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“Okay, so basically everyone just adds a sentence, and we go around the circle to tell a story, right?” It wasn’t exactly complicated, but Phil looked at each of the four faces sitting around the campfire with him to be sure they understood. All four nodded, some more impatiently than others. Phil continued, “Okay, I’ll start. There was a boy who lived in a cabin in the woods.” Phil gestured at Jack, who was sitting to his right, to continue the story.
“Okay, uh… and the boy murdered his parents because he was a twat.” Jack shrugged and turned to Dan.
Dan thought for a moment, taking a breath to calm the flutter in his stomach. He didn’t care about Jack and Tom and PJ all staring at him, they had already spent 3 weeks together last summer at this very camp—no, it was the new counsellor, Phil, with his unsettlingly blue eyes, that was twisting Dan’s insides. In a good way. Maybe.
Dan cleared his throat. “Yes, he was a twat, but he came from a long line of twats because he was just keeping the tradition alive, so to speak, since his parents had killed their parents and so forth. Or, uh, back forth.” He turned to PJ, eyebrows raised as if asking, what are you gonna do with that?
PJ smiled, already satisfied with himself, and continued the story. “Right, well another tradition going back generations was to bury their murder victims in homemade graves right there on the property, saving all kinds of money on funeral and burial costs, and that, my friends, is why the boy in the woods is unfathomably, like jaw-droppingly, rich.”
“That sounded like more than one sentence,” Phil said with a scrunch in his nose.
Dan giggled at PJ’s gasp of exaggerated offence at the accusation.
“I assure you good sir, it was just one,” PJ said.
Tom rolled his eyes. “Listen, shh, we don’t need the sentence police ruining the flow of this. Where are we? Jaw-droppingly rich, okay. I got this. The boy was so rich and so fucking greedy, unlike all the familial murderers that came before him—and I mean literally came—that he just bought more and more of the land around his property, and he vowed never to procreate so that he would never be murdered and in fact, he owns the very land upon which we sit right now and, listen to this shit, he roams the woods at night—or maybe it’s his ghost, I’m not a fucking historian—and it’s said that he will kill anybody who crosses his path so that they can’t kill him first and take his fortune.” Tom laughed and popped another marshmallow on his stick to hold over the flame. “Top that, motherfuckers!”
Later that night, after many more marshmallows were had, and bunkbeds were climbed into…
Dan rolled from his back to his side, and then from his side to his stomach, and then onto his other side. He had his eyes clenched shut, willing himself to just fall sleep, but he knew it was no use. He had to pee. He loved the camp, but he hated being outside alone at night. And that’s even when the camp is full of wild, screaming kids and staff. Tonight, his first night back, it was only the junior counsellors and some early maintenance staff a few cabins down. The toilets were in their own building, past all the cabins, past everything, closest to the woods. As Jack had liked to say all of last summer to tease him: the toilets are where nobody can hear you scream. Of course they weren’t that far, and of course everyone would hear him scream, Dan knew that, but for some reason that thought didn’t comfort him in the slightest. He flung his sheet off his body and sighed. “Time to go get murdered by the boy in the woods,” he whispered to himself.
“Dan?” Somebody whispered back.
Dan jumped, hitting the ceiling, and then leaned over his bed to look into the bunk below while rubbing his head. “Phil?”
“Yeah. Sorry if I scared you.”
Dan was already climbing out of the bunk and onto the floor but his lanky frame combined with his desperate need to pee and shaking limbs from Phil’s whispered equivalent to a jumpscare were making the trip considerably more difficult than usual. Phil stood up from his bunk and helped Dan down, apologizing again for scaring him.
“I’m going to the toilets,” Dan said when he had finally made it to the floor in one shaking piece. He fished his shoes from under the bunkbed and was surprised to find Phil doing the same beside him.
“Oh thank God! I have to pee so bad, but I’ve already forgotten which building they’re in. I was about to go on a tree or something until I heard you moving around. You, uh, don’t mind if I tag along?”
“Of course not!” They made their way out of the cabin as quietly as they could and after a few steps Dan spoke again, still quiet but no longer whispering. “To be honest, I find this place pretty scary at night, I can’t deal with it alone.”
“Well, I’m glad I had to go too, then.” Phil looked at Dan and smiled, and Dan’s stomach fluttered again. Definitely in a good way. Definitely.
“So, um, how old are you?” Dan asked.
“21.” Phil looked at Dan again and laughed. “Is that old? For a camp counsellor, I mean.” He shrugged. “My parents know the director here and wanted me to get out of the house for a bit this summer before going back to Uni. They said it was either this or a real job.”
Dan shuddered. “Oh God, not a real job.”
“Right?" Phil laughed. "Not yet, anyway. How, um, how old are you?”
Dan felt his face flush and knew he couldn’t lie, not with all the other guys around like loose cannons for the next few weeks. “I’m 17.”
“Oh.”
Dan couldn’t tell by Phil’s tone if it was a good oh or a bad oh, but the toilets were finally in sight and Dan’s bladder couldn’t let him navigate that conversation just yet. All he could say was, “I’ll race you!” and the two of them took off in a sprint to reach the door. Dan made it first, but the only victory he cared about was the relief of his empty bladder a few moments later.
“Always pee before bed,” Dan said, looking in the mirror at Phil as they stood next to each other at the sinks washing their hands.
“Or just bring a friend so you’re not alone,” Phil said, with a glint in his eye. “This wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Dan stared in the mirror with that damn flutter wreaking havoc in his stomach as he rinsed his hands for just a little too long.
“Yeah, maybe we could do it again sometime.”