Dinner is a combination of roasted marshmallows and chicken kebabs and creamy potato salad.
It looks so good that even though I don’t really have an appetite, I join my class around the campfire, stacking my paper plate with as much food as it can physically carry. Then I drape my cardigan over the log and sit down on it, inhaling the sweet smoke and the scent of the lake nearby, content to chew and stretch my legs out and lick the melted sugar off my fork.
The teachers are meant to eat with us outside too, but Ms. Hedge is the only one of the three who appears. She’s barely sat down when her face pinches, her skin turning a concerning shade of green, and she dashes off in the direction of the cabins, a hand covering her mouth.
“What’s up with her?” Ray asks.
“Must’ve been the raw salmon from earlier,” Georgina says, with the firm authority of someone who’s suffered through food poisoning multiple times in the past. “On my way out, the other teachers looked like they were dying too.”
Sympathetic murmurs travel around the tight circle, but nobody makes a move to check up on the teachers. Instead everybody relaxes in the absence of any adult authorities. The air seems to lighten, the conversations around me rising in volume, whispered jokes and muffled giggles turning into full- body laughter. It feels less like a school retreat and more like a massive party—except, unlike the one at my house, I can almost bring myself to enjoy it. To eat the melted marshmallows and watch the sun start to slide its way down the horizon, lending a pink glow to the sky.
“You know what the moment calls for?” Rosie speaks up.
“Spin the bottle?” Ray says instantly.
I drop my fork. No. Absolutely not. I think I’ll die if I have to kiss Julius again, and I’ll die if I see him kiss someone else. “How about scary stories,” I suggest, with perhaps more fake enthusiasm than I’ve ever summoned in my life.
To be honest, I expect Rosie to shoot down my idea right away and call it childish, but she considers it for a second, then nods. “Sure,” she says, crossing her ankles elegantly, as if the log is a throne. “Do you have one?”
“Oh . . . I guess.” I straighten, trying to make something up on the spot. “Okay, okay, here’s one: Once there was a girl called . . . um, Skye. She was very smart and very organized. She had a habit of keeping all her homework notes and certificates and important files in a special compartment inside her locker. Then one day . . . she discovered that her locker was empty.”
This is meant to elicit gasps of shock and horror, but all I get are blank, perplexed stares.
“Sorry, is that meant to be scary?” someone asks at last.
“Her certificates are missing,” I emphasize, frowning. “Her records of achievement are gone. She may have to redo all her homework.”
“Okay, do we have any non-homework-related stories?” someone else asks.
“I have a ghost story,” Julius offers, and all heads swivel to him. He
lowers his voice so it’s just barely audible over the dry hiss and crackle of the campfire. “A real ghost story. Actually, it’s set right in the woods, not too far from here.”
“Sure it is,” I mutter.
But everyone’s already listening closely, hanging on to his every word. “There used to be a house in these woods,” he begins, soaking in the
attention. “A young couple and their two children: a boy named Jack, and a girl named Scarlett. The boy was healthy and always happy; everyone who saw him adored him. But Scarlett was born . . . strange.” He drags out the word in a whisper. “As a baby, her father claimed that her eyes would flash
red. It was quick, so quick it could’ve been confused for the light, but it happened too many times for it to be a coincidence. He even took her to the doctor once, wondering if it was some kind of rare disease, and the doctor said there was nothing wrong. Nothing that they could find anyway.”
On the other end of the circle, one of the girls shivers and wraps the wool blanket tighter around her shoulders.
“There were other things too,” Julius continues. “Like she would be running, and her shadow would disappear. Or she would throw a tantrum, and within an hour, a bird would drop dead outside their yard. Or she would get into a fight with her little brother, and he’d wake up in the middle of the night claiming someone was choking him. Over time, her parents started to suspect that she was cursed. Perhaps a demon incarnate, or a monster.”
It’s a silly story. Typical. Certainly no better than mine, which is rooted in realism. But in the falling darkness, by the crimson light of the fire, I can’t help the pinch of fear in my gut.
Julius catches my eye across the circle, and one side of his mouth lifts, as if he can read my mind. “On Scarlett’s thirteenth birthday, there was a sudden, terrible storm. It was as if the sea was falling from the sky. The
whole house was flooded. The parents didn’t even have time to pack; they just grabbed what they could and fled into the night. But whether by accident or not, they forgot about Scarlett. When they came back, almost everything was destroyed. The wood was rotted through, the furniture in pieces, the windows shattered. They looked around, and they couldn’t find any sign of Scarlett. There was no body. Not even any of her old clothes or toys. It was as though she’d never existed.”
He pauses for dramatic effect. In the same instance, a heavy wind picks up, blowing through the trees, and more than a few people startle and
glance around them. The sky is no longer rose pink but graying, clouds forming in the near distance.
“They were rather attached to the woods, so they rebuilt their house in the exact same place,” Julius says. “But every time it rained again, they could hear . . . crying. It sounded like a child. Like Scarlett. They tried to
follow it, but it seemed to be coming from within the house, within the very walls. A year later, there came another storm. Much tamer than the first.
Almost everyone survived it; the water levels didn’t even rise above the knee. Except Scarlett’s family was found drowned in the living room the next morning, all of them lying facedown.”
“And then?” someone whispers.
“That’s it,” he says smoothly. “They all died.” Heavy silence follows in the wake of his words.
Then, somewhere in the distance a door slams, and Ray lets out such a high-pitched shriek I briefly wonder if a chicken has broken loose.
But the spell is broken. Everyone’s too busy laughing at Ray to linger on the details.
As the campfire burns on, people split off into private conversations, friends huddling together on the log. I’m cleaning my plate when I feel a weight lower itself next to me.
Rosie.
I instantly stiffen.
“Chill, Sadie, I’m not here to bite your head off,” she says, seeing my reaction. She’s smiling, which is very alarming. “I just wanted to chat.”
“About what?” I ask.
“I’ve been thinking about the email you sent me, and you know what? I was really, really pissed off.” She brushes her hair over her shoulder. “Honestly, when I first read it, I was ready to slap someone.”
I shift back, out of slapping distance.
“But I kind of deserved it. I did copy your science project.” She exhales. “I didn’t plan to. I don’t know what I was thinking. Or, well, I guess . . .
Everyone knows I’m gorgeous, right? Sometimes when I’m walking past a mirror, I have to stop for a few seconds because I can’t believe how stunning I am. Like, damn.”
I officially have no idea where this conversation is going.
“I’m proud of it,” she adds. “It takes a lot of work to look this good all the time. But I was just . . . curious. What it’s like to get great grades and
have people compliment you for your intelligence. To be you.”
This is perhaps the most bizarre statement I’ve ever heard. Even more shocking than Abigail’s prediction about Rosie devoting the rest of her life to being a nun.
“I was planning to apologize,” she goes on, crossing her legs. “Except I feel like we’d only be going in circles with our apologies. I’m sorry I copied your project; you’re sorry you wrote that email. I’m sorry I proceeded to snap at you in front of the year level. So I guess what I’m really trying to say is—thank you. For being understanding, and for all your help in general.” She lets out a little laugh. “Funnily enough, it wasn’t until I made it a point to ignore you that I realized how often I turned to you for notes and stuff. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.”
It takes me a minute to remember how to speak. “Um. You’re— welcome?”
She laughs again. “So we’re good?”
“Yeah. Yes. Very good,” I say, still stunned.
“I’ll miss you when we graduate, you know,” she adds. “I can’t believe this will all be over soon.”
“Yeah,” I repeat softly, gazing around the campfire, at all the familiar, laughing faces. “I can’t believe it either.”
• • •
“She actually said that?”
“I know,” I tell Abigail that evening, plopping down on the bed. We’re lucky enough to have been assigned one of the smaller cabin rooms, made for only two people. Some of the girls have to share with three or four others. “I was so certain that she would never forgive me for the emails, that she’d spend the rest of her life hating me. That the damage would be irreversible. I’ve literally been sick to my stomach for weeks, months, thinking about it, and now . . . Thank god.” I release a laugh, shaking my head.
She turns back to me from the dresser, a strange little smile on her lips. “Were the emails . . . that bad? I mean, did it . . . affect you so much?”
“That bad?” I snort. “They were catastrophic.”
“Right.” Her smile wobbles. “I didn’t realize— I knew you were embarrassed, obviously, but you never talked that much about it.”
It’s true, I guess. I haven’t really talked about it with anyone. Not my mom, because I don’t want her to worry. Not Max, because I don’t think he’d understand. And not Abigail, because I don’t want her pity. But maybe it’s also habit by this point. The summer when I was eleven, we had flown to China for a large family gathering, and as everyone was trading stories and laughing and clinking drinks in the crimson glow of the restaurant, a fish bone had gotten lodged in my throat. Instead of making a big deal out of it and trying to cough it out in front of thirty-six people I was directly or indirectly related to, I’d chosen to swallow it inward, to quietly absorb the pain as the bone scraped its way down while I sat there and smiled. Nobody could have guessed that something was wrong.
It was only years later, when the event had long passed, that I had even thought to bring it up with my mother as a joke. She was horrified. You could have choked to death, she’d scolded me. You should’ve said something.
But you were chatting with laolao, I’d replied. I was afraid of bothering you.
She had been silent for a long time. When she finally breathed out, her eyes were so sad and heavy I’d regretted bringing it up in the first place.
Why are you this way? she kept asking, until I didn’t know if she was directing the question at me or herself. Since when did you become this way?
“Sadie,” Abigail says, yanking me back to the cabin, to the present. “There’s something . . . something I’ve been keeping to myself. I didn’t mean to, I swear—I know I should’ve said it way earlier, but . . .”
I stiffen, my pulse accelerating immediately. “What’s wrong?”
She wrings her hands. Steps forward, then stops a few feet away from me. Abigail Ong is never nervous, not before delivering a class presentation, not before a date, not before any major test. Except she’s
nervous right now, her eyes flicking to the dark clouds rolling in beyond the window, then back to me. “The emails,” she says. That’s all she says at first.
I blink at her, not understanding. “I sent them.”
I don’t process the words. There’s a faint ringing in my ears, all sound distorted, muted. I feel like I’m falling away from my own body, like those scenes in the movies where the camera zooms out and out from the person to the sky above them.
“Not on purpose,” she says, speaking in a rush, like she’s scared I’m not going to give her the chance to continue. “Not all of them. I was just—I was reading the draft you wrote to Julius, and I knew that he’d been bothering you for ages, and in that moment I thought . . . I don’t know, I was tired of seeing people walk all over you. It was only one email; it was only supposed to be one email. But then you had, like, hundreds of tabs open, and your laptop was lagging, and when I hit send, nothing happened, so I kind of just—I kept clicking and trying to send it, and then suddenly all
your drafts were being sent out, and I couldn’t undo it . . .”
I’m frozen in place, rooted in my shock. “Wait,” I croak out. Squeeze my temples. “You sent the email? When? No, hang on . . .”
It’s all coming back to me, the details sharpened, everything different under a new light. When I’d rushed outside the classroom and come back to find my laptop moved. “Oh my god,” I say. Part of me still refuses to
believe it. Waits for her to tell me she’s joking, she’s making it up.
“I shouldn’t have gone behind your back,” she whispers, her face pale. “I know. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I take full responsibility. I’ll—I’ll write an explanation to every single person who received an email from you. I’ll do anything. Just . . . please don’t be mad at me.”
“I don’t get it,” I say slowly, even as my heart pounds at breakneck speed, each thud painful. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”
“I tried to, I swear.” She holds up a hand as if making an oath. “But
There never seemed to be a good time, and I truly believed I was making the right choice in the long run. My whole life, I’ve thought I knew what was best, but after everything that happened with Liam, it hit me that maybe my instincts aren’t as reliable as I once believed. She pauses, swallowing hard, her gaze fixed on the floor.
Even amidst my shock and anger, a wave of sympathy tugs at me from deep within.
“Plus, for a while there,” she continues, “it seemed like everything would sort itself out. People started treating you differently, pushing you around less. And you and Julius had gotten closer—”
The sound of his name strikes me like a whip. “He’s exactly why those emails should never have been sent.”
I’m trembling now, as if some invisible force is shaking me from within, wrenching my bones and nerves out of alignment. My teeth chatter, my fingers shake. Everything feels so unnatural that I don’t know whether to stand, sit, storm out, or scream until my throat is raw. Abigail and I never fight; she’s too laid-back, and I’m too afraid of confrontation. The most heated argument we’ve ever had was over whether potatoes should count as vegetables.
“If he’d never read those emails, we wouldn’t have been forced to do all those ridiculous tasks together, I wouldn’t have thrown that party, and I wouldn’t have had the chance to like him. And now I do, god help me, and it—it really feels like—” I struggle to find the right words, the most articulate way to convey the ache in my chest. “It feels like crap.”
“Okay, whoa.” For a second, Abigail seems to forget we’re fighting. Her mouth falls wide open. “I thought you had, like, a firm no‑swearing policy
—”
“It’s horrible,” I continue furiously. “It’s revolting how much I care about him. Even now. I shouldn’t want this. I shouldn’t want him.”
Her jaw drops farther, her gaze catching on something behind me. “Um, Sadie—”
But I’m too angry to stop. “Out of all the people in this school, it
somehow has to be the one person who called me up just to taunt me when I had a fever and missed out on practice—”
“Sadie,” Abigail says again, louder.
“It’s like I’ve been poisoned,” I go on, my palms itching. “It’s like a sickness, and somehow, the cause and cure of it is him. I hate it so much, but I can’t even control my own brain—”
“Sadie.”
I freeze. Because this time, it’s not coming from Abigail. It’s a low, male voice, coming from behind me.
My whole life seems to disintegrate before my eyes as I turn around on my heel, and I’m praying it’s not him, it can’t be him, please let it be anybody but Julius—
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. He’s holding out my cardigan in the doorway, and I can’t read any of the emotions on his face as he stares at me. “You left this behind at the campfire . . .”
It’s somewhat difficult to hear him over the sound of my dignity splintering into a thousand pieces. I consider dismissing the whole thing as a joke, or maybe a reenactment from a very dramatic play about modern feminism, but I can tell from his expression, from the terrible, sweltering
silence in the room, that the damage has already been done.
There’s no taking it back now.
“Thank you,” I manage to say, which is a miracle in and of itself. I keep my eyes averted as I grab the cardigan from him, my skin searing hot.
“Not at all,” he says with equal politeness.
This is probably the most polite we’ve ever been around each other. And then—nobody speaks.
I’m staring at a fissure in the wall, and in my peripheral vision, Abigail is staring at the clouds outside the window, and Julius is still staring at the side of my face. It’s excruciating.
“Well, thanks a lot for visiting,” I tell the spot under Julius’s shoes when I can’t stand it anymore. “This has been very fun. If that was all, please feel free to go whenever—”
“No,” he says quickly.
My head jerks up against my will. This is what I mean about the sickness, because only somebody who is utterly unwell would hear that one word and wonder: No, what? No, there’s more? No, he doesn’t wish to
leave? No, he doesn’t like me?
But before he can elaborate, a deafening clap of thunder startles all of us, so loud it makes the floor tremble. I glance outside just in time to watch the skies split open, water pouring down to flood the earth. It’s almost breathtaking to witness the rain come in, the droplets shattering the lake’s
surface like hundreds of tiny knives. Within seconds, the pavement has darkened to black, the wild grass submerged under rapidly growing puddles.
Then, from inside a cabin, someone starts yelling.
