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It had not been Nancy’s idea to be camp counselors that summer.
In fact, when the camp director (who was a friend of Carson’s) had brought the idea up, she’d at first outright refused. She wasn’t the best employee at The Claw, but she did attempt to make it to her shifts most of the time, and she certainly owed her place of employment some loyalty.
And yet one whole month from the date of offer, she’d found herself swatting at mosquitos as she and her 4 closest friends unloaded their bags from their respective vehicles. “The Claw can run itself for a few weeks. People who work at Camp Shady Pines get their family in for free,” George had argued, another selfless moment for her sisters propelling her into a quick acceptance of the job. Nick hadn’t been hard to convince after that and then, one-by-one, the rest fell in line.
The Claw, it turned out, would be just fine under the watchful eye of the recently hired (but not yet entirely trusted) Assistant Manager. Ryan and Carson would be checking in daily and sending updates directly to George and Nick. Everything was all squared away.
She wasn’t 100% sure how they’d all actually been hired, given the not insignificant criminal records between them that any background check would turn up, but… desperate times called for desperate measures. And the haunting of Camp Shady Pines, a tale of missing children from years past, could be considered desperate. Providing a little more than a scary story to tell around the campfire, it hadn’t taken the group long to determine the real reason why Nancy specifically had been asked to join the staff.
And thus, with some hesitation on Nancy’s part, all five Horseshoe Baygles turned their attention to the molding of young minds, their investigation to take place in pre-determined time away from the campers.
Ace was teaching archery, Nick was a lifeguard, Bess called dibs on arts and crafts, and George had been hired to help out in the kitchen. Nancy didn’t know what she was in for until she arrived and told that she would be in charge of keeping one whole cabin of girls somewhat in line as an average camp counselor.
But that first day was three days prior to the first session of camp. The kids weren’t there yet.
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The plan had been simple – take a very short amount of time to unpack and scout the area, then start to really investigate by doing one night of camping in the woods. Away from the lights of camp and the rush of camp staff preparing the camp, they could do a séance to try and get to the bottom of things far enough away so as to not cause anyone’s immediate (or drawn out, in an ideal world) demise.
Settling in for most of them hadn’t been hard, a quick bathroom break, stealing food from the mess hall, and tossing belongings into trunks. Even Bess had managed to pack practically for their summertime employment, and Nancy had felt pretty good about their odds of solving the case as they headed out into the woods.
They had not walked more than half a mile towards their intended destination when they received a glaring reminder that they were about to spend a decent chunk of uninterrupted time in nature.
“Oh. No, no, absolutely not!” Bess had cried out at the first sound of rustling in the bushes, and after a long line of panicked whispers about what could be heading their way (bears! wolves! another bloodthirsty animal of similar stature!), Bess had been the first to declare the plan simply too much.
As it would turn out it had just been a deer, but it was too late. Their party of five became a party of four.
---
Nancy, George, Nick, and Ace trudged on for hours until they came to a clearing that felt suitable, the small bits of kindling they’d collected on their way easily stacking up within some rocks safe distance from where they pitched their tents. And it was nice, actually, to be out under the stars, gathered around a campfire with her friends, breathing in the fresh air. They had zero cell service (mildly concerning) but minus occasional how-to videos for some of the trickier supernatural encounters they’d had in the past they didn’t particularly need it.
The séance happened at midnight, all four crew members weary from their long day of travel and sun. Hands held in a circle, they had called to the spirits of the nearby camp, the ghost kids or any other kind of malevolent spirit that may be lurking, wreaking havoc. With closed eyes and a strong, clear voice, everyone did exactly what they’d done the last time they needed to call upon the dead. It had happened so many times by that point that they had it down to an art.
But no spirits came. There wasn’t even a slight gust of wind to indicate that their actions had any impact whatsoever. George stomped off in frustration minutes later to one of the two tents they had set up, Nick fast on her heels to reassure her that they would figure things out before her sisters arrived and faced another life-or-death situation.
After ten minutes of sitting in semi-comfortable silence, listening to the sound of the fire crackling and peeking over at Ace every now and again out of the corner of her eye, a realization left Nancy horror-struck.
There were only two tents, the idea being that the boys take one and the girls take the other. But George and Nick had headed off and were clearly not returning, and Bess had turned back and found solace in a building with electricity and air conditioning (that they’d been informed of with the last of their cell service). Which left…
“I could sleep outside.”
The statement had caught Nancy off guard almost as much as the realization that she and Ace had both come to deduce what was happening at the same time.
Mouth open for perhaps a second too long as she processed the offer, Ace was quick to fall into a friendly sort of ramble, remarks about the stars and Mother Nature and “a sleeping bag is really all I need” coming before she could interject.
It had been about eight months since Nancy had realized her feelings for Ace. Eight months since his road trip with then-girlfriend Amanda. He had been gone for three weeks, and in that time Nancy had managed to bury her feelings as far down as they could possibly go, hopeful that they would never be resuscitated.
They re-emerged at Christmas after a near mistletoe disaster and had swung back into focus entirely by the time he and Amanda had broken up post-Valentine’s Day. But by then things weren’t quite the same between Nancy and Ace as they had been before she went to his house to confess his feelings. Even Rebecca’s delicious cookies hadn’t been able to stop the overwhelming sadness that had followed Nancy for a few weeks, the guilt about actively trying to confess her feelings for one of her best friends, who had a girlfriend, following her for long after the act itself.
Post-road trip she had begun to pull away, protecting herself from the inevitable fallout that her feelings could have. She had stopped standing so close to him, stopped with the casual touches that she had realized she was so used to, and she’d started texting others first to rope them into her adventures.
He had noticed. Of course, he had noticed. And he had brought it up. But she had waved away the concern and pretended like everything was fine, and… now there they were, a full year after they had really started to get to know each other, not quite back at square one but definitely three steps back from where they had been previously.
And Nancy knew that with even the slightest bit of proximity, the carefully constructed wall that she had built up over the past few months could come crashing down.
However.
If they were simply camping in her backyard, maybe she would have considered it. As Bess had reminded them earlier, though, there was plenty of wildlife that could be bad news for someone caught unaware. Her personal bubble was not worth putting Ace in the path of any sort of harm (her grandmother had been murdered as a result of her trying to prevent any harm from coming to him, actually, so she would be damned if any choices she made allowed it to happen anyway).
Still, she hesitated, and let him continue to speak as she weighed the options. Like there was anything other than one obvious choice.
“No, it’s fine. We’re about due for a platonic sleepover, I think,” Nancy shrugged, offering a small yet friendly smile after she spoke to extend a long overdue olive branch. “I’ll put out the fire if you want to go claim a sleeping bag.”
The smile he offered her in return was enough to have her nervous as she approached the tent they were to share that evening, flashlight in hand, as the remaining embers of the fire began to dim.
“Hey, so, little problem with the sleeping bag situation,” he greeted her the second she unzipped the tent to slide in. “Not a hundred percent sure, but I think George… took hers. And mine. And also Nick’s. And they maybe have a mega sleeping bag thing going on in their tent because the only one here is yours. I’d go get mine, but even though we’re good now she’s still… scary and I would rather suffer than wake her up. Luckily, I put on a jacket when the sun went down, so I’m a man of many layers.”
“Ace-” Nancy interjected, already regretting what she was going to say. “It’s fine. I am okay to share.”
It may have been dark, but she could still see his eyes widen at her suggestion, so she quickly followed up to elaborate. Luckily she could focus on taking off her shoes to keep her face from betraying any hint of emotion.
“I meant that we could unzip it and put it beneath us, and then we could both wear jackets to keep warm.”
“Right. No doubt. Great plan,” he answered with a slow nod, unzipping as much as he could before reaching what was clearly his determination of the end of Nancy’s personal bubble. From there he gestured for her to take over.
He was way further away than she’d perhaps ever thought he might be. Even though they were in a confined space together, they felt… far apart. Like they were tiptoeing around each other. And she knew it was her fault.
“Which side do you sleep on?” she asked to make the silence feel less daunting, his “right” coming a little too soon for her to come up with a follow-up question or remark. Instead she just nodded, smoothing out the open sleeping bag and gesturing for him to take his place before she rummaged through her backpack for her jacket. She had no intention of sleeping any time soon, but she could read by the light of the portable lantern they had until Ace fell asleep.
At least, she thought she could. The silence stretched from seconds to minutes, longer and longer, and Nancy could feel Ace’s eyes on her with increasing regularity as she shoved her clothes for the next day under her butt to make her reading in the corner of the tent more comfortable.
“What are you-” Nancy could hear Ace beginning to ask quietly, his voice gaining confidence only after he started to repeat himself. “What are you reading?”
“I have a summer assignment for my first class at Columbia. Just trying to get ahead,” she answered, not looking up from her book.
“Oh. Cool,” she could sense him nodding, and then they fell back into silence.
He was giving her space, she could tell, and she knew that she should be thankful for it. She had been the one to built up the walls, and ever-respectful, he had adapted to the new boundaries. Having already disrupted the Columbia-cone-of-silence, however, Nancy grew keenly aware of the fact that their time to have important talks was running out. In the fall she was off to college and all of her friends were staying back in Horseshoe Bay. Life would continue without her. Maybe everyone would move on. Maybe she would move on.
Not romantically. Friendship-wise. She was not under any sort of impression that her friends would simply be waiting, arms open, when she returned from New York. But the thought was nice… comforting even.
“Nancy?” she heard then, her faux concentration on the book before her instantly broken as she turned to look at Ace. He was nervous, that much was obvious, and from his place on the sleeping bag he was having to put in a little extra work to glance at her upside-down. It appeared that Columbia had been the magic word to break his self-control.
“What’s up?” she asked, the words barely out of her mouth before he was speaking again, shuffling so that he was at least sitting up and facing her. His movements had brought him closer to her, but not too close that it was uncomfortable.
“I know that we haven’t talked as much lately, and I don’t know what I did to cause it but I’m sorry. I just… I need to tell you something before you go to Columbia, and right now is probably not the right time, but if it makes things awkward then at least we have a lot of ground to keep between us until things aren’t weird anymore. I’ve just been thinking a lot, about how much I’m going to miss you when you go to New York, and how I’ve missed you even now. I know things have been a little… off since my road trip with Amanda, and I know some of that was on me, but I think we both know that it was both of us. And I don’t know where you were coming from with it, but I feel like I owe you an explanation for my side of it…”
He finally paused to take a breath, Nancy realizing in that moment that she’d been holding her own.
She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting when he’d started to speak, but it definitely wasn’t the words that had come out of his mouth. She had thought that she knew Ace enough by that point to not be surprised by him anymore, but… his current words were throwing her for a loop and she had no clue what was going to be said next.
Nancy had to legitimately remind herself to breathe as he dove right back in, her book now forgotten at her side.
“I made a conscious effort to focus on Amanda. We both, actually, made sure to prioritize each other. And it came at the expense of other things and other people and it was super well intentioned, but it didn’t… work. Because I was always prioritizing something-someone else. Me and Amanda… we tried but she was getting really annoyed with me because she did a lot to get out from under her brother’s thumb, but I would still run off every time I got a text from…” he shifted gears. “She broke up with me. On Valentine’s Day. And I deserved it. By that point I had realized that I had-have other feelings. Feelings for someone else, and it wasn’t fair to her and I told her and she knew it wasn’t. And I thought that maybe… maybe you knew something before I did. About me. About me having feelings for you. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring it up to you, even if it’s ridiculously scary to do it because I don’t want to put you in a weird position but if it makes you uncomfortable, I will dip right on out of this camp job and go back to The Claw for the rest of the summer. But I thought you deserved to know. That I still do have those feelings. And that I am going to miss you a lot when you leave. And that I regret not doing this sooner, but I felt like I had to do it now because the universe has put us into this very particular situation and I know I’m a night cuddler and assuming that either of us actually fall asleep tonight – because that’s a long book and I’m hyped up with a lot of adrenaline right now, not any other reason – it would not be entirely meaningless if I… tried to sleep cuddle you.”
The words had come out in a rush, but Nancy had never paid attention to anything so carefully. She didn’t miss a single thing. That didn’t mean her brain was fully able to process things, though.
In fact, she let the new silence built for almost too long as she sat, mouth agape, and connected the dots. It actually got to the point where Ace started apologizing, multiple times, and insisting that he was going to sleep outside. Luckily before he could unzip the tent, Nancy was grabbing his arm to get him to face her, an unconscious decision made.
“Ace,” she started, dragging him back to the sleeping bag on top of which they were to spend the rest of the night. Nancy Drew was able to deduce a great many things, but her feelings being returned was apparently a weak spot. All at once she felt both justified (she had been right to distance herself – it had been the respectful, proper thing to do) and… dumb. For not having realized things sooner.
They had wasted so much time.
Sliding the hand that had grabbed his arm down to clasp his hand in her own, Nancy took a deep breath as she interlocked their fingers and began a confession of her own.
“I didn’t distance myself from you because I had any inkling about what you felt for me. I did it because my wraith-fueled dreamscape moment back in November made me realize that I had feelings for you. I went to your house to tell you, but you were already gone. And it was very, very unfair to Amanda and to you that I’d done it in the first place and I felt horrible and I figured that avoiding you would make the problem go away. It didn’t, but we both know that I’m really good at burying emotions. And I’m cognizant of the fact that at some point it became a mutual avoidance, but I started it. And I’m sorry. But the feelings that I have for you haven’t gone away either. We can talk about what that actually means for us once we’ve solved this missing camper case, but in the meantime if you were to hold me in your sleep… awake me would not oppose.”
It was perhaps odd to try and play it cool when so much had been admitted already, but Nancy was nothing if not cautious with her heart and old habits.
Ace, on the other hand, immediately appeared as if a great weight had been lifted from him. It was clear in the way he flopped back onto the sleeping bag, a soft “ouch” escaping as he landed on the still-hard ground.
“Selfishly, I am going to try and go to sleep now,” he admitted, near-conspiratorial. “Not to be too eager. I mean, join whenever. I already pointed out that the book is long. I get it,” he nodded, but she had already forgotten about it. Instead she reached for the lantern, shutting it off before sliding down and into Ace’s already open embrace.
Sleep did not come for over an hour for either of them, but the sounds of nature and soft murmurs between the two of them (both coherent and, at a certain point, nonsensical) provided a steady lull until the next thing either of them knew, they were startled awake by a loud and familiar “finally!” from somewhere near their feet.
“George, you can’t just-” Nancy heard Nick protesting, but she and Ace were too busy untangling their limbs and retreating to opposite sides of the small tent to clock the knowing look that came with George’s greeting.
Instead Ace simply slid on his shoes and escaped into the fresh morning air, his “hey man” perhaps a bit too chipper for what had to be 5am.
“Bess is going to be so pissed she missed this, but I just won a hundred bucks,” George smirked, her amusement only somewhat short-lived. “We’re wasting daylight, Drew. Up and at ‘em. I need to be at a mess hall team meeting by noon and I’m not going to leave you out here to perish because you want to sleep in and cuddle with-”
“I’m up!” Nancy shouted, cutting off George before she could complete the thought.
A few hours later they were back at camp, George’s smirk growing bigger and bigger as Nancy and Ace trailed behind.
At least, that was the case until they reached cell service once again and everyone’s phones pinged incessantly with both group chat and individual messages.
Bess 🎀: hey I had a thought.
Bess 🎀: do you think I should look into it?
Bess 🎀: no probably not, right?
Bess 🎀 ➡️ Nancy: if i die tonight, this text message serves as a part of my last will and testament. to you, nancy drew, i leave my old navy rockstar jeans and my stunning purple cape. you mustn’t sell them. they are to remember me by.
Bess 🎀: SOS!!!
Bess 🎀: jk all is well.
Bess 🎀: see you in the morning!
“What the-” Nick started to ask, but before he could they emerged back into the camp where Bess was already waiting.
“Before you ask, I got worried, so I started to track Ace’s phone. Cracked the case while you were gone,” she cheered, beaming at her own accomplishment and ignoring the shock on everyone else’s faces.
“Turns out it wasn’t supernatural at all. The gardener has been doing this for years to try and get the camp shut down. It was very Scooby Doo. I offered a kind ear and he told me everything. Since we’re just outside of the Horseshoe Bay city limits, Detective Tamura couldn’t do anything, but he sent over some lovely state officers who were more than happy to have such a pleasant ending to this. It’s a bit sad, actually, how desperate he was to speak with someone. But hey! Now we are all set to live out the next few weeks with not a shred of supernatural interference. Isn’t that marvelous?”
“Bess, you scared me half to death,” Nick was the first to say, a friendly hand coming to rest on her shoulder as he visibly relaxed. “That’s big, though. Congrats. Next time maybe wait for some backup, especially since I’m in no rush to be bequeathed your locker at The Claw. But I’m proud of you.”
Similar sentiments soon followed, Ace offering the biggest and fondest reaction of all. But only seconds had passed before Nancy noticed George pulling Bess aside to share what Nancy could only assume was news about what she had observed that morning.
Occasionally her friends were predictable.
“You owe me a hundred bucks,” she heard, loud and clear. The gasp that followed was dramatic enough to have won an award.
Interjecting, Nancy wedged herself between the two girls only to give her sole demand for that morning. Her mind was already somewhere else. “He sleep cuddles. Bess can confirm. It is therefore unlikely that anyone won anything. Any more bets on my personal life and I take a cut. Now if you’ll excuse me, I promised Ace that I’d help him test out the bows on the archery field and I’d like to feel like a human before that. Someone is a sleeping bag hoarder, so I am intimately acquainted with what it feels like to sleep on the ground.”
“Testing bows?” Ace asked once they were far enough away, having volunteered to see her back to her cabin in comfortable silence.
“I said that we’d figure things out when the case was closed. Thanks to Bess the case is closed,” Nancy reasoned, pausing at the door to the cabin. “Unless… you’d rather push back the conversation even longer?”
“No, no. It’s a date. I’ll freshen up too and I’ll meet you in half an hour?”
“Half an hour it is.”
With an exchange of nods and soft, anxious smiles they parted, Nancy immediately rushing to the showers to get some of the grime from the past 36 hours off of her.
It was still one and a half days before the campers were to even arrive, but already enough had happened that it felt like they had been there for weeks. It had been so long since they had felt unburdened by supernatural entities, and unless their séance in the woods had turned something up (unlikely, given the complete lack of response)… it was looking like the days ahead were going to be full of sun, friends, figuring things out one step at a time with Ace, and work.
And Bess was right. It was marvelous.