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  From the bathroom, Spider called, “Don’t say ‘retarded.’ It’s insensitive.”

  “I can say whatever I want,” Miss called.

  “It’s a free country,” Whitney said.

  I stood, facing Miss. “You don’t have to be mean.”

  “Who was mean? I’m not mean.”

  “Harriet looks pretty,” I said.

  “She’s gorgeous,” Miss said, yawning. “I must be jealous.”

  “You didn’t have to make Eden feel bad.”

  “Eden jacks my style!” Whitney said. “She tries to talk like she’s black all the time. It’s annoying. She said the N word yesterday. I’m sick of dumb white bitches thinking they’re black. Eden’s a racist.”

  “She’s not a racist.”

  “This is why I hate females.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said.

  “There are so many dumb bitches at this camp.”

  And then a scream came from Eden’s room, so loud and shrill, my vision blurred. Spider ran out of the bathroom, her face scrubbed clean. She was wearing nothing but day-of-the-week underpants. Tuesdays. Ever since the drastic weight losses from the first weigh-in, it was not uncommon for everyone, except Harriet, to be stripped down to underwear.

  Sheena popped her head out her door. “What the hell is going on?”

  Harriet reappeared, too.

  Eden burst out of her room, still screaming, still wearing her towel, her wet hair now loose on her arms and back. “Someone put cockroaches in my fucking bed!” She stopped screaming and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “There are no cockroaches in this part of the country,” Spider said, scratching at a peeling patch of skin on her cheek. “Earwigs, maybe. But cockroaches are city dwellers.”

  Eden closed her eyes and balled up her fists at her sides. “Cockroaches. In. My. Bed.”

  I looked around. Whitney was looking at the floor. Sheena was looking at Miss, who was twirling a yellow lock of hair around her finger, watching Eden with a face as blank as a plate. Harriet was crying.

  “Harriet, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I hate when people scream,” she muttered, and then she stomped into her room and slammed the door.

  “What is everyone’s problem?” Sheena said. “We’re at camp. Bugs get inside sometimes. Deal with it!”

  “We’re at a boarding school!” Eden said. “It’s not a real camp.”

  “Maybe it was a hate crime,” Spider said.

  “Y’all are drama queens,” Whitney said.

  Whitney and Miss linked elbows and scurried into Sheena’s room. Sheena followed them in and closed the door.

  Eden turned to stomp into Spider’s room. I heard the squeak of the mattress springs when she threw herself on Spider’s bed. “I’m not sleeping in my room!” she shouted. “Ever again!”

  “I’ll trade with her,” Spider said.

  “You don’t have to do that, Spider.”

  “I like earwigs.” She scratched her forehead. It was pink from all the scratching. “I wouldn’t mind having an earwig farm.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Want me to get them and take them outside?”

  I watched the pink spread across her forehead. I nodded. “I hate bugs,” I said. I thought, My sister and I hate bugs. “But it’s not your job, Spider. So don’t do it if you don’t want to, okay?”

  “Everyone thinks earwigs crawl into people’s ears,” Spider said. “And lay eggs in their brains.”

  I shuddered.

  “But that’s an urban legend. Or maybe a rural legend.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “Of bugs?”

  I looked at the antidote necklaces draped around Spider’s neck. “You’re brave,” I told her.

  Spider lifted her arms away from her body and then dropped them as she made her way toward Eden’s room. “People are so afraid of things that aren’t even scary.”

  I went to Spider’s door and placed my palms on it. For a second, I thought I felt a heartbeat. “Can I come in?”

  Eden didn’t answer.

  “Spider’s in your room getting the bugs out of your bed.”

  After another minute of silence, I opened the door and stepped into Spider’s dim room. The air smelled medicinal. A Japanese flag hung in place of blinds, suspended by the breeze from the window fan. Below it, Eden was sprawled facedown on the bed.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said into the pillow.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “We don’t have to.”

  “I don’t want to talk. At all. About anything.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But don’t you want to go to the social?”

  Eden rocked her forehead right and left on the pillow. No.

  I looked at her wet hair and pictured my father’s hand cupping the back of her head. I could hear his voice saying, “Cheer up, sleepy Jean.”

  I thought of Eden’s mother, her eyes locked with our father’s. I wondered how they’d met. How much time had they spent together? When he died, had she still loved him? Had he loved her? Had he kissed the great wave of her bangs? Had they sat side by side in an air-conditioned movie theater, his palm cupping the nape of her neck? Had he held her beneath a summer-night sky? Had he pointed to the heavens, his belly at her back, and whispered into her hair? (“See how the moon loves the stars? Don’t I love you like that?”)

  I didn’t touch Eden. But I wanted to give her something. I could have just said it. Told her what I’d come to tell her. It certainly would have taken her mind off the cockroaches or earwigs, or whatever they were.

  But when I opened my mouth, nausea rose inside me. I could do it. No, I couldn’t. I had to. No, not yet. Not yet. Yes, now. Now. I inhaled sharply. But suddenly it felt like a lie. Eden, I’m your sister. It was ridiculous. What was I thinking? This was the first time I’d been close to her. This was not The Moment. She would scream for Sheena. I would be taken away in a straitjacket.

  I slowed my heart by remembering that I had time. The program was working. I felt . . . surrendered to it. I could wait out the summer. By August, everyone would say, “Gray and Eden are like sisters.” We would be like sisters. Then I would tell her.

  In the meantime, I offered a fortune cookie fortune, since that was what I did best. In fact, I gave her my father’s words: “Most people,” I said, “are schmucks.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the cafeteria, blue paper streamers ran from one wall to the other, balloons gathered at the ceiling, and construction paper posters on the walls read DANCE! and SHAKE IT! One read LOVELY LADY LUMPS. Pudge had gotten out of his wheelchair and was lying on his side on the stage in a colossal red T-shirt and matching red do-rag. His knees were slightly bent, his head propped on his palm. He looked like a fat lady from a painting waiting to be hand-fed grapes. Someone had plugged an iPod into speakers, and Pudge was playing DJ.

  The youngest girls looked ready for Easter in long pastel dresses. One girl wore a white bow in her hair. The intermediate girls wore cutoff jean shorts or miniskirts, the bolder ones sporting tube tops and halters. The boys arrived with hair still damp from the shower and short-sleeve button-down shirts already darkening at the armpits.

  No one was dancing. The campers stood in girl clusters and boy clusters, or sat at the one picnic table that hadn’t been stacked up against the wall.

  Lewis stood beside Pudge on the stage. “Isn’t anyone going to dance?” he called. “This is a social! Dance! Dance!”

  Spider tapped my shoulder. She was wearing terry-cloth wristbands and holding a round hairbrush. Her T-shirt was tucked into her shorts, which were hiked up to her ribs. Of my five campers, Spider had the least weight to lose. She was more puffy than fat, as if her body were a shrine to her allergies. “Will you do my hair?”

  “Now?”

  “I was going to ask you before.”

  I looked at her hair. What could I do with it? It was as dry as rope, frizzy and heavy
and straggly. It looked as if it would easily burn—wheat in a bad harvest year.

  “I could braid it,” I said, taking the brush.

  “French braid?”

  “People still wear French braids?”

  “My mom French-braids my hair.”

  “I haven’t seen a French braid in ten years.”

  “It’s my favorite hairdo,” Spider said. “I like how it starts from the top.”

  “Do you know who Bob Marley was?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know that when he died, they found thirty-seven new species of bugs in his hair?”

  “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “Don’t tell Eden that,” Spider whispered. “I think she’s phobic.”

  She followed me to the picnic table, where I sat on one end of the bench. She sat on the floor at my feet, wrapped her arms around her body, and scratched hard at the eczema on her shoulders, sending tiny dry skin flakes fluttering into the atmosphere. When I took her hair in my hands, she sighed and her shoulders relaxed. She stopped scratching.

  Bennett came out of the kitchen carrying a blue cooler. “Snack!” he yelled above the music, and the kids moved toward him. As he doled out sugar-free Popsicles, he looked over the sea of heads at Spider and me. “Popsicle?” he mouthed.

  I shook my head, finished Spider’s braid, and snapped the elastic into place. She hopped to her feet and ran to Bennett. My fingers found their way to my hipbones. I’d been touching them constantly, speaking to them silently: Welcome back, dear hipbones. I hope your past year was better than mine.

  Bennett handed out the last of the Popsicles as I stood and crossed the cafeteria. “Angeline,” he said when I reached him. His dimples sank into his cheeks, sucking all the air from the room.

  I looked away, my face hot, and saw Miss, no longer the critic, alone in a corner with Brendan, holding both of his hands. He was bent down, whispering into her ear.

  “I’m off duty tonight,” I told Bennett. “I don’t even have to be here now. Sheena’s here. So.”

  “That right?” Bennett closed the white lid of the cooler and sat on it. He rested his elbows on his thighs and grinned up at me. Then he hooked a finger through a belt loop on my jeans. “You okay, Angeline?”

  The Popsicles campers were licking looked like icicles. This was what happened when I was with Bennett: Sweets were stripped of sugar; food became nonfood.

  “I just want to get out of camp for a bit.” I raked my hair off my face, making a ponytail with trembling hands. When I realized I didn’t have an elastic, I let my hair fall. “I’ve hardly left camp in two weeks.”

  “Do that again,” Bennett said.

  “What?”

  “That thing with your hair. That was sexy.”

  I wiped my palms on my back pockets. I was empty of words. My stomach growled.

  Bennett hopped off the cooler and pinched my waist. “Well, let’s get you out of camp,” he said. “Can’t have a city girl all cooped up like a hamster in a cage.”

  Carolina Academy sat nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in between Melrose, the ugliest town in America, and Falling Rock, the prettiest. Melrose was the land of all-you-can-eat buffets, gas stations, and cell phone stores. Falling Rock was all beautiful cliffs and gorges, sky that stretched pink and ominous, and windy roads that made your ears clog and pop, clog and pop, as if the human body was ill equipped for such splendor.

  The bar Bennett chose in Falling Rock was in a dim Mexican restaurant, the walls decorated with straw sombreros; photographs of customers drinking margaritas from tall plastic vases; and colorful ponchos, sleeves spread—invisible people waiting for hugs. We sat side by side on bar stools. Bennett ordered a Corona and a shot of Patrón Silver. The bartender wore a thick, long braid down her narrow back. She was thinner than I had ever been, and her thinness looked thoughtless, like she was a woman who would eat a few nachos and then smoke a cigarette.

  “Chilled?” she asked Bennett, holding up her shaker.

  “Nah.”

  “Salt?”

  “Won’t be necessary.”

  My impulse was to show possession, to touch Bennett’s hand, the pale green veins beneath his skin like the cords of a leaf, his black waterproof watch, the blond hairs on the backs of his fingers, the smooth clipped panes of his nails. But to touch him was to admit to a decision. The outer corners of our knees brushed together through our jeans, and I felt Bennett as acutely as if we were naked.

  “So,” Bennett said, and I leaned closer to him. I loved that word when it came from a stranger. From someone close, “so” meant, We need to talk and it won’t be pleasant. From Bennett, it felt like fingertips grazing the outermost cells of my skin. “It’s high time you told me what you’re doing here,” he said.

  I hesitated, unsure of what he meant. Here with him? Here at camp? Here in a town elevated 3,500 feet above New York City?

  “We should all sit down sometime,” Bennett said, “the whole staff, and tell our stories. Bet we’d hear some crazy ones.”

  Yes. These were the conversations I wanted to have. Bennett was so different from the cynics I knew in New York—the harried servers, the stand-up comics.

  “Everyone’s here to lose weight,” I said. “Everyone’s in college. Or just out. And they’re overweight. And here’s an opportunity to get paid to diet for two months. That’s everyone’s story.”

  “Not yours.”

  “Not yours, either.” Behind the bar, the liquor bottles stood at attention, guarding a gilt-framed mirror. A poster tacked to the ceiling showed a cowboy on horseback, mid-lasso. “What do you think he’s trying to catch?” I finished my Stoli and soda as Bennett took his shot. The bartender replaced our empty glasses with full ones.

  Bennett tilted his head back and squinted one eye at the poster. “A cow?”

  I smiled. Mikey would have answered with a joke. He would have said it loudly enough for everyone around us to hear.

  “It’s like us at camp,” I said.

  “Lassoing cows?”

  “God.” I covered my face. “I have this friend who teaches special ed and she always makes jokes about her students . . . What’s it called? Battlefield humor? So tasteless. But now here I am, no different.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I lifted my face from my hands. “I hate when people say that. I’m not hard enough on myself.”

  “You’re a good person, Angeline.”

  “There’s no such thing as a good person.”

  “What have you done that’s so bad?”

  I paused. “I don’t know.”

  “Killed anyone?”

  I laughed. It sounded shrill.

  “See? You’re fine.”

  “Three-legged dogs turn my stomach. I can’t even look at them. A good person would adopt one. And one time this spring, I was leaving work, and it was pouring out, and I took someone’s nice umbrella from the umbrella stand by the door and left my cheap broken one. I still have the nice one. It has a big yellow sun inside. I love it. I don’t even feel guilty about it anymore.”

  “If you weren’t a good person, you wouldn’t be working at a weight-loss camp.”

  “What would I be doing? Tanning? Robbing banks?” I traced the rim of my glass with one fingertip. “A lot of bad people act good. There are pedophiles who become religious leaders. Sociopaths who become psychiatrists. Maybe you overestimate me.”

  “Maybe you underestimate yourself.”

  “So you’re one of those motivator personal trainers. You’re like Richard Simmons.”

  Bennett lifted an eyebrow. “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” I shook my head, clearing the image of Mikey as if from an Etch A Sketch. “What are you doing here?”

  “Asked you first.”

  “Guess you did. Okay.” I looked at him and lied. I told him the carefully phrased half-truth—no, tiny fraction of a truth—I’d t
old everyone before I left New York: “My father died last summer. He was obese. It killed him. I want to help obese children.”

  Bennett pressed his lime into the mouth of his beer bottle with his thumb. “My son’s got a weight problem,” he said. “I wanted him to come to camp, but he wouldn’t. And his mother’s no help.”

  My eyes moved to his tattoo. His sleeve covered most of it, but the point of the heart peeked out. “Is Camille his mother?”

  Bennett swigged his beer, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Yup.”

  “Were you married?”

  “Married. Working in sales. The whole nine.”

  “I used to work in sales, too,” I said.

  I had a brief, bright memory then of barking in the West Village, before my business took off, before I hired a street team to bark for me. In a way, that had been the best time—the beginning, when I was doing everything myself, when I thought I could make anything happen.

  Barking had come to me intuitively. I knew what to say to unlock strangers’ wallets. I would study each person’s face, how he held his arms, where his feet were pointing, and I would infer what he needed to hear, when he wanted me to laugh, and at which point in the conversation I should casually touch his arm or step a little closer to him, making a mirror image of his toes with mine. I targeted large groups, sometimes selling ten tickets in one shot. I knew to compliment a woman’s accessories, a man’s height, a baby’s distinctiveness. I learned quickly never to waste time on a person wearing headphones or a man holding a woman’s hand.

  Unlike most barkers, I didn’t hate barking. I liked being on my feet all day, burning calories. I liked when men would say, “You’re too sweet to be selling things from the sidewalk.” They would ask, “Are you a comedian?” and I would say, demurely, “No, I’m just the face.”

  “The face,” they would say. “Well, it’s a pretty cute face.” And they would reach into the back pockets of their jeans.

  “I can see you in sales,” I told Bennett.