The Last Time I Lied(28)
It turns out that Casey’s an expert tale-spinner, for as she finishes, I feel a chill in the air. A light frisson that makes me look to the woods behind her, half expecting to see either a ghostly figure or mutant forest-dweller emerging from the tree line.
“What do you really think happened to them?” I say.
“I think they got lost in the woods. Vivian was always wandering off.” Casey drops her cigarette and grinds it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Which is why I’ve always felt partly responsible for what happened. I was a camp counselor. It was my job to make sure all of you were safe. And I regret not paying more attention to you and what was going on in that cabin.”
I stare at her, surprised. “Were there things going on I didn’t know about?”
“I don’t know,” Casey says as she fumbles in her pocket for another cigarette. “Maybe.”
“Like what? You were friends with Vivian. Surely you noticed something.”
“I wouldn’t say the two of us were friends. I was a senior camper her first summer and then came back to work as a counselor the two years after that. She was always a troublemaker, but charming enough to get away with it.”
Oh, I know that all too well. Vivian excelled at charm. That and lying were her two greatest skills.
“But something about her seemed off that last summer,” Casey continues. “Not majorly different. Nothing that someone who only knew her casually would notice. But she wasn’t the same. She seemed distracted.”
I think of the strange map Vivian had drawn and the even stranger photo of the woman with long hair.
“By what?”
Casey shrugs and looks away again as she irritably puffs out more smoke. “I don’t know, Emma. Like I said, we weren’t that close.”
“But you noticed things.”
“Little things,” Casey says. “I noticed her walking alone around camp a few times. Which never happened the previous summers. Vivian was always surrounded by people. And maybe she just wanted to be left alone. Or maybe . . .”
Her voice trails off as she takes one last draw of her cigarette.
“Maybe what?”
“She was up to no good,” Casey says. “On the second day of camp, I caught her trying to sneak into the Lodge. She was hanging around the steps on the back deck, ready to run inside. She said she was looking for Franny, but I didn’t buy it.”
“Why would she want to break into the Lodge?”
Casey shrugs again. The gesture contains a note of annoyance, almost as if she wishes she’d never brought up the topic of Vivian. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she says.
* * *
—
My final stop on cabin check is Dogwood, where I find all three girls on their beds, phones in hand, faces awash in the ice-blue light of their screens. Sasha is already under the covers, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose as she plays Candy Crush or some similarly frustrating time-waste of a game. A cacophony of chirps and beeps erupts from her phone.
In the bunk below her, Krystal has changed into baggy sweats. The matted teddy bear sits in the crook of her arm as she watches a Marvel movie on her phone, the soundtrack leaking out of her earbuds, tinny and shrill. I can hear blips of gunfire and the telltale crunch of fist hitting skull.
On the other side of the cabin, Miranda reclines on the top bunk, now dressed in a tight tank top and black shorts so small they barely qualify to be called that. She holds her phone close to her face, doing a faux pout as she takes several pictures.
“You shouldn’t be using your phones,” I say, even though I was guilty of doing the same thing earlier. “Save your batteries.”
Krystal tugs off her earbuds. “What else are we going to do?”
“We could, you know, talk,” I suggest. “You may find it hard to believe, but people actually did that before everyone spent all their time squinting at screens.”
“I saw you talking to Theo after dinner,” Miranda says, her voice wavering between innocence and accusation. “Is he, like, your boyfriend?”
“No. He’s a—”
I truly don’t know what to call Theo. Several different labels apply.
My friend? Not necessarily.
One of my first crushes? Probably.
The person I accused of doing something horrible to Vivian, Natalie, and Allison?
Definitely.
“He’s an acquaintance,” I say.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Sasha asks.
“Not at the moment.”
I have plenty of friends who are boys, most of them gay or too socially awkward to consider a romantic relationship. When I do date someone, it’s not for very long. A lot of men like the idea of being in a relationship with an artist, but few actually get used to the reality of the situation. The odd hours, the self-doubt and stained hands that stink of oil paint more often than not. The last guy I dated—a dorky-cute accountant at a rival ad agency—managed to put up with it for four months before breaking things off.
Lately, my romantic life has consisted of occasional dalliances with a French sculptor when he happens to be in the city on business. We meet for drinks, conversation, sex made more passionate by how infrequent it is.
“Then how do you know Theo?” Krystal says.
“From when I was a camper here.”