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  Other passengers craned their necks to see us. Ahead, I saw Whitney and Miss laughing, their fingers splayed at their mouths.

  I thought Harriet would step out of the car, back onto the metal platform. I thought she would run down the ramp to escape. Instead, she bent abruptly into a lumbering squat, trying to force her hips between the door of the car and the seat partition.

  But the attendant had gauged the size difference correctly. “She’s not gonna fit,” he said again. He tapped my shoulder.

  I wrenched away from him. “Stop it,” I hissed. “We’re getting off. Just go away.”

  The attendant raised his hands as if I might shoot. “No need to get your Wranglers in a wad. Not my fault she’s over the weight limit.” He moved on to the next car and started lowering the harnesses. “But get on out,” he called back to me, “so I can let the next two people on.”

  Harriet had switched tactics. She had turned sideways and was trying to wedge herself into the seat like a thick coin into a slot. I thought of her in her bed at home, eating an Entenmann’s cake under the covers. I had done that once some months before, alone in the apartment after work: eaten an entire Entenmann’s All Butter French Crumb Cake in bed. Then I’d gotten out of bed, gotten dressed, and run to the store for another one.

  “Come on,” I said again to Harriet. I was suddenly very tired. I did not want this cameo in someone else’s trauma. I looked back at Eden’s car and saw the side of her head, the shiny black of her hair like a censor. She was talking to Sheena, who was looking away. Sheena should have been dealing with Harriet. I should have been sitting with Eden.

  I took a step back from Harriet, out of this flashbulb image that would become an indelible memory; one she would, two decades down the road, relay to a blank-faced therapist, or to a lover while sharing a cigarette in the dark.

  She paused in her efforts, looked at me with hate all over her face—in her slightly crooked glasses, her vaguely quivering lip, her clenched forehead—and then stood, finally, and fled. She ran to the ramp where she had to squeeze past the line of people, who would move aside, watch her pass, and imagine her eating under her covers.

  I followed.

  “Excuse me,” I said to each person. “Excuse me. Sorry. Excuse me.”

  What was I apologizing for? I wasn’t fat. I had been acting like a fat person for just over a year. I had gained fifteen pounds. Okay. Sure. But I had fought it. I had gone for long runs by the East River. Some days, I had fasted, taking in nothing but water. I had shown some self-control. I touched my stomach. I touched each of my arms and felt the lightness in my step.

  “Coming through. Please step aside,” I said like a security guard, or a person carrying a beer keg aloft.

  At the bottom of the ramp, I followed Harriet to a bench. She sat with her legs spread, her elbows on her thighs. She took off her glasses and put her face in her palms. I sat beside her. The glasses sat between us, reflecting a cruel sun. I squinted up at the roller-coaster-car-size people screaming through the sky.

  “Do you want to talk?” I touched Harriet’s coarse hair. It was so hot, I curled my fingers in.

  When she didn’t answer, I understood. It was like times I’d lain in bed, sick, knowing I’d feel better if I ran to the bathroom to vomit, but too afraid of vomiting to do anything but lie there, squirming, hot and tangled in synthetic sheets, comfortable inside discomfort.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Like everyone else’s, my body was diminishing. Week two and I could feel there was less of it. According to the scale, I had lost seven pounds. But my clothes said I had lost more.

  “Are your tits shrinking?” Mikey asked me on the phone.

  They were. In the cups of my bras there were wrinkles, where once the fabric had been taut.

  “Come home. I’ll massage them back to health.”

  “I’ve never felt healthier,” I said, and it was true. Since the night at Chinese Buffet, I had eaten only what I was given.

  “Are you going to turn into one of those girls who’s always wearing a sports bra?”

  “When wasn’t I one of those girls?”

  “Listen. If you want to sleep with Richard Simmons, I’ll give you a pass. I know how summer can be.”

  He did know how summer could be. We’d fallen in love in the summer.

  Five summers later, our love was tired, but fresh love was in bloom all around me. After dinner, Whitney and Pudge sat on the stone steps that led up to the cafeteria, Pudge at the bottom in his wheelchair, Whitney beside him on the first step. In Whitney’s presence, Pudge looked regal, a king on a throne, holding court. Sometimes Whitney leaned her face against his shin and he palmed the top of her head as if to bless her.

  And Miss had begun wearing Brendan’s North Carolina State hat, her thick blond ponytail pulled through the hole above the size adjustment strap.

  Spider asked me, “Are counselors allowed to have girlfriends who are campers?”

  I didn’t know. Camp Carolina was light on rules.

  “Brendan might want to have sex with Miss, and she’s just a kid.”

  “Brendan’s a kid, too,” I said.

  “No,” Spider said, “Brendan’s in college.”

  Brendan and Miss walked around the loop together every morning, Miss in a white hooded sweatshirt, unzipped, hood up; Brendan trying not to pant, pushing his undersize glasses up the sweaty bridge of his nose.

  “Doesn’t Brendan just scream ‘virgin’?” Sheena said to me one morning as we made our way into the cafeteria for breakfast. “He’s got a big red bow tied around his cock.”

  “He’s only nineteen,” I said.

  Sheena snorted. “I’m nineteen! I’ve been having sex since I was eleven.”

  “That’s disturbing.”

  “Gray, sometimes I think I’m so much older than you.”

  I would like to think that she was right. I was young. I didn’t know anything. But I would just be excusing my own summer love.

  Look, I would never have talked to Bennett if he hadn’t talked to me. Would never have asked for his time had he not offered it first. He was a man who could twirl a whistle on a shoelace, who could lift a soccer ball with the front of his foot and with the slightest flick send it neatly to his fingertips.

  I saw myself in contrast to him—a girl who spent too much time and money in Manhattan bars, who kept her head down in the street instead of smiling a southern hello. I was the girl who couldn’t throw, who couldn’t catch, who knew words like “reps,” “sets,” “electrolytes,” “core strength,” “body mass index,” and “medicine ball” only because I was terrified of fat, not because I was an athlete.

  He called me Angeline. He sang to me, “Lookin’ at the bright lights, searchin’ for the silver screen.” And what a thrill it was not to be Gray, to be a whole new angelic person, to be some girl from some song. When he said, “Angeline, come help me set up the gym for kickball,” or, “Hold the stopwatch while the kids run sprints,” I felt anointed. This was not high school. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman. But in the glow of Bennett Milton, I felt nothing short of anointed.

  I told myself, There’s nothing wrong with having a crush. I told myself, I’m allowed to have friends of the opposite sex.

  Then I thought of Mikey saying, “Don’t you know by now that men don’t want to be your friends?”

  Usually when he said that, he meant comedians. Comedians, back when I was booking clubs, were interested only in what I had to give them. I knew that. “I’m not naïve,” I always told Mikey. But sometimes after I’d talked with an audience member at a club or a friend of a friend at a party, he would say, “New friend, huh?”

  “That guy’s really cool,” I’d say. “He—”

  “Gray. He’s not cool. He’s trying to fuck you.”

  “You think everyone’s trying to fuck me.”

  “Nope. Just that guy.”

  “You always say that.”

  “You know how he asked
you about your college major?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And about your favorite movie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s male code language. Allow me to translate: ‘I’m trying to fuck you.’ ”

  But Bennett never tried to do anything. His whole existence was one effortless, fluid movement—a sea turtle gliding through the water.

  “Who’s Camille?” I asked him one night.

  I was what Lewis called “Head O.D.” O.D. stood for “on duty,” and Head O.D. was in charge of the whole camp until midnight, which meant I had to sit on the cafeteria steps, holding a useless flashlight and a walkie-talkie that barely worked in case one of the other on-duty counselors radioed in from the dorms with a problem. From the steps, I could see part of the loop, and beyond that, the library, the girls’ dorm to the right, part of the boys’ dorm to the left. And always against the white of the buildings, trees as green as putting mats.

  Bennett and I sat side by side, drinking water from Camp Carolina water bottles, surrounded by crickets and stars. I felt the way I constantly felt with Bennett—as if he was about to get up and walk away. The feeling always compelled me to ask him a lot of questions.

  Bennett glanced down at his tattoo. “I swear, I have to get that thing removed,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to do it. But it’s not cheap.”

  “How not cheap?”

  “Maybe a thousand. Or more.” He inspected the tattoo more closely, ran his finger over the letters of Camille’s name. “It’s a lot of ink.”

  I looked at his arm. The heart throbbed red and full.

  “Not much gets by you,” Bennett said. He leaned back on his elbows.

  “Plenty gets by me.”

  “Think so?” He yawned.

  There it was, my favorite part of talking with Bennett: how our banter would seem to be building momentum, until he would throw out an absentminded stock phrase, like a crisis line operator reading from a script. So different from Mikey, who was always on, always waiting for his chance to be funny, his skin buzzing with anticipation.

  “You been into Melrose yet?” Bennett asked. “We should drive into Melrose one of these nights. Get some ribs. Pitcher of beer.”

  Two weeks ago, I could have devoured multiple rib cages if given the chance, and then licked every last drop of barbecue sauce from my fingers. But with my eyes on Bennett, I felt no hunger. Ribs were a meal that hungry people ate.

  “The personal trainer eats ribs?”

  “Don’t tell the kids,” he said.

  I laughed, and then I saw it for the first time: the cross around his neck. It was small and wooden, dangling from a leather thong at the base of his throat.

  “Know what I’m famous for with my friends? Ask me about the specials at any fast-food place. Go on. I always know.”

  “KFC.”

  “Free medium soft drink with any plated meal.”

  “What’s a plated meal?”

  “A meal on a plate.”

  “Makes it sound healthy.”

  “Never claimed it was healthy.”

  “Mia was telling the kids the other day that they should always eat off a plate. Where you get in trouble is if you start eating out of the bag.”

  “Because you won’t know when to stop.”

  “Knowing when to stop is half the ba—” I cut myself off. I was so very sick of my platitudes.

  “Give me another,” Bennett said.

  “I don’t know. Burger King?”

  “A free vampire collector’s glass with any value meal.”

  “What’s a collector’s glass?”

  “A glass for collectors.”

  “But who would collect—”

  “Do you know what a value meal is?”

  “Isn’t it . . . No, actually.”

  “Bunch of items that cost less all together than they would individually.”

  “How gestalt.”

  “Pardon?”

  I shook my head. “So you’re one of those hypocrite trainers,” I said. “I can’t believe you eat fast food.” I almost nudged him with my elbow, but I stopped just short of touching him.

  “I’m not a real personal trainer yet. My test isn’t until October.”

  “So come October, you’ll stop eating Burger King?”

  “Come October, a lot of things will change. I’ll strike out on my own, for one thing. I’m already getting to the end of my rope with Lewis. This camp is a mess. Do you know how many employees here are unqualified?”

  “How many?”

  “All of us. Pretty much. Look, I know plenty about fitness. Still, though. He couldn’t find a real trainer? Not that I’m complaining. Just saying. You know, Mia doesn’t have her RD certification. She’s practically a kid. And Brendan sure as shit shouldn’t be anywhere near that climbing wall, and KJ, let me tell you, is no lifeguard. Then there’s Nurse, who’s, what, fifty years old? And hasn’t gotten her nursing certification yet. That woman’s crass as all get-out. She thinks Couth is her uncle, she’s so country.”

  “You don’t like Nurse?”

  “I like everyone.”

  I leaned back on my elbows like Bennett. Above us, the stars winked.

  “And you,” Bennett said. “Do you know what water aerobics is?”

  “No.”

  “How’d you even hear about us, all the way down here?”

  “I was reading about weight-loss camps once,” I said, crooking my nails to study them. I added, “On the Internet,” as if to substantiate my credentials.

  “Don’t even get me started on Lewis,” Bennett said. “For some godforsaken reason, that man thinks he’s better than everyone at everything. He’s sure that one day he’ll prove it.”

  “I love your accent,” I said.

  “I don’t have an accent.”

  “ ‘Godforsaken.’ What does that even mean?”

  “Beats me,” Bennett said, sitting back up and rubbing his knees. “Watch. That man is going to go down. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But you watch. It won’t be pretty.”

  “I know about narcissists,” I said. I sat up, too. “They tend to self-destruct. I used to work with comedians.”

  Bennett stopped rubbing his knees and stared at me. He wore a Carolina Hurricanes baseball cap, worn and faded; a Rolling Stones T-shirt with a lips-and-tongue logo; cutoff khaki shorts; his black-and-white-striped soccer sandals. “I like how you talk,” he said. “It’s so fancy.”

  I thought, Dumb jock. Then I felt guilty for thinking it. Then I felt turned on. Then I sucked air and words into my chest. And when I opened my mouth, I said, “I like that idea. Ribs and beer. Melrose. Pick any night when I’m off duty.”

  My heart pounded like wild fists, but Bennett just yawned and stretched his arms. “I forgot I even said that,” he said. “I must be tired.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, we don’t have to.”

  Bennett laughed. “You want ribs? Who am I to deny Miss Angeline?” He stood. Stretched. Gave my ponytail a noncommittal tug. Then he jogged down the steps and vanished.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The second Saturday of camp, the youngest girls decorated the cafeteria for the social (Lewis’s Camp-ese for “dance”). Before it began, Miss sat against the wall in our hallway in the dorm, wearing jogging shorts and a T-shirt, complaining, “This is going to be so gay,” as everyone else walked around in towels, borrowing one another’s clothes, battling the humidity with blow dryers. Whitney had her music cranked up, and Eden was dancing in the hallway, piling her hair up on top of her head, letting it fall as she twitched her hips. When no one joined her, she danced to the bathroom to shower.

  I was sitting outside of Eden’s room, pretending to do something important with my cell phone.

  “So gay,” Miss went on. “So retarded. Who are you all dressing up for anyway? There’s no one hot at this whole camp, except Bennett, and he’s, like, a dad.”

  Spider slid down the wall across fr
om her, wearing a mustache of white foam.

  “You’re bleaching your mustache?” Miss said.

  Spider pointed to it, and then said something in sign language.

  Whitney came out into the hall wearing skintight jeans and a hot pink tube top. “Maybe you should wear a North Carolina State bikini,” Whitney said, nudging Miss’s arm with her foot. “Brendan would get such a trombone in his pants.”

  When Whitney and Miss began to giggle, Spider, across from them, waved her hands frantically, pointing to her mustache bleach. Finally, unable to contain herself, she jumped to her feet and ran.

  From inside the bathroom, she roared, “Trombone!” and exploded into laughter. “Whitney! You made my bleach fall off!”

  Harriet stepped into the hallway wearing a black turtleneck dress.

  “You’re going to sweat to death,” I told her.

  “No, I won’t.”

  I returned to my phone, pretending not to notice Eden walking out of the bathroom in her towel and flip-flops, another towel twisted around her wet hair.

  “Harriet, are you going to a funeral?” Miss asked.

  “No.”

  “I see. Are you a ninja?”

  Harriet pulled her turtleneck over her mouth and nose, and then headed back to her room.

  “Sorry. I mean, are you a mime? No. I didn’t mean that. Are you a stagehand? Are you going to change the set between acts in the dark?”

  Whitney snorted, but her laughter stopped abruptly when Eden pointed to her and said, “I was totally going to wear jeans, too.”

  Whitney sighed and leaned against the wall, a brown roll of fat inflating like an inner tube between the button of her jeans and the bottom of her cropped shirt. “Of course you were.”

  “I’m obsessed with jeans,” Eden said.

  “Congratulations,” Miss said. “You just won the Most Retarded Sentence of the Week Award.” She stood and whispered something into Whitney’s ear, and Eden watched for a second, blinking rapidly, and then wandered into her room.