Chapter 11
eleven
. . .
Evan was waiting for me outside the cabin to walk to dinner together again.
His hair was damp from the shower and I noticed he gave his beard a trim.
He was cleaned up in athletic pants and a slim fit black t-shirt that snugly hugged his shoulders.
The same broad, strong shoulders that I had wrapped myself around earlier.
He had presented himself as if he were in fact treating a run of the mill dinner as a true date.
“Hey,” I began to question my own choice in wardrobe after opting to remain in the jean shorts and tank top I had tossed on. I wanted to wear a flirty dress and twirl around like the lead in a romcom, except all of my flirty dresses were hanging in a closet three hundred or so miles away.
“Shall we?” Evan softly smiled and extended his hand. I grabbed it, soft and warm still from the shower. Our first true date and it would be in the kitchen of my aunt’s house, and a double date with my aunt and uncle. The nature of tonight’s dinner would be a secret shared only between us two.
We had sat at that same table this morning but now things had changed, everything would be blown up and romanticized.
Instead of pensively sitting at the end of the table across from Evan, I decided to sit beside him.
We subtly grabbed the other’s hand out of sight or briefly rubbed the other’s leg.
Sue, naturally, noticed the shift and gave me an all too dramatic wink when setting plates down. I rolled my eyes.
Sue had been going all out on meals thanks to a certain guest's willingness to pay a premium for his week’s stay.
What would usually be a cost-effective meal was now a high end feast. Filet mignon, roasted baby potatoes, and creamed spinach with freshly baked rolls.
Sue had never made anything remotely close to this in all my years coming to camp.
The meal was an exclamation point on the day, which already was a more notable one in my recent memory.
Randy gruffly thanked Evan for the work he had done, to which Sue playfully slapped him for “making a guest work on his vacation.”
Evan had to jump in as defense, saying he had made the offer to continue to help, and that he was happy to do it.
“Honestly, it’s exactly like how it is when I come home to visit my father,” he retorted. Sue threatened Randy that if he tried to do something like that again she would refund Evan’s trip. Randy, who was as motivated by money as he was the satisfaction of a hard day’s work, quickly shut up.
There was a lull in the conversation and Evan sparked a mischievous grin and redirected the conversation, plopping his head in his hands as his elbows rested on the table.
“Sue, I have to know, what was young Dani like?”
I perked up from moving creamed spinach around my plate and gently jabbed Evan in the side.
Sue smiled, she had almost three decades of material on me. My most embarrassing moments were lived out on this property. “Dan was a wild child, and then a very odd teenager, she went through this phase where all she’d wear were these tight pants with neon color studded belts, right Dan?”
“You don’t need to bring up my very temporary lapse in judgement regarding my fashion choices.”
Middle school was a bitch to all of us in its own way, and for a short period of time I’d emulated Hayley Williams and every MySpace model. Incredibly poorly.
“She’d come in here to straighten her hair every day, the smell of burnt hair lingered for weeks. And she would sit at the table and draw these weird little figures constantly. Actually I think I have one of them, hold on.”
Sue got up and walked down the hallway to a cork board stuck on the wall, it was littered with phone numbers and receipts, and apparently a relic from my most mortifying era.
She unpinned a wrinkly piece of paper and brought it to the table.
Bella and Edward from Twilight, drawn in the style of Tim Burton.
A true time capsule of a very particular time in pop culture history.
“Oh, oh wow,” Evan chuckled. “This is incredible, I need to take a picture of this. My friend Rob would love it.” He looked at me and winked.
I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing about this “friend Rob,” but I knew exactly who he was referring to.
Evan took his phone out of his pocket and snapped a quick photo. “Dani, you never told me you were an artist.”
“Career was short-lived.” I replied curtly.
Sue sat back down and the drawing remained in the middle of the table. The large Burton-esque eyes were burning a hole into my own.
“Those were some fun summers, Dan. You tried to be too cool to do anything and so sullen but you’d always manage to slip up and get excited about something.”
The last summer I was in that phase was the one before my father died. Something about experiencing death first hand made dressing every day for a funeral less fun.
“Now what’s the plan for tomorrow for you two? More canoodling in the lake?” Sue wriggled her brows dramatically.
“SUE!” I shot her a glare, Evan giggled. Giggled!
For once I did have a plan, I was going to show him the best of what the camp had to offer.
We could escape from prying eyes a bit. “Actually, and I hadn’t asked Evan yet, but I thought we could hike Elephant Ridge.
” I turned to him to explain further, “it’s not as long as the falls but it’s more strenuous, but it has the best view of the lake, and you can see the other mountains and lakes beyond. ”
“Works for me,” Evan shrugged, “I’m just happy to be here.”
Sue in particular was charmed by his affable and easy-going nature, always getting excited when he wanted to do anything at camp at all.
She gave me another not-so-subtle wink from her place at the table, and Randy redirected the conversation to how much he’d have to spend to repair the roof of one of the cabins.
“You’re not actually friends with Robert Pattinson, right?” I stopped Evan as we walked out of the kitchen.
“Ha, no, we have a handful of mutual friends and I’ve met him a few times but definitely not close enough to text him that masterpiece, as tempting as it may be.”
I was audibly relieved, the sigh puffing out of me and echoing across the lake. Still, being two degrees away from Edward Cullen himself was enough to put a pit in my stomach. “I try to forget that version of me existed.”
I had traded one form of fandom for another through the years, and in hindsight all of them were embarrassing, not just the most recent one.
“Sue clearly hasn’t. And trust me, I have equally—if not more so—embarrassing instances from middle school. Being a Tim Burton and Twilight fan is a rite of passage for a quirky teenager in the late 2000s.”
“And if I told you Edward Scissorhands was my first crush?”
Unfortunately, a true statement. How I went from my sexual preferences being the sweet goth with blades for hands to the literal hero of a fantasy realm was beyond me.
He cocked his head and assessed me, searching for any hint of a joke. “I’d be sorry that I could never compete with him,” he winked.
There was too much cloud cover that evening to make stargazing worthwhile, but Evan and I remained at the fire pit until it became a pile of glowing embers.
We had built the fire together with the hope that we could have some quiet alone time out on the beach, but Sue managed to invite herself, and neither of us had the heart to decline her.
I knew exactly what she was doing, Sue was a meddler at heart and now she had her entertainment for the week.
Sue had never liked Nick all that much, though she had never said so explicitly.
I was a quick witted free spirit and Nick stifled me in a way, at least that’s how Sue would see it each time we came to camp.
In hindsight, she was right, of course she was.
I finally shed his dead weight, and was lighter now.
Now I had my other opportunity, a literal handsome knight on a white horse, who I still didn’t know what to do with.
Sue, I’m sure, wanted me to seize this opportunity.
Evan and I chose to sit a few chairs apart, keeping up the appearance of being separate guests at the same place who were friendly with one another, even though Sue had seen us wrapped around each other hours before.
We were making mindless conversation, talking for the sake of talking and hoping that Sue would somehow get the hint that we wanted to be alone.
“What’s over on the other side of the lake?” Evan asked.
He didn’t realize the Pandora’s box he was about to open.
Sue’s mouth spread into a sly smile as she pinpointed another victim to frighten with the lore of the lake.
She never told these stories with the purpose to scare anyone off entirely, she allowed it to serve as a test of sorts, if they were truly cut out to be at camp.
She leaned in closer, letting the amber flames illuminate the shadows on her face.
She recounted her carefully rehearsed story, “ours is the only camp officially on the lake, and it’s been here for about a hundred years.
Randy and I bought it thirty five years ago with the understanding that there would be no homes or camps built elsewhere on the water or in the surrounding woods.
During our first summer running the place there would be smoke coming from the far end of the lake, just about there,” she gestured to the left side of the lake behind the bend.
“Randy wanted to investigate, he knew it would be too far to take a canoe out himself so he tried fixing up the old motorboat they had left us so he could go check things out. I, on the other hand, had a feeling that whoever was there didn’t want to be found.
So next time I went into town I began asking around, eventually that led me to learn the story of the lake hermit. ” She was building up the suspense.