The town wasn’t exactly small, but luckily, everything we needed was pretty much within walking distance. It was just after 8:30 p.m., and the clouds were turning dark. We’d been out for over an hour talking about some places we should try for breakfast or hotspots for the weekends. Now we were strolling down the shopping strip about two miles from the beach with our single-scoop ice-cream cups.
“So, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don’t have a boyfriend,” Rachel said.
I laughed. “Thanks! Do I appear that undatable?”
“Undatable? No! I just don’t see someone leaving her boyfriend two thousand miles away during the summer.” She turned to me, eyeing me again, and continued. “Plus, you don’t have that love-is-in-the-air glow.”
“First, it’s fewer than eighteen hundred miles, and, second, you don’t necessarilyloveevery guy you date, do you?”
“I suppose not,” she agreed. “But was I wrong?”
“No,” I admitted. “You’re not wrong.”
“I’m guilty of being a hopeless romantic. Long walks on the beach, fireworks during a first kiss. Rocks thrown at your window in the middle of the night because he can’t stop thinking about you.”
I didn’t have much to say to that early-nineties description of romance, so I just nodded.
Rachel blushed. “Sorry, I went to an all-girls high school. Romance novels with those scenarios were all I had to understand what love is.”
I shook my head. “Sounds pretty perfect, but I’m sure there’s a little more to it than that.”
“Your parents still married?” she asked after a short moment. It wasn’t a ridiculous question, considering how many marriages were ending quicker these days.
“They probably would have been,” I said looking ahead and glancing up. “My mother died when I was twelve.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Rachel said. She looked back at her scoop and frowned.
Guess I really put a damper on our lighthearted conversation. She asked a very simple question, which, unfortunately, had a difficult answer. My mother had lived a lot longer than expected. She’d been diagnosed with cervical cancer when I was nine. And it was a roller-coaster until she died just after my twelfth birthday.
I shook it off, as if it wasn’t a big deal anymore. And it really wasn’t; I was used to people asking me about my mother and the uncomfortable silence that followed. Luckily, I’d become somewhat of an expert at brightening the mood again.
“I tell ya, though, she’d never let me eat ice cream.” I scooped up my last bite and chucked the cup at the nearest trash can. “How do you keep a kid from cookies and cream?” I asked, throwing my hands up in the air dramatically. Rachel laughed, and I was glad we were officially off the subject. We walked back to Bays House, predicting some of the cliché camp events and taking turns coming up with predictable verses of how the end-of-summer song would go.
Later, after I’d completed all the forms, I stuck my driver’s license and lifeguard cert in my back pocket and decided to go check if the staff lounge was open. It was just after eleven o’clock, and I sincerely hoped they were open till at least midnight.
“Be back in a few,” I called out to Rachel while she was in the shower.
I walked out, finding it to be chillier than when we had been out earlier. The moon was low and round, and I wondered what the weather would be like the next day. I walked down the stairs of the open beachside complex and headed down to the first level, where the lounge was. It wasn’t a good sign that the lights were out. I turned the knob: locked. I glanced up at the other units in the building and didn’t see many lights on anywhere. All the in-house counselors and staff were probably either still out—it was, after all, a Saturday night—or sound asleep.
I sighed and stood there for a moment. Since I was already out, I decided to take a quick walk around the campgrounds. I wasn’t sure I was ready to go back and have a slumber party with my new roommate. Hopefully, she’d be asleep by the time I got back.
A few minutes later, I was walking around the perimeter of the campus, and my eye caught on the shimmering wrinkles in a bright-blue swimming pool. Only the slightest bit of it was visible from where I stood, so I headed in that direction. I’ve always loved the iridescence of the water in a swimming pool at night. It might even catch the reflection of the moon, since it was so low and round that night.
I walked over and unhooked the metal latch on the gate. Well, no moon reflection, but there were little LED lights in the pool that gave it a nice glow. I started walking along the side. The smell of the chlorine doesn’t exactly hold the same draw as the salty ocean, and it isn’t exactly as peaceful as sunrise or a sunset at the beach, but it still made me smile and excited for the summer.
I swung my head around at a figure I noticed at the other side of the pool. A man wearing a dark-gray hooded sweatshirt and sweat pants sat against the black fence. His hood was on, and he blended into the night so easily that I was surprised I noticed him. He had an unlabeled black backpack, and I began to panic.
Oh crap, I thought. Okay, stay cool. Bums don’t usually carry bombs or guns…do they?
“Hey, I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here. This is a private pool, and it’s closed,” I said. The guy was holding a silver can, which I assumed was beer. He didn’t look up at me or respond right away. He just held up his can and finished it off.
“Then what are you doing here?” he asked calmly. His voice surprisingly was not one of an old drunk bum, but one younger and more alert than I would have expected.
“I work here.” That wasn’t exactly true yet, so I corrected myself in case this led to official statements. “I’m staying at Bays House. You need to leave. Now.”
He didn’t respond. Instead he picked off the metal opener of the can and flicked it inside the empty container. Even from across the pool, I could hear the clatter it made. It almost echoed in the empty space. That irritated me.
“You need to leave,” I repeated. “Iwillcall security.”
