Twenty-Seven

twenty-seven

Considering I am far less familiar with stories about Gaby the camp ghost than the dozens of Camp Reynolds returners, I should probably be the last person to follow her straight to Finn. But there I am, a mere five minutes later, standing at the base of an allegedly haunted tree with the shadow of a Finn-shaped human making long shapes on the ground.

I crunch down on a spare branch when I come to a stop, and Finn’s face pops down between the branches. He takes one look at me, closes his eyes, and says, “Shit.”

“Good to see you, too.”

He turns his head away, toward the skyline, which is getting darker by the second. “I’m not stuck.”

“That sounds like something a stuck person would say.”

“Is Savvy with you?”

I don’t even have the wherewithal to be offended. Even if I did, we’ve got much bigger problems judging from the sound of his voice, which is very much that of someone trying not to panic and doing a very bad job of it.

“Just me.”

Before he can bleat out some other excuse or Finn-ism, I tug the strap of my bag so Poppy’s camera is on my back, flex my wrists, and start climbing the tree. It isn’t exactly an easy feat without much light, but that’s the problem. There’s no time to turn around and get Savvy, or turn around and get anyone, really. I’ve got about five minutes to coach him down before the sun ghosts us and the whole camp goes dark.

“You don’t have to…”

I’m fast, faster than Finn’s expecting. His eyes go wide at me closing in on him, big and red-rimmed and giving him away before he can turn his head.

“What are you doing up here?”

He’s clinging to the tree and another branch for dear life, but at least he seems to relax once I’m up there. There’s nothing between us but bark and the faded MAKE A WISH sign. Whatever plans he had of not looking at me are immediately foiled when a twig of a branch cracks under my hand and he full-body flinches.

“Don’t you have your own problems to deal with?” he asks, voice strained.

I’m high enough now that I’m eye level with him. “Nice deflecting.”

He’s looking at me without looking at me, half peering and half laser-focused on the arms he has wrapped around the tree.

“Finn.”

He rests his head on the tree trunk. “I … was climbing. And I guess I don’t usually climb it by myself. And I’m … a little bit…”

“Stuck,” I provide.

He blows out an embarrassed breath.

“Well, I’m here now. I’ll help you down.”

It feels like someone else is saying it. I’m not used to feeling like someone with authority, someone with a plan. That was always Connie in our group, or my parents at home, or the army of teachers and tutors at school. I kind of assumed I’d be bad at it.

And maybe I still am, but there’s no time to overthink that now.

“Yeah,” says Finn, except it sounds less like a yeah and more like he choked on his own spit.

I try another tactic. “Why’d you come up here in the first place?”

“For wishing,” he says, a flash of his usual self. “Duh.”

I try to think back to the wishes we made, but it feels like it’s been years since he first brought me here. Leo told me once that all your skin cells replace themselves every two or three weeks, but this time it’s like I felt it, every single one of them dying and being reborn, making some new version of me with edges and pieces I don’t fully know how to use yet.

My wishes were so specific then. I may not have been able to fix my problems, but at least I could give them names. Now I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Which is how I remember exactly what Finn said, because it’s exactly what I feel all these weeks later.

“For things to be less fucked up?”

He lets out a wheeze that might have started out a laugh, tilting his head away from me. Problem is his limbs are too occupied glomming onto the tree to swipe at his eyes or stop the quick tear that slides down his cheek.

“You know I wasn’t even supposed to go to camp this summer? We were going to go on a big trip across the U.S. together, me and my mom and dad. We’d been planning it for years.”

My chest is tight, wondering what’s on the other end of this, knowing from the look on his face that it’s about to go from bad to worse.

“But then—my mom just—left.”

He says it with the bewilderment of someone it just happened to, like he’s not stuck in this tree, but stuck in the leaving. I wait him out, thinking he’ll go on, but he’s miles from these tree branches, somewhere I can’t reach.

“Like she left your dad, or…”

Finn shakes his head, a piece of him coming back. “I mean—she just—came into my room one morning and told me she was going to Chicago to see my uncle, and did I want to come, and I said yeah. She said she’d wait for me downstairs. And I said, ‘Wait, right now?’ and she said yes, and I said ‘I have school,’ and—” Finn’s ramble stops like a train that yanked its brakes, realizing it was about to go off the tracks. “I mean, I was barely even awake. I didn’t think…”

It’s almost fully dark. Whatever chance we had of using the sun’s light to get us down is a lost cause, so I stop trying to rush him. I sit and let the time go with us.

“She lives there now, in Chicago. She just decided she didn’t want to be with my dad anymore, so she left us both.”

I latch on to what he said before, knowing it won’t help but at a loss for what else to say. “But she wanted you to come with her.”

Finn lets out a terse breath, finally moving his forehead off the tree to look at me. “No, she didn’t. Not if she asked me like that, she didn’t. You only ask someone something like that if you want the answer to be no.”

I glance into the murky darkness below, trying to understand what might have been going through her head. She didn’t want him to come with her because she knew his world was here. She didn’t want him to feel like he had to say yes and leave everything behind, but still wanted him to know that she loved him. Because sometimes trying to protect people from your own fucked-up decisions is so impossible that there’s no right and wrong way to do it—everything will explode in the end. You can only try to anticipate which direction the explosion will come from.

The thought sidles a little too close to the anger I’m not ready to let go of yet, pricks like a needle trying to deflate it. The trouble is, I understand exactly why my parents did what they did. It just doesn’t change the way I feel about any of it right now.

“It wasn’t a choice. It was a trap. And anyway…” His voice goes low. He doesn’t seem afraid anymore, at least. Only tired. Ashamed. “I messed some things up after that. I told her I hated her and I never wanted to see her again.”

My own fuck you is still rattling like a pinball through the camp.

“You didn’t mean it,” I say.

“I think I did, when I said it.”

We’re quiet for a moment.

“It’s shitty,” he tells me. “The way she left, I mean. I did some stuff I shouldn’t have done. Messed up my grades. My dad made me come back for the whole ‘Reynolds method’ thing basically to punish me, but I think he just doesn’t want to deal with me anymore. And my mom…”

“You thought she’d come home. When shit started going wrong.”

His face tightens, like he’s trying to hold himself still, but his jaw starts to shake. “Your parents were here in the blink of an eye,” he says, sounding younger than he ever has. “They’re still here. And mine are too mad at each other to remember I exist.”

He is staring at the MAKE A WISH sign with enough intensity to set it on fire. I don’t think he even means to. It’s just directly in his line of sight, and there’s too much darkness to look past it and see anything else.

“I thought when I got here that it would help, being with my friends. But they’re all busy with actual camp jobs, and I’m … I got left behind.”

It resonates in a way that I wish it didn’t. It kind of crept up on me, that exact feeling—months of Connie being too busy to hang out, and then heading off for Europe. The shock of Leo leaving for good. Maybe it’s why I’ve been gravitating toward Finn this whole summer. We’re both trying to catch up to people who seem like they’re already gone.

I know he’s thinking the same thing when he says, “I’m glad you’re here, though.”

“Well, I’m probably not the one to be giving advice on families right now,” I admit. “But I think you have to call your mom.”

For once he isn’t fidgeting or trying to stay a step ahead for a laugh. “What am I supposed to do, apologize?”

“Maybe nobody has to say sorry,” I say quietly. “Maybe you just have to talk.”

The words settle there in the branches. We’re closer than we’ve ever been, but entire universes apart—Finn in his bedroom, me in the parking lot, both trying to relive things that happened too fast to fully live when they happened.

Finn interrupts the silence with a groan. “You know, I was gonna spend the summer trying to impress you. And here I am snotting it up stuck in a tree.”

“I mean, I’m still impressed,” I say, trying to lift the mood. “This height’s no joke. You’re basically the alpha of every squirrel on the island now.”

“Except how the hell am I supposed to get back down?”

“Slowly. And at the mercy of Gaby the camp ghost.”

“May she be as merciful as she is super dead.”

I reach out and touch his hand, a light graze so I don’t startle him. “Did you make your wish yet?”

“Nah, I was too busy trying not to become a forest pancake.”

“We’ll make one together. Then we’ll go down.”

Finn nods, shifting to tighten his grip on the tree, and closes his eyes. I shut mine too, my wish so immediate that it feels like it’s been taking shape all day. It’s short this time, but bigger than the word alone can hold. I wish for some kind of peace. For the lost years to count for something. For everyone to come out the other side of this stronger than they started.

Finn and I finish our wishes at the same moment, breathing them out into the black. His eyes gleam back at me, cutting through the darkness, so wide on mine that I see myself in them as much as I do him.

I lean forward and kiss him on the cheek, but it’s less of a kiss and more of an understanding. There isn’t a thrill, or a swoop, or some desire for it to be anything more. There is only my lips on his skin, and the quiet comfort of being seen, understood.

“Okay,” I tell him, my voice firm like Savvy’s when she’s directing campers. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll use the flashlight on my phone to light the way down. I’ll go first, so you can watch what I do and copy it.”

Finn swallows hard. “Yeah. Cool.”

“We’ll go slow.”

And that we do. The same tree that took me less than a minute to climb up takes an excruciating ten to get back down. I talk Finn through every step, pausing during the occasional panic. I start to understand things about Finn that everyone else here must have already known: he is not a risk-taker, not a rebel. He’s a confused kid doing his best at acting like one.

“Almost there,” I tell him.

Just then my phone buzzes to life in my hands, a picture of Savvy lighting up the screen. I flinch in surprise, and there’s a crunch—the slightest, stupidest misstep—and I take the last five feet of the tree tumbling, reaching out for a branch that isn’t there, hitting the ground with a thud.

“Shit. Abby—are you okay?”

“Fine,” I grumble. I don’t know whether it’s a lie yet. I’m still too stunned to take account of myself, but I don’t want to scare him. Poppy’s camera is miraculously unharmed, and that’s all that really matters to me anyway. “Hold on, I’ll grab the light so you can…”

I suck in a breath, because when I grapple for my phone in the dark, I feel it. The twinge in my left wrist that shoots all the way up my elbow, my shoulder, straight into the oh no part of my brain.

I ignore it, using my other hand to find the phone and shining the flashlight up toward Finn, even as the pain starts to beat in time with my heart and settle throughout my entire arm. He works his way down and scrambles over to help me up. I wave him off, using my right hand to hoist up my very bruised self.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

I make a show of stretching myself out. Everything else, at least, seems to be in regular order.

“Trust me. My butt has endured much worse.”

I can’t see Finn in the dark, but I can feel his uneasy smile. He reaches out in the dark and grabs my good hand, squeezing it.

“Thanks,” he says.

I squeeze back, and it feels less like we made a wish, and more of a promise. Now we just have to figure out how to keep it.