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Love was an alien concept to Vee.
Love was a strange word, though. Three and Four, the other basilisks she’d escaped Belos with definitely cared for her, but they were gone now. She was here - in the Human Realm! - at the gates of a summer camp being hugged goodbye by a woman who thought Vee was her runaway daughter.
“Stay safe, mija! Take lots of pictures for me!”
That was love for Luz, not her. It didn't count. “I will, mamá!”
The gates of Reality Check Summer Camp were wide open, scared human teens - and some even younger - waving goodbye. A bitter wind swept across the rough ground and Vee was grateful for the soft turquoise cardigan that she’d found in one of the bags Luz had left behind. With one last look to Camila, strangely scared to leave her, Vee turned, dragging her suitcase, and fell into line behind a teen with messy brown hair and bright eyes.
Following them through the wrought-iron gates, she found herself in a field littered with footprints and daisies. She allowed herself to spin around slowly, again and again, dropping the masquerade for a second to take in everything around her. Colours like this didn’t exist in the Demon Realm, and Vee was desperate to decipher as much of the world as she could.
“Careful!” laughed the teen beside her, and Vee almost fell over. “You’re going to get all dizzy!”
A bolt of fear shot through Vee's chest. “Is that like… a disease?”
To her surprise, they laughed. “No, silly! Look.”
Grabbing her hands, they began to spin and so did Vee, faster and faster until the camp was just a flash surrounding the two of them and Vee was laughing and laughing, barely aware of anything anymore and resolving secretly to show this to the other basili-
The pair collapsed on the grass, their laughter fading as they caught their breath.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
An easy lie. “Luz.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I've seen you at school before. You like fantasy stuff, right?” Vee nodded - another lie. She didn't even know what fantasy was .
“The name’s Masha,” they smiled, propping themselves up on their elbows. It wasn't long before the sound of a bell echoed through the camp and the gates were dragged shut with a screech behind them.
No going back now.
“ Freedom,” Masha sighed, starry-eyed. “Oh look, they’re assigning cabins - you have to be in mine!”
A few minutes later, Masha was proudly holding a scrap of paper with their names scribbled onto it.
“We need two more people,” they sighed thoughtfully. “Any other outcasts around? Oh, Luz, look-”
A boy with a dark fringe falling over his eyes and a girl with short auburn hair and glasses sat together opposite them, the boy plaiting blades of grass and the girl staring off into the distance.
Masha waved to them excitedly, calling their names. “Erin! Lukas! Have you two got a cabin yet?”
The girl lifted her head and waved, grabbing the boy’s hand and the guitar case resting beside him and pulling both over to where Vee and Masha sat.
“Not yet,” the girl - Erin - sighed. “Have you?”
In response, Masha held up the crumpled form like it was a priceless artefact, which to Vee it kind of was. “ Voila! Do you want to join us?”
“Oh, absolutely!” Erin grinned, high-fiving Lukas.
Masha scribbled their names down too, then grabbed Vee’s hand again and dragged her over to the cabins.
Oh Titan, Vee thought the second she set her eyes on them, why do they have to be numbered?
The number seven hung above the door before her like an omen, the metal glinting in the midday sunlight. Digging her nails into her skin, Vee took a deep breath and tried to force away the image of Number Seven, but it was no use - all she could see was his dark, empty eyes and the thick, crimson pools of basilisk blood, so much blood, blood that would be her own when the others found out about her-
“Luz?”
Lukas’ voice came from the doorway - closing her eyes, Vee turned away from the number and towards the others. Her heart - no, Luz’s heart? - was beating frantically in her chest, but there was no way she could ever let herself tell them.
She found herself in a small, square room, twin bunk beds pressed against each wood-panelled wall and a cabinet with four drawers resting in the sun under the window. Masha was balancing precariously on it, stringing up fairy lights - “If we’re going to be here for three months, everything has to at least look cool!” - whilst Erin was laughing, sitting cross-legged on the rug in the middle of the room and unpacking her bags, soon joined by Lukas.
Vee followed suit, unzipping Luz’s suitcase. It felt strange to be going through her things like this - folding colourful t-shirts for bands she’d never heard of, tucking a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses she'd never worn neatly into her allocated drawer, puzzling over a small coven of extremely inaccurate figurines of witches that meant nothing to her.
After spending the rest of the day in a series of beautifully mundane grey-brick buildings studying taxes and the economy, Vee found herself leaning over the edge of her bunk, the moon - just one moon, imagine! - hanging white-gold outside the window. As Masha sat cross-legged on the rug, telling electrifying stories of the camp’s resident ghosts as they painted their nails in an alternating pattern of yellow, white, purple and black, Vee found herself staring. Her eyes drifted dazedly from one thing to another: Masha's round ears, the gentle waves of their messy hair, the way they focused so intently on their nails even as feathers drifted onto their head from Erin and Lukas’ pillow fight on the top bunk opposite. There was something about Masha that was drawing Vee hopelessly in, and she found herself suddenly wishing, with all the heart that didn't belong to her, that she was a human.
"What's wrong, Luz?"
Vee had no choice but to shake her head and smile. She was working things out now, like a bird beginning to test its wings. Erin was sincere, straightforward, and better at singing than she liked to admit. Her best friend since childhood, Lukas, was calm and quiet, in addition to being a talented guitarist. And Masha was… well, to Vee? They were everything.
Wrapped in Luz’s soft pyjamas, Vee curled up on her bed. She was just dozing off into uneasy sleep when Masha appeared, popping their head over the slats of Vee’s bunk with a laugh.
“Luz! You’re not falling asleep yet, are you?” They brushed Vee's hand with their thumb, their nail polish half-dried. “It’s only just eleven, come and sit with us!”
So Vee followed them to the semicircle on the rug, falling into place with Masha and Lukas on either side, tiny white feathers - the remnants of the pillow fight - blanketing the ground. An empty bottle lay in the centre between them, and Masha was tossing a pack of worn cards from one hand to the other. Sitting cross-legged beside them, Vee could almost swear the air was tinged with the sweet alien scent of magic - but, then again, the nightmares that plagued her every night weren't real, why would this be? Once again, Vee tried to forget the Demon Realm, tried to forget the thought.
That was, until the bottle landed on Erin and Masha placed one of the cards down in front of her. An image of a skeleton stared upwards, and a long-repressed memory flickered to the surface of Vee’s mind.
“You're not fortified by the Titan’s Skeleton. I play… the Archivist Moon!”
Stars exploded across the stone floor, tearing the rival cards to shreds.
Two guards had played this game for hours in front of Vee’s cage, back in the prison - Hexes Hold ’Em.
Now the three others pored over the card, trying to decipher its meaning into a question.
"A skeleton - what's the closest you've been to death?" Lukas asked mysteriously.
"Let's see," grinned Erin, ticking them off on her fingers. "There was the roller skating incident, oh, and the time I fell off that rock-climbing wall…"
Her voice faded away, deafened by a humming in Vee's ears. What did she know about Luz? What could she say? How much did the others know about the real Luz? She couldn't risk being found out. Not after everything.
“Masha!” she found herself saying. “What if I show you how to actually play this game?”
She picked up the pack of cards, drew one, and tried to shuffle them like she’d watched the guards do.
“This one,” she pointed to the card she had just drawn, “is called the Archivist Moon. It destroys any rival cards unless they’re fortified by this card,” she pointed to Erin’s, “the Titan’s Skeleton.”
Masha leant over and drew another card, handing it to Vee with their eyes sparkling. “And this one?”
Vee studied the card, which portrayed a red demon not unlike some she’d stolen from back in Bonesborough. “Oh, this is the wild card. It animates all of your cards and makes them fight until…”
For the second time that night, Vee froze.
‘Animates’? ‘Makes them fight’?
“I-, I just meant-”
But Masha was smiling, unfazed. “Until what?”
“Until one side wins. Of course, that’s pretty much always the side which played the wild card.”
Good save, Vee congratulated herself.
“Can we play?” asked Erin, and Vee nodded.
Eventually, a game was in full swing - Masha and Vee against Erin and Lukas. However, it wasn’t long until Masha and Erin’s unrelenting rivalry took over, and Lukas fell asleep on his bunk, Vee finding herself dozing off on Masha’s shoulder.
She finally climbed into her bunk a few minutes past midnight, when Masha had woken her up and whispered that everyone else was asleep.
Her sleep was fractured, though.
Emperor Belos tore open the door of her cage, twisting the metal bars like they were violin strings. Vee, trapped in her basilisk form, cowered beneath him, a gilded cage of rats before her. She couldn't drain - she tried, tore her lungs to shreds, but the power was gone. The Emperor took off his mask, but beneath, there was no face - in its place, a shifting array of safety: Masha, Erin, Lukas, Camila. All staring at her with eyes that bled hatred, their voices echoing the number five.
Vee awoke with a start, shoving off the soft blankets and drawing her knees - thank Titan, she hadn't transformed back - up to her chest. Her nightmares were usually almost comical in their dramatics, but she couldn't shake those eyes from her mind. Vee climbed down from the bunk and slipped into the bathroom, staring into the cracked mirror that hung above the sink. She was a liar and a fraud and it would make sense if they looked at her like that. After her lies, she would never come close to deserving their love.
She pulled off Luz’s soft cardigan. There were very few things basilisks couldn’t transform into existence or out of it - namely warm clothes, tattoos or piercings, and scars. Vee’s chameleonic scales were peppered with scars - one vivid and raised across her shoulder, snaking down to her elbow, from a hazy memory of a sharp mechanical staff before her very first draining. Another ran perfectly straight across both her ankles - a missed strike before she’d escaped. Many more shone against her skin - spell scars like an array of tiny fireworks.
Time seemed as alien as the Human Realm to Vee then, staring into the mirror at the face of someone she didn't know at all. It was only when gentle guitar music drifted into the bathroom through the half-open window that Vee finally let go of the ceramic. She crept through the open front door to see - who else? - Lukas sitting on the wooden steps of the cabin, playing soft chords that rose and fell with his breath.
“Hey, Lukas.”
The music stopped abruptly and Lukas turned to face Vee, looking guilty.
“Luz! Sorry for waking you up. I forgot to shut the door.”
Vee sat down, cross-legged, beside him. “No, it’s okay - I was already up.”
“Oh, I thought I was the only insomniac in this cabin,” he sighed with a half-laugh.
Vee had spent the entire week pretending to understand words she’d never heard in her life, but now she was curious. Maybe it was exhaustion - or the lingering adrenaline from earlier - warping her mind, but for once she didn't mind sounding a bit alien. “What's that?”
“Insomniac? Someone who can't sleep.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess that’s me too.”
“I usually just come and sit here ‘til I feel like I’m gonna fall asleep again. It’s nice to have some company, though.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“Lukas?”
“Hm?”
“It’s nice here.”
Lukas picked up his guitar again and continued playing. “It is.”
As the notes drifted through the cold night air, Vee found herself staring upwards at the number seven above the door, metal glinting in the moonlight. It was still stained with the memory of blood, and maybe it always would be, but underneath the red it held the faces of Masha, Erin, and Lukas - Cabin Seven - and that was enough for Vee.
It was sunset two weeks later, during the most exciting activity yet - counting how many trees there were in the camp’s forest - when Vee found herself paired up with Erin, whose gentle humming as she scraped the spiderwebs from the trees made Vee's breath catch as she imagined being that free and calm, with no past hunting her down like a pack of wild griffins.
Erin handed her clunky old camera to Vee - she and Masha, forever rivals, were competing to see who could take photos of all of the camp’s different spiders.
"You know, you're not how I imagined you’d be, Luz," she stated simply, pulling silvery strings from her clothes.
Vee tried to look surprised. "Hm?"
"I mean, no offence, but me and Lukas always thought you were avoiding people. Your performance in Romeo and Juliet last year was amazing, and even your book report was cool, but you seemed to spend all of your time on your own, just reading those fantasy books. We thought you didn't even want friends."
For the first time, a kind of bitterness towards Luz welled up in Vee. Her life seemed so good . She followed Erin, eyes flicking back and forth between the trees, counting as she searched for the glint of silk in the last of the day’s sunlight.
“One hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-one…”
"You're nothing like the Luz I thought I knew."
A week ago, Vee would have frozen, would have dug her nails into her turquoise sleeves and stammered an apology. But now, with a laugh that almost felt real, Vee seized the camera in Erin’s hands and held it high above her head. And suddenly, as Erin laughed, Vee felt light for the first time in her life .
"Am I not?" she smiled.
She watched the sunset gleam against the camera's glass lens before taking off running, picking no particular direction, following where the ground was dappled with golden light from the sunset through the leaves.
As the sound of Erin’s footsteps caught up with her, she swung onto a low-hanging branch and - missing her tail, for once - pulled herself up between the leaves. From here, she could see farther, between the trees, to a wide, circular glade where the grass had been worn away. Curiosity peaked, she edged along the branch and, climbing down, made her way towards it, her footsteps silent on the soft earth.
Dragonflies hummed around Vee’s head as she stepped into the glade. Trees surrounded her in a perfect circle, dandelions and daisies staring blankly from the outskirts like spectators in an amphitheatre, faint yellow in the darkening light, waiting for a fight. The ground felt rough and uneven beneath Vee’s canvas shoes - glancing down, she saw it peppered in prints, twin ovals leaning towards one another.
“Masha and Lukas are just catching up, so-” Erin’s voice drifted into the glade behind her. “Oh, woah.”
She paused beside Vee, gazing around. “Masha would call this magical.”
A shadow fell across the ground, and Vee’s words died on her lips before she’d even had the chance to find them.
Antlers. Belos.
Vee screamed, sharp and painful and involuntary. Blindly, she stumbled towards Erin, vaguely aware of her shouts and Masha’s voice in the distance. Deep grey clouds began to coast over the moon as the sun dipped gently below the horizon.
Darkness had almost completely descended on them now. Erin was moving away, her voice a signal, steady and calm, but to Vee, everything sounded like it was underwater. Trying to find her way towards her in the half-light, she stumbled over a log, and as she caught her balance she came face to face with… them .
A horde of beasts stared silently at her, twisted antlers silhouetted against the indigo sky.
Belos. Belos and the guards .
Vee's hands shot up of their own accord. It took everything in her power not to transform back - shapeshifting was always punished. She was about to surrender when voices came from behind her, breaking through the cloud of her mind.
"Luz?"
“Luz!”
Darting backwards, shoes slipping and tears burning, Vee almost collided with a dark flash that thundered towards her, before a pair of arms caught her waist and pulled her into the shadows of a hollow tree.
" Luz."
"Masha."
“Elk. We’ve gotta go.”
For a moment, they stood silent, the only sounds winding their way into the hollow tree were the faint humming of cicadas, the thundering of hooves and a stream of sharp, frantic shouts, all muffled by the drumming of blood in Vee’s head. She turned to Masha, who had pulled their shirt sleeves over their hands and was furiously ripping apart the brambles, face pressed up to a gap between the thorns where shadows sent the faint moonlight flashing, blind to the rivulet of blood dripping down their cheek.
“I think Erin and Lukas managed to get back. That, or they got skewered.” They turned to Vee, determination etched all over their face. “We should try to follow them before these guys get even more freaked out.”
Tearing wreaths of brambles from the fabric of her clothes, trying to ignore the pinpricks of scarlet across her hands, Vee, following Masha's lead, tried to fight her way from the cove of cracked wood - only to be faced with a silhouette twice their size looming beyond. Vee staggered backwards, slamming into the rough bark behind her.
A runaway basilisk had no reason to be happy.
Masha shrank back as the ground shook again, face unreadable in the darkness but voice clear, cracking as they spoke.
"I don't know what to do."
“Me too,” Vee whispered in response. How could she put them - them all - in danger? Luz’s voice tasted like acid in her mouth.
But her voice was one of the things she could control.
“Masha,” Vee began, finding their wrist in the darkness, “Do loud noises scare these demons?”
A shaky, stifled laugh came from beside her. “Demons? But yeah, I think so.” They paused. Vee took a deep breath. “Why? We don't have any-”
“Can you cover your ears?”
As Vee transformed her vocal cords, completely lost, trying to do the opposite of what she’d do before softly telling stories to Number Seven through the bars of his cage - she realised that there was something liberating in finally shapeshifting again, even if it was invisible to the eye: not for Belos, not for the Golden Guard, not to steal and survive, but for herself and Masha, for Erin and Lukas.
So as the whistle poured from her mouth, fierce and sirenic, Vee knew that it could stun a Titan, let alone scare away a herd of elk with antlers like the Emperor.
“Luz!”
She and Masha ran back to the cabin hand-in-hand, ears ringing as they followed the faint shapes of Erin and Lukas in the distance.
“Thanks,” Masha grinned, ducking beneath a branch which scattered their hair with leaves.
“It’s okay, it- it was nothing!”
They turned back to Vee, their eyes sparkling. “It was incredible. I’ll never forget it.”
They collapsed on the steps of the cabin beside Erin and Lukas, the only sound the hazy fluorescent light above them humming and flickering as moths danced around it.
Masha stifled a laugh, shaking green-gold leaves from their hair. "That was wild!"
"It was pretty cool," admitted Lukas with a smile.
Vee stayed silent, now, fighting the adrenaline, her mind searching for structure, searching for orders-
“Erin,” she breathed. “We never found the fifth kind of spider.”
“No need,” smiled Erin, brushing a steak of blood from beneath her eye and pointing to Vee’s wrist.
There, perched on the cuff of her turquoise cardigan, was a tiny brown spider.
An hour later, the four were sitting close together on the rug between the twin bunk beds. Vee, as always, was dozing off on Masha’s shoulder. The adrenaline of the forest had finally worn off, leaving her bones feeling like palistrom wood beneath her skin. Masha’s fingers were flicking to and fro as they wove a bracelet of orange, white and pink, Lukas was lazily strumming on his guitar, and Erin was humming to herself as she flicked through photos on her phone of her dog back home. As Masha rolled up their sleeve to tie one of their bracelets around it, Vee could see the plasters that ran across her lower arm, carefully placed by Vee to cover up the thorns’ work. Reminded once again of her stunt in the forest, Vee felt a void burn in her chest. Withdrawing from the achingly peaceful scene, Vee tucked the Hexes Hold ‘Em cards into the pocket of her cardigan and, sitting in the hallway and fighting off her guilt, replenished her store of magic as much as she could, before slipping back into the room and joining Masha once more.
Just before she fell asleep that night, just after breathing a soft good night to the others and climbing up the ladder of her bunk, freezing cold but warm inside, Vee slipped her hand under her pillow to pull out the steadily growing pile of crumpled paper stashed beneath it. She brushed the creases from the spider photos with finger and thumb before turning her attention to the rest. It was on the first few nights, when she’d be kept awake for hours and hours by her frantic mind, that she would distract herself by obsessively scrawling in a half-full spiral-bound notebook she’d found tucked in a hoodie of Luz’s. Each morning, battling exhaustion and a tinge of embarrassment, she would tear out all of her pages, leaving the book clean again - clean and Luz’s, Luz’s so she could come back and live her own life again, Luz’s and free from Vee’s marring - mutilation of it, of her life.
Now the notebook lay safe and untouched on the top of the chest of drawers, and Vee’s pages lay on her lap, crumpled and torn from nights of restless sleep.
Most were writing - trying to perfect her human handwriting, trying to make it as neat as possible, trying to to make it fit with what the camp counsellors etched out on the blackboards. She had spilled out as much as she could onto the pages - her thoughts, mainly, sometimes passages from the books she had read in the Demon Realm that she was unable to shake from her head, even at times the sentences Masha mumbled in their sleep from the bunk beneath her. Eventually, what had been constructed was handwriting that was almost painfully meticulous, not worlds away from the swirling fonts of the Emperor’s decrees that had been plastered outside her cage.
Then there were the drawings. Even back in the prison, Vee had never been much one for art, and she doubted that that was going to change. What she had managed to create was an amalgamation of fear - the faces of Three and Four, the basilisks she’d escaped with; spiders spilling from the eyes of the Emperor’s mask; recreation of the Owl Lady’s wanted poster in smudged pencil; a careful drawing of Luz, a reminder of her reflection in the mirror.
Vee sighed at the pages before crumpling them up and tossing them into the bin across the room. To not think about the Demon Realm, she had to not draw the Demon Realm.
Vee picked up her pencil and set to work on a drawing of a cat. Maybe she was getting better at this whole human thing.
The next thing she knew, Masha’s voice was piercing her dreams. Dreams?
“Luz! Luz!”
Vee awoke with a start - she must have fallen asleep, then - and opened her eyes to Masha’s face only a few inches away, peeking between the slats of her bunk. They had a habit of appearing out of the blue.
“Masha?” Vee glanced at the clock above the door - the weakest rays of dawn lit it from below. “It's five in the morning, why are you up?”
“Want to come on a walk with me?”
“What?” Now it was Vee’s turn to laugh. “No way!”
It took thirty seconds for Masha to persuade her otherwise and three minutes for the pair to get ready. Then they were stepping out onto the hazy mist of dawn, chasing each other through the dewy grass and scribbling their initials in permanent marker on the wall of their cabin - a wobbly L, in Vee’s case, that looked a little like a V if you tilted your head just right.
She discovered that looking at her initial didn’t hurt that much anymore.
When soft rain began to fall, the pair ran to the shelter of the forest. There were more leaves than ever now, blanketing the ground - looking up, a canopy of red and orange shielded them from the palest teal sky above.
The Human Realm never stopped changing.
“Oh, Luz! ”
The next thing Vee knew, ice-cold water was swirling across her ankles. Masha was doubled over on the bank of the stream, laughing and laughing, looking impossibly beautiful.
Well, beautiful and… unsuspecting.
“Get in here, dork!”
Vee grabbed Masha’s wrists and pulled them into the water beside her.
“You-!”
At least they were both laughing now.
They followed the river as far as it would take them, shoes in hand, Masha holding up the hem of their skirt as the water rushed past. At times, it lined up perfectly with the scars across Vee’s ankles. She found that she didn't really mind.
A dragonfly hummed past as the river became a stream, a brook, a tiny creek that trickled away between tall trees and dandelions. Vee followed Masha out of the water, crouching down to pull on her shoes. The ground felt rough under her fingertips: she lifted her hand.
Twin ovals leaning towards one another.
“Masha.”
“Luz!” Their voice came from behind - Masha was a few metres away, staring into the shadows of a hollow tree. The hollow tree.
A pair of shed antlers lay between them like an omen. The glade bled fear. Vee had to get her feet off of the tainted ground, had to run away from everything again.
Masha took a step forward, eyes straying to the antlers before them for a second before they kicked them aside with their black Mary Janes. “What’s wrong? I mean, I get it if you wanna go back.”
Yes, Vee’s mind screamed. Yes, yes, yes.
Instead, she held out her hand to Masha, and gestured towards the tallest tree overlooking the glade.
“I don't like confrontations.” Masha slipped their hand into hers. “However, I can climb trees.”
Masha’s eyes sparkled.
Back in the Demon Realm, after her escape, Vee had slept wherever she could - very often in trees, or on roofs, curled up under the stars. Heights felt safe; climbing was the gateway to that safety. Now she moved like lightning, hands flying one after another, grabbing onto every available branch as she launched herself higher and higher, as if an invisible anchor had finally begun to be lifted from her past. Her own sails propelled her further, until the branches thinned and Vee found herself alone in the sky, clinging to the tip of the tree trunk.
From here, she could see the entire camp. A flurry of green and orange flooded over the landscape, untouched but for the faraway cabins and buildings, as small as bug-demons’ houses. The first rays of sunlight were just emerging over the horizon. The sun had first seen her emerge from a portal, shaking and scared; last seen her running from the elk, frantic and terrified. Now it saw her trying to break her chains, trying to forge a path, loving and being loved under the sky.
Vee had found this place: found this life. A kind of peaceful elation flooded over her, unbroken until Masha called from below.
“How did you even get up there?”
They sat together on a slightly lower branch now, legs dangling down and grazing the tips of the smaller trees. Masha had lost one shoe on the climb - they were still trying to persuade Vee to ditch one too.
“I said I like climbing trees!” Vee shrugged with a smile.
Masha grinned. “You are a girl of many mysteries.”
“I am.”
As the sun began to rise past the haze of rain, the silence that fell between the pair was strangely comfortable. Vee had spent the past months constantly trying to keep up a terrifying masquerade, and even if she wasn’t out of the woods yet - metaphorically or literally - the chance to just… stop was more than welcome. She turned her gaze to Masha, who was staring down in awe at the glade below them.
“Luz, look.”
A herd - the herd - of elk were gathering in the glade. Vee followed Masha’s gaze to the centre of the herd, where three tiny calves stayed shyly by their parents’ sides. Their orange-brown coats were almost the exact shade of the leaves that now drifted in the breeze, freckled with flecks of white.
“They were just looking after their kids,” Masha breathed.
One of the calves began to chase a swallowtail that flew just out of its reach, the way it stumbled over its own legs reminding Vee, she realised with a smile, somewhat of herself.
She didn't know if she’d ever be able to bring herself to go near an elk, but from fifty feet up, and with Masha…
Vee took in the elaborate patterns adorning their favourite black skirt, torn and splashed with mud as of the night before. A dark streak of red was just visible on the hem.
“I’m sorry I ruined it the first time.”
“Are you kidding? You didn't ruin it!”
“Masha, I've freaked out at every little thing for nearly three months now.”
Masha took Vee’s hands tightly. “You've never ruined anything. Ever.”
They paused, before continuing, “I didn't even want to come here that badly this year. My parents always think it'll get me to be more ‘ladylike’, whatever that's supposed to mean. Last year was cool, but I mainly stuck to myself. But, I don't know, you seemed so… different.”
Vee squeezed their hand. “Should I take that as a compliment?”
Masha’s dark-bright eyes meet Vee’s. “Yes,” they nod seriously. “Definitely.”
The pair stared at one another for an unbroken moment. Masha tilted her head to the side with a grin, returned by Vee, who laughed.
“I'm glad I met you.”
Silken gold rays of sun burst over the trees. Fine grey rain still fell. This would never be called fair weather, but it was beautiful.
“All of you.”
Vee finally felt like a bird who had at long last learned to fly: and then suddenly, in a flurry of campfires and Cabin Seven chants, tearful goodbyes and scribbled phone numbers, it was all over.
Coming home from camp felt a little like dying. Vee gazed out of the car window in a daze as Camila pulled out of the car park, watching her cabin get smaller and smaller until it faded away into the tangerine colours of the trees beyond. What she had made her whole life was slipping away from her, disappearing in a blur around a corner for at least three seasons, likely a lifetime.
“Are you okay, cariño? You’ve been very quiet, missing your friends already?”
Vee nodded. She didn’t know how to explain it all - how the camp was almost as painful to leave as her friends, how she knew every tree and every cabin, how it was the first place she'd ever known that felt like a home. How she wasn’t even Camila’s daughter, no matter how much she wished she was. Fighting tears, she stared fixedly out of the window, until the car slowed and Camila suddenly wrapped her arms around her.
“It’ll be okay, Luz. Te prometo.”
Maybe she was right. Vee rested her head against the glass and watched the streets of Gravesfield sail past.
She wasn’t herself, but she was loved.