In a week, Scottie will break into the med tent and try to overdose on a handful of Benadryl and antidepressants. It’ll be easy for the girl — nobody will see her walk into the unguarded tent, despite the gleam her white-blonde hair will make in the Montana sun right before the flap closes behind her. No counselors or kids will pull her away as she props open the lid of the unlocked med case or pops the caps of the various pill bottles. Or when, deliriously, she stumbles past the camping tents to the creek filled with cow shit, where a kid got giardia last month, and hits her head against a stone, or tries to run away or drown herself.
None of the kids know what Scottie tried to do in the creek, just that she didn’t succeed. A band of three campers—Anna, Sylvie, and Julian, who have been inseparable ever since—might know, but they won’t tell anyone. The three of them were closest to the driveway, huddled in the ambulance lights as it came to pick up a disheveled Scottie close to dusk. They were the ones to find her, over-medicated and maybe streaked in creek dirt or scraped up or drowning, and selfishly, they refuse to share this pain.
In a week, when Scottie is lifted onto the stretcher and wheeled into the ambulance truck, Charlie, a soft-spoken girl from the tri-state area with frizzy brown hair resembling a modern Christ, will want into the trio. She will crane her neck to watch the ambulance go and a counselor will refuse to answer her questions due to “administrative reasons.” Charlie will huddle with Ethan, a kid from Bel Air who wears a rotation of highlighter-hued basketball shorts and claims to have met Jay Z, and Emilie, an Upper East Side private school student who vocally despises her stepmother, Emmaline. The three campers will talk about how sudden Scottie’s choice was and whose meds she recruited for her final cocktail. All three will wish they had been the ones to find the white-haired girl in her darkest hour.
Before the ambulance appears in the farm grounds’ driveway, Charlie will be sitting in a circle with Ethan and Emilie on the side of the highway, outside their tents, using her thumbnail to strip the seeds off a stalk of wheat. When Emilie complains about her stepmother’s disruption of her parents’ marriage, Charlie will make fun of how Emmaline spells her name like the parody of a white person and hope that the parallel to Emilie herself isn’t too obvious. She and Emilie will give Ethan advice on winning back his on-and-off girlfriend once and for all, despite the fact that Charlie has never been close to being in a relationship, has never even held a boy’s hand. She will not yet have discovered that she is bisexual, but she will have started to feel that everyone else has for her. Regardless, she will nod conspiratorially with Emilie, as the girl affectionately flaunts her boyfriend, a lacrosse player named Blake, of whom she will show everyone a picture when the campers get their phones back to call home next week. Emilie will tell the two others that Blake describes everything as a “situation,” including when Emilie gave him a handjob under a blanket at a group movie night last fall.
“I’m gonna go clean up this situation, he said,” she parrots, laughing, even though Charlie and Ethan will have both already heard this story several times by now. The three will laugh, anyway—there’s nothing else to do—and none will show any recognition of the repetition.
Charlie will be hungry by this point in the evening. While feigning a lack of virginity, she will remember her bad lunch: the raw lettuce she ate and the black bean chili that tasted faintly of bleach, a direct result of the campers on cleaning duty who didn’t wash enough dish rags. Charlie will remember how the bleach slid down her throat in a musky fire, how she spit into the creek.
For a moment she will imagine a burnt trail from her throat to her stomach, and her bones liquifying, and she will feel nauseous before she chooses to forget the incident altogether. Two days before the ambulance wheels silently out of the campsite and the campers crowd the empty driveway in its wake, Charlie will witness Scottie pull Charlie’s best friend, Anna, to the shower tent. She will grow silent as her group’s conversation continues on around her, and direct her hearing towards the shower, where the flap closes behind the two elbow-linked girls. She will know that another girl, Luna, is already showering, and she will correctly conclude that Scottie will invite Anna to join her in the remaining stall. She will feel a type of jealousy at this, and then anger, and then a deep, persistent apprehension. Charlie will excuse herself from the gaggle of post-workday campers with the lie that she needs to change out of her field jeans. She will walk back to her tent, sky blue and pitched in the middle of the front row, and try to ignore how heavy, almost waterlogged, her feet feel. Crouched in the tent, she will rummage through her duffle to find a pair of athletic shorts. She will not think of Scottie, pale green eyes squinting under a ridiculous hunting hat she stole from Jack, one of the boy campers. She will not think of Jack, a self-proclaimed DJ from Silverlake who preaches that vulnerability is the only way forward, who asked Charlie about the copy of Huckleberry Finn she was reading at the airport upon arrival, and upon her stunted response has shown little to no interest in her person.
In his mandatory card at the end of the program, Jack will write to Charlie that she ought to try being less sad, and Charlie will absorb his feedback and redirect her self-view accordingly. She will spend two months convinced that Jack from Silverlake was right, that she is her own obstacle to being “less sad,” and then she will fall into a deep episode and be diagnosed with clinical depression. However, she doesn’t know any of that now, just that Jack’s hat is on
Scottie’s head and he likes the white-haired girl, Anna likes the white-haired girl, and Jack and the white-haired girl want nothing to do with Charlie.
But above all, Charlie will not think about Scottie and Anna, in the shower together, naked. She will not think of the damp wood that smells faintly of almonds and organic, compostable soap, or the warm light of the tent, summer evening sun seeping through the bare canvas. Charlie will cringe as she thinks about when she showered with Emilie, how she made her turn around even when she left on her sports bra. She had not known what to do when Emilie undressed completely, when she turned around too early and saw her breasts, felt shame like creekwater weighing down her lungs. Scottie will not feel shame, the hunting hat tossed aside, her unsettlingly pale eyes wide open as Anna, equally comfortable, shares the shower stream. Upon unzipping her tent, Charlie will see Anna’s face, returned from the shower bright and cleared of farm dust, and she will not bring up the white-haired girl who is better than her at having a body.
Five days before Scottie is driven away and Ethan books a flight home by tricking the work director into granting him a free call, Charlie will squat at the top of a snow-patched mountain with Anna, Emilie, and a small girl of about five or six, the daughter of a local park ranger. They will be half of the remaining group of a failed hiking excursion, having driven several days with no direction or cellular service around a wildfire-ravaged Northwest wilderness. By this point, one girl will have begun to vomit and two more will have grown substantially weak, and upon splitting off for the campsite, they will have accidentally taken the remaining food, leaving only a clouded, picked-through ziploc of trail mix.
At night, Charlie will sleep packed with the girls in the singular bed of a colonial cabin as the boys and counselor sleep in hammocks outside, and she will feel comforted when Anna and
Emilie tell her she is pretty and will find love someday. Upon waking, the girls will giggle uneasily when the park ranger stoops at the cabin window to try to see them in their underwear, and they’ll dress in the darkest corner with their smooth backs to the light. Although she would never voice it, Charlie will feel a deep relief that Scottie is not there with the three girls, among the charred, dusty trees, pushing the ranger’s daughter down the remaining mountain ice, or in the cabin bed.
A week before the white-haired girl is dressed in a blue-pocked hospital gown and hooked up to a medical machine, Charlie will crowd with the other campers in a semi-circle around a freshly-killed bison. It will hang by its legs off a post suspended from the back of a large truck, and a bison farmer will explain the sustainability of his harvest as the kids pass around a cherished bag of pretzel chips. Scottie will lean forward to the black, oily carcass of the beast, and she will not flinch when the farmer brandishes a knife, illustrates his method for extraction, then slits the bison’s throat with the sound of a saw through thick canvas. She will take a handful of pretzels and pass them along, unblinking as the bison’s belly is sliced in a vertical line, and its corpse opens like an exposed seam. Her nose might crinkle, slightly, when the bison’s freed stomach inflates like a balloon, and, laughing, the farmer brings his knife down from over his shoulder and punctures the growing white sack. She might flinch, barely, when a gas presses up against the children, a grassy, sulfurous smell.
Charlie will go back to the camp cars, sit in the passenger seat alongside Ethan and Emilie in the backseat. “I’m gonna get a helicopter,” Ethan will say. His neon yellow shorts will be streaked with dust. His face will be stern, but in a confused way, like he can’t quite make out what is happening to him, what the body hanging from the truck is, wavering, clouded with flies.
Charlie will remain silent, eyes locked on Scottie through the dusty windshield. “My parents are gonna send over our helicopter and I’m gonna fly out of here.”
2025