“Bunk Five!” Marissa calls out. “You’re next!”
“Janelle!” Lis cries. “Can you get us our towels?”
Janelle is at the top of the beach talking to the guys.
“She’s a flirt, huh?” Talia mutters. “JANELLE! Janelle has too many letters. We need a nickname for her. Nelly? Belly? Ohhh, Jelly?”
I can’t tell if that’s an insulting nickname or not. “Let’s just call her Janelle,” I say.
“Jelly is a really good nickname,” Lis says.
Janelle looks over at us.
“Jelly! Janelle! Would you bring us our towels?” Lis cries. “We’re freezing!”
“Of course!” Janelle calls back and runs back down the hill to the waterfront. She picks up our three towels and brings them to the edge of the water. “Here you go, m’ladies.”
“Thanks,” Lis says, shivering. “Are my lips blue? They feel blue.”
I thank Janelle for my towel as she hands it to me with a smile.
The guys from Bunk 5 walk down the beach with Janelle. Muffs and wild-haired JJ. JJ is tall, thin, and pale. Muffs is shorter, tanned, muscular, and still wearing his earmuffs.
“So what came first?” I ask him. “The nickname or the headwear?”
“The headwear,” he says.
“And why do you wear earmuffs during the summer?” I ask. “No judgment. Just curious.”
“It’s kind of my thing,” he admits. “I have cold ears.”
“Or maybe you have really nasty ears,” Lis says. “And you just don’t want to show anyone.”
“That is absolutely a possibility,” he says. “I am not a fan of Q-tips. I’m going to take the earmuffs off to swim, though. So you can check them out.” He turns to me. “So why did you stop coming?”
“Huh? You mean to camp?”
“Yeah.”
“I just . . .”
“Oh, there was that horrible girl in your bunk! Zoe Buckman!” JJ says. “Was it because of her?”
I nod. “Sort of.”
“Bennett is a senior,” Muffs says.
“Who’s Bennett?” I ask.
“Her brother,” he says.
“Her brother still goes here?” I ask. Ugh. Not that I’d recognize her brother. Or he’d recognize me. And anyway, he would be too young to have been here eight years ago.
“My cousin was in your bunk,” Muffs says. “Kara Fortnoy?”
“No way!” I say. “I remember her.”
“She was a bitch too,” he says.
“Nah,” I lie. She had been the one to notice my bloodstained sweatpants on my overnight. Then she told her BFF Zoe Buckman.
“She totally was. It’s okay. She still is. So why’d you come back? Because they’re gone?”
“I just missed the camp mac and cheese,” I say.
He laughs.
“And my boyfriend was going away and Danish offered me the job on the train. I’m studying to be a teacher, so it all worked out.”
“Does that mean you’re going to take being a counselor, like, super seriously?” Lis asks.
“Well, I want to do a good job,” I say. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“Maybe you can do a great job for both of us,” Talia says, and everyone laughs.
I think she’s kidding?
“So are you still with the guy?” Muffs asks.
“Of course,” I say. “We didn’t break up because he went away.”
He laughs. “Good luck with that. Relationships never last at camp.”
“What a terrible thing to say,” Lis says, swatting him on the arm. “Relationships last.”
“No they don’t,” JJ says. “Name one.”
“Trevor had a girlfriend last year!”
“He did?”
“He totally did.”
“Didn’t he hook up with the office girl?”
“The druggie?”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“I don’t think so.”
“Look—” I interrupt, feeling a squeezing in my chest. “My relationship is going to last. We’ve been together a long time. Almost a year. And he’s the best. A summer apart is not going to make a difference.”
Everyone’s quiet. “If you say so,” Muffs says. He readjusts his earmuffs.
“Don’t be an ass,” Lis says to him.
“Where did he go, anyway?” Muffs asks. “Your boyfriend who’s the best.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “Europe.”
“No way,” Muffs says. “Gavin’s girlfriend is in Europe too.”
We all turn to the water, where Gavin is on a sailboat.
“Is she backpacking too?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Muffs says.
“I’m not the only one at camp with a significant other, then, huh?”
“Nope.”
“There you go.”
“You guys can go hunt for Wi-Fi together,” Talia says.
It might be nice to have a friend in loneliness.
After swimming, we meet Dr. Harris back in the Dining Hall. She wears her blond hair in a tight bun and shows us how to use an EpiPen.
We practice jabbing each other in the thigh.
Post a lunch of make-your-own tuna sandwiches, I sneak over to the cell signal spot to try to call Eli. I know I won’t be able to do this when the kids are here, since they aren’t supposed to see us on our phones, but today is fair game. A bunch of texts from him pour in, but I dial right away. My heart starts to thump as I wait for him to answer.
He answers on the first ring. “Hi!” he exclaims.
“You answered!”
“I did!”
“Hi!” I can’t stop smiling. “How’s Rome?”
“Hot.”
“What time is it there? Where are you? Are you with your cousin?”
“It’s eight p.m. here,” he says. “And I’m at the hostel. And his plane lands at nine, so I’ll see him soon.”
I wish I had met Yosef. I have no idea what he’s like. Or what he’s going to want to do. “Are you exhausted?” I ask.
“I just woke up.”
“Did I wake you?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, no, no, it’s good you did. I need to shower and I slept for five hours anyway, which is way too long. How’s camp?”
“Good. Better than the last time I was here, at least.”
“No one called you any sexy names?” he says with a laugh.
“It wasn’t sexy,” I say quickly.
“I’m kidding,” he says. “I know how much that name bothered you.”
I’ve told him about being called Porny. It was one of the reasons I waited seven months before sleeping with him. I felt so much shame about my body, about having sex, about being “Porny.”
Eli was so patient, too. He never pressured me, even though he had slept with his high school girlfriend regularly. He waited until I was ready. Until one Thursday night, when we were just lying in his bed, my head on his NYU T-shirt, talking about where to go that night, when I told him I wanted to.