21. Becca
One night. That’s all.
Plus, several hours today and more tomorrow, but there’s a time limit. I won’t be stuck here with Miller forever.
Honestly, it’s not entirely that I don’t want to be around him. He’s growing on me, in a weird way. My initial impressions of him—too easygoing, takes nothing seriously—are definitely true, but there’s more to it.
That’s just the surface. Once you get deeper, he’s different. More sensitive, observant, sweet. The way he let me lean on him after the sailboat incident was just what I needed in that moment.
At this point, my objection to him is more that around him, I seem to be a hot mess.
I don’t need this weekend to add any more incidents to the tipped sailboat and Maya’s black eye.
Thinking of Maya makes me smile. She left after her one week at camp, and the way all the girls clamored to hug her, some even tearing up that she was leaving, made my heart swell.
I’m not sure they’ll appreciate it until they’re older, but they all learned so much from one another this past week. I had to blink back tears when I said goodbye to Maya, too. She’s going to be one I’ll remember for a long time. She promised to write to Vivien and me while we’re at camp the rest of the summer, and I can’t wait to get a letter from her.
I send up a silent prayer to the camping gods that we can get through this weekend without anyone else getting injured.
The start of the trail is flat and easy. The path is shaded by a mass of trees and soft from layers of pine needles and fallen leaves, and the air smells even more strongly of pine here than back at camp. I take a deep breath in through my nose. Pine is my favorite scent, because it reminds me of camp. But this place might even have Camp Winnie beat.
We walk along at a reasonable pace, and I do my best to keep track of time so we can stop every ten or fifteen minutes for water. After a mile, the kids are the ones stopping us for breaks.
“Can we stop for a snack?” Lena asks from her spot right behind me.
I check my watch. It’s been three minutes since our last break. “Let’s give it a couple more minutes.”
One minute goes by before Bayley asks for trail mix.
I pause on the side of the trail and pull out the baggie that holds the nut mixture. The kids hold their hands cupped out and I pour some out for each of them.
“Need some trail mix?” I ask Miller as I reach him.
“Nah. I’ll eat the nuts they don’t want.”
Sure enough, the kids eat the chocolate chips and then hand Miller the peanuts and almonds and raisins. So basically, we stopped to feed them chocolate. Great.
“Okay, let’s get moving again,” I say, returning to my position at the front.
“I’m thirsty.”
I refrain from rolling my eyes as I unclip Ben’s water bottle from the outside of his pack and hand it to him. He takes two sips, then hands it back. It seems light for having just started, but maybe he’s sharing it with one of the other kids.
“Do you have another water bottle you want me to clip on the outside?” I ask him. We may as well dig through his backpack while we’re stopped.
He shakes his head and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I just brought one.”
“No problem. You can borrow some water from a friend if you need.” I take the bottle from his outstretched hand and clip it to his pack.
His little eyebrows are knit together when I turn around. “I think we all brought just one.”
Oh, no. No, no, no. I told my girls to bring their three. We don’t have a water source once we get higher up. I look at the four of them, but they look guilty, too.
Dammit. I say one thing and they do the opposite. Is this how my parents felt when I was a teenager?
“We didn’t want to carry too many waters. They’re heavy,” Mollie admits, with as much of a shrug as she can manage with the heavy pack on her shoulders.
I look at Miller. He’s ignoring us, play fighting with Liam. Clearly, Miller doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of this situation.
Less than a mile into this hike, and things are already falling apart.
* * *
The campers eat more chocolate chips while I conference with Miller, who decided to only bring two water bottles himself.
“We can just refill them, right?” he asks with an easy smile.
Oh, if only it were that easy. I grit my teeth, reminding myself that there are campers standing near us. I’ll have to yell at him later.
“Down here, sure. But up where we’re supposed to camp tonight, there isn’t water available. We’ll end up dehydrated.” I consider the options, tapping a finger against my lips. We could turn around and head back to camp, but I’d hate to do that to the kids.
“If there’s water down here, why don’t we just camp down here?”
I’m about to tell Miller that we can’t just stay anywhere, but something stops me. He has a point, actually. Every part of the rule follower inside me is screaming that we need to follow the map we were given, camp at the spot we’re supposed to be at—but why?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep the campers safe, even if it’s going a little off-book?
I chew on my lip while I look over my shoulder to make sure no one has choked on a peanut while we’ve been conferencing. The kids are chomping away, unconcerned with the fact that they’re consuming massive amounts of sodium without enough water to drink.
Finally, I give in, “Okay. Let’s look at the map and find a place.”
Miller pulls the trail map out of the pocket on the front of my backpack and hands it to me. I look it over for a minute. The stream runs close to the trail at about the one-and-a-half-mile mark from the trailhead, and there’s a tiny figure on the map that indicates camping is allowed in that area.
“Let’s detour to this side trail and camp here.” I point at the spot I found. “We’re probably almost there already.”
“Sweet,” he says, popping a peanut into his mouth.
We get moving again. It’s less than half a mile to where we’re headed, and with the frequent stops for trail mix and water, we reach the site in an hour, with most of the water bottles empty.
As I take in the site and the campers, I realize stopping here was definitely the best option. It would have taken us at least three hours at this rate to reach the campsite we initially planned to stay at, and we would have had no water for the last two hours, not to mention all night.
Miller and I help the campers fill their water bottles from the stream and drop in iodine pills to purify. As soon as my watch beeps to indicate the required time to purify the water, the kids begin gulping from their bottles.
Yeah, this was definitely the best choice.
“Why don’t you guys start setting up the tents?” Miller asks. He looks at me, lowering his voice. “I just don’t want them to drink so much they puke. Or pee their pants.”
There are three tents in total: one each in Miller’s and my backpacks, and then one that’s been distributed among the campers in pieces. We gather the parts, and it looks like all of them are there. Finally, one thing on this trip that’s gone right.
After the kids leaving water bottles behind, I was expecting to be missing a rain fly or the poles to set it up.
I find three relatively flat spots to set them up and point them out to the campers. “Okay, girls, let’s set this one up together, then the other girls’ tent. Three in one, and two in the other tent. Miller will help the boys.” I start to pull items out of the canvas bag and lay them out.
“Hey, Becca?” Miller calls.
I straighten and turn to look at him. He’s sitting on the ground, his back reclined against a pine tree, looking like he has no intention of helping to set up a tent. I wonder if it makes me a bitch to hope he gets sap in his hair.
“Come here, I have a question for you. Kids, start setting up while Becca and I talk.” He motions with his hand again for me to come towards him.
“What’s up?” I ask as I get close. My heart beats a little faster at the thought that I messed something up. It’s not at the lines that form at the corner of his eyes when he smiles. It’s not. “Are we missing something?”
He shakes his head and motions to the ground next to him. “Let them do it,” he murmurs, so softly I think I’m mishearing him at first.
“Huh?”
He takes my hand and tugs until I sit on the ground next to him. “Let them do it. Alone, without us.”
Now I know he’s crazy. “Uh, they don’t know how to set up a tent.”
He shrugs, a grin spreading across his face. “So they’ll learn. We have extra time to kill, right?”
“I guess.” I’m not sure this is a great plan. What if they mess it up?
He sits on a boulder and motions for me to sit next to him. “Here’s the thing. If we help them set up the tents, the tents will be set up.”
“I think that’s the point.”
Miller shakes his head. Even with a grin on his face, this is as serious as I’ve seen him, so I listen. “But if we make them do it themselves, the tents will also be set up. And they’ll feel accomplished. And be closer with one another.”
“I—“ He has a point, I realize. They might make mistakes. But the end goal of this weekend isn’t getting tents put up. It’s making friends. Making memories.
“The quickest way to bring people together is a common goal. And maybe a common enemy, which is what we can be, the mean counselors making them do this themselves while we sit in the hammock.”
* * *
“How come you’re not helping?” Liam asks.
It’s taken a solid fifteen minutes for them to realize we never came back to help, which was long enough for Miller to get out the double hammock he somehow crammed into his pack. He strung it up between two large trees, and now the two of us are sharing it while the campers do all the work.
Miller drops an arm over his face. “You guys can do it.”
I peer at him from where I’m lying in the hammock, my head by his feet. He looks the picture of a guy who just doesn’t care. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he truly just didn’t feel like helping.
Until Liam walks back toward the tent he’s working on, and Miller lifts his arm to wink at me.
I watch the kids as they struggle, but when Mollie finally gets the poles in the tent correctly, the proud smile that stretches across her face has me convinced. Miller was right.
This time.
I follow his lead and act disinterested, while still trying to keep a close eye on the campers. I don’t think I’m pulling it off as effectively as Miller, but the campers barely look in our direction. Getting all three tents set up takes them longer than it would have taken me, but they seem to be having fun once they get the basic idea of what to do.
“It’s working,” I murmur in amazement as one tent stands up. Four campers give one another high fives.
“I’m not as dumb as I look,” Miller says, flashing me another wink. Does he know how sexy he looks when he does that?
My cheeks heat. “I never said you were dumb.”
“Just thought it, right?” he teases.
Maybe. Or at least thought he was inexperienced. How did he end up working at camp, anyway? This isn’t exactly a common summer gig for people once they hit their early twenties, and both of us are well past that.
“How come you’re working at camp?” I ask finally, curiosity getting the best of me.
“Honestly? No idea, really,” he says, shifting his body and making the hammock sway. “Brett’s an old high school friend. We played lacrosse together. I was looking for something different to do, he needed help… here we are.”
“Different from what?”
He nudges my arm with his knee. “Ah, I knew you’d be interested eventually.”
I try to shrug, but my arms are trapped against the fabric of the hammock. “Not interested. Just making small talk.”
Maybe you’re interested,a tiny voice inside me points out. I choose to ignore her.
“Well, to answer your question, I’ve been playing poker professionally since college. And it’s fun, but I’m almost thirty, you know?”
I raise a brow at him. “So, you thought you’d go to summer camp?”
He laughs, throwing his head back. I’m realizing that this is Miller. He expresses his feelings fully, out in the open. Pretty much the opposite of what I do, keeping my emotions bottled up. “Kind of. I thought I’d make some changes, maybe find something different to do with my life. Settle down at some point, all that. And this was the first different thing that popped up.”
It makes sense, in kind of a weird way. “So you signed on for the summer without having any clue what you were getting into?”
“Nah.” Miller shakes his head, looking over at the campers and then back to me. “I honestly didn’t think I’d last more than a few days. Brett bet me that I couldn’t hack it, and I can’t turn down a bet.”
I snort with laughter, then cover my mouth with my hand. “This is all a bet.”
“Yeah. If I bail out, I have to donate my salary to the camper scholarship fund. So it’s more for fun than anything, and it helps Brett out either way.” He closes his eyes, his wide grin fading to a smaller smile. “I like your laugh. You should do it more.”
“I laugh plenty,” I protest, but his words are turning over in my head. For all his laid-back, devil-may-care attitude, he might just be a good guy at his core.
“Nah. You giggle, but you don’t usually make that cute little snort. I like it.”
This is getting dangerously close to flirting. Our bodies are close, our sides pressed together in the hammock. My stomach flips as I focus on the spots where our bodies are touching.
Suddenly, every point of contact feels like it’s on fire.
I suck in a breath and look over toward the campers, needing a minute. I’m surprised to realize all three tents have been erected. One is facing the wrong way, and one has the rain fly on upside down, but they did an admirable job.
I shift my gaze to the right to find seven campers walking toward us, Lena and Noah leading the way.
“We want our own tents,” Lena announces.
“What?” I ask, trying to figure out her angle. There are three tents. Three boys plus Miller in one. Five girls—four campers and me—split between the other two, three in one tent and two in the other. How else is she planning to divide things up?
“The boys are going to sleep in one, and all the girls want to sleep together. You guys take a counselor tent for the two of you.”