Page 40 of Until Next Summer

She startles and holds the notebook to her chest. “Oh, hi, Jess. How’s it going?”

“Good. Just working on the scavenger hunt,” I say, motioning to my compass.

Her eyes light up. “I always loved that!”

“We were good at it,” I say, smiling.

“Well, you were. Do you remember the year Tommy Flanagan got lost?”

“Oh yeah. He was bragging about his orienteering skills all week—”

“But then he ended up at the totally wrong end of camp,” Hillary cuts in.

“And no one found him until morning—”

“And he kept saying—”

Together, we wail:“My compass! It’s broooooken!”

We descend into a fit of laughter that reminds me of the teenage hilarity you leave behind when you enter adulthood. Hillary and I were always getting reprimanded for laughing during serious activities like flag ceremony—all I had to do was catch her eye and we’d crack up.

“Now that I think about it,” Hillary says, “it would be terrifying to be lost in the woods overnight. Poor kid.”

“Yeah, Nathaniel and Lola must have been beside themselves. Safety, safety, safety was drilled into our heads during counselor training.”

Hillary’s smile falters, and I wince, then clear my throat. “What are you up to?”

“Just sketching,” she says, showing me the page—a pencil drawing of the scene below us: rolling hills, pine trees, lake.

“I love that you still do this!” I say, smiling.

She hesitates. “Well, I don’t. Not in years, I mean.”

“Really? How come?” I’m surprised; when we were kids, she was always drawing something in her sketchbook or creating incredible Sharpie tattoos for the girls in our cabin.

“At some point you have to grow up,” she says, with a self-deprecating shrug. “Stop spending time on things that don’t move your life forward, as my dad would say.”

Her words sting. As ifIhaven’t grown up, moved forward. I know that’s not what she means—she’s talkingabout herself, not me—but I had my own conversation with my mom yesterday. She kept asking me if I was going to get a “real job” now that the camp is closing. Neither of my parents has ever understood how much this job means to me. That it’s not just a job—it’s my identity.

But as Dot would say, my parents aren’t camp people. They don’t get it.

“Uh, yeah,” I say stiffly. “I’ll let you get back to it.”

“You should put the final clue in that big maple tree down by the stream,” Hillary says.

“The one we used to climb?”

She nods. “Put it up high. It’ll make it more fun.”

—

I continue setting clues until I arrive at the last one, which tells the group that finds it that they’re the winners. Holding it in my hand, I stare up at the maple tree, which has grown since the last time Hillary and I climbed it.

Grabbing the lowest branch, I heave myself up. It’s been a while since I’ve climbed a tree, and I scrape my knee and palms on the rough bark. But eventually I get to a good spot and tie the final clue to a branch.

Before climbing down, I sit on a thick limb and look out at the lake’s shining blue waters to the east and the green roofs of the cabins peeking through the trees to the south. The wind carries the faint sound of laughter and conversation.

My mom’s words come back to me:Are you going to get a real job now?

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