It is hard to be from somewhere else. No matter how long you live away from where you grew up, you never stop comparing it to where you are. The further she barreled east across North Carolina, the more Maggie noticed it was flattening. The pines were thinning. Opening up into pasture plotted distance far as the eye was willing to linger offroad. It reminded her of home. Maggie pulled down hard on the left side of the steering wheel and veered across double yellow lines as delicately as if she stepped on someone’s toe. Music that lost her attention an hour ago is blaring comically loud in front of her. She’s singing words to a different song. She turned the radio off in her head. There’s empty coffees in the floorboard and she’s leaning forward in the seat, strong elbows bent sharp and grip locked beneath dead eyes frozen forward in rigamortis.
Five hours, she says to herself. For a lake. She is driving five hours, for a lake. She had a rule to never drive further than two for fresh water. This weekend she broke it. For a guy, of course. A guaranteed interesting kind of event he had called ‘Hippie Camp’. Leaned back in the driver’s seat now, tonguing the skin off a peanut or something where a molar meets her gums, reminiscing who all Andy said would be there. Not just names, but who, what baggage they brought.
There were rock band guys from Brooklyn, legends for vaping on the plane. The drummer’s older brother was head organizer, a tour guide of a museum of Natural Science or something with dreads past his hips. He has a wife, a little boy, and a girl, along with several married friends with children of their own, all kids of hippies, which is a much more honest situation than regular children. There’s two dudes who went to high school with Andy, he had never really mentioned them to Maggie, but then there is this other friend, the girl. She and Andy have history. But Maggie, reclined now, resolute with one confident hand crowning the leather wrapped wheel, doesn’t take Andy seriously enough to be threatened.
Maggie is a junior lawyer, a year in, at a small town firm which only stays open because the name on the sign got elected to the state legislature. It’s a cushy job. If you can ignore a former congressman the age of your grandfather texting after nine-thirty on a Saturday night.
The place sounded neat. A little state underfunded park built around a really unusual natural lake. In a cluster of similarly shaped Bay lakes, most famous of which is Waccamaw. Kind of near Myrtle Beach, where Maggie wished she was headed. But anyhow. They are all wide, shallow, inexplicably round. Andy has been down for the week, and in ferociously slurred speech, informed her he had read somewhere online aliens created them.
The pine trees thicken back up along the road and ahead there is an unmistakable darkly stained tacky wooden sign, the kind they use exclusively for underfunded state parks. The trees have that sharp snake-like crescendo to them with silvery gray bark, roots that knob out of the ground like fresh stolen eggs bulging from the snake’s insides. She could hear the sounds of insects through her tight shut windows, and see them, roving clouds of some sort of jurassic gnat. Sand everywhere like the beach, but no ocean to lap at it and make it interesting. No view, yet. Pulling to a locked gate. She’s outside her car ducking a little as if she could cower below the flying bugs. Yep, deadbolted. At this point, she’s unhappy. Phone to her ear. She hears laughter in the background before his voice. Hangs up.
Lucky for Andy, he and two buds come slapping sandals up the thin asphalt path around a bend, he spreads his arms and bends his knees smiling excitedly like a good boy should and she stands and waits for him. The buds hold back, Andy takes Maggie by her waist, holds her suspended for a moment, wearing a pout she saved from girlhood.
“You have no idea how happy I am you’re here.”
“I’m happy too.” Maggie rolls her eyes and her hold on the corners of her mouth fails. She turns up an irresistible smile.
“We’re happy too,” chimes out from the buds.
“You have no idea.” It is funny. She allows it to be funny. They open the gate without using a key. The bolt isn’t actually fastened, dummy looped to make it seem so. She bites her lower lip shaking her head driving through the gate. Three boys in the car now. The two in the back smell like a misdemeanor.
“What do you think of this place?” Andy asks, still believing he has turned this around.
“It’s really beautiful so far. Not a fan of the bugs.”
“They really just come out this time of day.” This turned out to be a lie.
“You really don’t notice them after a while.” Also untrue.
The car crunching in the sand peels off road onto peastone driveway forming a short u in front of a large rustic building. A summer camp, Maggie recognizes, right off. This is a godforsaken summer camp he’s brought her to. She realizes staring up at a mess hall like a little boy’s Cub Scout retreat, maybe the place they take juvenile delinquents to be outdoors and teach them about feeling trapped. The windows are not glass, mesh screens, completely throwing the possibility of air conditioning out the window. No hope of temperature control. In June. In the South. Standing in the doorway at the top of a short flight of wide nail-spitting steps, stood a lion wearing a mane of time and insistence draped across his shoulders and decorating his back, he could have been nude, and clothed in his hair. He has such an enchanting, cleverly knowing, mischievous smile on, and generally wry look. He shortens as he descends and hugs Maggie like he knows her. He thinks he does. It is only after a severely awkward moment he deduces she is not the same girl Andy brought to camp last year.
A full family, down to the infant, are in a massive metal kitchen covered over in dulled hanging scratched up steel cookware all around, making some kind of Italian chicken that smelled amazing. Two o’clock in the afternoon. Maggie knew she had entered a devastatingly intriguing realm. She placed bags of food she had been specifically asked to bring in a walk-in refrigerator, the buds were a great help. The drummer’s brother, Thom, talks from behind her.
“Do not, let me rephrase, please, that does not reflect on Andy. That was entirely me. He is all about you. All yours. I’m sorry. Let me start over. It has been quite the week here at Hippie Camp already and it’s only Thursday.”
“Andy talks about this place all the time. You’re going to love me. Next year you’ll even think the new girl is me.”
“That’s the spirit, welcome to camp. We’ll see you at supper.”
“Yep,” Andy says over his shoulder, stepping next to Maggie and setting his hand on her. “What we do now, is all up to-”
“Lake. Swimming. Water. Bathing suit. Feeling naked. Outside. Right now.”
“You heard her boys, let us prepare.”
“Did she say naked?”
“Dude.”
“Dude,” the other bud rebukes. He is short, dark hair, tan complexion, really bright, straight teeth and eyes that play well with others. Bass player. Maggie has definitely pinpointed, he is the one who smells like misdemeanor.
Each step is unlevel on boards that have probably been hovering a foot above freshwater totally exposed to the harsh bulb of unbroken sun and humidity going on fifteen years. Spitting out nail heads like people who fight for a living let go of teeth. Maggie’s barefoot, so she is careful. Far as she can see in the upcoming distance, the dock, really more of a pier, extends twenty, thirty, forty, she tightens eyelids and arches her neck, eighty feet over water, roofed near the end, another forty or so feet past that the shape of an inverted f, for parking boats. A formidable distance. Kept surprising her, she even let her jaw drop as she spun in the full abrasive day-star so all the boys could see her approval.
Framed by bald cypress, a giant circular depression, filled by more acidic than usual freshwater, kept from being completely overtaken by algae and scum. It was dark, brackish, unfiltered tea, but it was cool, contrasted with June heat perfectly, and to Maggie’s unfettered surprise, as far out as they were, she was only waist deep in water. She could imagine hordes of shirtless little boys leaping over edges, disobeying orders not to dive and holding breath long enough to scare their truest friends.
The boys mixed up some really upscale Brooklyn whiskey and lemonade with ice into giant thermoses that stayed cold for hours, and they laid out there, swam, sat back on their elbows and had polite bullshit conversation we like so much designed not to lead anywhere. Andy and one of the boys from the band took a small amount of acid dropped onto Mentos. They offered it to Maggie in the form of a shrug. She answered turning as if she hadn’t seen.
Some sort of rainbow like Maggie had never seen formed over their heads, it wasn’t a bow, it was the spectrum in a straight line, nested in a completely overbearing blue, cloudless sky. It took the entire rest of the day to convince Andy it hadn’t been a message from God. As they were starting to tucker out in the sun, the first of their huge double-walled aluminum mugs ran dry, the group was shifting items together and wrapping towels they’d been sitting on around their bodies, and the girl, that one, and another friend from high school, were walking up the pier.
They exchanged pleasantries, Maggie was introduced, Emily, they pretended to be extra stimulated by each other’s presence. She was okay. Maggie could see the connection, they looked like they could be siblings. The other one was named Jamie. You would have thought he was king of all old friends the way they ran up and embraced him. Maggie felt more jealousy toward that hug than the other one. Jamie had short black hair in a hand-part faded, short hiker dude shorts, chaco sandals, a quick dry REI button up shirt that says I am going to sweat through this and yes, I am still going to wear it out to dinner.
Once the first drink is done, they pick up pace, as does everything, all things lead to the other, another drink, a walk to the mess hall for dinner, good dinner, foods from every time of day all set at the same table. Very soon after supper guitars break out like butterflies in spring and there are more people playing them than there are to enjoy it.
This becomes an impromptu fireside howling fest that carries on late into the night, when Maggie loses sight of Andy, doesn’t find him again until the sound stops and everyone hears the glaring compared to fresh silence sound of sloppy kissing.
Maggie had hardly unpacked. She had her car up the midnight path faster than diving into water, it was only at the gate she remembered the deadbolt. The camp key. She knew exactly where it was. And this time the gate was locked. She would have to see people she swore she’d never talk to again to get it.
In the young woods, by Singletary Lake, in eastern North Carolina, Maggie left a chunk of bumper and one of the long chrome decorative trims from the passenger side of her car where they tore off as she went clean around the gate, over stumps, crushing saplings, by sheer vehicular luck not damaging her undercarriage. She got away, in high speed pursuit of having Hippie Camp, and Andy, and whatever freshwater detour that was, behind her.
In the rear view, Maggie sees that sign slowly shrink, stating in large white painted letters against deep, dirt brown wood backing, Singletary. Like a secretary, but who works alone, maybe. A secretary without a boss would be a boss. Wait, she lost herself.
Five hours now. A thousand off-the-wall thoughts to give over. She clicks on the song she needs to play out loud while she runs the one that never ceases inside her mind. She thinks of what she could do with the rest of her weekend, once she’s done sleeping tonight off. She looks out across a coral dawn destroying a flat horizon white with sand, the way it stays white with snow, where she is really from.