Before Wings (7 page)

“Oh yeah,” said Mira loudly, catching on. “Oh yeah, it’s a real nice
day
. I can see it’s very sunny and bright out there.”

The outer door slammed and Adrien sat up grouchily. So, it looked as if rule number three was going to be strictly obeyed ... by the obedient. If what Connor had said was true, she was the only disobedient staff in decades, which left no one else to disobey rule number three with,
not even administration—not that she wanted to run to her aunt and tattle. Well, she could live with ignoring the whole thing as long as they left her alone. All they really wanted was her mouth shut so they could party. They sure weren’t interested in her witty companionship or sparkling personality—probably the entire group was vastly relieved that the Doomsday Girl had rejected them.

The morning went by, absolutely normal. Everyone was friendly, just a little friendlier than yesterday. Even Connor made a point of saying good morning without evil undertones. He was in charge of the morning session by the beach, and began with a careful explanation of the waterfront safety regulations. The sunlight enhanced his hair dye, the wind ruffled his golden locks, and his biceps rippled. He was wearing his designer Camp Lakeshore T-shirt and he was gorgeous.

Adrien didn’t see why she had to stand around listening to a hypocrite discuss the
rules
for sailboating, so early into Connor’s spiel, she began edging into the trees, then turned and walked past the girls’ cabins and the fenced-off septic pond. She veered left, avoiding the archery range, which was never to be approached from the south, and came out onto the road that led to the corrals. She had and hadn’t been thinking about Paul, so when she caught sight of him working on another section of fencing, she was caught in a rush of confusion, wanting and not wanting the feelings that flew through her on raw wings. She was used to the guys at school, but not like this. Not with a slow wind riding the trees, not with the rich deep smell of earth so strong she could feel it in her skin. He wasn’t even close and she felt like they were touching.

“Hey, Angel.”

“I’m not Angel.” Overdoing her anger made it easier to face him. He was smiling. So much happened in his face when he smiled. Whole stories told themselves.

“All right,
Adrien
. What’re you doing up here?”

“Nothing. Much. Really.” Words weren’t doing the sentence thing. She stared intensely at the toe of his boot.

“So help me with this fence. Here, grab this.” He handed her a rail and she held it as he hammered it into place.

“I’m supposed to be at Connor’s sailboat session,” she said, as if she owed Paul an explanation. “But ...”

“But what?” He straightened and looked at her. He was about an inch taller, his eyes were brownish-green, his lips a soft flush of red.

“Uh.” She couldn’t speak. “Last night ...”

“Initiation?” He turned back to the fence. “So, how’d it go?”

He was breaking rule number three! Finally, a partner in sanity. Her shyness vanished. “Did you have to do it?”

“They tried to make me last summer, but I’m never here at night. Wild man capers with city-slicker tough guys,” he said softly. “What a blast.”

She hesitated, unsure if he was including her. “They said Aunt Erin knows about it. I doubt it. She’d
never
let them get away with breaking all those rules.”

“She knows,” Paul said quietly. “She used to be summer staff. She went to deep-woods parties twenty years ago.”

Adrien gaped. She could
not
imagine her aunt doing anything that ... social.

Paul grinned at her expression. “Who cares what they
do, as long as they don’t tear down any buildings or raise the dead.”

“But the training manual says—”

“They show up for their jobs in the morning and treat the kids okay. It’s their business what they do in the middle of the night.”

“Then why don’t you go?” demanded Adrien.

“I don’t like the company,” he shrugged, then paused. “What exactly do they do out there, frolicking in the woods?”

“It’s not
Lord of the Flies
,” she said. “There aren’t any sticks sharpened at both ends. It’s mostly drinking. They make the new staff do something stupid, so I left.”

“You don’t like parties?”

“I didn’t like the way they were talking about Aunt Erin,” she burst out. “They suck up to her all day, then talk her down when they get out there at night. If they don’t like her, they should act like it to her face.”

“Like you do?”

“Yeah.” She looked at him breathlessly, challenging him to tell her she was wrong. His eyes moved slowly over her face.

“You want a cigarette?” he asked. “I get a mid-morning break. C’mon, we’ll go into the trees so no one sees us.” He touched her bare arm and she almost cried out at the sudden heat.

“Um, here’s fine,” she said. “I, uh, like the horses.”

His smile faded. “Sure. We’ll watch the horses.” He fished the pack out of his lumber jacket and handed her a cigarette. “Careful,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Smoking kills ten out of ten, y’know.”

“D’you really believe,” she asked slowly, “that you know exactly when and where you’re going to die?”

He gave a short laugh and leaned on the fence, watching the horses at the other end of the paddock. After a pause, she realized that had been his response.

“Well, aren’t you going to do something about it?” she demanded. “Make sure it doesn’t happen?”

“What’re you doing about yours?” he asked, not looking at her.

“I can’t do anything, it’s my brain. My blood vessels are warped. Yours aren’t.”

He stared moodily into the trees. “It’s going to happen, one way or another.”

“That’s an attitude,” she said flatly.

“Oh yeah?” He turned to look at her, his face derisive. “You’re telling me I’ve been dreaming an
attitude
for two years? It’s my
attitude
that keeps killing me a hundred different ways? You’re telling me my
attitude
put you in my dreams before I ever saw or heard about you?”

He was so intense, the air about him throbbed. “No,” she stammered. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Good,” he said tersely. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

He ducked through the rails and left her standing alone with her cigarette.

The girls in the photograph could have been from her classes at school. Swimsuits hadn’t changed that much since the ‘70s, and neither had hairstyles. She wondered where they had come from, what they had returned to after their week
at camp. Had Camp Lakeshore changed their lives, brought the shy ones out of their shells and taught the arrogant ones a lesson? Had they all made wishes at the Wishing Tree and had their wishes come true? They would be adults now, old enough to be her mother. How many of their children had experienced a brain aneurysm? Had any of them died?

It was Friday morning, the last day of Training Session. Adrien was alone in the cabin, sitting on her bed, skipping yet another staff activity. The only workshops she had attended all week had been led by Aunt Erin, Guy or Gwen, because they were the only instructors who would have noticed or cared about her absence. The lesson she was currently skipping dealt with wilderness camping, and was full of exciting scenarios such as where to set a tent on the side of a hill in a swarm of soldier ants with a storm brewing. After lunch, Connor would be leading a session on staff morale. Adrien had seen the list of exercises on Aunt Erin’s desk. The first one involved standing on a fence post and falling backwards into the arms of fellow staff. Bonding was supposed to occur
if
they caught and cradled you. Fat chance she was showing up for that one.

Paul hadn’t spoken to her since her killer comment about his attitude problem. Every time he saw her, a dark mood swallowed his face and he turned away. The guy could sure hold a grudge—her nic fits were driving her up a wall.

Darcie spoke to her only in passing. Adrien had woken several times in the middle of the night to see her roommate heading out or coming back in, but she didn’t ask questions and Darcie didn’t discuss anything. If staff looked suspi
ciously hungover in the morning, Aunt Erin didn’t mention it.
Maybe she’s used to it
, Adrien thought.
Maybe she always let them party hearty during Training Session
. Tomorrow, staff got the day off, and on Sunday the first wave of campers would arrive. Aunt Erin probably realized the night frolics would eventually fizzle out from sheer exhaustion.

Adrien was tired of trying to figure it all out. She was tired of everyone walking by with chipper smiles, tossing words at her that were supposed to matter. “Hey Grouch! How’s it going, Grouch?” No one waited for an answer, they all hurried off to another workshop, the essential training manual tucked under an arm. Hypocrites. The whole place was a scam. If she reached out and actually touched someone, the person would probably dissolve into mist and fade away.

The only place she felt solid was standing by the lakeshore, watching the spirits. These past few days, their glow had been growing brighter. She had checked several times daily, and they were always there, floating on the water’s surface. Watching them she felt at peace, drifting in a dream as vast as the lake, listening to the thousand tiny waves of her heart.

She leaned over the photograph, focusing on the five girls who clustered so close to Aunt Erin, they seemed like a single unit. They were the ones with the social telepathy, the girls who walked in a cabin door, scanned everyone and immediately recognized those who would become life-long friends. Until her aneurysm, Adrien had fit right in. She had never thought about the stragglers, the outsiders. Now she looked at the three girls standing back from the group.
Their smiles were wistful; they weren’t so sure they were happy. Each carried a visible strike against her—two were chubby, one had braces, another wore glasses. In contrast, the girls at the center of the photograph looked as if they rode a constant ongoing laugh—if they glanced at each other the giggles would burst free, creating a separate universe to which only they belonged.

The girl under Aunt Erin’s left arm was probably the leader. She had black shoulder-length hair and her nose was slightly beaked, but she was still pretty and she knew it. Her mouth was wide open; she looked loud, friendly and entirely oblivious to the existence of the three wistful girls in the background. She looked like every best friend Adrien had made during her Camp Lakeshore summers.

The cabin was suddenly cold. A slight wind had picked up, something different coming through the trees. In one corner of the room, a faint blur shifted, and a shiver ran down the back of Adrien’s neck. Her breath stilled. She raised her eyes slowly, but the room rested empty of anything but the whispering green light. Whatever had just come from between the worlds to watch her was gone, but she knew it had been there. When she breathed again she breathed deeper, as if the air also came from a place beyond this one and she was breathing it in, pulling other worlds closer, until finally she would be able to see them and understand.

Adrien leaned against the fence at the archery range, watching her roommate. Darcie’s hair was perfectly curled and her
neon blue makeup glowed, but she wore a whistle around her neck and was speaking with
the voice of authority
. “No one,” Darcie said emphatically, “absolutely no one is to step across this shooting line for any reason until I blow the whistle. If you notch your arrow improperly and it falls to the ground in front of you instead of flying through the air, too bad. Sometimes arrows from other people’s bows fly sideways, and you can get hit just leaning over the line. If you’re the stupid sucker who wastes a shot, leave it on the ground. If I catch you crossing that line, even
leaning
over it before I blow my whistle, you’ll lose shooting privileges, got it?”

It was mid-afternoon. Connor had finished his morale booster, and staff had gathered for the last workshop of Training Session. It was the only one Adrien had been interested in attending. She hid a grin as Darcie glared ferociously at the group, trying to imprint on them the seriousness of the situation. “Grade five and six girls are
the worst
,” she said with disgust. “They get the giggles and forget they’ve got a loaded bow. Someone makes a joke and they turn around to hear it.” Darcie illustrated, whirling suddenly and pointing a loaded bow at the startled crowd. “If you’ve got a cabin of gigglers, you’re going to have to give them a serious talk before they get here. I don’t tolerate gigglers on my range. Understood?”

When enough staff had nodded, Darcie stopped pointing her loaded bow at them and moved into the proper stance for loading and shooting. Targets had been pinned to four straw bales at the opposite end of the range. They looked a long ways off. Adrien watched in disbelief as her roommate’s first arrow sailed through the air and buried
itself in a bull’s eye. The group’s mild clapping grew louder as Darcie repeated this act with her second and third arrows. “It’s a short range,” she said dismissively. “It’s not hard to hit the target unless it’s windy. It’s for kids, after all.”

Everyone joined one of the lines facing the targets, and Darcie handed the first person in each line three arrows. Adrien stood at the back and watched as arrows began wobbling, wiggling and whizzing through the air. Cheers and whistles accompanied the odd bull’s eye, but no one managed consecutive ones, even Connor, who went first and hit the target every time. Once all twelve arrows had been released, Darcie blew her whistle, and the archers retrieved their arrows and handed them to the next person in line. Then Darcie wailed on her whistle and another round of shooting began.

Adrien managed to land her first arrow on the target’s outer ring. Her next shot arced high and nose-dived, embedding itself in the ground. Her third flew over the back fence into the trees. “Way to go, Grouch,” called the staff in her line, and turned back to their private conversations. Surrounded and alone, Adrien waited for Darcie’s manic whistle, then headed onto the range with the other archers. Her first two arrows were easy to find, but the third would be difficult—the feathers that identified her set of arrows were green. Adrien went through the gate at the back of the range and pushed into the green shrubbery. Had her dumb green arrow gone high or low when it zoomed over the fence? Had it disappeared into this green bunch of leaves or that green bunch? She could hear staff pulling their arrows out of the targets and making jokes about
being reincarnated as Robin Hood. “Get this,” proclaimed one guy. “Robin Hood gets reincarnated as
me
.” Boos and hisses accompanied this comment. Adrien pushed further into the greenery. Darcie had been adamant about returning with all three arrows. They were expensive to replace, and it taught
responsibility
. Grumpily, Adrien pushed through mosquitoes and poison ivy until her responsible foot knocked against the missing arrow. With her incredible skill and accuracy, she had managed to hit the ground twice. As she bent down to pull it out, she saw a yellow arrow embedded nearby. Feeling doubly responsible, she pulled them both out, then returned to the exit door at the south end of the range and pushed it open.