The Paper Palace(41)

It had rained heavily the night before, and the air was waterlogged. Early morning heat raised steam off the damp pine needle paths around the camp. Already our cabin smelled of mildew. I needed to pee.

I closed the cabin door quietly behind me and headed to the bathroom, kicking away sharp, squirrel-nibbled pinecones with my bare feet. The towels we’d hung on the line to dry were soaked and heavy, flecked with bits of debris from the overhanging trees.

When I sat down on the toilet, I noticed blood on my shin. I wiped it off with a wodge of toilet paper and got a Band-Aid from the medicine cabinet. I had one leg up on the toilet seat, struggling to open the frustrating wax-papery wrapper, when I saw drops of blood on the floor. I lifted up the hem of my nightgown. The back was stained with blood. Finally. I’d waited so long for this, checking my underpants every day, hoping to catch up with my friends.

I dug around in the linen closet, found Anna’s box of Playtex, and sat down on the toilet seat, little plinks of blood dripping into the water. I knew what to do. I’d stolen her tampons a few times before, practiced inserting them. Becky said I was being an idiot, but I was worried that if I did it wrong, the tampon would break my hymen. I’d studied the little pamphlet in the box with its pictograms of a lunglike vaginal canal, squat legs bent at the knees for just the correct positioning.

I was peeling off the plastic wrapper when there was a knock on the bathroom door.

“Don’t come in!” I shouted. “I’m in here!”

“Well, hurry up, I need a piss.” It was Conrad.

“Pee in the bushes. Are you a girl?”

“Are you a total bitch?”

I listened to him stumbling away into the woods. There were moments when Conrad was bearable. At times I even felt sorry for him. But he had this creepy, insinuating way about him—the kind of guy who’s constantly washing his hands. Recently he’d started following me and Anna when we walked to the beach, always just out of sight. Sometimes, lying on the hot sand, we would catch him spying on us from the top of the dunes, hoping to see our boobs.

I made sure the bathroom door was locked. Sat back down on the toilet, pulled my nightgown high up around my waist and took my underpants off so I could spread my legs wide enough apart. I positioned the pink plastic applicator and was pushing the plunger when I heard a noise. On the opposite side of the bathroom, Conrad’s face was smashed tight against the clerestory window, eyes wide, staring between my open legs. I dropped the tampon applicator and it skittled away across the bathroom floor.

“Get away, you freak!” I shrieked, my entire body vibrating with rage and shame. I listened to Conrad’s sickening laugh as he ran off. By tomorrow, every one of his weirdo friends would know. I sat on the toilet weeping, wanting to die. The second I heard his cabin door slam shut, I ran for my cabin, shoved my bloody nightgown out of sight under my bed, yanked on my bathing suit, and raced to the pond. My only thought was to put as much distance between me and Conrad as possible. I would never be able to face him again, that much was clear. A stack of paddles was leaning against a tree. I grabbed one, pushed our fiberglass canoe off the spongy green undergrowth into the water as hard as I could, lay down on the bottom of the boat as the canoe drifted away from the beach. I hugged my arms to my chest, stared up at the early morning sky. This must be what it’s like to be a Viking dead person, I thought as the boat glided out unmanned.

When I was far enough from shore, I sat up and paddled away as fast as I could. By the time I reached the middle of the pond, I’d decided the simplest option was to drown myself. I would need something heavy to weigh me down. I was a strong swimmer and I knew that, in the end, I would fight for the surface. If I had a big rock, I could tie it to the boat’s painter, wrap the rope round my ankle, and jump. Conrad might never admit what he had done, but he would know, for the rest of his miserable psycho life, that he was responsible for my death.

I paddled toward the swampy, uninhabited side of the pond, where the horsetail reeds stalked out into the pond like an army, and hair-thin tangles of lily pad stems waited to trap your oar. The shoreline here was scattered with glacial debris, ancient rocks and pebbles deposited in the wake of the slow-moving glacial ice.

As I neared the shallows, I dug my paddle hard into the water, gathering momentum, then lifted it high and clear over the lily pads, gliding silently over their spidery web. The crunch of the sandy floor scraped the bottom of the canoe. I was about to leap out and drag it the rest of the way in when I heard a quiet voice.

“Don’t move. Stay in the boat.”

I looked up, startled. Jonas was sitting perfectly still on the lowest branch of a pitch pine that jutted out above my head, over the water. Almost completely camouflaged. Shirtless, wearing a pair of faded army-green shorts, long legs dangling. He was leaner than the last time I’d seen him. Taller, of course—he must be at least twelve by now—his thick black hair tangled below his shoulders. But his eyes had the same older-than-his-years intensity that had struck me the day he found me in the woods.

“Hand me your paddle,” he whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.

He pointed to the reeds beneath my boat.

I leaned over the edge of the canoe, trying to see what he was pointing at, but from my angle I couldn’t make out anything.

“The paddle?” he whispered again.

I stood up, careful not to rock the canoe, and passed the paddle up into the tree. Jonas took a plastic bag of something that looked like raw hamburger meat out of his pocket and slathered it over the end of the oar.