked down at Ramona, now shivering inside a towel. “See? It’s not the end of the world.”

Twenty

U
nofficially, the staff common room at Camp Kioga was known as the party shack. This was a large, all-purpose room where counselors and workers came after work to hang out and play music. As Connor approached the shack, he felt a base beat rattling the walls and rafters, and knew the party was already in full swing.

He stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness, which was illuminated by the glow of the stereo equipment and a couple of candles on a table with some bags of chips and bowls of salsa. Undulating bodies clustered in the middle of the room, creating an impromptu mosh pit. Others stood around the periphery of the building, drinking contraband beer and trying to hold conversations despite the volume of the music. Connor scanned the place for Lolly, but he couldn’t find her.

Maybe she was…mad at him? He couldn’t quite figure out why, but when he’d helped her up off the dock today, she’d seemed pissed off, dismissing him with a curt, “Fine.” Girls, he thought. Who the hell could figure them out?

A leggy blonde in a windbreaker that was unzipped to her belly button sidled up to him, holding a longneck bottle of beer. The music subsided as the CD changed. “Here’s to getting through another day with the ankle biters,” she said in a low, sultry voice. Her tongue slipped out to moisten her lips. “I had no idea little kids were so much work.” She lifted the longneck to her mouth and took a swig, then drew the bottle away with a kissing sound and offered it to him.

The music started up again, “Do It With A Stranger,” the metal beat banging hard against the walls of the place.

“Want some?” she asked, leaning up to shout into his ear over the loud music.

“No, thanks.”

“People call me Jazzy, by the way,” she said with a smile.

Maybe you should tell them to stop, he thought. “I’m Connor.”

“I know.” She winked. “I asked. You got a girlfriend, Connor?”

He saw Lolly come in with her two cousins, and the three of them started waving and greeting people. “Nope,” he said.

“Excellent. It’s going to be a great summer. I’m from L.A.”

“Buffalo,” he said. Big deal.

She laughed as if he’d said something funny, then did that dumb-girl thing where she pretended to be tipsy, and staggered into him. She smelled of beer and fruity shampoo. Her boobs felt unnaturally firm—which he’d heard was a telltale sign of a boob job. He slipped one arm around her and helped her to a bench. She apparently assumed he wanted to make out with her, and wound her arms around his neck.

“I’m going to grab something to drink,” he yelled in her ear. “Nice to meet you, Jazzy.”

He looked around, part of him wanting to escape, the other part wanting to stay and party, and of course, yet another part wanting to jump her bones. But no. Not with Jazzy from L.A. Or with the other girl—Mandy or Mindy—who hit on him as he wended his way to the refreshments table, laden with soft drinks and chips.

It wasn’t that he had anything against hooking up. Far from it. He practically had a hard-on right now, just from the thought of Jazzy leaning against him. But he didn’t want to start the summer hooking up with some random girl, that was for sure. He needed to scope out the territory first.

And now two more girls were bearing down on him. The one with the big tits and the Mount Holyoke tank top, and her giggling friend, whose father manufactured a line of overpriced clothing.

He spotted a lifeline in the form of Lolly Bellamy. She stood at the fringes of the crowd, watching with a bored expression on her face. Connor crossed the room to her, cutting a path through the crowd, which was now freak dancing to Metalopolis.

“Hey,” he said, acting casual.

“Hey.” Her smile was brief, and he wondered if she was still mad about something.

“So we said we’d catch up,” he reminded her.

“What’s that?” She cupped a hand around her ear.

“Catch up,” he repeated, and gestured for her to follow him to a far corner of the room, out of the blare of the stereo speakers. She smiled up at him with a look that was soft and genuine. He’d always liked her face. She had nice skin and pretty eyes behind the glasses.

“I was surprised when I learned you’d be here this summer,” she said.

“I hadn’t planned to come back,” Connor explained. He was a man now, as Mel was fond of reminding him. Old enough to leave home, to get out of his stepfather’s life. And of course, he couldn’t escape fast enough. It wasn’t as if he liked living at his mother’s. It was simply the best option he had in order to save every possible penny for college. Because it was a given that he’d get no help from his mother and Mel, or from his father, in that department.

Which was fine with Connor. He didn’t mind paying his own way. He would have been long gone the minute he tossed his graduation mortarboard in the air, except that his mother had other plans for him.

“What made you decide to come back?” Lolly asked.

He hesitated, wondering how much to tell her. “I figured after graduation, I’d get a job and a place of my own. I figured I’d get a life.”

“And here you are.”

“Just couldn’t stay away.” There was plenty more he could have said to her, and probably would, except it was almost impossible to have a decent conversation amid all this noise. Maybe that was for the better. Maybe there was no need for Lolly to hear the real reason he was back here once again. His mother’s other son, eight-year-old Julian, had come up from Louisiana for the summer. Their mother needed Connor to look after him.

That was code for keeping the kid out of her hair, and out of the way of Mel’s fists.

Connor had only ever known his brother as a baby, and then their mom had given Julian away like an unwanted puppy. It had taken Connor years to get over that, and maybe it made Julian a little odd, too. At eight years of age, he was a bundle of energy, simmering with seldom-denied impulses. According to his school records, private diagnostic testing would be required to determine Julian’s specific needs, but that had never been done. His level of intelligence had never been measured; it was that far off the charts.

The other thing that came through on school records was a multipage litany of conduct infractions. These were not your garden-variety episodes of schoolyard horseplay or sassing the teachers. They were, for the most part, bizarre and dangerous acts that affected only one person—Julian himself.

Connor’s mother claimed the boy would turn her into a nervous wreck. The solution had come from an unlikely source—his father, who still worked at Camp Kioga. The Bellamys offered Connor a job for the summer, and invited Julian to camp. He wondered if they’d told Lolly that there was yet another scholarship camper, courtesy of Terry Davis. He suspected they hadn’t. Charles and Jane Bellamy were discreet when it came to such matters.

“So what’ve you been up to?” Lolly asked. “Why didn’t you come back until now?”

“My stepfather told me I was old enough to bring in some money.” Connor did his working-class Mel imitation. “‘You get a job, son. I don’t want to see you sitting around all day, eating us out of house and home.’”

So many levels of irony to choose from. In the first place, he was not Mel’s son. Like it or not, Connor had a father. “And the thing about house and home?” he snorted. “It assumes we have them—a house and a home. The truth is, we live in a trailer park and it’s nobody’s home. Just a place to stay for a while.”

He tried to figure out the expression on her face. Was it disgust? Superiority? What did someone like her think when she heard how someone like him lived?

“It sounds kind of amazing,” she concluded.

“It does?”

“Well, heck. Think about it. You can walk away anytime you want. Just…walk away. Believe me, if my parents had been able to do that when they split up, their divorce would not have turned so ugly and painful.”

“It was ugly and painful?”

“Ha. They wrote the book on ugly and painful. And the thing was, all their fights—the Cold War Years, I call it—were about things. Stuff. Like a painting or a lamp or an antique. You know?”

“They didn’t fight over custody of you?”

“As if. There was no way my mother would have considered giving me up. I was the one thing they didn’t fight over. It was just a given that my mother would keep me, same as she would keep her ovaries.”

More irony, he thought. Lolly couldn’t escape her parents’ expectations. He couldn’t imagine parents who expected anything of him.

“So what about you?” he asked her. “What’ve you been up to?”

“The last two summers, I did some traveling.”

“Where to?”

“Overseas.”

“You could be more specific. I think I remember some of my geography.”

She offered a joyless smile. “Let’s see. Summer after sophomore year, I spent with my mother and her mother—my grandmother Gwen—in London, Paris and Prague. In the summer after my junior year, not to be outdone, my father took me to Alexandria, then Athens and Istanbul.”

“Sounds awesome,” he said. “Man—Istanbul. And Egypt. Did you see the pyramids?”

“I did. And it was just like I imagined. No, better. Those summers, the places I went, the things I saw, were…like a dream.”

“You’re lucky, Lolly. Lucky Lolly. Sounds like the name of a racehorse up at Saratoga.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Lucky.”

“You mean you had a bad time?”

“No. Trust me, you can’t go to Paris and have a bad time. But…it was just lonely and strained. I felt the way I’ve felt ever since the divorce, as if I’m supposed to be or act a certain way. God, I sound like a baby, whining about this stuff.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t feel too sorry for you.”

“Good, because I don’t feel sorry for you, either.”

“I know. You never have.” Another thing he liked about her.

“What are your plans?” Lolly asked.

“I wish I had a nickel for every time someone’s asked me that.” What he really wished was that he had an answer he actually liked, travel or college or a kick-ass job he couldn’t wait to go to every day. Reality was much less appealing. He was going to have to get a job, live on the cheap and go to community college part-time. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. What about you? I bet you’ve had a plan since you were in grade school.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re a planner. That’s how it always seemed to me.”

“Well, now that I’ve survived high school, I’m going to shock the world with a bold move,” she said with exaggerated drama.

“How’s that?”

“Wait for it. College.”

“You’re right. I’m shocked.” College was, of course, the next logical step for people like the Bellamys, and most of the people at this camp. Rich kids learning how to be rich grown-ups, so they could perpetuate the species.

“I think I’d like to be a high-school teacher,” she said. “An art teacher.” In the shadows, he could see her smile turn kind of shy, flickering at him through the darkness. “You’re the first person I’ve told that.”

“Is it some big secret?”

“Not really, but it’s not the kind of thing that would thrill my mother. She’d rather see me in the foreign service, something exciting like that.”

“It’s your life. Your decision.”

“Kind of. I hate disappointing my mother. I haven’t even told my therapist.”

He chuckled. “You still have a therapist.”

“Always. And as you can probably tell, I like talking. Dr. Schneider’s like a friend who charges by the hour.”

“I’d be your friend for free,” he told her.

That smile again. It flashed at him through the shadows, kind of shy, kind of pretty. “Thanks,” she said. “That, um, it means a lot to me, Connor. I’ve never had a lot of friends.”