Mother-Daughter Book Camp
“We have a busy day ahead,” Gwen tells us. “A busy week, in fact. Our campers will be arriving Saturday afternoon, and there’s a great deal to do before then to get everything ready. As always, you and your campers have been divided into four teams for the summer. This is a Camp Lovejoy tradition that gives everyone a chance to bond with others besides just their cabinmates.” She looks over at the head counselor, who waves her clipboard. “Please see Marge on the way out for your team assignment,” Gwen continues. “Today, each team will be responsible for cleaning and readying one part of camp. We’ll continue this routine daily until everything is shipshape and squared away.”
There’s a clatter of dishes and scraping of benches as we all stand up and start clearing away breakfast things. Gwen taps her orange juice glass and the room grows quiet again. “We’ll meet at the flagpole at 10:30 a.m. sharp. Listen for the bell, and be prompt. You don’t want to keep your team members waiting. Between now and then, I’d like you to spend some time cleaning out your cabins and cubies and settling in.”
Following the other counselors’ lead, we help clear the tables, then go to line up in front of Sergeant Marge.
Brianna turns to me. “I really hope I don’t get stuck with the team that has Trip Shack duty,” she whispers with a shudder. “Last year during pre-camp cleanup they found a family of possums nesting in the backpacks.”
I stare at her, horrified. And I thought a spider was bad! Possums would be a deal-breaker. I’d have no choice but to call my parents and beg them to take me home. My father would totally understand—he likes the great outdoors, but only from a safe distance. His idea of camping is a hotel without room service.
“Name?” Marge barks as I reach the head of the line.
“Megan Wong.”
“Wong . . . Wong . . . Wong,” she says, tracing a stubby forefinger down the clipboard. No manicures for no-nonsense Marge. No manicures for me this summer either, I suddenly realize. I doubt there’s a nail salon in teeny-tiny Pumpkin Falls, and the camp packing list specifically requested that we leave makeup and beauty products at home.
“Camp Lovejoy is a place where girls can be girls—naturally,” the brochure stated breezily, but the reality of this sets in as I contemplate Marge’s polish-free fingernail. Which finally comes to a halt at the bottom of the clipboard. “Here we are: Wong, Megan. You’ll be on the Ruby Team this summer. Rubies will be cleaning and resupplying the Art Studio.”
I whoosh out a breath of relief. I dodged the possum bullet.
So did Becca, who is also Team Ruby.
Cassidy’s a Sapphire. “We’re setting up the waterfront,” she tells us happily. “I might just have to accidentally fall in the lake if it gets hot this afternoon.”
“How about you, Emma?” I ask.
“Emerald,” she says. “Boathouse.”
“I’m an Amethyst,” Jess tells us. “We’re cleaning out the Trip Shack.”
“Possum duty!” I blurt out. My friends look over at me in surprise, and I explain what happened last summer.
“Eew.” Becca wrinkles her nose.
Jess just smiles. “Bring ’em on,” she says. “There’s nothing I like better than wrangling animals.”
This is true. Not only does Jess live on a farm, but she’s also a certified wildlife rehabilitator. It started out as a school science project a couple of years ago, when she took care of an injured baby fox with the help of a local expert back in Concord. Jess has been his apprentice ever since, and earlier this year, after she turned eighteen, she applied for her rehabilitator’s license.
“Not that I’ll be able to use it in New York City,” she told us when the certificate arrived in the mail. Jess is going to be in New York this fall too. She’s got an amazing voice, and none of us were at all surprised when she got accepted at Juilliard to study music. “But you never know. Central Park is pretty wild in some parts.”
We head off to our cabins, and after sweeping ours out and arranging the furniture the way we want it, Becca and I head over to Cubbyhole.
“This is kind of cool,” Becca says, flipping on the light to reveal the cubie house’s long central hallway.
Wooden doors on either side lead to individual dressing room cubicles, or “cubies,” as they call them here at camp. Becca’s and mine are directly across from each other, in the middle of the cubie house. Felicia and Emma are at the end closest to our cabins, since they have the youngest campers, and Cassidy and Jess are at the opposite end, by the door leading to the waterfront.
I open my cubie’s swinging door cautiously, on high alert for spiders. The coast is clear from what I can tell. Just some stray cobwebs. There’s a window, a small closet area with a shelf above it, and a tiny dressing table with a built-in stool. Basic, but I can definitely do something with it.
“Okay, everyone, let’s start at one end and work our way to the other!” calls Felicia, who’s been put in charge. She’s been coming to Camp Lovejoy since she was practically in diapers, according to Jess. “Mind if I put on some music?” Felicia adds as she hands out brooms and cleaning supplies.
“Great idea,” I tell her, hoping she picks something upbeat.
No such luck. A moment later, Cubbyhole is echoing to the sounds of some string quartet. I look over at Jess, who has a pained expression on her face.
“Sorry, guys.”
Cassidy grins and picks up her broom. She’s getting a kick out of Jess’s cousin already, I can tell. I pick my broom up too, and putting my earbuds in, fire up a dance party playlist as I set to work.
An hour later, the floors are swept, the ceilings de-cobwebbed, the windows washed, and Cubbyhole fairly gleams. Sergeant Marge gives us a thumbs-up when she comes to inspect.
“Very nice, ladies. Go ahead and settle in.”
The packing list told us to bring along six yards of fabric for decorating our cubies. Cassidy thought the whole idea was stupid until I suggested scarlet-and-white striped ticking. Scarlet and white are her new college colors. She’s going to Boston University on a full ride this fall, thanks to her hockey skills.
Back in Concord a few weeks ago, my friends and I took a field trip to the fabric store and I helped everybody pick something out. Becca was easy. I found her a pale lavender cotton with brightly colored shoes scattered all over it. Becca adores shoes. For Jess, it was a toss-up between a musical note pattern and horses. She went with horses.
“More kid-friendly,” she decided.
I tried to find a book motif for Emma, but we had to settle on red-and-white gingham decorated with strawberries. Strawberry is her favorite ice cream flavor. For myself, I chose a crisp black-and-white polka dot, with hot pink grosgrain ribbon for trim.
I pull my fabric out of my trunk and get busy pleating and tacking skirts around the edges of my dressing table and the little built-in stool in front of it. When I’m finished, I step back and survey my handiwork. The cozy room already looks cheerier. I have enough left over to add a short ruffle around the closet shelf, and I even tack faux curtains up at the windows, using more pink ribbon as tiebacks.
Becca pokes her head in as I’m admiring the results. “Hey, this looks fabulous!”
“Thanks.”
“Come look at mine,” she says, beckoning me across the hall.
“Nice!” I tell her, looking around. “The shoe fabric is perfect.” Suddenly, I’m not feeling so gloomy about camp. I go back to my cubie and start hanging up my clothes, humming to myself. I loop my bathrobe over the hook beside the door, set out my shower caddy, and line up my shoes. Then it’s time for the fun stuff, all the knickknacks and pictures and posters I brought along to personalize the space.
I’m beginning to see why Brianna and Melissa were so enthusiastic at breakfast about the cubies. They’re a tiny piece of home. I perch on the stool in front of my dressing table, gazing at the walls, where generations of previous campers have signed their names. I grab a marker and sign mine, too: MEGAN WONG WAS HERE.
r /> Next up is hanging my bulletin board. It’s covered with pictures—my cats when they were kittens; Becca and me on a Christmas cruise a couple of years ago; Pies & Prejudice on opening day; my grandmother and me at Paris Fashion Week; celebrating with my mother at her election party; all of my friends and family on Gigi and Edouard’s wedding day.
I take one last picture out of my trunk. It’s in a silver frame that Becca gave me for Christmas this year. It’s my favorite picture of Simon, my long-distance British boyfriend. Cassidy took it the year he lived in Concord with his family. Amazingly, we’ve stayed together, even though we’re thousands of miles apart. Not that we haven’t had rocky moments, but videoconferencing and e-mail help. It also helps that I get over to France a couple of times a year, now that Gigi is married to Edouard. I always manage to squeeze in a visit with Simon, since England is only a hop and a skip away. I’ve been to visit him at his house, and he’s been to visit me at Gigi and Edouard’s cottage, too.
Simon is going to Oxford University next year, which is England’s version of an Ivy League school. His parents are bursting with pride, especially since his older brother Tristan, one of the planets orbiting the sun that is Cassidy Sloane, has deferred college to pursue his ice dancing career. We all think Tristan is headed for the next Olympics.
I set the picture on my dressing table and pause for a moment, smiling at it. Then my smile fades. Simon had originally planned to come see me in New York this summer, while I was interning at Flash. Now, though, with me here at camp, we won’t see each other for at least another six months.
Will our relationship survive? Or will we end up like Emma and Stewart, slowly drifting apart? What if Simon finds a new girlfriend when he gets to Oxford? And will I feel differently too, living in New York?
The fabric of summer that’s stretching out in front of me suddenly isn’t blank anymore. It’s covered with question marks.
CASSIDY
“She had, of course, little idea how she herself looked because the mirrors at Putney Farm were all small and high up, and anyway they were so old and greenish that they made everybody look very queer-colored. You looked in them to see if your hair was smooth, and that was about all you could stand.”
—Understood Betsy
I flop onto my stomach in my bunk, totally exhausted.
“Are you as tired as I am?” groans Jess from across the cabin. She’s collapsed in a heap on her bed too.
“More,” I reply. “I swam a mile this morning, remember?” Since we’ve been here, I’ve been superdisciplined about getting up early every day to run or swim. I promised the BU hockey coach I’d arrive at September’s preseason training camp in peak condition.
“Show-off,” says Jess. She rolls over and pulls the pillow over her head.
We’ve been working like crazy all week. In addition to cleaning and prepping camp—scouring cabins and cubies, washing down boats and life vests, spreading mulch, pulling all the athletic and waterfront and other equipment out of storage, checking and sorting and arranging it, and replacing whatever needs to be replaced—we’ve also had team-building exercises and staff training every day. Jess and I both took a wilderness first aid class, and I led a hike up Lovejoy Mountain, which is really more of a big hill. I passed the sailing instructor certification course with flying colors, but Sergeant Marge wasn’t as impressed with my kayaking and canoeing skills.
“Barely adequate,” she’d told me with a sniff, marking my grade on her clipboard.
That made me mad. My skills are plenty adequate.
Somehow, I’ve managed to get off on the wrong foot with Sergeant Marge. This is not a good thing, because the two of us will be working closely this summer. I’ll be splitting my time between the boat dock, where I’m going to teach sailing, canoeing, and kayaking, and the Trip Shack, which is the head counselor’s domain, and where I’ll help her plan hiking trips.
It started that first day, when I showed up at the waterfront with the other Sapphires to help put the docks in the lake. I was wearing my whistle around my neck. She’d spotted it and frowned. “Kind of fancy for camp, sport.”
I hate it when people call me “sport.”
Plus, my silver whistle is one of my most treasured possessions. Eva Bergson, an older lady who used to be in our mother-daughter book club back in Concord, and who was a former Olympic skater and my mentor, left it to me. It’s my good luck charm. No way was I going to leave it at home. Besides, I figured it would be useful. You never know when you’re going to need a whistle, especially with a bunch of campers running around, right?
Sergeant Marge made me put it back in my cubie, and she’s been keeping a close eye on me ever since.
Even with her wet-blanket attitude, though, I still love it here.
The only camps I’ve ever been to before were sports camps. Which are fine, don’t get me wrong. I eat, sleep, and breathe sports, especially ice hockey, and I’m happy for any opportunity I get to play. But those camps were usually on some boring school or college campus, and I barely ever poked my head outside the rink.
Camp Lovejoy is different.
It’s about as far from boring as you can possibly get. The lake is huge, and gorgeous, and Lovejoy Mountain looms over the far end, its reflection mirrored in the water whenever it’s still.
The peninsula that the camp is on is shaped sort of like a fat hockey stick, if you count Hairbrush Island as the blade. Running along the top of the shaft are the tennis courts, the Dining Hall, the Grove, the Biffy, and the cabins on the Hill. In the middle, Lower Camp’s cabins are spaced out on a quiet cove along the east side, where they get the early morning sun. On the west side is the waterfront—the H dock and the big float, the kayak shed, and the water ski beach. Between them are Primporium and Cubbyhole, Lower Camp’s cubie houses, along with Lower Lodge. Way down at the end of the stick is the Point—a spit of land marking camp’s farthest boundary. The Director’s Cottage is on the Point, and past it, at the very tip, right about where the hockey stick’s shaft joins the blade, is the Gazebo, with its fabulous view of the sandbar that leads over to Hairbrush Island.
The Gazebo is my favorite spot at camp. For some reason it reminds me of the turret in my family’s Victorian house. I guess because it’s round like a turret, and a bit private. For whatever reason, I’m drawn to it like a magnet. We haven’t had much free time this week, but during what little we’ve had, I’ve made a dash for it with my camera. I’ve taken pictures of the early morning mist on the water, and of some amazing sunsets, and of the loons, of course. Lake Lovejoy is known for its loons, these cool birds that are kind of like ducks, except their heads are black as hockey pucks and the feathers on their backs are kind of a black-and-white check pattern. They’re really beautiful. Plus, they have the most awesome, haunting cry. It gives me the shivers, and I can’t get enough of it. Jess calls them by their Latin name, Gavia immer, but then she would.
I drift off to sleep thinking about loons.
My nap is rudely interrupted forty-five minutes later by the clanging of the bell. I was dreaming I was playing hockey, and for a minute I think it’s the buzzer signaling the end of the period. Then I remember where I am.
“I can tell I’m going to be really sick of that bell by the end of the summer,” I tell Jess as I sit up, yawning. Camp Lovejoy’s entire day runs by it.
“Yeah,” Jess agrees. “Hey, we’re supposed to report to the flagpole now, right?”
I nod. “In our swimsuits.”
There’s one last team-bonding exercise planned for the staff this afternoon. They haven’t told us what it is yet, just that it involves water. I suspect it has something to do with kayaks, though, because I spotted Sergeant Marge prowling around the kayak racks earlier today.
Jess and I head over to the cubie house to change, grabbing our swimsuits off the clothesline that’s stretched alongside it. I thought cubies were a stupid idea at first—it seemed like it would be way simpler just to keep all our
stuff in the cabins—but over the past few days I’ve changed my mind. With so many other people around, it’s actually kind of nice to have a space I can retreat to that’s all my own. And I’m sure once the campers arrive, I’ll appreciate it even more.
Closing the door behind me, I step out of my shorts and wriggle into my swimsuit—still slightly clammy from my early-morning laps—and blow a kiss to my sisters. Well, to their picture, which is sitting on my dressing table.
I don’t really have a best friend. I’m not like Emma and Jess, or Megan and Becca, who seem to have been best friends forever. I consider them all close friends—my dearest ones, actually—but my best friends are my sisters. Especially Courtney. I see so little of her these days, though, it’s kind of pathetic. She just graduated from UCLA this spring, and she and her fiancé, Grant, are getting married at Thanksgiving. My mom’s in a dither helping plan the wedding. I’m going to be maid of honor, and our little sister, Chloe, will be the flower girl.
I took the picture of them earlier this summer, when we got back from Courtney’s graduation. The three of us were up in the turret, where I’ve taken some of my best shots. The light is always so perfect up there.
Anyway, Chloe was perched on Courtney’s lap, and the two of them were looking at a bridal magazine. Chloe looked so serious that it struck me as funny. She’s four! What does a four-year-old care about weddings? I ran downstairs for my camera and took a bunch of pictures of the two of them, some serious and some goofy. At one point they both looked up at me at the same time, laughing. That’s when I snapped this one. I love it, and them.
In fact, I love my little sister so much that I chose my college because of her. I was heavily recruited by about half a dozen Division One schools, and ultimately it came down to a choice between Boston University or the University of Wisconsin. It was a tough decision—Patriot League vs. Big Ten, for one thing—but at the end of the day, the deciding factor was Chloe.