I snap back immediately, scanning the field until I find Noah, who is crouched on the ground, his knees tucked up beneath him, his hands over his ears, his head curled down so that only a mop of reddish hair is showing.
Beside him, a small girl named Sadie Smith is staring with wide eyes. “All I did was tag him,” she says quickly, blinking up at me.
I give her a pat on the shoulder, trying to be reassuring. “It’s fine,” I tell her. “Go tag someone else.”
But she remains there, her eyes fixed on Noah, who is rocking now. I turn around to see that they’re all watching. It’s impossible to tell who’s been frozen and who’s still free, because each and every one of them is standing stock-still.
Over near the school buildings, which the day camp borrows during the summer, I spot Grace, one of the junior counselors, carrying over the midday snack: a giant box of Popsicles, which leave everyone tie-dyed and sugar-happy but are always the highlight of the day.
“Snack time,” I call out, and just like that, they’re off, sprinting across the field to meet Grace, with more energy than they’ve shown during any of the games this morning.
Once we’re alone, I sit down on the grass beside Noah, who lets out a soft moan but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge me. It’s been about a month now, and I’ve learned this is the best tactic. At first, when this kind of thing happened, I would try to talk to him, or reason with him, or soothe him in some way. Once, I even tried to take his hand, which turned out to be the worst possible thing I could’ve done. He wrenched it away from me, then promptly began to wail.
Now I peek under his arms, which are clasped around his knees, to where his face is hidden. His cheeks are pink from the heat, and his mouth is screwed up to one side, and there’s a single tear leaking from his right eye, which breaks my heart a little.
“Hey, Noah,” I say softly, and he stiffens.
I sit back again, picking a few blades of dry grass, then letting them scatter in the breeze from the nearby lake. In the distance, the other campers are running around with their Popsicles, their chins sticky and their shirts already stained. On the blacktop, the older kids are playing basketball, the sound of the ball steady as a drumbeat.
On the first day of camp, Mr. Hamill, the director—a middle-aged man who worked as a gym teacher for most of the year and was never without a whistle around his neck—had asked me to arrive an hour early. It was my third summer as a counselor, and I assumed I was getting a promotion. When I’d started working here a few years earlier, it was mostly just because I needed a way to earn some extra spending money. I’d loved going to camp as a kid, and it seemed a better alternative than bagging groceries or scooping ice cream or any of the other jobs that might consider hiring a fourteen-year-old whose only résumé item was babysitting.
But now, after a couple years of corralling kids and pressing on Band-Aids, leading wildly off-key songs and supervising glitter usage during craft time, I’d come to genuinely enjoy it. Still, everyone knew it was easier to work with the older kids, who tended to be more self-sufficient, less likely to burst into tears or wander off or forget to put on sunscreen. So I hoped that might be where I was headed this summer.
Instead, it turned out Mr. Hamill wanted to tell me about Noah.
“Listen, Annie,” he said in a thick Chicago accent that wasn’t often heard this far out in the suburbs. “We’re gonna try something out this summer. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”
I nodded. “Okay…”
“It’s a new camper,” he continued, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “He’s, uh, on the spectrum. You know. He has autism. So I just wanted to give you a heads up, since it might be a challenge. He’s not all that verbal, for one thing, but I guess they’re working on that. And he’s pretty active. Apparently, they tried a special-needs camp last year, but it didn’t keep him busy enough. It sounds like he has a lot of energy.”
“So he’ll be in my group?”
“Yeah, he’s six, so he’s one of yours. The idea is to be patient, but also get him involved as much as possible, you know? I figure we’ll give it a try, as long as it’s okay with you, and basically just see how it goes.”
“Okay,” I said brightly, because that’s what I do. I smile, and I nod, and I give it my best shot. That’s always how it’s been. If my friends are fighting, I’m the one who tries to smooth it over. If someone is mad at me, I walk around with a pit in my stomach until we’ve managed to sort things out. If somebody asks me a favor, or gives me a challenge, or needs something from me, the answer is always yes.
And if the kids at camp aren’t having fun, it feels like I’m failing.
Which is what makes Noah so tough. I’ve spoken to his mom enough over the last month to know that he just needs time. But sitting here on the warm grass, watching his shoulders shake—it’s almost too much to bear. And worse than that is the feeling that no matter what I try, I just can’t seem to reach him.
The thing is, I’m good with these kids. I know that Emerson is allergic to peanuts and to save a red Popsicle for Connell. I know that Sullivan will always want to play kickball when given the choice, and that Ellis likes to sit on my lap after lunch. Caroline keeps a stuffed rabbit in her backpack, and Will wears his lucky astronaut socks every day. Georgia sings under her breath when she’s nervous, and Elisabeth lights up when you compliment her on her cartwheels.
There’s a key to every lock, a trick that works for every kid.
Every kid except Noah.
We sit there for a long time. The other campers head into the gym for a game of dodgeball, led by one of the junior counselors, and the sun drifts higher in the flat, white sky. But still Noah remains hunched on the ground, curled into himself like a pill bug. Every once in a while I reach over and give his shoulder a pat, which makes him flinch.
Finally, just before pickup—almost as if he’s been keeping track—he lifts his head.
“You okay?” I ask, but he doesn’t say anything. His eyes are focused on the school building, where the other kids are lining up to go home.
When he still doesn’t answer, I say, “I promise we’ll play a different game tomorrow.” I don’t know if it was freeze tag that set him off, or if it was an unexpected hand on his back, or if it was just the sun and the grass and the day all around him. It could have been anything. It feels horrible not to know exactly what.
But still I keep talking, sounding desperate even to myself. “We’ll try capture the flag,” I promise, even though each day we attempt a new game, and each day it ends this same way. “Or red light, green light. Or follow the leader! I think you’d really like follow the leader…”
Noah doesn’t say anything. He simply stands up, his face entirely blank, then brushes the grass off his knees and walks toward the parking lot.
It’s not much, but I take it as a yes. And I follow him.
* * *
At the end of every day, there’s the chaos of pickup time: a half hour of attempting to direct traffic and shepherd kids as mothers glare at the cars in front of them and nannies shout for their charges not to forget their lunch boxes and counselors do their best to make sure nobody gets hit by a slow-moving minivan.
Today, I’m in charge of keeping things running on time, which basically means standing in the middle of it all and hoping I don’t get clipped by a side mirror. It’s only 2:07, and already more than half the kids have been whisked away. The rest are sitting cross-legged under the trees in front of the entrance to the school, digging through their backpacks or trading woven bracelets or tossing things at the junior counselors.
We’re right on schedule, but I still can’t help glancing at my watch. Griffin is supposed to be picking me up at 2:30, and though everyone is usually gone by twenty after, that still leaves me only a few minutes to change. I’ve brought my favorite outfit, a pale-yellow sundress that’s probably a bit much for a trip to an arcade. But there’s no way I’ll be wearing my sweaty camp clothes
when I see him again. Not this time.
By 2:18, there are three kids left: a pair of eight-year-old identical twins who match right down to their orange sneakers, and Noah, who is sitting with his back to the parking lot, tapping intently on the trunk of a tree.
Most of the other counselors have taken off. There’s only me and Alex Sanchez, a soon-to-be senior who likes to tease me about my freckles, which have been multiplying by the day, and who is generally a lot nicer than he needs to be, considering the fact that he’s a whole year older than me and the star of the football team.
But that’s the thing about summer: The regular hierarchies collapse like sand castles at this time of year. Everything shifts and settles and takes new shape.
It’s a great equalizer, this season.
Soon, the twins’ mother pulls up—full of apologies—and Alex heads off, with a sympathetic glance in my direction.
“See you tomorrow, Freckles,” he says, trotting over to his car.
It’s 2:22 and the parking lot is quiet. Noah is hunched over, still facing the tree, and through the thin cotton of his camp T-shirt I can see the knobs of his spine. The wind ruffles his red hair as he examines the fraying end of his shoelace.
Behind us, the door to the school opens and Mr. Hamill walks out with a pink Post-it note stuck to his finger. He hands it to me with a sheepish look, and I see that there’s a phone number scrawled across it.
“So I tried his mom a few times,” he says. “But there’s no answer, and I have to leave for a dentist appointment.” He points at his mouth and winces. “Broken crown.”
My eyes travel over to the entrance to the parking lot, where Griffin’s car will soon appear.
“I feel terrible about this,” Mr. Hamill says with a sigh. “But his mom’s not usually late, so I can’t imagine she’ll be long. Do you mind waiting with him?”
Noah shifts on the grass, swiveling to face us. When I glance down at him, our eyes meet briefly, and he holds my gaze for a split second before looking away again.
It’s now 2:28.
“Of course,” I say, because that’s the kind of thing I always say. “I’m happy to.”
* * *
By the time Griffin’s car—something old and loud and blue—turns into the drive at 2:30 on the dot, I’m midway through dialing Noah’s mother for the second time. I lower the phone and hang up, feeling panicked. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Noah is now walking in circles around the trunk of the tree, dragging his fingers across the rough bark as he spins, and I think again of the small duffel bag I tucked away, full of not just a change of clothes but also deodorant and perfume and a brush, all of which I could desperately use right about now.
But there’s no time for any of that: Griffin is already walking toward me, a hand lifted awkwardly, his eyes pinging between me and Noah, who has stopped circling and is now simply staring.
“Hi,” I say, and Griffin smiles. He’s wearing the usual blue shirt and khakis, but his hair is freshly combed and still a little damp, and though it’s approximately a thousand degrees out—the air so humid it has a weight to it—he still somehow manages to look improbably cool.
Which only makes me feel like more of a mess.
“Hi,” he says.
“I’m really sorry,” I begin, even before he’s all the way across the parking lot. I gesture at Noah, then shrug helplessly. “His mom isn’t here yet, so I have to wait with him, which means I can’t—”
“That’s okay,” Griffin says. “I’ll wait with you.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I say automatically, and he raises his eyebrows.
“I know,” he says stiffly. “But I want to. Otherwise I wouldn’t have offered.”
His words linger between us for a beat too long, until I finally say, “Okay then.”
“Okay then,” he says with a nod, already walking past me to where Noah stands underneath the tree. The two of them look at each other for a second, then both immediately avert their eyes. Griffin takes a step forward, and Noah takes a step back, like two dancers practicing a choreographed routine. There’s a long pause, and I watch them, curious to see what will happen next. Finally, Griffin lifts his hand in a kind of half-wave.
“Hi,” he says. “I’m Griffin.”
Noah squints up at him, tilting his head. And then, to my surprise, he says it back: “Hi.”
It’s not that Noah doesn’t ever talk. It’s just that he rarely does so on cue. If you ask him a question, he tends to look away. If you say hello, he ignores you. If you try to include him in a game that requires singing or chanting or talking, he usually shuts down. When he does speak, it’s mostly to himself.
So now, hearing him respond to a greeting like it’s something that happens every day, my throat goes thick with unexpected emotion.
“What should we do while we wait?” Griffin asks, his eyes trained on the small, startled boy in front of him.
I hold my breath, waiting, as the silence seems to stretch on forever.
But just as I’m about to interrupt—to come to his rescue, to cut through the quiet, to help out by suggesting a game—Noah hops to his feet and says, “Basketball.”
* * *
Griffin, it turns out, is better with a basketball than he was with a bag of candy. I stand at the edge of the blacktop with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to it ring for what feels like the thousandth time, as he sinks another effortless shot from the free throw line and Noah chases after the rebound.
“I’m feeling less confident about our Pop-A-Shot competition,” I say, giving up on the call. I’ve left several messages now, and there’s not much more to be done except to wait.
“I don’t know,” Griffin says without looking at me. “Someone told me you’re insanely good.”
“Who said that?”
The corners of his mouth turn up in a half-smile. “You.”
“Oh.” I flush. “Right.”
Noah is attempting to dribble, which mostly consists of slapping at the ball with his open palms, and Griffin walks over, bending close to demonstrate how to soften his hand. I fold my arms across my chest, watching with interest. I keep waiting for Griffin to make a wrong move and set Noah off, the way I always manage to do when I touch his shoulder or speak too loudly or get too close. But he doesn’t. He seems to know instinctively what not to do, and because of it, Noah has said more to him in the last twenty minutes than he’s said to me all summer.
I’m admittedly a little jealous.
“Hey, Noah.” I clap my hands, which makes him wince. “Pass it here.”
He stops trying to dribble and glances over at me, his face impassive. Then he turns back to Griffin, handing him the ball.
“Thanks, dude.” Griffin quicksteps around him and darts for the basket. There’s something so fluid about him when he has the ball in his hands. He’s long and lean, and all of his stiffness, all of his usual guardedness, seems to fall away.
“My turn,” Noah says, and Griffin bounces it to him gently.
“You’re good with him,” I say, when he jogs over to stand with me. Around us, the schoolyard is quiet except for the sound of a distant lawn mower, and the afternoon sun is caught in the trees at the edge of the soccer field. “Do you have younger brothers or sisters?”
He shakes his head. “Only child.”
“Well, that explains it.”
“What?”
“Why you never talked to anyone in Spanish.”
He glances sideways at me. “I talked.”
“Yeah, when Señor Mandelbaum asked you a question.”
On the court, Noah flings the ball up toward the basket, but it only makes it a couple feet in the air before falling to the asphalt with a heavy thud.
“You never talked, either,” Griffin points out.
“Did too.”
“Puedo ir al baño? Doesn’t count.”
“Hey,” I say, laughing. “Is it my fault if I had to ir al baño?”
/> He raises an eyebrow. “Twice every class?”
“Señor Mandelbaum was seriously, seriously boring,” I admit. “Most of the time I just ended up reading out in the hallway.”
“En inglés?” Griffin asks, and I laugh.
“Si,” I tell him. “En inglés.”
We stand there in silence, watching Noah heave the ball at the basket again and again. As his arms get tired, each shot falls shorter, until he’s basically throwing it straight up in the air, then dodging it as it comes back down again.
When the ball rolls my way, I scoop it up and take a shot myself, but it doesn’t go much farther than Noah’s attempts, barely grazing the bottom of the net.
“See?” I say, frowning. “This is why Pop-A-Shot is better.”
I glance over at Griffin, who looks amused, and it occurs to me that whatever this is—this maybe-date, which was questionable even before it took such an odd detour—it should be going horribly wrong. With an empty playground for a backdrop and a six-year-old sidekick, how could it be anything else? This certainly wasn’t how I’d imagined it, all those times I stared at the back of his head in Spanish class.
But for whatever reason, Griffin looks almost happy right now.
And I realize I am too.
“Let’s play a game of caballo,” he suggests, and Noah lets out a burst of unexpected laughter.
“Caballo,” he shouts, pumping an arm in the air. “Caballo, caballo!”
“What’s caballo?” I ask Griffin, who’s already walking over to the basket, and when he turns around, he can’t help laughing.
“It’s horse,” he says with a grin. “En español.”
* * *
It’s nearly four o’clock by the time I start worrying that this is more than just lateness and that something might be seriously wrong with Noah’s mother.