Four Weeks, Five People

“No, seriously,” Andrew says.

“No, seriously,” I reply.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as Mason walks over to Ben and badgers him into playing a game of pool.

“But it’s so nice!”

“Nice? Are you fucking with me right now?”

“No! All I’m saying is just—Look out the window! It’s like having one of those travel brochures right outside, except it’s not a travel brochure, it’s actually what’s outside—do you know what I mean?”

“We’re never allowed to be together unsupervised, just in case we accidentally end up murdering each other. The counselors do bed checks every two hours after lights-out. And every day of every week is planned with some dumb therapeutic activity that’s supposed to make us confuse exhaustion with actually feeling better. I’m going to go with no. No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“But don’t you feel kind of hopeful about it all?” Andrew says.

“Being hopeful didn’t work out so well for me last year. So I’ve abandoned it for a better strategy.”

“What’s the better strategy?”

“Unadulterated apathy.”

“Oh,” Andrew says. He looks down at his hands. “I guess that works...”

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s the fact that Andrew genuinely looks like all of his hopes and dreams have just been dashed. Maybe it’s the way he starts looking out the window again, all wistful and earnest and full of feelings. Maybe it’s that the kid just came up to me and started telling me his life story, for fuck’s sake, as if we’re best friends as opposed to strangers tossed into the middle of New York for a month. Whatever it is, before I can stop myself, the words come tumbling out of my mouth.

“But hey—don’t be too upset. It won’t be miserable, like, a hundred percent of the time. I’ll get us drunk. And there’s always The Ridge, even though no one—”

“You brought alcohol?” Andrew whispers, awestruck. His faith in humanity restored.

“Were you expecting to get through this experience sober?”

“Isn’t that kind of against the rules?”

I sigh. If this kid has spent his entire life trying to avoid going against the rules, it’s no wonder he wound up at Ugunduzi.

“Yeah, it is, so stop yelling about it. Look, are you in or not?”

“Like, now?”

“Yes, right now. Right now, right here, in front of Jessie and Josh standing across the room, both of whom will promptly see us and expel us from this lovely camp that our parents have pinned all their hopes and dreams on. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

Andrew looks taken aback.

“No, not now. Later, after lights-out.”

I pause. Is this really something I want to do? I was planning on waiting until the end of the first week of camp to break out the alcohol, when everyone is especially miserable with the realization that they still have three more weeks of camp. But right now we all have four whole weeks of camp left, and isn’t that even more miserable?

“Yeah, let’s do later tonight,” I say. “Look, you guys just have to sneak into our room. It’s really easy. We literally never got caught last year.”

“I don’t really—” Andrew starts.

“All you have to do,” I continue, cutting him off, “is wait until right after they finish the first bed check and then walk across the right wall of the common room to our side of the hall. Then as long as you’re back before two hours, it’s all fine.”

“That’s not what I was saying. What I was saying was—”

“Look,” I say, exasperated. “All you have to do is come over. It’ll be fun. And could you please stop looking like someone murdered your family pet? It’s making me uncomfortable.”

“All right,” Andrew says. “What’s the plan?”

Once I explain the camera blind spot and how foolproof the entire process is, Andrew is actually pretty down with the plan. He gets super into explaining all of the times he and his band mates snuck into various parks, or museums, or stores, which is impressive, I guess, considering it took three solid minutes to convince him to come over and drink. No, Andrew is all right. It’s Clarisa who ends up being the bigger problem.

“So,” I say to her when we’re alone in our room after dinner. “You ready for the initiation?”

Clarisa looks up at me, alarmed. “Initiation?” she echoes.

I take the last pile of clothes out of my suitcase and open up the compartment at the top. There, I’ve hidden eight water bottles full of vodka, obtained from one of my older brother’s friends through a potent combination of charm and cleavage (that is to say, ten percent charm, ninety percent cleavage), and six shot glasses.

“Stella,” Clarisa says, “tell me that’s water.”

I grin. “It’s a lot more fun than water, I promise.”

Clarisa closes her eyes and takes seven deep breaths.

“Stella,” she says. She puts down the poster she was in the process of taping to the wall and clasps her hands together. “Stella. Stellastellastellastellastella. That’s...that’s definitely not allowed.”

“Astute,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. Her words come tumbling out, one after another. “I don’t want to be, like, the lame friend, even though I’ve been the lame friend for the past fifteen years of my life. But—”

She takes another breath.

“—whatifwegetcaught?”

“We won’t get caught,” I say. “We never got caught last year, and no one last year knew anyone who got caught the year before. Getting caught is not a thing that happens. They never do room checks more than once every two hours, and they always do one at midnight. So between that one and 2:00 a.m., we should be fine. Oh, and I invited the guys over.”

“What?” she says. Clarisa is one of those people who deals with heated discussions on illicit topics by lowering her voice to a furious whisper, which would be great and all, except there’s no one who can hear us, anyway. “Stella, you can’t just do this!”

“What is your problem? This is a nice thing!”

“I don’t like nice things!” she whisper-shouts. “Not when they come out of nowhere and give me panic attacks!”

“Oh. Right.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry. I just—I already told Andrew to come over. I guess they could come and then we could ask them to leave, but—I don’t know. Don’t you feel like it’s camp, and you want to do camp things, and not let ‘your illness control your life,’ or whatever? Does your psychologist say that?”

“Every psychologist says that,” Clarisa says, and, well, she certainly has me there.

“Good point,” I say.