When We Were Good

Chapter 13

When we were fourteen, Megan and I went away to an all-girls summer camp. It was the same camp where our moms had first met a million years before, and it was something they couldn't wait for us to experience for ourselves: roughing it in the woods and coming home with a whole galaxy of mosquito bites on our legs, already begging to go back the next year.

I was nervous to leave but excited to spend time with my best friend, who by the end of grade eight was already showing serious signs of drifting away.

The camp session ran from the start of July all the way to the end of August—the whole summer. Only Megan got sent home after just a week for hooking up with one of the boys who worked in the kitchen. Dan was in charge of mixing juice crystals in a giant garbage bin full of water to make the Tang they served us at lunch. His hands were died permanently orange and left a tell-tale sign on the back pocket of her cut-offs one day when Megan went to take a walk during rest hour.

At the time, her getting sent home was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And not just because after Dan was fired they only served us water that tasted like it had come straight from the lake—I had no idea how to be alone or how to make other friends. Megan had totally intimidated the other girls in our cabin and after she left they still treated me like I was a bully's lapdog, now minus my master.

The only good thing that happened that whole summer was meeting Kim. She was in the older girls' cabin next door and we'd both signed up to learn to sail. Back on dry land we rarely talked to each other, but when we were out on the water in our tiny little sailboat it was something else altogether.

She was maybe the most stunning person I'd ever seen up close, with dirty blonde hair and dark eyebrows, her mouth in a perpetual unimpressed smirk. She'd tease me and threaten to capsize our boat, but her magnetic pull was unbelievable. When I made her laugh it felt like I'd found the answer to everything. Nothing ever happened between us, but on the very last night of camp—when the sun had gone down, and no one could see us—she held my hand at the final campfire.

We exchanged addresses but never wrote to each other. When I got home, I found out Megan had spent the whole summer trying to dodge her parents to go meet up with Dan in Barrie, his hometown. She'd basically been under house arrest since then and couldn't wait to fill me in on the minutiae of her summer vacation. I never breathed a word about Kim to her or anyone.

***

On Thursday, Megan found me at my locker after school.

"You're not still hanging out with Marie are you?" she asked. "Because someone in my French class said they heard she's getting you to, like, play drums in her band or something."

"I'm just going to watch them practise," I said. "Why's it such a big deal?"

"I just thought that if you were going to ditch me for someone, you'd at least do it for someone who was cool."

"You ditched me first," I said. "When you and Pat got together it was like I never existed. Actually, you know what? No. It was a long time before that. It was when you started dating Jason, and then Mark. It's like you haven't been single for two weeks since you hit puberty, and as long as you have a guy around you don't need me. You ditched me first."

"I think you know that's not how it happened." Her face didn't move. She looked like a robot. 

This was the girl who I'd played Barbies with for weekends at a time when we were kids. How had we become such strangers? 

"Jack's coming home this weekend," she continued. "He asked about you and now my mom's making me invite you to dinner."

I could feel my pulse quicken at just the sound of his name. "He's back?" I said. "For how long?"