Chapter Text
Altea Sleepaway Camp was nestled in an idyllic valley, its 150 acres of woodland cradled by rolling mountains and run through with creeks that fed out into a massive lake. The campground itself was arranged a circular shape with facilities at one end, cabins on the other, and a wide grassy clearing in the center. At the height of summer, that clearing would be packed with young campers, sunburnt and giddy, sitting side by side while they listened to morning announcements. Right now, however, it was silent save the occasional chirp of a bird rousing itself from sleep and preening the dawn dew from its feathers.
A bluejay took to the air squawking indignantly as the quiet was ruined by the choke and sputter of an engine. A little beige hatchback spun its wheels on the wide dirt road and pulled in haphazardly amongst the trees, and a figure stumbled out of the driver’s side door, red hoodie pulled up over dark hair.
“Coming through!” Keith panted, brushing past a knot of half-awake staff and sprinting for the director’s office, trampling flowers as he went. “‘Scuse me!”
When Keith burst through the screen door and let it slap shut behind him, the two strangers in the room fixed him with surprised stares, and he tried on an apologetic smile. Judging by the reaction, it probably looked a little disconcerting on him. He was sweaty, out of breath, and disheveled. Maybe a little frantic. He really needed this job. Or, more accurately, the paycheck that came with it.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, holding up the crumpled, coffee-stained map in his fist and pushing back his hood. “I got so lost, and none of the roads are labeled, there was no one to ask for directions, I couldn’t get cell service, and my car is -- well, my car is barely hanging on to life at this point so I’m honestly shocked it survived the trip, but it did, and I’m here.”
Wait. Fuck. I missed a step.
“I’m, uh.” He cleared his throat. “I’m Keith. By the way.”
“Hello, Keith, and welcome to Altea,” the camp director said. He knew she was the camp director because he recognized her voice right away -- smooth, accented, and lovely. They’d spoken on the phone when he called about the job offer posted on Craigslist: eight weeks as a camp counselor in upstate New York, two hundred and fifty bucks a week, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Even though Keith wasn’t overly fond of kids, he did enjoy having more than thirty-two cents in his bank account, so he sublet his shitty studio apartment, gassed up his car, and made the four-hour drive.
And now he was over an hour late. On his first day.
The director stood up, twisting her long hair into a pale bun atop her head and reaching for Keith’s hand. “I’m Allura,” she said.
“I know,” Keith told her, then remembered he was supposed to shake her hand, so he did. “We’ve spoken.”
“Yes, we have,” she said with a smile. “I like to talk to all my staff personally, and I’m glad to finally meet you. Come in, sit down. Catch your breath.”
Allura’s cabin was the biggest one in the valley, housing the functional heart of Camp Altea -- the paper-strewn chaos of the ground floor served as the administration office -- and Allura oversaw her kingdom from her regal perch behind a broad wood-paneled desk. Standing dutifully aside was a man wearing pleated khaki shorts and a neatly-groomed mustache.
“This is my co-director and right-hand man, Coran,” Allura said, pulling out a rickety chair and gesturing for Keith to take it.
“A pleasure, a pleasure!” Coran crowed, pumping Keith’s hand with relish. “First day of camp starts bright and early tomorrow morning, so we’ll all be busy little bees for the next 24 hours. Your colleagues have already been briefed and given tasks, so let’s get you caught up, shall we?”
When he sat in it, Keith’s chair made a sound like it was on the verge of crumbling into matchsticks, so he stood back up awkwardly. “Yeah, sure. Just… point me in the right direction and tell me what to do.”
“Well!” Coran bent over the desk and fished out a poorly-stapled stack of papers. “Here’s your employee handbook, as it were. It has your cabin assignment, the names of your campers, and your daily schedule, as well as our code of conduct. Lots of safety information, too.”
His name was scrawled across the top: KEITH KOGANE, RED CABIN. He tilted his head as he flipped through the leaflet. “Section 2 is just a picture of poison ivy copied and pasted twelve times.”
“Ah, hm. Yes.” Coran scratched his chin. “There’s quite a bit of the stuff around the edges of the campground, so we want to be sure everyone is properly informed. Last summer, we had an unfortunate mishap with a number of counselors who, er, were not able to readily identify poison ivy.”
“Don’t wipe your ass with it, if you’ll pardon my French,” Allura said briskly, sliding two more sheets of paper across the desk toward Keith. “Here’s your employment contract, as well as a waiver stating that Camp Altea isn’t responsible if you fall into one of our campfires or drown in the lake -- the usual legal stuff. Take your time and look it over.”
Keith signed it all without reading it and handed it back, and Allura frowned slightly, then shrugged and shuffled the documents into a bulging accordion folder that looked like it weighed as much as she did (and was probably older than her, too).
“Our cabins are color-coded,” she said, struggling to stuff the folder back into her desk drawer. “Easier for the campers to remember. You’ll be overseeing our red cabin for the next eight weeks. During the day, your troop will be your responsibility, but you’re free to do as you like in the evenings. After lights-out on the weekends, you may take excursions into town for recreational purposes, provided you’re back before midnight.”
“No drinking or smoking in front of the campers,” Coran continued, seamlessly picking up where Allura left off. Keith got the impression they’d given this speech many, many times. “No coarse language, no illicit drug use, and no reckless behavior that might endanger a child’s safety. Cabins will be inspected for cleanliness every Monday morning, and your troop will be given extra chores if you fail.”
“Any questions?” Allura finished, leaning her elbows on the desk and giving Keith a gentle smile.
“Uh,” Keith said. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Then let’s get right to it!” Allura rose to her feet and breezed out the door with Coran on her heels, and Keith followed, still holding on to both his road map and the stack of papers. She pointed to various landmarks as she marched them across the grounds. Mess hall, kitchens, infirmary, staff cabins, showers. Archery range, baseball diamond, swimming hole. This path led to the lake, that path led to the barn, and the other one -- neglected and half-buried under shrubbery -- led across the river.
“What’s across the river?” Keith asked.
Allura made a face like she’d tasted something sour. “Camp Galra.”
“Awful bunch,” Coran grumbled. “Their director’s got sand in his shorts because he doesn’t like sharing the valley with us; he’d rather have the whole thing to himself so he can expand. For the last few summers, they’ve been hassling us, trying to push us out --”
“But we’re not budging.” Allura put her hands on her hips and stared fiercely over the river. Keith squinted, looking into the woods, but it was too far to see anything except a banner that said GO GALRA in obnoxious purple letters. “This half of the valley belonged to my father for years. He gave it to me before he died, and I intend to make him proud.”
Coran patted Allura’s shoulder. “I dare say you already have. This place was a mess when you inherited it, and look at it now. Tip-top shape! Wouldn’t you agree, Keith?”
Keith wasn’t sure he would use “tip-top” to describe anything about the place -- it could use a coat of fresh paint, or possibly an entire renovation -- but he nodded anyhow. “Never seen anything like it.”
(This was technically true. He’d never been to a summer camp before in his life.)
Someone ambled by with an armful of firewood and a wide-brimmed straw hat balanced precariously on wild hair.
“Oh!” Allura exclaimed, easily lifting the bulky logs. “Pidge! This is Keith, our late arrival. He missed this morning’s meeting.”
Pidge turned around and tipped back her straw hat to look up at him, sizing him up. She had a thick stripe of sunblock down the bridge of her nose and several smudges of it on her glasses. “We were wondering when you’d show up,” she said.
He shrugged, self-conscious. “I spent a few hours driving the wrong way down the highway. Can’t read a map to save my life.”
“Really?” She raised her eyebrows and leaned in. “D’you wanna learn? I can teach you! Actually, hey, my dad taught me a cool trick -- if you’re ever lost and you need to find magnetic north, just set your watch against the sun like this --”
Keith didn’t wear a watch.
“Pidge is our wilderness survival expert,” Allura said. “There’s a lot of knowledge stuffed in that little head. This firewood is headed out to the barn, isn’t it? I’ll go with you.”
Pidge beamed.
The sun was climbing higher in the sky and the air was warming up, the morning mist having long dissipated. The campground was coming alive, too, with groups of staff bustling to get ready for tomorrow morning’s deluge of screaming children. Keith dodged two girls in Camp Altea t-shirts hauling a kayak and narrowly avoided an oar to the face. Across the field, someone was hammering a welcome sign to a beribboned pole, and a stream of people filtered in and out of the kitchens carrying propane tanks and industrial-sized jars of ketchup. Allura took the east path to the barn, hefting the cord of firewood in her arms, while Pidge talked animatedly beside her.
“There they are,” Coran said proudly as he and Keith crested a small slope in the opposite direction. “Our beautiful cabins. Take in all that rustic glory.”
The cabins were clearly hand-built, raised slightly off the ground on short stilts, and were hardly more than sturdy wooden frames left mostly open to the air. Narrow cots hung with mosquito netting were tucked in each of the four corners, and every cabin was fitted with a colored canvas tarp roof -- he spotted blue, yellow, green, black, and red.
“Is that mine?” he asked, pointing at the last in line. “The red one.”
“None other than,” Coran said. “Let’s see how the old girl is holding up.” He took off at an excited canter toward the red-roofed cabin.
Keith tagged along at a more leisurely pace. “Not much privacy,” he observed, sticking his head through one of the open walls.
“Oh, you’ll get used to it in no time. After all, there’s not much privacy anywhere else on the campground, either -- communal showers, communal toilets, communal dining hall…”
“Hang on. If I’m sleeping out here, then what are those staff cabins for?” Keith jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the little cluster of whitewashed cabins with actual walls and actual roofs.
“Senior staff only,” Coran told him, brushing splinters off the mud-stained floor and smoothing the starched white sheets on one of the cots. “Our head counselors have beds there…” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and waggled his eyebrows. “…Though I have heard they’ll trade off with you for a night or two if you ask politely. Private toilet and everything. Very cushy.”
Immediately, Keith wrote that off as a lost cause and resigned himself to sleeping under a mosquito net and pissing outside for the next eight weeks. Politeness was not really a skill in his repertoire, and even if it had been, people just… didn’t like him very much. He’d stopped trying to figure out why; all he knew is that he was used to being picked last for dodgeball, used to birthday party invites getting lost in the mail -- used to being passed on, overlooked, shut out. The idea of sucking up to senior staff didn’t appeal to him, even if it did mean he’d be able to take a dump in relative peace and isolation.
Beyond the first row of cabins, there were several more, all color-coded with garish tarp roofs. Pink, purple, orange, two more blues, three different shades of green… The whole scene looked like an unfinished page from a coloring book, or a jumbled box of crayons. Keith was endlessly grateful he was simply the red cabin, rather than something fussy like burnt umber or midnight indigo.
Coran shooed him down the crooked steps out of his cabin and back towards the field. “All right, off we go,” he prompted. “You’ll want to see the kitchens, I’m sure, and then the lake. Everyone always wants to see the lake.”
Keith actually wasn’t terribly interested in either of these things, but he was getting paid $250 a week to pretend like he was, so he put his head down and kept following Coran.
The dining hall was cavernous, built with huge slabs of knotty pine and filled by dozens of long tables. The place could easily seat two or three hundred people, but it was nearly empty at the moment save for a few folks sorting silverware into bins or sprawling sweatily in chairs.
Coran straightened a few of the seats compulsively as he talked. “Mealtimes are 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., though the dining hall stays open until 9 in the evening to accommodate a little bit of late-night snacking. We have a consulting chef on hand this year, so our menu is considerably expanded.”
Keith raised an eyebrow. “Consulting chef?”
“Well… Our swimming instructor is actually a culinary school graduate,” Coran admitted. “Top marks and everything, I’m told. All of our chef positions are filled and he was too overqualified for us to hire him as entry-level kitchen staff, so we offered him a bonus if he’d help our head chef, ah, broaden her horizons beyond meatloaf and canned peas.”
Two sets of large swinging doors led from the dining hall into the stainless steel interior of the kitchens, and compared to the quiet outside, it was chaos. Cooks were dicing, peeling and chopping, burners were lit, pots were boiling, fridges were in the process of being stocked, and someone was mopping up a spill that both looked and smelled like cat puke.
“Ah, speak of the devil,” Coran said. “Our consulting chef in the flesh. Hunk, this is Keith, a fresh face on Team Altea.”
Tucking the mop into the crook of his elbow and scrubbing sticky sweat out of his eyes, Hunk raised a hand in greeting, then gestured to the madness that surrounded them. “Hey, man. Welcome to the Thunderdome. First time?”
“I guess so,” Keith said uncertainly. “Never been a counselor before, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, boy… Well, it’s a trip, I can tell you that much. Wait, hold this for me.” Hunk didn’t wait for an answer, thrusting the wet mop into Keith’s hands and spinning around to check on a tall pot of unidentifiable broth. He fished a ladle out of the pocket of his apron and stirred the steaming pot, mumbling to himself. “Shit, where’d the cayenne go? I just put it right here.”
“Coran told me you were the swimming instructor, right?” Keith said, looking at the mop in his hands. “Are you getting paid to do grunt work?”
“Kinda,” Hunk told him, rifling through several of the cupboards above his head. “I mostly do it because I like it, and this place is like Allura’s baby, so if it makes her happy, then I don’t mind. Besides, their chef sucks, and she needs all the help she can get.”
“Screw you and your culinary arts degree!” a voice echoed across the kitchen.
“Sorry, Shay, but your food is garbage and everyone knows it,” Hunk called back affectionately. “Even though she’s in charge of the kitchens here, cooking isn’t really Shay’s thing -- she’s more into gardening, and oh, man, she is good at it. It’s crazy. You see all that fancy landscaping outside Allura’s office? All those flowers and shit? And the perfect rows of tulips bordering the archery range? That’s all Shay. She planted each one and organized them all by color or something, I think. Pretty wild, right?” Hunk’s eyes crinkled at the corners.
“Yeah, wild,” Keith said. He guiltily recalled stomping on young flowers as he dashed into Allura's office that morning. “Does Shay know you’re so, uh, passionate? About her work?”
Hunk shook his head with conviction, still digging in the cupboard. “Nah, can’t let that stuff go to her head. You know how it is. Gotta keep each other humble around here. Ah! Cayenne! Got you, motherfucker.”
“Have you been working here for a long time?” Keith asked awkwardly, peering around for Coran. The red mustache had disappeared into the fray, and Keith wasn’t very good at small talk.
Hunk swiped the mop from Keith’s hands and messily smeared it over the tile. “This is my third summer, yeah. My big sister has been coming here as a camper since she was a kid, way back when Allura’s old man owned it, so I thought I’d kinda carry on the tradition after she grew out of it. It's a family thing.”
Keith fiddled with a butter knife. “Right. Makes sense.”
“…But that’s super boring and you don’t care about my life story,” Hunk said with a good-natured smile. He pointed his ladle over the top of the island to where Coran was munching pieces of sliced cucumber off an unattended cutting board. “Listen, if you don’t get out of here and take Coran with you, Shay’s going to have a tantrum.”
“Hunk, I’m about this close to reporting you to Allura for insubordination,” Shay hollered.
Brandishing his mop, he retorted, “I don’t even officially work under you!”
They were both grinning at each other as they bickered. Keith felt like there was some kind of secondary conversation happening here that he didn’t quite understand, and he not-so-gracefully extricated himself by simply turning around and walking toward the swinging doors.
“How do I get to the lake?” he asked Hunk over his shoulder.
“Oh, uh -- head straight out of the dining hall and hang a left,” Hunk told him. “You’ll see a sign once you reach the woods.” He rapped his knuckles on the counter to get Coran’s attention and pointed after Keith.
On the front steps, Keith stopped short and stared at the wash of colorful flowers freshly planted at his feet. The mulch smelled dark and earthy, and he kind of liked it. He nudged a purple blossom with the toe of his shoe; it swayed happily in response.
“There you are!” Coran clapped him on the shoulder with one hand, picking bits of cucumber rind out of his teeth with the other. “Can’t get rid of me that easily, sorry to say. Come on, then!”
Weaving through the trees, Keith shuffled his feet in the thick blanket of pine needles that covered the ground just to hear the gentle, whispery noise it made. Coran babbled about the history of the valley -- how the parcel of land came into Allura’s family because her great-grandfather traded it for a couple of cows and a half-bottle of whiskey, or so the legend goes -- while Keith half-listened. Eventually the tree line broke and opened out onto the sandy shore of the lake; it was huge, shielded entirely by mountains, protected from the outside world like a kind of clandestine paradise. Frogs belched quietly among the reeds. The sunlight fragmented into a thousand glittering pieces on the surface of the water.
“Lake Arus,” Coran said with a note of pride in his voice, as if he were personally responsible for the magnificent view. “The gem of the valley.”
Further down the shoreline, a long, wide pier floated over the water. It was lined with small battered sailboats bobbing in sync, their sails tightly wrapped, and a cluster of people that looked like they were skipping rocks.
Coran hopped up onto the pier, and it wobbled under his sudden weight. “Ahoy, sailors! Hard at work, are we?”
One of them glanced back at Coran and elbowed his friends; they all straightened up and dropped the rocks in their hands into the water with a conspicuous plop-plop-plop sound.
“We finished spraying down the skiffs and prepping them for tomorrow,” the first one said. He had a toothy grin and bright blue eyes.
“And the canoes? Have you cleaned and waxed them as well?” Coran asked, arms crossed.
“Uh…” He hesitated, looking slightly sheepish. “No?”
The cluster dissipated, several of them wandering away to return to work, but Coran pushed Keith forward.
“This young troublemaker is our sailing instructor -- and the head of the blue cabin,” he explained. “Keith, Lance. Lance, Keith.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lance said, “the new guy.”
Keith shrugged. “That’s me.”
“You ever sailed before?” Lance asked.
“Nope.” Keith had been canoeing on a river once when he was a kid, as part of an outreach program for "troubled" children. The canoe tipped and he split his head open on a rock at the bottom. He still had a jagged line of scar tissue on his scalp. Ever since then, his general stance toward anything related to boating was fuck that.
“Well, I’m pretty good at it,” Lance said nonchalantly. “I’ve been the instructor here for a few years, and I’ve won a couple sloop races back home. I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”
“No, thanks, I’m good,” Keith said, frowning slightly. “I don’t actually have any interest in sailing. At all.”
Lance raised his eyebrows, then guffawed, a sharp, bright sound. “Sorry, bud, you don’t have a choice. Wait, wait -- Allura didn’t tell you? All cabin counselors have to participate in lessons with their campers, so you’re learning to sail whether you like it or not, my dude.”
Keith looked back at Coran for confirmation, and felt a heavy fist of dread when he nodded. “Everything? All the lessons?” Keith asked.
“Oh, yes,” Coran said. “Camp Altea is as much a learning experience for its campers as it is for its counselors. Archery, horseback riding, wilderness skills, swimming… It’s very educational. Last summer, Hunk even taught me how to make friendship bracelets.” He held up a wrist, adorned with multicolored, braided string.
Well, shit.
Keith had been under the impression he’d be getting paid to mostly sit in the sun and keep a handful of dumb kids from eating poisonous berries or whatever. He didn’t realize he’d actually have to participate.
“Surprise,” Lance said, chortling like he’d just heard his favorite joke. “I guess I’ll be seeing you on the lake tomorrow, huh?”
Keith scowled. Part of him considered tossing his “employee handbook” off the pier, climbing back in his car and driving the four hours back to the city. He’d never gone to summer camp as a kid -- for as long as he could remember, he’d either been in remedial school or he’d worked a shitty minimum-wage job. He had exactly zero experience with any of this stuff; he was nineteen years old and could barely swim. His mastery of team sports was limited to playing basketball at public courts with hard-eyed older boys who towered over him and shoved him down into the asphalt. Hell, he’d never even seen a horse in real life.
God help them all if they expected him to sing campfire songs.
He didn’t mind eating crappy food or sleeping outside (he was intimately familiar with the discomfort of roughing it), but being laughed at for his utter lack of knowledge was a sour prospect. Keith had spent so much of his life just trying to scrape by and survive, he’d missed out entirely on all the warm, glowing childhood memories that most people had. He’d taught himself how to ride a bike doing shaky figure-eights in a dark parking lot when he was nine.
I missed my high school graduation because my foster father called the cops on me wasn’t exactly the kind of fond remembrance Keith could share with others. If he did, they looked at him differently. He could pinpoint the sea change every time: their gaze would turn from curious to horrified to a kind of gross, cloying pity. Or maybe fear. He didn’t know which was worse; they all made him feel like he was broken or dysfunctional somehow.
He stared at Lance, who was looking back at him with a cocky grin, tipping his chin down to return Keith’s gaze. With sudden, sharp clarity, Keith remembered the older boys on the courts who elbowed him in the face when he went to sink a basket and snickered to each other as Keith picked grit out of his scraped knees.
He was on a team all his own, but he kept playing.
Fuck it.
Besides, his car would probably disintegrate into a hundred sad, rusty pieces if he tried to take it on the highway again.
“Yeah,” Keith said, crossing his arms. “I’ll be here.”