Chapter Text
It goes like this: Heather, despite her general annoyance for sunburn and mosquitoes and overly-sugary high-calorie bonfire snacks and slimy bathroom tiles, loves Camp Wawanakwa. On a broader scale she simply loves summer, with its endless blue skies, the faint hum of six-legged life between the trees, thrumming, like a heat-stroked orchestra — but really, she just loves Camp. Summer at camp always seems to stretch impossibly wide, a cat’s yawn, maw-mouthed and sleepy and sharp-fanged with the bitter edge of prohibited drinks and bonfire smoke. Time on the island is so much more than an easy summer job; it’s an endless expanse of radio-pop blasting through the windows of the girls cabin, gold-tinged days spent sticking bandaids on scrappy kids’ knees or working on that perfect tan, cracking open shitty but deliciously cold cans of beer in the evenings, stealing sticky-sweet lip gloss from her coworkers, dangling her legs into the coolness of the lake in her lifeguard duties.
And then there are the girls — bright-eyed girls, giggly girls, clever girls, girls who will sneak kisses behind the communal bathrooms during their free time, or throw heavy, lingering glances towards her over their morning oatmeal whilst intertwining their legs, hidden underneath the camp kitchen tables. A new one every summer, because they rarely stick around and if they do, they find someone else to spend their evenings intertwined with.
Heather knows she’s not forever for most girls. In all honesty, that’s part of the fun.
The first year it had been Bridgette — back when they were still teenagers, seventeen and curious, delirious, mapping out their desires in quiet, dark corners of their cabin on stolen afternoons. Bridgette had been confident and sporty and naive, and an easy target right from the beginning: Heather only needed to pick a few unnecessarily sexually charged arguments with her early on, slowly work her way into a tense, vaguely flirtatious truce through lending her little things or offering to rub sunscreen into her back, then throw her longing, intense gazes across the bonfire until Bridgette finally plucked up the courage to shove her into a bathroom stall and makeout with her. The next year she was off rescuing turtles in the Caribbean or something or other, and Heather was still at Camp, a temporary blemish in Bridgette’s otherwise perfect life.
The second year it had been Lindsay. Another blonde, though less earthly than Bridgette — more bottle bleach and too much fake tan. Lindsay had been dumb, innocent, and sweet. And easy. Almost too easy. Heather hadn’t even worked for it; she just made up some story about how she’d never had her first kiss before (a blatant lie), and she was feeling just so sad about it, and batted her lashes a few times, and Lindsay had leaned across the bunk-bed mattress and kissed her on the mouth. Soft and sticky like her lip gloss. Then whenever they had a spare moment they were kissing. A year later Lindsay had a boyfriend and spent her time pretending that nothing had ever happened.
Then, only last year, it had been Gwen. She’d been a slightly trickier target. Heather had tried the usual tactics of starting vaguely homoerotic arguments with her, then purposefully leaning over whilst wearing a push-up bra and the tiniest short-shorts she could find whilst grabbing her a beer from the esky Geoff always supplied, then ‘accidentally’ catching Gwen smoking a cigarette behind the boatshed and coyly asking if she could try one. After a few weeks of increasingly embarrassing and obvious attempts at seducing her, Gwen had simply sat down beside her on a particularly cool evening and said: “you know, if you wanted to fuck me, you could’ve just said so.” And that had been that, and the rest of the summer had been marginally more exciting. Gwen has some weird, artsy, equally talented girlfriend from her art school now. Heather stalks their pretentious historical museum dates on social media sometimes and pretends it doesn’t drive her crazy that everyone keeps moving on while she stays right where she is, static, hopeless, bored.
It goes like this: Heather loves summer, especially at camp, especially the girls, but she’s at a loose end. All the girls Heather would ever have an interest in are not really options: Leshawna, who’s always been ridiculously, heart-stoppingly beautiful but unfortunately infatuated with some geeky camp counsellor, Izzy, who is hot but completely nuts, and Courtney, the newest camp counsellor, who is so incredibly straight-edged that Heather thinks she’d probably pull out a ruler during sex to ensure an appropriate distance between their breasts is being maintained. And even if she’s interested in girls, which Heather finds unlikely, she’s not sure she’s really interested anyway. Sure, Courtney is hot: smooth brown skin, freckles tracing the bridge of her nose, dark eyes framed under long lashes, narrow, gentle curves— but she’s so… uptight. Perfect to a freakish degree. Curtain bangs exceptionally straight, feet wedged into neat little leather loafers, crisp white polo shirt tucked into her fucking khaki pants — thanks but no thanks, Heather has some standards, and one of those standards is that she would rather not hook up with someone who was probably a mathlete in high school. And on the debate team. And probably also class president, and valedictorian, and swim-team captain and tennis champion and whatever other trophies over-achieving goody-two-shoes like Courtney like to collect.
She doesn’t even drink. Heather tries it on one of the bonfire nights, offering her a can, thinking maybe it’ll soften her edges and get her to loosen up a little, but all Courtney does is stick up her nose.
“It’ll give you liver-damage,” she says, in that stuck-up, high-and-mighty way of hers. “And it’s against the rules to drink at camp, anyway.”
“Hello, we’re counsellors?” Heather replies. “We make the rules.”
Courtney sniffs. “I don’t need to be under the influence to have fun.”
“You never have fun,” Heather says, rolling her eyes. “You’ve always got a stick up your ass.”
“And you’re a total bitch,” Courtney snaps back quickly. “You haven’t said a single nice thing to anyone since we’ve got here.”
Heather shrugs. “At least I can have fun.”
“I have fun!”
“Like what?”
“I read. I listen to music.”
“Ugh,” Heather says, wrinkling her nose. “You sound like Gwen.”
“Who’s Gwen?”
Heather glances at her fingernails, inspecting them in the flickering bonfire light. They need filing. “None of your business.”
“Fine,” Courtney huffs.
Heather staunches away. God, Courtney is so dull that even arguing with her is boring. And so much for Heather's traditional summer fling. It is SO not happening this year.