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Vanessa wakes up to the sun hawking across Rosie’s glasses.
“Ugh,” they say, throwing a hand over their eyes. “None of that. Too early.”
Rosie kneels down, presses her hands into the wings of Vanessa’s shoulders. “Vanessa.” Her voice sounds wavery, like she’s been crying. If Rosie’s been crying, it’s probably the end of the world. The thought is strangely comforting.
“Ugh,” Vanessa says, since the message clearly didn’t come across the first time.
“Vanessa, it’s over. You can come home.”
Vanessa sits up. For the last four days, she’s been sleeping on the bank of a river that sings massacre lullabies, conversing through dreams with something huge and cold and full of teeth. Her eyes always hurt, and her hands always shake. There is literally an unfathomable amount of dirt in her bra.
It’s over whispers the adolescent ghost in the back of Vanessa’s brain. It’s over it’s over it’s over.
“No,” Vanessa says. Over could mean a couple different things, but the only image they can summon is of a rockslide, a wildfire, a flood. No survivors, nothing to save. Over as in you failed, you failed, try again.
“Yes.” Rosie’s hand is gentle on her arm. “It’s the last day of camp. Come on, or we’ll miss them.”
In the ancient ruins of early June, Vanessa had straightened all the twin sheets to hotel standard. They had set the box fans to run at maximum strength, lit the bug-spray candles, and sat on the porch with their knees knocking together, waiting for the summer to begin.
It’s hard to remember things, sometimes. Vanessa tries to hold onto it--the smudge of Wren’s eyeshadow, the hair ties on Mackenzie’s wrist. The icebreaker games that live forever in some field of dandelions somewhere-- I’m Helpful Hes. I’m Energetic Emily. I’m Done-With-This Diane, when is dinner?
Vanessa had a new pair of sunflower earrings, and a pack of star stickers which she was embarrassed to hand out to her cabin, so she covered her clipboard with them instead. There was something buoyant and wonderful rising up inside her, a reckless joy that had already hibernated the winter away. Vanessa had a tattoo of a bear on one forearm, and when Emily asked them about it, they said that they just really loved bears.
There were a lot of things that Vanessa really loved. They loved bugs and salamanders and their new sandals which were both waterproof and had excellent traction. They loved the heat, and the way it softened in the dusk. They loved being a counselor, and they loved every one of their campers instantly.
Vanessa’s most stunning accomplishment of the day was that Hes broke into a smile the second she saw them, as if it had simply been pulled out of her. Wow, she’d said, which had made Vanessa grin even harder and flap their hands behind their back. You have really good vibes.
It was amazing, to be here and alive and to get to meet such spectacular people and facilitate their camp experience. To stand in the meadow and shout I’m Vivacious Vanessa! loud enough to startle the blackbirds.
It’s been six years since that morning. Vanessa tries to hold onto it. Stops everywhere she goes to run her fingers through the grass. Closes her eyes whenever the Voice pulls at the rim of her brain and whispers I’m Vivacious Vanessa and my love for everything is stronger than you.
Six years of holding onto that love as the world turns like a glacier running into the sea. Six years of waiting for the summer to end, wanting and fearing it in equal measure.
It’s the last day of camp, sings the adolescent ghost in Vanessa’s brain, who today sounds a little like Abigail and a little like Emily. It’s the last day of camp, and it’s time to go home.
The dandelions haven’t died yet. It’s this that gives Vanessa the courage to draw in a breath and keep going, the campground stretched out infinitely before them.
“What time is it?” they ask Rosie.
“Almost noon,” Rosie says. “Come on. Pickup starts soon.”
Everything looks just as Vanessa left it. Is that reassuring, or terrifying? What have they changed, and what have they preserved? What if they open the door to the Zodiac cabin and nobody has grown, nobody’s cuts have scabbed over, nobody has even changed shirts since that first day?
If a tree falls in the forest, but time keeps slowing inexorably down, will it ever hit the ground? Or will it rot all the way through before it makes it there?
Cars clog the main road, a thin line of color in the distance. There aren’t as many insects calling as there should be, but maybe that’s just how the end of summer is.
Has Vanessa ever made it to the end of summer before? She can’t remember.
Rosie leads her to the main cabin. Campers and parents cluster around the door, spilling across the porch and into the grass. Vanessa watches them, the sweat tracking through the curve of their ears, the shoes shifting incrementally against the yellow wood. The affection that comes over her feels like a defibrillator blast, a familiar joy.
They head for Rosie’s office. Rosie pulls out a chair, and Vanessa sits without thinking about it.
“I don’t want to keep you too long,” Rosie says. “You have people to get back to.”
Vanessa grips the edge of the chair. Can’t conjure an image of the kids, can’t conjure an image of anything. Head a slate of white static. “Right,” they manage.
Rosie shifts. “I want to talk to you about some administerial changes that need to be made for next year.”
Vanessa opens her mouth to ask if they can talk logistics after the campers leave, but then they shut it again, frowning. They can almost hear--
Thud. Thud. Thud.
“What--what is that?” Vanessa says, but there is some small, certain part of their brain that has always known.
Rosie’s face goes tight. She stands up fast enough to knock her chair over.
Vanessa sprints onto the porch, trips onto the grass. Campers are shouting, scattering into battle formations that Vanessa never taught them. Parents scream, lunging for their children.
Above the treeline, the Grootslang stands up and continues to rise, rise, rise, blotting out the sun. A mountain of skin and hand and blazing eye.
Vanessa picks up the pace, and flings herself across the threshold of the Zodiac Cabin--
--just as it and everything else in a twenty-foot radius is crushed under one massive foot.
Vanessa wakes up to the sun hawking across Rosie’s glasses.
“What,” they say. There’s dirt and blood and some decaying taste of regret in their mouth, but that’s not too unusual. “What. Rosie.”
“Vanessa,” Rosie says. Tremulous, like the world is ending. “Vanessa, it’s over. You can come home.”
Vanessa crawls onto her knees. “Rosie,” she says. “I died. I died twenty seconds ago and--and I was just here--”
“It’s okay,” Rosie says, like she hasn’t heard her. “It’s the last day of camp. It’s all going to be okay.”
“Just tell me the kids got out okay,” Vanessa says. “They didn’t do anything. Tell me the Grootslang knows that.”
Rosie stops walking for a second, but doesn’t turn around. Briefly, Vanessa sees--or maybe imagines--the trembling line of her shoulders.
“Come on,” Rosie says. She starts walking again. “You’re going to miss them.”
Vanessa squints at her. They know it’s in vogue for camp directors to be vaguely blasé about the whole “mortal danger and preteens” issue, but they’d really thought that wasn’t Rosie’s thing.
“Did you hear me?” they say. “Grootslang? Big old elephant guy? Abigail’s nemesis? Is this ringing any bells, because it’s heading right for camp--”
“You’re right,” Rosie interrupts them. She reaches out and takes Vanessa’s hand, squeezes it hard. Vanessa leans into it unconsciously, wishing that their stupid touch-starved body wasn’t so pathetically transparent. “We should head for camp.”
“My God, you’re really not practicing active listening skills today, are you?”
Rosie smiles, as if she’s proud of that. “It’s all going to be okay now. It’s time to come back.”
Against their better judgment, Vanessa follows Rosie back to camp.
There’s nothing to come back to, the adolescent ghost in Vanessa’s brain informs them. Today, it sounds a little like Wren. You’ll never be allowed to return to a place that’s still standing.
“What time is it?” they ask Rosie.
Rosie doesn’t glance at them. “About ten in the morning. Pickup’s about to start.”
That doesn’t sound right. Vanessa tries again. “Are the Zodiacs--do they--?”
Do they need my help, she was going to ask, but she can’t get the words out. Because surely, after all this time, the answer will be no.
“They’re waiting for you,” Rosie says, gaze still fixed staunchly on the horizon.
“Okay,” Vanessa says, biting back her frustration. But maybe Rosie’s right, and this time around everything really is okay. She should be thrilled--she is --that she’s going to get another chance to see her cabin.
She’s been dreaming of this moment for years. But if the past however-long has taught her anything, it’s that getting what she wants is a bad sign.
“I wanted to talk to you before we get there,” Rosie says, finally going off-script. “Some of the choices we made for this summer are, frankly, unsustainable. I’m trying to bring some people in next year, and I wondered if you--”
The campground rises into view. Rosie breaks off to wave at a passing cluster of Sasquatches, and Vanessa tries to wrap their head around choices we made for this summer. For them, it was never just a choice, never just a summer. But maybe to Rosie, all of this has just been a stopgap.
They can’t begrudge Rosie that. She has her own eternity to keep ahead of.
“Rosie, can we stop for a minute?” Vanessa asks.
Rosie doesn’t look at her. “We’re almost there.”
“We need to talk about the Grootslang,” Vanessa says, but she isn’t expecting much to come of it.
“We have time.”
“No, we don’t.” Vanessa tries to dig their heels in, but Rosie is moving too fast. Vanessa could let Rosie go, find some way to deal with this on their own, but they can see the roof of the Zodiac Cabin from here. And Vanessa has tried to hold onto it, and Vanessa has tried to hold on, but Rosie’s hand around their wrist is so alien and so wonderful that they have a hard time thinking about anything else. “It’s going to kill everyone. Do you understand that? It’s going to kill me.”
“You’re not doing this alone anymore,” Rosie says, which knocks the breath clean out of Vanessa’s body. “You’re going to be okay. All you have to do is come with me.”
“I can’t,” Vanessa says. “Rosie, you know that I can’t.”
“You can,” Rosie says, and the insects aren’t singing and the sky is blue enough to have been torn from a painting or a poem, and the grass is still spotted with wildflowers and Vanessa’s love for everything has gotten her this far, but she doesn’t even know where to start anymore.
Halfway to the cabin, a car backfires and sets off a screeching horde of minotaurs, rolling in from the forest like a stormcloud from half a lifetime away. Vanessa watches in a vague, terrible joy, and the adolescent ghost in their brain laughs as they’re trampled underfoot.
The third time that Vanessa wakes up to the sun hawking off of Rosie’s glasses, they start to suspect that something might be up.
They listen to Rosie talk, the reassurances and promises that fall a little flat, now. Maybe this is the forest’s way of making things up to them. Maybe this is all they’ll ever be allowed--this segment of conversation with Rosie, this little perfect splinter of camp. Maybe they can learn to live with that.
If the summer spends too long never ending, surely at some point it has to switch to always ending. Surely, at some point, Vanessa will have paid their dues.
They’ve stayed still too long. Rosie reaches down, hauls them to their feet. They have to blink away the vertigo, the acid taste of crushed throat.
“Hey,” Vanessa croaks. “You okay?”
Rosie rubs her chest. Can she feel it too, all the death bottling up in her?
“It’s time to go home,” Rosie says, but she sounds uncertain.
“I know,” Vanessa says. “Just a minute, okay?”
Rosie squints at the sky, which is already flushing into the most gorgeous shade of blue that could ever exist. The unfairness of it shakes Vanessa to her core. “It’s almost eight in the morning,” Rosie says. “We don’t have much time left.”
Last time, there was no Grootslang. Vanessa doesn’t know what to do with that information. There was a minute, last time, where it felt like they had control, like they could stop it all from coming down, but then there was no Grootslang and nothing to plan around. They don’t know whether to be terrified that they can’t stop it or relieved that they don’t have to try. They don’t think they could stand to hear Rosie dismiss them again.
What happened to Rosie this summer, to turn her into such a pale imitation of herself? She’s acting like Nellie. What did she see? What did the forest do to her?
But it’s almost eight, and camp is almost over, and it’s the last day of summer and sometimes still Vanessa is afraid that this time it’s really going to end. So she lets herself be led down the hill, and tries not to grip Rosie’s wrist too tightly. She focuses on the twang of her pulse in the shared space of their skins, as tireless and confused as a wasp throwing itself at a closed window.
I’m sorry, Vanessa thinks, trying to manually transplant the thought into Rosie’s head. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you.
And then, just for good measure, just in case Rosie or anyone is listening: I love you.
They end up behind Rosie’s desk again. The buzz of my-cabin-my-cabin-my-cabin is still prickling at Vanessa’s skin, but this time they push it down. They try to memorize everything in this room, the shed antlers scraping up the floor, the bioluminescent moths rattling around the vents, the stuck-teeth taste of magic.
It feels good. It feels right, which is worrying.
“Is everything okay in the forest?” Vanessa asks.
Rosie pauses halfway to her chair. “I should be asking you that.”
“I don’t have all the information anymore.”
“Nobody does,” Rosie says. “Well. Abigail might. I read her diary once, there’s a shocking number of state secrets in there.”
Vanessa tries to laugh, but it’s a little strained,
“I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary,” Rosie says. “Which I guess is odd in and of itself. Usually, the forest--well, you know.”
Eons and eons ago, in previous years, the forest pushed back against the end of summer. Rosie used to call it the camp’s temper tantrum, but only once they were an hour down I-95, getting day-drunk in a JoAnn’s Fabrics and trash-talking the forest somewhere it couldn’t hear them--an age-old tradition. Suddenly, Vanessa wants to survive and get out if only to have that one, beautiful afternoon with Rosie without anything coloring their thoughts.
“I think something might be happening,” Vanessa says. “I’m not . . . completely sure what it is, though.”
They pause, gauging Rosie’s reaction, but she’s not as easy to read anymore.
Or maybe it’s just Vanessa who changed. One more thing they couldn’t hold onto.
Vanessa flexes their fingers against the desk, trying to decide how much they can say before Rosie starts deflecting again. “It’s been a weird couple of days.”
Silence.
Heart in their throat, Vanessa tries again. “Rosie, I keep--”
The door bangs open and in bursts one of the bright-faced Roanoke kids, the small one with blue in her hair and too-long sleeves. “Hi Rosie! Hi stranger! ‘Scuse me, I really need to borrow this.” She elbows past a bookshelf of supernatural encyclopediae to grab a sawed-off shotgun. She hoists it easily over her shoulder, clips off a two-fingered salute, and darts back out the door.
Rosie massages her temple. “I should probably go handle that.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa says. There isn’t even room in their chest for disappointment, not really. It’s a feeling no different than waking up again this morning, the understanding that this is how things go now.
“It’s good to have you back, counselor,” Rosie says, already halfway out the door. She might be winking under her glasses, but it’s hard to tell.
Vanessa stands up too. Rosie is standing on the front porch, surveying the campground. Vanessa drapes herself across the doorframe, savors the feeling of clean wood scraping against her cheek.
“Rosie, we’re all about to die. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but it’s soon. The world’s going to end. Camp’s going to get destroyed. We’ll both die. The kids will die. Or I guess, maybe I’m the only one who has to die. But functionally, the world ends either way because today is going to collapse in on itself at any minute now. Do you understand me? Do you understand how bad it’s going to get?”
Rosie turns around. The sun blots out her face entirely, makes her a delirious silhouette of orange and black.
“It’s okay,” Rosie says, like the recitation of a poem. “It’s the last day of summer.”
With that, she pulls her axe out of its holster and charges down the steps, disappearing into the mutinous light of early morning.
Vanessa closes her eyes. The insects aren’t making any noise, which is how she knows this won’t last.
She’s tried to hold on. She’s still trying. Can feel the strain of it, in moments like this, when it’s warm and calm and the day is so perfect that she just wants to evaporate.
Vanessa knocks a quick Morse-code message on the doorframe-- SOS, because she doesn’t actually know how to say anything else. Then, she starts across the wide lawn to the Zodiac cabin.
She actually makes it through the door this time. For a minute, she can only blink, scared and disoriented and too emotional to hold on to any one thought. The beds are stripped. The walls are bare. The box fans are turned off, clustered in the corner like a useless pantheon.
That’s about when she notices the enormous cockatrice passing in front of the window.
“Aw, nuts,” she says, just as it turns its head, just as she fails to get out of the way, just as the cold washes over her and eliminates all room for thought, or hope, or grief.
Vanessa wakes up. The sun is hawking off Rosie’s glasses. It’s almost seven o’clock. Vanessa gets up. They sprint down the hill. They skid across the massive lawn, bypassing Rosie’s cabin, bypassing everything. There’s a silhouette in the window of the Zodiac cabin, someone brushing their teeth. Maybe one of the girls. Maybe Barney, who seems amazing and so brave and who Vanessa hasn’t even gotten to meet. Maybe it’s all of them waiting behind the door. Maybe another death. Maybe another chance.
Vanessa flings the door open. Stumbles into the cabin. The bunks are unmade, messy. There are duffel bags all over the floor. The kids are packing up. It’s the last day of summer. It has to be, after all this time.
And then there’s the familiar crack of something landing on the cabin--the Grootslang again, or one of the sentries, or just a massive, magical tree branch grown from a sprout specifically to ruin Vanessa’s goddamn day, and the roof caves in, and the walls splinter, and they can’t breathe, and they can’t say anything that they need to say, and they can’t breathe, and--
Vanessa wakes up and rolls to her feet.
“Vanessa, it’s over,” Rosie is saying, the sun hawking off her glasses, but Vanessa can’t listen to this again. Somewhere, camp is breaking up and kids are going home and Vanessa’s cabin is probably promising to write to each other.
She wants the kids to leave. She has to want the kids to leave. She has to sit here, watching the sun dissemble the valley, and hope with everything she has that the kids leave and never look back.
When Vanessa was a kid, they would pick up river rocks to bring home from the creek. And then their older brother told them that they were hurting aquatic habitats and so they stopped going to the creek at all. Because Vanessa knew that when your love becomes destructive, you have to put it somewhere you can’t reach.
So she doesn’t go back to camp, even though it’s over and it’s all okay and she can go home now. She charges straight into the forest.
Vanessa’s most secret shame is that one of her terrible destructive loves is the forest itself. It’s contradictory, she knows; the forest isn’t everything she’s fighting against, but it’s the root of most of it. There are things that live here that want nothing more than to raze the camp to the ground, who don’t care if their collateral has braces and skinned knees and a C-plus in math that they’re trying to get up to a B.
Still, the mushrooms here are the size of her head. Every time she thinks about how afraid she is, how much this place has taken from her, she can’t help but remember the mushrooms. They’re brilliant white, perfect orange, brutal red--colors previously only claimed by the skies in her dreams.
She looks at the mushrooms, and the labyrinth of roots, and the birds dive-bombing the anthills, and she can’t help but love every inch of it. It’s the cruelest, most wonderful feeling.
And so Vanessa goes to the forest, doesn’t think about the Zodiac Cabin or the waver of Rosie’s voice or the dandelions. Instead, they run their way down a list of potential apocalypses, a process as familiar as grocery-shopping.
The Grootslang, curled into cliff-face, the diamond in its chest dusky in the almost-dawn. The waterfall, warm to the touch. Vanessa presses their hand into it, lets the spray curtain between their fingers like healing salve. Three-eyed foxes that scatter when they pass, barking desperate warnings in jumbled script. The sentry, sleeping, hollowing out someone’s dreams from an eon away.
The river isn’t flooding. The ground isn’t shaking. The sphinxes and the Sasquatches and the yellow-eyed frogs are all getting along. The forest is only as on the brink of catastrophe as it ever is. So maybe it’s not the last day of summer. Maybe nothing is ending, nothing is changing. It’s hard to think that Rosie might have been lying, with that first beautiful it’s time to go home, but time here is hard to pin down. It could just be that the forest rejected that notion, just as it’s rejected for six years that Vanessa had any home to go to.
Eventually, she wanders back to the river and settles down to fish. She’s died three times now on an empty stomach, and there’s something to be said for the comfort of routine.
The river feeds into the waterfall, so of course there’s nothing innocent about it. It whispers to anyone who stops by, seeding mistrust into the corners of camp. When Vanessa was a kid, the voices told world-ending secrets, but like most things it’s mellowed with age. Now the river mostly writes poems, testing slant rhymes in the eves of Vanessa’s brain.
Vanessa has been here. Vanessa has lived here, on the edge of a distorted truth. Has slept in these weeds, always hungry and always tired and always keeping something at bay that she doesn’t even think she could name.
“God,” she says, feeling more wretched than she has these entire six years. “What else have you been keeping from me?”
A line of adelgids slumps up the nearest tree. Here, at least, the insects make noise. Vanessa sits in the dirt and pretends that she was born a cicada, that she played at life in some dark underground for years. That this summer is the only one she will ever know.
She catches a fish, skins and eats it through pure muscle memory. It tastes like ash, and she puts that down as a tally for the waterfall being the thing to end it all this time.
It’s the end of summer, whispers the adolescent ghost in Vanessa’s brain, who today sounds mostly like static.
Not to be outdone, the river adds and now we only shudder.
When Vanessa wakes up again to the sun hawking off of Rosie’s glasses, they feel more than a little cheated.
“Did I die that time?” they ask, interrupting Rosie’s shaky Vanessa, it’s over. “Or did I just fall asleep? It--usually it hurts a little more.”
Rosie takes their hand. After fifteen seconds, during which time Vanessa’s pulse freezes and brain melts, she starts to rub a slow thumb over the ridge of their knuckles.
“You’re okay,” Rosie says. The sun hasn’t risen yet. It must be four or five a.m., the half-moon taking on the blur of early morning. The air is so still, and cool. Vanessa closes her eyes and allows herself thirty seconds of unmitigated delight over the temperature, the grass, the crook of Rosie’s palm. “Vanessa, you’re okay, you’re here. Nobody’s dead.”
Vanessa’s mouth is too dry to form words. Their chest hurts, but it also feels like an abstraction, not completely connected to their body. “Can I put my head in your lap?”
Rosie shifts to accommodate, and yeah. Her shirt smells like coffee and cedar and blood, but the way blood smells when you’re fourteen and giddy with exhaustion, comparing bruises with the people you don’t yet know that you would die for. She’s so warm. She strokes Vanessa’s hair, gets her fingers tangled because Vanessa has been washing it in evil river water for six years and that’s not good for frizz.
“I love you,” Vanessa says. “I’m sorry I love the forest, too.”
Rosie laughs. Vanessa tries to memorize the sound, just like she practiced. Tries to hold onto it.
“You love everything,” Rosie says, voice raw with fondness. “I would never--I wish you could just sit in the grass forever and not have to do anything but love the clouds and me and Abby and the Grootslang and the campers and the grasshoppers.”
“Frickin’ love grasshoppers,” Vanessa says into the space above Rosie’s hip. “They have the best pants.”
“I’ve known you for forty years and I still don’t know what the hell you mean by that,” Rosie says. “I’m so sorry, Vanessa. I don’t know if it would be easier to watch you do this if you weren’t so you or if it would be worse.”
Vanessa thinks about the sound of their spine breaking, the nauseating emptiness of petrification. “It’s always going to be me.”
“It’s always going to be me, too,” Rosie says. “Always me and you and Abigail. And the kids. I’m so scared that it’s always going to be the kids.”
“No,” Vanessa says. “Kids grow up. It’s their best quality.”
“We grew up, too,” Rosie says, wrists soft, shirt stained, last day of summer.
“Sure,” Vanessa says. “We grew up.”
They walk to camp arm-in-arm. Touch no longer feels so much like a live wire, and now Vanessa is hoping that this inevitable apocalypse doesn’t force Rosie to let go of her. In future iterations, she’s going to wake up and say Rosie, please hold my hand now. There’s no time to pretend not to want it, no time to pretend not to want anything.
Surely, somewhere, there’s something Vanessa can say to make Rosie believe them. Surely they can keep this, this beautiful thing where Rosie talks like Vanessa remembers and acts like Vanessa remembers and is warm like Vanessa remembers, and still save the world.
I’m Vivacious Vanessa, and my optimism knows no bounds, they think. Against all odds, it does make them feel better. They dig the toe of their shoe into the wet ground, watch the dirt furrow around it.
There aren’t any lights on in the campground. It’s so dark and still that for a moment Vanessa can see the camp of forty years ago, the place where she watched cicadas molt by the tire swing, where she kept her skirt neat and hair brushed, where she fought the armies of darkness in her sleep and forgot it all by the morning. She closes her eyes, suddenly loath to let the mirage end.
“Sometimes I can’t even believe it’s real,” she tells Rosie. “It’s real and I get to have it.”
Rosie surveys the pit of cabins, moonlight turning the rims of her glasses white. “Hard to believe,” she says. “Hard to take sometimes, too.”
Vanessa can’t look at Rosie, but she also can’t look at the thing behind her closed eyes. She looks up instead, watches the stars. How much dimmer they are, here by the cabins where night doesn’t eat itself alive.
“Listen to me, Vanessa,” Rosie says. “There’s something I have to tell you,” and Vanessa wants to say no, listen to me but can’t, and the air is too still and smells not at all like blood or bad magic, and Rosie is saying something important that’s completely drowned out by the adolescent ghost in Vanessa’s brain, who today sounds exactly like the crickets.
They go down to the lake, instead of Rosie’s cabin. Vanessa would sort of like to drown, this time around. Cool off a little, get something in their throat that isn’t mucus, dirt, splintered bone.
It’s a morbid thought. They try to evict it from their brain, and don’t totally succeed.
From her endless pockets, Rosie produces a sandwich wrapped in parchment paper, unwraps it, and wordlessly hands half to Vanessa. It’s chicken salad. When Vanessa takes it, mayo smears across the inside of their finger. The feeling is strange enough that it quiets every other impulse in their body, and so they take a bite.
It’s kind of objectively a bad sandwich. Rosie makes terrible sandwiches, always has. Gets jam everywhere. Doesn’t line up the bread right, or defrost it all the way. Vanessa wants nothing more than to sit here on the bank of this lake and eat this sandwich for the rest of their life, until the summer is forced to its knees.
“I can’t believe you made me a sandwich.” Vanessa says.
“You’ve been fighting my war all summer,” Rosie says. “Am I really that bad a person, that you didn’t expect me to make you a sandwich?”
“You’re the best person,” Vanessa says. “The absolute best. The sandwich cements it.”
Rosie wraps an arm around Vanessa, lets them lean into her side. “It’s an awful sandwich,” she says, sounding resigned. “I used too much celery again.”
“I love celery,” Vanessa says. “Celery is an amazing vegetable, and an invaluable addition to a chicken salad sandwich.”
Rosie strips a piece of crust from her half and throws it in the lake. One iridescent tentacle rises silently from the depths to latch onto it.
You’ve never given me a sandwich before, Vanessa thinks. Has Rosie always had it in her pocket, just waiting for the time to be right? Is it unfair to love this iteration of Rosie just a little more than all the ones that came before her?
No, that’s ridiculous. All of these days, this terrible pile-up of days, has just been time passing to them. And love is cumulative. Everyone knows that.
They loved the forest a little more every year, too. Maybe that’s why this is happening, the campground pushing them away before the love gets too big for any one place to hold.
“You’re a good person,” Vanessa says. “And it’s not your war.”
Rosie barks a little laugh. “I saw my future self this summer, you know. My teeth get pretty long, in the end. Lots of fur. Claws sharp enough to rip the place apart.”
“Oh never mind, eventually turning a little hairy means that you have personal ownership of every bad thing that ever happens here-- no, you numbskull. This place can shut the hell up with its chosen-one nonsense because I’m not letting you go.”
“Oh God, Vanessa,” Rosie says, voice sounding rawer than Vanessa remembers it being in thirty years. “Please come back to the cabin and let me make you another sandwich.”
Vanessa tucks their legs up to their chest, presses their chin to Rosie’s sternum. When the dawn comes, the lake will be soaked in such a new and vulnerable light that it’ll look like a different planet entirely. Vanessa has held onto that for years, and she might hold onto it forever. I’m Vivacious Vanessa, and I can keep it all. Even in just a small way. Even for just a small time.
“Let’s stay here,” she says. “We have time. It’s the end of summer.”
The flood, when it comes, is so brutally cold that it actually feels kind of beautiful, and it covers everything, and it only hurts for a minute.
Vanessa wakes up to the sun hawking off Rosie’s glasses. She rolls over, grabs Rosie’s hand, and says with as much conviction as she can muster, “I love you and I love your sandwiches, but I have to go.”
“Vanessa, it’s over,” Rosie finishes saying and then blinks, thrown off-balance.
“It’ll all be okay, Rosie.” Vanessa gets to their feet, finds their balance. Thinks a little wistfully about mayonnaise on their fingers, a feeling wiped away by the remorseless slate of time. “It’s the end of summer, and it’s going to be fine.”
“That’s my line,” Rosie says, but Vanessa is already halfway down the hill.
They open the door to the Zodiac cabin, and about sixteen moths fly out in a burst.
“Huh,” Vanessa says, bemused and elated. Have their wonderfully weird campers been raising caterpillars again?
They want so badly to ask someone, anyone. But one look around the cabin makes it clear that there’s no one to ask.
It looks like it’s the middle of the night. By all logic, everyone should be here, asleep and safe and a little annoyed at Vanessa for bursting in like this.
Vanessa wanders over to the floor and sits down next to the pale panel of moonlight coming in through the window. They pass their hand through it and watch the white make an alien of their skin, fingers twitching, nails growing, something monstrous hidden in the muscle memory.
It’s okay. This is enough, for now.
You’re never going to see them, whispers the adolescent ghost in Vanessa’s brain, who today sounds a little regretful. It’s never going to let you see them.
There are two different stuffed lizards on Emily’s bunk. Hes has acquired, somehow, even more Bigfoot stickers for her water bottle. There’s a bunk in the corner that smells like magic, and one above it that is made to perfection and has at least forty sticky notes adorning the walls, each with a different cat face drawn in different handwriting.
Barney’s bunk, then. Vanessa’s never met them, but the sheets and pillows and carefully-arranged set of footie pajamas write out a whole, precious history. Vanessa wants to add a cat face to the wall, possibly more than she’s ever wanted anything in her life, but there’s nothing around to do it with.
There’s a page of Zodiac Cabin Legislature on the wall, written in blue gel pen. There’s a cat bed covered in enormous hairs. A most-definitely-against-the-rules minifridge, cool to the touch but plugged in nowhere that Vanessa can see. Inside, two frozen Hershey’s bars and a plastic cup filled with viscous, bright pink fluid.
This is enough. It has to be. Sitting on the floor and, for the first time all summer, watching something come together instead of falling apart.
Vanessa doesn’t know how long she’s there before a shadow fills the doorframe. She looks up, hardly daring to hope, pulse finding some manic second rhythm in her throat.
It’s one of the other counselors. Vanessa met her at the beginning of the summer, once or twice. Eons ago. A lifetime ago, enough time for all the children to grow up and go away.
“Hey,” the counselor says. She comes in. She’s terribly, painfully young, probably not out of high school. “Everything okay?”
“I’m so sorry,” Vanessa says blankly, really meaning it, really feeling the sorrow. “I don’t remember your name.”
“That’s okay.” The kid comes over, kneels next to her. “I’m Jen.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“Thank you.” Jen smiles, a really nice smile, picked clean by the moon. “You’re Vanessa, right? I think we met once.”
“We certainly did. I’m sure I enjoyed it immensely, and I’m enjoying it again.” Vanessa wrings a hand through their hair. “I’m sorry, I’m not at my best right now.”
“You don’t have to be,” Jen says. It’s a kind thing to say, incredibly, undeservedly kind. “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know your campers this summer. They’re an amazing bunch of kids.”
“They are ,” Vanessa says. “They so are. It shocks me every year to see how amazing the kids are. Like, are they getting amazing-er, or is it just me?”
Jen laughs. “I wouldn’t know. It’s my first year.”
“Hell of a first year.”
Jen giggles. They’re frantic, exuberant giggles, born from late nights and exhaustion and never knowing what’s going on. “Oh my god, it’s been so weird. ”
“Orientation doesn’t begin to cover it,” Vanessa agrees. “Also, don’t know if anyone’s told you what the pay is yet, but it’s not worth speaking about.”
“I’m doing this for my college apps .” Jen says. She and Vanessa meet eyes for a moment, and then they both burst out laughing.
The moonlight has crept to cover the plants and the shoes and the hem of Vanessa’s pants. She’s losing it in a cabin that perhaps recently also held her campers, that perhaps watched them brush their teeth and untangle themselves from their sheets, that listened to their secrets and kept out the rain and let them be safe, just for now, just for the summer. It’s such a good feeling that Vanessa wouldn’t let herself believe in it, except that Vanessa believes in everything.
Somehow, the world hasn’t ended yet, so she leans against the wall and listens to Jen talk, an alternating stream of camp stories and space facts. She can’t help but wonder what Jen was like as a child, if she would have come here, if she would have come back. Maybe. It would have hurt, to see her return, but there would have been some relief in it, too.
Jen doesn’t seem like a quitter, even when the thing she’s facing is completely, cataclysmically bad. It’s a terrible thing to know about someone, but Vanessa takes that with the love and the shame and with all of it.
“I just don’t understand how it got so cold,” Jen is saying. “Middle of summer one second, and yes, okay, the Grootslang was doing some weird nonsense but I don’t think anyone ever explained-- ”
Vanessa sits up. “The Grootslang?”
“That’s what Rosie called it.”
Vanessa closes their eyes. They remember the feeling of being crushed, but more than that they remember watching the shadow rise up above the treeline, the dry certainty that they were about to die. That was back when death was something real and lasting, not some cheap hoax that couldn’t make up its damn mind about whether it wanted to stick around or not. Even though they don’t have much room in them for fear anymore, there’s still a cold well of dread in the pit of their stomach. Maybe with enough turns it’ll become physical, like how they always wake up hungry and with a crick in their neck, like how their fingers always shake and they have a blister on their heel that won’t go away.
“How did you stop it?” they ask. There are a couple of ways to calm the Grootslang down, and Vanessa’s learned most of them over the years. There are lullabies, places you can touch, smells you can produce by boiling just the right kind of fungus in just the right kind of river-water during the lunar eclipse.
Actually, on second thought, that last one might have just gotten it high.
“Barney found its gem in some sort of treasure room,” Jen says, and Vanessa’s chest pulls at the mention of Barney. The footie pajamas. The cat doodles. The little details, there for Vanessa to scrap together. “It was just in time, too, because Abigail was about to--”
“You know Abigail?”
“Oh,” Jen says. She sounds taken aback. Vanessa takes a deep breath and forces herself to dial it down. “We’ve met a couple times, I guess. Where do you know her from?”
Well, isn’t that a complicated question. “We used to work together. A long time ago.”
“I can’t picture Abigail as a counselor,” Jen says. “She seemed a little, um. Excited? About blowing things up?”
“Uh, if you can’t be a counselor and excited about blowing things up, they can fire me right now,” Vanessa says. Abigail never was a counselor, because Jen’s right that she didn’t exactly have her priorities in order. But Vanessa doesn’t want to tell Jen that when this place isn’t a camp, it’s a battleground, and Abigail is an excellent coworker to have.
There’s a long moment of quiet. Vanessa watches the shadows warp on the floorboards, a dumb parody of the branches out the window. She knows she can’t stay here forever, tucked away in this place where her campers are just out of reach and everyone is still alive, but she’s a little afraid that these walls are the only thing holding the day up. Of course everything will die once she steps outside. It won’t be able to help itself.
“It’s been a whole summer,” Jen says finally. “Where have you been?”
There’s no accusation in her voice, no you abandoned your kids, no you haven’t even met Barney, what could be more important than that, what could possibly matter more than meeting Barney? Vanessa is glad, because they don’t have an answer.
“Jen,” and Vanessa’s voice sounds hoarse, doesn’t it, every morning it sounds a little hoarser, some part of their body unable to acclimate to having people around. “How were the kids?”
Jen stares at them for a moment, something hard and unreadable in her gaze. “They were great. Really responsible kids. Been through a lot this summer, with all the things mine keep roping them into. And with Diane.”
Vanessa can’t really remember how much of that they knew. They used to talk to Hes sometimes, way back at the beginning, but it’s been at least a couple of years since the last Skype session. Terribly, unforgivably, some of the details have started to blur together.
Vanessa tried to hold on. Vanessa made that their only purpose, some days when the sky was white or red or apocalyptic with rain and all the lines of their strange second world had smeared into a long dark blot. Just sitting with their head almost all the way in the river that whispered aging secrets, trying to hold on to something that every day became a little less.
They knew about Diane, though, because they signed the paperwork and met a couple of deities and worked really hard to make it work. They wanted it to work, wanted Diane to have many happy years here and then to never come back.
“They’re all okay?” they ask, because it’s better than saying hey Jen, please don’t tell me it was for nothing, please let me die not knowing. “Even if things got weird?”
“Oh, Vanessa,” Jen says, and Vanessa can’t even think about what their face must look like to inspire that kind of tone. “They’re all absolutely fine.”
Suddenly, Vanessa can’t breathe through their shame. They cover their face with both hands, hunching in on themself.
Jen reaches over, gently pries one hand from Vanessa’s forehead and wraps it around her own. Like with Rosie, the touch is almost enough. The touch, and the moonlight filtering through the windows, and the unmade beds lining the walls.
“Things were always weird, though,” Jen says, still with an incredible tenderness. “Things have been absolutely bananas here from day one.”
It feels like the sun should be up by the time Vanessa leaves the Zodiac Cabin, but of course it isn’t. She sits on the porch for a while, pressing her hand against the banister and focusing on the feeling of rough grain against her skin. She takes off her shoes, something she should’ve done days ago. Wiggles her toes so that they just brush across the damp grass.
Despite everything, Vanessa still wants to live. And wants to live here, which might be even more miraculous. Vanessa would go through a thousand iterations of today, learning to love an infinite combination of new things and then getting killed by each of them in turn.
The adolescent ghost in her brain is mumbling, too quiet for Vanessa to make out the words. It sounds a little like a lullaby.
Vanessa will hold on, and she will take the little scraps of this place that she is given and she will say it’s okay, that’s enough, that’s enough for now. She can still feel Jen’s hand in hers. Rosie’s arms wrapped around her waist. I can take it. This is all I need to be able to take it.
Vanessa picks up her sandals, which are both waterproof and have excellent traction, and takes them inside. There are shoes lined up under each bunk, patiently awaiting their next adventures. Combat boots and muddy sneakers, rainboots, flip-flops, a pair of yellow Crocs that Vanessa would wear given half the opportunity.
There’s one bed in the cabin that she hasn’t spent much time looking at. The one she slept in, once, all those years ago at the beginning of summer.
Vanessa knows that she never made her bed, so one of the campers must have done it for her. The thought pulls at her chest, but the emotion is so long-detached that she can’t identify it. It looks like a shrine.
She pushes her sandals under until just the heels poke out. Then, barefoot and breathing deep, she leaves again and sets off towards the forest.
Before she gets there, a bird the size of the mountain face touches down terrifyingly close to the sleeping sentry. It triggers a rockslide. Vanessa’s mouth and nose fill with dust as she dies, erasing the residual smell of the Zodiac Cabin. She would cry if she could.
“Vanessa,” Rosie says, sun hawking across her glasses. “It’s over. You can come home.”
Vanessa rolls over and stares at the sky. It’s so deep and dark that it could be the thorax of a rhino beetle, or a pupil, or the soft black of a closed throat. There’s no moon. No stars.
Nothing that could produce the kind of light that just woke Vanessa up, actually. That’s maybe kind of worrying.
“It’s the last day of summer,” Rosie says. Between the light obscuring her eyes and the dark eating away at the lines of her face, it’s impossible to tell what she looks like.
Between Vanessa’s six years of solitude and these past however many days of death and grasshoppers and waking up to a world a little harder to explain than the last, they can’t interpret Rosie’s voice anymore either. It’s a blank slate.
“Okay,” Vanessa says, willing to give Rosie the benefit of the doubt because they love her, because they never stopped. “It’s the last day of summer, then. What are we going to do?”
“It’s time to go home,” Rosie says, face still inscrutable.
“I will,” Vanessa says. Her throat is clogged with some fierce blot of emotion. “I will go home. I just need to see someone else, first.”
“Pickup’s about to start,” Rosie says. Vanessa can’t tell what time it is; the sky doesn’t give anything away, and neither does Rosie. “You’ll miss it.”
“I won’t,” Vanessa says. “I’ll be quick, promise.”
Vanessa gets to their feet. They’re hungry again, but they don’t dare ask Rosie if she has any sandwiches for fear that the answer will be no.
“Camp’s over,” Rosie says. There’s something almost heartbreaking in her doggedness. Vanessa leans in and kisses her on the cheek. Rosie’s skin is dry, and smells like smoke.
“I love you. I love you even if you’re turning into a weird time-travel robot who can’t break script, and I will love you even if you never tell me a single thing other than that it’s the last day of summer.”
“But it is,” Rosie says.
“You mean very, very much to me, but I have had a terrible week and you are not helping right now,” Vanessa says. “So I’m going to go hunt down Abigail and help her blow some stuff up, mkay?”
“Okay,” Rosie says helplessly. “I just don’t want you to miss pickup.”
“I kind of don’t think pickup’s ever going to happen,” Vanessa says, “but okay. I’ll be back.”
When Vanessa reaches Abigail’s little murder cabin, she knocks incessantly on the door until it swings open.
Abigail looks the way she always did, beautiful and sweatered and covered in scratches from some ill-fated raccoon encounter or another. Vanessa loves her terribly, every inch, even when the first thing she says is “What is this, The Big Bang Theory? ”
“I’m too pretty to get that reference,” Vanessa lies. “Come over here and hug me.”
Abigail obliges. “ Vanessa. My God. It’s been way too long.”
Vanessa squeezes a little harder, hands almost white against Abigail’s shoulders. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“You’re probably right,” Abigail says, unusually agreeable today. “Do you want some hot cocoa?”
“It’s August,” Vanessa says, and then it strikes her that she doesn’t know. “It is August, right?”
“Right,” Abigail says. “Wine, then. I’ve been having all of these preteen guests, I’m doing a terrible job getting through the wine. And maybe also some hot cocoa, if only as a vehicle for marshmallows.”
God, Abigail knows her so well. “All of the above, please. And will you make me some of the toast you make, with the really excellent marmalade?”
“Who do you take me for?” Without releasing Vanessa’s arms, Abigail starts the trek into the kitchen, looking like the most determined contestant in the history of three-legged races. “I’ve had some really excellent marmalade set aside for you for months.”
“As it should be,” Vanessa says, quietly thrumming with delight. “Tell me all about your summer. I hear you’ve been trying to blow some things up.”
Abigail starts to untwist the bread bag with her teeth. “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.”
Vanessa untangles herself from Abigail’s arms and hups up onto the counter. Abigail’s kitchen is overwhelmingly Abigail; there’s monster blood tracking out through the back door, zero ovens, and three different blenders. Last time Vanessa was over, she found a bag of disembodied eyeballs in the freezer instead of the pint of Rocky Road that Abigail had sworn was in there.
When Vanessa looks out the window, they can still see the formless dark of the outside. There’s no silhouettes, no outlines. It’s like a buffering video game, some part of this place that hasn’t fully loaded yet. So ready for the world to end that it didn’t even bother to come together.
But if Vanessa tears their gaze away, they can focus on Abigail, and the hanging fruit baskets, and the way the toast is almost definitely going to burn but Abigail will scrape the worst bits off into the sink, the knife against the bread a raw sound that Vanessa has come to associate with total, selfless love.
“How long has this summer been for you?” they ask.
Abigail’s shoulders stiffen then go back down again, forcedly casual. “I don’t know. Most of a year, maybe?”
Vanessa won’t look out the window. Won’t do it. The world is still here in this kitchen, and that has to be enough. “How do you tell?”
“I don’t know. I used to try to tally it, but. It felt too much like solitary confinement, you know? Me with my wall full of decade-old newspaper clippings and my porch full of incomprehensible insects, and the tally marks by the fireplace.” Abigail stirs a mug of long-cold tea left on the counter. “It started to feel like something I couldn’t walk away from. And I can’t walk away, I know I can’t walk away, but it gets--sometimes it just gets hard to take.”
Vanessa leans against the cabinets, traces intricate glyphs into the countertop with one shaking thumb. “I miss the seasons, sometimes.”
“I know!” Abigail blows on her tea, futilely, ridiculously. They both know it’s been sitting on the counter for an untold period of time, perhaps for years; there’s no point cooling it down. “Winter used to be the hardest thing in the world, but it was worth it. It never stopped snowing once, October to February. And everything got so much bigger, in the snow. Nothing cared about us or what we wanted from it. It’s what the Milky Way must look like to a moth.”
Vanessa isn’t always here for the winters, but they remember it. Somewhere, back behind this behemoth of a summer, there was snow.
The toast pops up. It’s burnt. Abigail pulls it out with her fingers, wincing the whole time at the heat. Vanessa wants to buy her a pair of toast tongs, the wood kind that won’t electrocute her, but they know Abigail would never use it. Vanessa wants to make everything better all the time, but there is some part of Abigail that balks at gestures of kindness. They’ve circled each other in this way for years--Vanessa reaching out, and Abigail darting away.
Still, the jar of really excellent marmalade is coming out of the pantry, lid tied down with a frayed blue ribbon, and Vanessa wants to cry with how unfair it is, how they can never just meet each other in the middle with their love.
“Damn, I burned it,” Abigail says, completely unapologetic, already moving toward the sink. “Give me a sec.”
“You can have all the time you need,” Vanessa says. “All the time in the world. A thousand mornings, as beautiful as you remember. You’ll let me give you that, right, Abigail? You’ll let me do that for you?”
Abigail throws them a bewildered look. “I only need, like, twenty seconds. I wasn’t even gonna scrape that much off, to be honest. It’s still going to taste burnt.”
Vanessa’s mouth has tasted burnt for days. “That’s okay. I love you. It’s all okay.”
Abigail visibly decides she doesn’t want to deal with this, turning back to the sink. The knife fumbles over the bread, only shaking a little bit in her hand.
The toast tastes amazing, and Abigail does bring out the wine. They pour generous glasses and toast every thirty seconds to something different--Vanessa, Abigail, the camp, the forest, the summer, the kids, Rosie, Rosie’s axe, the sweater that Rosie is knitting for her axe, the moon, the marmalade, the wine, the toaster, the crickets crouched in the cracks of the tiles, the one merit badge that neither of them ever got.
“To us,” Abigail says, and Vanessa clinks their glass against hers. “To still being alive, despite everything.”
“To being here,” Vanessa says. “With you.”
It’s hard to tell if time is passing or not. The sky doesn’t shift, the ground doesn’t give. The bray of cicadas outside the dark hollow of window doesn’t stop for even a moment. There’s more toast, and hot cocoa, if only as a vehicle for marshmallows. Abigail sits cross legged on the floor, and Vanessa perches on the counter, and it feels like it could have been forty years ago, crouching in the cabin after lights-out and gossiping about Chupacabras. Some half-buried instinct wants Vanessa to check the doorway for approaching counselors, and then she remembers that she’s the counselor now. It’s a disquieting feeling.
“Abigail, when did we get so old ?”
“I used to say that I was going to be forever young,” Abigail says, gaze haunted over the rim of her mug. “Then my knees got wind of that notion and shut it down real quick.”
“I don’t even remember applying to be a counselor,” Vanessa says. “I think I just sleepwalked here one year and they gave me a clipboard and a bunch of sugared-up teenagers.”
“I wish I had a clipboard,” Abigail says.
“It’s the best part of the job. Except for all the other parts of the job. But it’s the best part of the job that you can put stickers on.”
“If it helps, I don’t recall ever applying to be the weird hermit of the forest,” Abigail says.
Vanessa nods sagely. “Some are born weird hermits, some achieve weird hermitage, and some have weird hermitage thrust upon them.”
“Truer words were never spoken.” Abigail stirs her hot cocoa with her index finger, like a teenager. It occurs to Vanessa that Abigail might not actually own a spoon.
There’s a long quiet, after that. It’s not unpleasant, but it makes Vanessa a little twitchy. The clock is ticking down on this day, however nice it’s been. The end must be coming fast, faster than they can even guess.
“Speaking of counselors,” Abigail says finally. Her gaze is fixed on the window, the great gaping hole beyond it. “Rosie’s been talking to me about that.”
Vanessa pauses halfway through a bite of toast. “You and Rosie talk to each other?”
“Some changes are being made,” Abigail says. She still won’t turn around. It shouldn’t make Vanessa nervous, but it does. It reminds her of Rosie, on the hill, last day of summer and the nowhere light cleaning her face of everything that once made her recognizable. “Administerial things.”
“That’s--Rosie mentioned that,” Vanessa says. She picks at the top of her mug, accidentally breaks a bit of ceramic off between her fingers.
“Rosie’s looking to hire some new people,” Abigail says. “Folks with the right qualifications, the right experiences. It’s not a very big pool, as you might guess.”
“Right,” Vanessa says. “So we add some mandatory forest training, raise the pay a little, make sure all applicants know how to do CPR on a minotaur or something like that. We can make it work.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Abigail says.
Vanessa knows it’s not simple. Has sat on the porch of a cabin only nebulously hers, drawing bugs and smiley faces on a list of camper names and wondering if the forest will succeed in destroying her this year.
Last year, at the JoAnn’s Fabrics off of I-95, Rosie had said that she thought it was starting to become bearable. I just want the kids to be safe, she’d said, head pillowed against a skein of pale pink yarn. It’s easier now that I’ve stopped trying to do anything else.
Vanessa can’t do that. Vanessa can’t stop wanting, can’t separate the parts of her brain that find everything worth preserving. Maybe the job should go to somebody else, someone who would raze this place to the ground if it meant one more kid got to go home.
“Then tell me,” Vanessa says, heart in her throat, cocoa going cold. “Tell me what we’re going to do.”
“Are you ready to hear it?” Abigail asks, gentle, sounding exactly like the adolescent ghost in Vanessa’s brain.
Vanessa knows Abigail’s brand of kindness, and so she understands that she doesn’t actually have a choice. There’s something a little comforting in that, a feeling not unlike the realization that she was caught in a time loop; the world is ending either way, the world is ending as they speak, and after long enough of being unable to do the right thing, you become unable to do the wrong thing by default. It’s all just varying shades of pushing back the inevitable.
So Vanessa grips the edge of the counter, and tries to hold onto it, tries to hold on, while Abigail tells her what they’re going to do.
Vanessa wakes up to darkness and silence. They fumble to their feet. They can just make out the band of horizon, somewhere in the distance; the sky and ground are almost exactly the same color.
There’s nobody around for miles. Vanessa forgot to hold Rosie’s hand, last time, and now they regret it more keenly and brightly than anything else in their life.
“I’m Vivacious Vanessa,” they say. Their voice is hoarse because they haven’t spoken to anyone in six years. Their head hurts, and they’re hungry. There is literally an unfathomable amount of dirt in their bra. “My love for everything is stronger than you, so you can go to hell .”
Oh, Vanessa, croons the adolescent ghost in the back of their brain, who today sounds a little like Hes and a little like Jen. We’re already there.
Smoke wheels across the sky like a flock of blackbirds. It smells like Abigail’s toast, like bad magic, like the river smells now that it’s stopped trying to trick them into drinking it.
There’s nothing else for it, so Vanessa starts down the hill. It’s the last day of summer, and it’s time to go home.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s nothing left.
The campground is a smoking pit. The cabins that are still identifiable have collapsed in on themselves, burning weakly in the thin light. Everywhere Vanessa steps, she sinks into half an inch of water from the flooded lake. The trees have been felled, some by enormous claw marks, others to fire or falling rocks. Rosie’s cabin has been crushed so neatly by a boulder that Vanessa can’t even see any debris. Somewhere beyond it all, the forest rises into a single, hulking shadow.
If Vanessa looks at the hole in the ground where the Zodiac Cabin used to be, she might not look anywhere else for the rest of her life. So instead, she starts to walk towards the lake, thinking vaguely of merpeople and sea serpents and the things that might have survived whatever this is. The things she can still help.
The sand around the lake has turned black and ashy. Despite everything, despite every horrible thought clanging around Vanessa’s head, there’s still a little part of her that thinks oh dang, that’s cool. She scratches at her arms, trying to feel properly penitent. Trying to grieve without this stupid brain always poking at the hollows, waiting for something interesting to raise its head.
Her kids don’t deserve this. Her kids don’t deserve her. They deserve someone who loves them to the exclusion of everything else. Everyone should have that when they’re young, something that loves them so much that it would do something truly unforgivable.
When Vanessa was a kid, that was the forest. In her dreams, every night, lullabies that were half-manic, half-tender. Dreams full of fire. Dreams to introduce her to the calamitous, apocalyptic world of her love, and the places and things that loved her back.
Now, too old and too tired and too late to save anyone, wandering through the burnt trees like the world’s most useless ghost, she wishes that she never felt it at all.
The lake rises into view as they crest a hill and there, sitting on the bank, is Diane.
Vanessa stops short. Everything in her freezes, shut down by the force of its own stammering need.
Diane has scrapes all up her arms. Her hair is tied back, and there’s soot lining her back. She’s hugging her legs to her chest, blankly facing the endless dark of the lake.
Vanessa kind of trips down the hill.
Diane turns to her. There’s no surprise in her eyes--actually, there’s not much of anything in her eyes. They’re as deep and open as the sky outside Abigail’s cabin, a world constantly rejecting light. There are thin tear tracks down her face, cutting through the soot and dirt.
She looks so grown. God. Vanessa’s heart breaks, over and over again, shuddering infinitely in the cavern of their chest.
Vanessa sits down behind her, reaches out, and wraps her in their arms.
Diane shivers, curling in and squeezing Vanessa’s wrist. “Vanessa.”
“Diane.” Vanessa starts to rock back and forth, less for Diane’s comfort than for their own. They’re supposed to be the counselor here, but they don’t even know what that means anymore. Can’t think of a single damn thing they’re qualified to do.
“I tried to stop it,” Diane says, voice thick. “I tried, Vanessa, I swear.”
Vanessa pushes Diane’s hair back from where it’s sealed to her forehead with sweat. “I know.”
The insects aren’t making any noise. Probably, there aren’t any insects left to make noise. Is this what the end of summer really looks like, outside of Vanessa’s head? They can’t remember. It would make sense, though. It would fit with the rest of the world.
“Do me a favor, someday,” Vanessa says into the crown of Diane’s head, so quiet that they don’t expect her to hear a word of it, “and don’t ever come back.”
Vanessa wakes up to the sun hawking across Rosie’s glasses.
“Vanessa, it’s over,” Rosie says. Wavery, like she’s been crying. If Rosie’s been crying, it’s probably the end of the world, or at least the end of something. “You can come home.”
Vanessa sits up. The world is nauseatingly bright. The view from the top of this hill is amazing, light shedding itself across the distant circle of cabins down below. The grass is so green that it must be a trick. It feels so foreign, so distant, that all Vanessa can do is stare.
“Rosie,” she says, and that’s about as far as she gets.
“Come on,” Rosie says, as gentle as Vanessa’s ever heard her. “It’s almost noon. Pickup’s about to start.”
“It’s almost noon,” Vanessa repeats, hesitant, like learning a new language.
Rosie helps her to her feet. It’s the sort of moment that wouldn’t have been out of place when they were kids, wiping blood from the shells of each other’s ears as morning settled in. Vanessa tucks her face into the creases of Rosie’s flannel.
When you live like Vanessa does, you have to believe that the place you live is not leading you to your death. You look for the trick in the first five good things that happen to you, the first fifty, and eventually you decide that the place you live might do evil things and might put evil things into your brain, but it still wants to protect you.
So Vanessa tries not to think of this as a trick. They think of it as the forest asking for forgiveness, promising not to kill anything else, not to black out the sky again, not to swallow up another teenager.
But it’s hard, because just yesterday it was Diane at the mouth of the lake. And Vanessa thought the forest understood that, the things that were not to be touched.
Rosie smooths down a bit of Vanessa’s hair, fingers catching all the twigs. “Are you hungry? I made sandwiches.”
Vanessa smiles. It’s a little teary, but Rosie won’t tell. “I know you did.”
Behind the desk in Rosie’s cabin, Vanessa eats their sandwich in five giant bites, and then eats Rosie’s. The room looks a little warmer, more open, in the flat hand of sunlight through the window.
Somewhere in the distance, cars are reaching the campground. Vanessa can hear the tires, the slap of tennis shoes against the road. The end of summer, piling up outside these doors. The insects screaming so loud for it that Vanessa can hardly hear themself think.
“Rosie,” they say.
Rosie’s whittling again. Some strange, long-limbed bird, like something from the edges of Vanessa’s dreams. Vanessa had forgotten the things Rosie could make, her museum of brutal ecology. But Rosie also makes tables and curtain rods and the most perfect cutting boards, because Rosie is nothing if not practical, and Rosie knows how to build a life on top of salted ground.
Vanessa loves her for it, predictably.
Rosie twists the knife, and a wing starts to take shape among the scarred wood. “There’s a few things I need to give you, if you’re ready for them.”
“I’m ready,” Vanessa says, and hopes it won’t be a lie. “It’s almost noon, I’m ready.”
Rosie stands up and crosses the room without a word. She opens a drawer and reveals Vanessa’s clipboard, which sat there patiently for six years and could have sat for a thousand more. Vanessa picks it up.
In the ancient ruins of early June, Vanessa had covered it with star stickers, because she was embarrassed to give them to her cabin. She shouldn’t have been; she should have given them everything she had. One of the stickers is peeling, the only evidence that any time has passed at all.
Vanessa will take it. She’ll take it, and hold on.
They had almost made it to the threshold of the Zodiac Cabin when Vanessa stopped and turned to Rosie and said I don’t know if I can do it, because she already knew that the cabin would be empty and unforgiving in its emptiness, like a scar, like a childhood bedroom. And Rosie had said you have to.
There are some things that need to be seen to the end. Vanessa would have known that even if it wasn’t in the counselor contract, signed in purple pen all those hundred years ago.
She is on the front step of her cabin. She doesn’t know if she can do it, watch the day turn in on itself like a shy animal, watch it all begin again someplace hotter and worse and more lonely.
“Vanessa,” Rosie says. When Vanessa turns back, she’s smiling. “I love you.”
Vanessa’s heart aches, plucks, fizzes in her chest. “I love you too.”
With that, she opens the door.
The beds are unmade. The box fans are on, puttering in misaligned diligence. The pajamas, strewn over the sheets--the sticky notes with cat drawings--the Cabin Legislature, flapping innocently in the breeze--
There’s nobody here.
Vanessa rubs a hand over her eyes, imagining for a second that she’ll open them and the world will be full again. When it fails to oblige, she reminds herself that getting what she wants is a bad sign.
“Why do you keep them from me?” she asks the room at large. “Why can’t I--why can’t I just see them? Just once?” She thinks of Diane, soot blurring the lines of her face. “Why can’t I get one good day with them?”
No response from the shadows, the doors, the forty scornful cat faces on the walls.
“Okay,” she says, heaving a sigh that would make any teenager proud. “I get it. I’ll be back.”
You’ll be back, agrees the adolescent ghost in her brain, which today sounds exactly like the screech of a screen door.
Vanessa clomps off the porch and lies down in the grass. They can almost imagine that it’s morning again, Rosie cresting the hill, the sun bright and harsh in her glasses. They throw an arm over their eyes, like an overwrought figure in a Renaissance painting, and try to focus on just making this last.
A grasshopper flings itself onto their chest, its web of compound eyes fixed to the horizon, and Vanessa could cry. This place is always asking for forgiveness, and Vanessa is the kind of fool who will always give it.
“Hello,” they say to the grasshopper, which ignores them with great dignity. “You look wonderful today. Really love the pants.”
“I hope you’re not talking to me, child.”
Vanessa startles, and then valiantly tries to pretend that she didn’t. “I’m sure your pants are great, Nellie.”
“Hm.” Nellie looks--the same. That’s kind of reassuring, actually. She’s standing in the hock of trees, face twisted into one of her kinder scowls. “Let’s not discuss my pants.”
“Works for me.” Vanessa crawls into a sitting position. “Are you here because I have to chat with the Ghosts of Summers Past, Present, and Future before I can change my life for the better?”
“Don’t try to make a morality tale out of me,” Nellie says, with the air of someone who has to say that a lot.
“Dickens should’ve added more bears, ” Vanessa says, not yet willing to let the bit go.
Nellie settles down into the grass. Sometimes, Vanessa can almost see the camp director in her, the woman who examined them ruthlessly for breaks in conduct and appearance. Vanessa doesn’t want to think about how long it’s been for her, what kind of time could turn someone like that into someone like this. The old Nellie never sat in the grass. It would’ve stained her skirt.
“Children think all their experiences are unique,” Nellie says. “We can’t begrudge them that, because we were the same way. But when you grow up, you realize that the real tragedy is that everything always happens the exact same way. The world repeats itself, and you’re stuck. You know too much to ignore what’s happening, and too little to prevent it.”
Camp rumors used to say that Nellie could set a whole swath of trees on fire with just a glare. Vanessa thinks she can see it, that light. The things that would destroy themselves just because Nellie made it so.
“I used to think that death would be preferable to letting this place go,” Nellie says, voice low. “And then I died many hundreds of times, and I still thought it. I went to the forest, where every day it smelled less like the place I grew up. And I said, I must be very foolish, to fight so hard for you.
“And then it said the same to me.”
Vanessa leans into Nellie’s side. They don’t think they would have done that before today. Maybe not even before today’s version of today. But their feet hurt and they’re tired and their desire for a hug has transcended all common sense.
“Oh, child,” Nellie says into Vanessa’s hair. “I tried to protect you, too.”
Again, Vanessa ends up sitting on the front step of the Zodiac Cabin, staring out into the forest.
“Nothing’s going to change,” they try to tell Nellie. “I’m never going to be allowed to see them.”
“Maybe so.” Nellie presses the clipboard back into Vanessa’s hands. “You dropped this.”
Vanessa picks it up. Turns it over in her hands, watching the star stickers blink and fritz in the sunlight. The list of campers, diligently marked with her own notes on nicknames, pronunciation, pronouns. At the bottom, someone else has written in Barney’s name. Maybe Rosie. Maybe Hes.
“It’s the end of summer,” Vanessa says. Her voice is hoarse even to her own ears.
“They’re waiting for you,” Nellie agrees. “You just have to find them.”
Vanessa stands up. Dusts off her pants. Scrapes some mud off the bottom of her sandals, which are both waterproof and have excellent traction.
Then, she walks back into the dark grimace of the forest.
It’s possible that Vanessa wanders for days, although unlikely. Time in the forest usually warps in subtler ways. It’s up in the mountains where you really have to worry, where scratching your shoulder can take five months and generations of hares rise and die within the hour.
Regardless, Vanessa walks, and time splits itself sideways against the trees, and then it is almost noon and almost time for pickup, and a clearing opens up, with a pair of squabbling three-headed snakes and--
Vanessa does an instinctual headcount, but she doesn’t need to. They’re all here.
“Vanessa!” Hes crows. The grin that cleaves her face is the most amazing thing Vanessa has ever seen. “Vanessa! You’re back!”
The others jump in, all at once.
“Vanessa! Come place your bets, I think the red snake’s gonna win--”
“--Emily doesn’t know what she’s talking about, the green one has gumption --”
Overwhelmed, unable to articulate a single thing, Vanessa opens their arms. Hes comes crashing in, laughing and shouting.
“Hes,” Vanessa says. “I can’t--I can’t believe you’re here.”
Hes looks up. Her smile is impossibly wide. “I can’t believe you’re here! I’m so glad you’re okay.”
Vanessa has spent six years on the bank of a cursed river, knowing in her heart that she was being kept on the edges as the forest squirreled away the people she loved. She hadn’t realized that Hes felt the same way.
But of course she did. Against all odds, Vanessa does remember what it was like to be a kid.
“I have so much to tell you,” Hes continues. “I knew you would come back. I knew it--nothing can beat you. You’re Vanessa .”
I’m Vivacious Vanessa, Vanessa thinks, distant, running a thumb over the line of Hes’ neck. I haven’t forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten you.
“Oh!” Hes says. “You have to meet Barney! Come here.”
“Barney,” Vanessa says, shaking their hand. “You have no idea what an absolute privilege and delight it is to meet you.”
Barney is short and smiley. They look at ease, like this place has been good to them. “It’s nice to meet you too,” they say, manners still untarnished by the time spent in the Zodiac Cabin. Vanessa is impressed.
“I heard that you’ve been terribly-behaved all summer,” Vanessa says to the group at large. “Couldn’t be prouder of you. Also, those snakes aren’t fighting.”
“What--oh, gross ,” Wren says, dropping her bookie notebook.
“That’s okay,” Mackenzie says, placing a comforting hand on Wren’s shoulder. “We were wrapping up anyway.”
“Good,” Vanessa says. “Come on back. Pickup’s about to start.”
Vanessa helps strip the beds, clear the decorations, turn the box fans off. She helps coax the cat out from under Barney’s bed. She opens the windows to air out some of the intense Gatorade smell. Then, she takes off her shoes and sits on the steps with her clipboard balanced on her knees.
Incredibly, shockingly, pickup actually does start. Parents trickle in slowly, making amicable small talk with Vanessa while their kids desperately try to find the last missing socks. Vanessa makes up vague anecdotes when people ask what did you all do this summer, drawing on decades of experience.
Lots of crafts, she says. Hikes, nature walks, board games. Pretty low-key year, to be honest.
As they leave, Vanessa peels stickers off her clipboard, sticking one to each kid’s cheek. They’re a fabulous galaxy, her cabin. She wouldn’t want any other.
Mackenzie crawls into the backseat of a car loaded down with at least thirty baffling bumper stickers. Wren and Emily get their duffel bags swapped, somehow, and both come rushing back to exchange. Barney clutches a cat carrier to their chest, insisting that Marigold is both hypoallergenic and an excellent mouser. Diane gets into the back of an ornately-sculpted chariot, and the gold of her receding silhouette couldn’t be more different than the girl curled at the edge of the lake.
Eventually, Hes comes out and sits next to Vanessa on the steps.
“It’s been a really good summer,” she says. “I, um. I hope it’s been good for you, too.”
Six years, at the bank of a river that pulled at the corners of their brain. Six years of this wonderful, terrible place. “I’ve been just fine, Hes. I only wish I could have been here for more of it.”
“Me too,” Hes says. “But I guess we both did okay.”
“You did great ,” Vanessa says. “I am so, so proud of you.”
Hes smiles again, that huge and wonderful smile. Vanessa hadn’t forgotten it, exactly, but the memory had started to blur. They’re glad to get a refresher.
“Hey,” Hes says. She’s looking at her sneakers, which are covered in grass stains and plastic beads. A souvenir of a summer. “Um, I wanted some advice, actually.”
Vanessa closes their eyes. Tries to hold onto it, this last innocent moment.
Hes scratches the back of her neck. “Rosie asked me--um, she and I were talking about next summer--”
The hardest part about time loops, Vanessa thinks, is that even the new things cannot be fully new. Nothing is ever unexpected. Vanessa had resigned herself to this whole day, all its beauty and evil, before it even started.
But still, even as the world warps and flips and tries to shift back into familiar patterns, there are rules that must be followed. There are things that are not to be touched.
“Hes, I’ve asked you to do a hundred hard things this summer, things that I never should have asked of you.” The adolescent ghost howls in the back of Vanessa’s head like a wounded animal, over and over, forever and a day. “I hope someday you’ll forgive me for asking one more, and when you leave, don’t come back.”
Hes doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t look up. Her feet tap, anxious, against the base of the step.
It’s too much to ask, yes, but Vanessa had to ask anyway. It’s been six years and a summer, one day and ten. It has to have been enough.
Silently, Hes reaches out and pulls a sticker from the back of the clipboard. With one thumb, she presses it to Vanessa’s cheek.
And then, while Vanessa is still frozen with an all-consuming grief, Hes stands up and slings her backpack across her shoulders. She looks like an adult, backlit by the sun glinting off the hoods of the cars.
“I’ll try,” she says. “I really will.”
“That’s all I can ask,” Vanessa says. “Take care of yourself, scout.”
Hes pulls her to her feet and wraps her in a bone-crushing hug.
Vanessa wraps her arms around Hes’ shoulders and squeezes. Tries to remember if she was this brave, as a kid. Probably not, but maybe; all children are exceptionally brave, just to come out and exist in the world.
Eventually, Hes releases her, still with the ghost of a smile, and walks towards the camp entrance.
Vanessa tucks her arms around herself. The grass is writhing with insects, a thousand tiny jubilant scenes. The sky is so blue that nobody would believe her if she told them so. A passing car upsets the blackbirds roosting in a nearby tree; they take to the air like an inflating lung.
“It’s the end of summer,” she tells them all, Rosie and Abigail and Nellie, the grasshoppers, the ground, the adolescent ghost. “It’s time to go home.”
And with that, she sets off into the forest again.