Chapter Four
Then
Fifty-Two Days Before the Fire
I found my mother in her office, head in her hands.
We were only a few days away from the first day of camp. Usually around this time, she was brimming with a nervous, excited energy. I almost never saw her looking so defeated.
“Mom?” I asked, my heart rate accelerating painfully. “What happened? Is Dad—”
“No, no, nothing like that,” she said quickly, shaking her head before I could really panic.
“I’m sorry. Everything’s fine. But there’s a bit of a situation.
I just got off the phone with Taylor. She and Madison have mono, of all things.
They’re both out for the summer. Which means I’ve got no counselor for Smallmouth.
” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if she were warding off a migraine.
I tried not to grimace, but it was hard. She was right; this would be a problem. I sat down in front of her desk and reached out to squeeze her hand.
“We’ll figure this out,” I promised. “We’ve had last-minute changes before. We can do it.” She gave me a weak smile.
“All right, so. How many girls in that cabin?”
“Twenty-six, as of yesterday.”
“Shit,” I let slip, before I could stop myself.
Because there were another twenty-six in Brook Trout that Chelsea and I were already responsible for.
Which meant that, if we didn’t find anyone, we would each be fully responsible for a group of almost thirty middle school girls for the next eight weeks.
I grabbed the laptop in front of her and spun it around, going into problem-solver mode. “Have you checked the floating application pool yet?”
She shook her head.
Typically, we finalized our hiring for each summer in February, and people began applying long before. We made a big deal of closing applications in the winter so that people would get them in early, but we did have an Open Application link available all the time, in case of emergencies like this.
To my surprise, there were two unseen applications, from a couple of days ago, sent at the same time. It must have been a pair of friends. Their names: Stephanie Bennett and Margo Pierce.
“These two look good,” I said. “Journalism majors at the University of Georgia, just graduated last week. Both have 4.0s, in Kappa, and love kids, apparently.”
I skimmed through both of their applications, trying to understand their last-minute interest in Dread’s Cove.
Margo was preparing for an extended Euro trip at the end of the summer.
And Stephanie—she listed her nickname of choice as Steph—explained that, while she didn’t have a job lined up for the fall just yet, she was exploring her options.
She’d always wanted to go to summer camp, she wrote, and it seemed like this was her perfect chance.
“Any red flags?” my mom asked when I’d been silent for several minutes.
I shook my head. “Not that I can see.”
“Great. They’re hired.”
“You don’t want to interview them first? Not even—I don’t know—give them a call? Make sure they aren’t serial killers?”
She gave me a look. “The kids get here Monday. If they’ve got reliable transportation to get here before then, they’re hired.”
“Shouldn’t we at least run a background check?”
“We’ll get Sheriff Ramon to run a light one. I’m not that worried about a few sorority girls from Atlanta.” She smiled, and she looked almost back to herself. “Thank you, Steph and Margo. Our lifesavers.”
By the time I’d left her office that night, she’d already had me send emails offering them the jobs, requesting their presence by Monday morning at the very latest.
I had a hard time believing they’d be able to make the turnaround that quickly, but the next day at lunch, they’d both already responded and accepted.
Just like that, Chelsea and I had two new roommates for the rest of the summer. We had no idea what we were in for.
—
When Steph and Margo arrived at Dread’s Cove, we heard them before we saw them. There was a laugh that was more like a squawk that made both me and Chelsea jump.
Steph barreled through the door of Black Bass first—I recognized her from the Instagram stalking I’d done the night before. She wore a red tennis dress, and her sneakers were a blinding, scuffless white.
“Steph Bennett,” she announced, doing a pirouette. She surprised me with how loud her voice was; it echoed around the small cabin.
“I’m Greer, and this is Chelsea,” I said, pointing behind me.
Steph squealed, as if learning our names was the best news she’d ever heard.
Before I knew it, she was hugging me, our faces smashed so close together that her earring crashed into mine, and I worried they’d get caught on each other.
I’d never met someone with such a disregard for personal space, except maybe Val.
I couldn’t help it, though—I found myself oddly charmed by her friendliness.
“This is my first time at a summer camp, can you believe that? My aunt and uncle never let me go when I was a kid. So overprotective. Oh my God, it’s so cute and, like, quaint, though, isn’t it? Have you met any guys yet?”
Behind her, Margo Pierce seemed to be deciding whether the floor was clean enough for her to set her bag down. She frowned before finally letting the leather duffel drop at her feet.
I looked back at Steph, who was smiling at me expectantly, tan arms crossed over her chest. “Oh, yeah, we know all of them already. Chelsea and I grew up here, actually.”
Her mouth popped open into a delicate o. “Wait, seriously? That’s so cool. How exactly does one grow up at a summer camp?”
I knew Chelsea was going to tell my secret, so I spoke quickly, trying to cut it off at the head. For one more minute, I wanted to be normal. “And you’re Margo, right?”
Margo was now standing with her arms crossed, assessing us with a faint grimace on her face. Like Steph, she was dressed like some kind of off-duty model, though her color of choice seemed to be black.
I was struck by a wave of shyness, wondering what I must have looked like to her: old T-shirt, dirty shorts, hair wet and tangled from an early-morning swim in the lake. After a brief, awkward pause, she stuck out her hand.
It felt dumb and oddly formal, but she clearly wasn’t a hugger. Her fingernails were gold and shaped like talons, and they dug uncomfortably into my skin. But then her smile went from displeased to almost mischievous, and I found myself standing up straighter, wondering what she might say.
“Do you have a nickname, or is it just Greer?”
“Margo’s the queen of nicknames,” Steph gushed as she plopped her bag down on the bed beneath Chelsea’s. For a second, we locked eyes—we’d already planned on sharing and letting the two of them be on the other side of the room.
But I didn’t acknowledge it, and neither did she, and the moment passed. Which was totally cool and fine. I was going to share a bunk bed with Margo Pierce, who was both beautiful and slightly terrifying, who maybe hated me on sight but maybe also wanted to give me a nickname.
“No, it’s just Greer,” I answered, feeling even more self-conscious. “But you can call me whatever.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked at me for a long moment, while behind us, Steph was talking Chelsea into a hug. “Bunk buddies!” I heard her say, which brought an unexpected laugh from Chelsea.
“Greer,” Margo said again, slowly, trying it out. She tapped a finger on her chin like she was solving a riddle. “That’s a tough one. I’ll have to come back to you.”
As they unpacked their suitcases, I tried not to be too nosy, but it was hard.
Steph moved like a hurricane. She was a swirl of colors, exclamations, curses, belly laughs.
Within minutes of arriving, her bed looked like she’d lived here for years; it was already covered in clothes, bottles of perfume, bikinis, and four different makeup bags, all half spilled out onto the sheets.
Margo was almost an entire contradiction.
Unimpressed with Chelsea’s handiwork, she’d actually unmade her bed and remade it, with hospital corners and all.
When I peered at her from the bathroom, she was putting a silk pillowcase on her camp-issued pillow, a divot forming between her eyebrows as she tried to smooth out invisible wrinkles with her hands.
They could have been related, save for a few defining features.
Where Margo’s eyes were so brown they were almost black, Steph’s were a shocking blue, brighter than even Chelsea’s.
They were both toned and tall, with glowy skin and the kind of fluffy eyelashes that were either the result of good makeup or good genetics, though you couldn’t be sure.
“Are those magazines?” I asked, eyeing the sizable stack that Steph had just put together beside her bed. It seemed to be the only thing she’d taken care in organizing so far. She must have had twenty-five or more.
Margo snorted as she sprayed something that smelled like lavender on my bed and hers.
“Please, don’t get her started. I can’t hear this asinine TED Talk again.
” She dipped her chin toward the floor on our side of the room, where she had her own neat stack of paperbacks.
“She likes to claim that they’re the same as books, that people don’t respect magazines the way they used to, and that it’s a fatal flaw with humanity. Did I get it right, S?”
Steph crossed her arms and jutted out a hip, but her eyes were sparkling. Both my head and Chelsea’s were ping-ponging back and forth between them.
“Tell me, babe, what are magazines if not literal books? Are they not a bunch of paper and words, sewn together? What else would I call them, you elitist?”
Margo rolled her eyes and turned back to her duffel, though she was smiling.
I was already getting the sense that this was normal; they sparred and quipped and laughed and never, ever got bored of each other.
Watching them interact was like watching the best kind of bingeable TV show—absolutely addicting.