Jennifer Yu - Four Weeks, Five People

“Stella,” Clarisa says, “tell me that’s water.”

I grin. “It’s a lot more fun than water, I promise.”

Clarisa closes her eyes and takes seven deep breaths.

“Stella,” she says. She puts down the poster she was in the process of taping to the wall and clasps her hands together. “Stella. Stellastellastellastellastella. That’s...that’s definitely not allowed.”

“Astute,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. Her words come tumbling out, one after another. “I don’t want to be, like, the lame friend, even though I’ve been the lame friend for the past fifteen years of my life. But—”

She takes another breath.

“—whatifwegetcaught?”

“We won’t get caught,” I say. “We never got caught last year, and no one last year knew anyone who got caught the year before. Getting caught is not a thing that happens. They never do room checks more than once every two hours, and they always do one at midnight. So between that one and 2:00 a.m., we should be fine. Oh, and I invited the guys over.”

“What?” she says. Clarisa is one of those people who deals with heated discussions on illicit topics by lowering her voice to a furious whisper, which would be great and all, except there’s no one who can hear us, anyway. “Stella, you can’t just do this!”

“What is your problem? This is a nice thing!”

“I don’t like nice things!” she whisper-shouts. “Not when they come out of nowhere and give me panic attacks!”

“Oh. Right.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry. I just—I already told Andrew to come over. I guess they could come and then we could ask them to leave, but—I don’t know. Don’t you feel like it’s camp, and you want to do camp things, and not let ‘your illness control your life,’ or whatever? Does your psychologist say that?”

“Every psychologist says that,” Clarisa says, and, well, she certainly has me there.

“Good point,” I say.

“Look,” she says. “It’s fine. Yes. You’re right. I’m supposed to be confronting my anxiety and moving out of my comfort zone, so I will try to do this, but I would just really appreciate some kind of warning next time you decide to carry out an entire illegal operation in our room, and also if then you didn’t try to pass it off as some messed-up therapeutic exercise.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry. Look, it’s quarter of twelve. We should pretend to be sleeping for when they come to check on us.”

Clarisa shoots me one last dirty look and then starts taking breaths in groups of seven again. I shut off the lights and climb into bed and pretend to sleep, feeling an awful mix of guilt and resentment and annoyance. I hate it when I’m sorry.

The boys arrive fifteen minutes after the bed check. Andrew comes in first, having switched from a black V-neck and black jeans to a black T-shirt and gray shorts, which I suppose is a step up. He still looks emaciated, but there’s only so much progress you can make over the course of one evening. After him comes Ben, who is actually fairly attractive, in a perpetually mussed-brown-hair and dazed-looking way. Then comes Mason, who, of course, has decided to grace our room with his presence shirtless and in boxers.

“Mason,” I say. “Where the fuck are your clothes?”

“Thought I’d do everyone a favor and lose them,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “You know you’re not actually James Dean, right? I know it must be hard sometimes, to remember, but I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out by now given how much time you must spend thinking about yourself.”

“Feisty,” he says.

“And correct,” I say.

“So, what is this heralded ‘camp tradition’?” Ben says. “And also, is this the kind of thing that’s going to get us sent into the woods and fed only rice and beans for a week? Because I saw a documentary about wilderness boot camp once, and—”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what happens,” I say. Ben’s eyebrows shoot up in horror. “And then they make you walk fifty miles naked.” Ben’s mouth drops open. “And after that, they waterboard you until you swear to never even think about breaking a camp rule ever again.” Ben’s expression reaches cosmic levels of dismay. “And then, when you’ve been reduced to a quivering, semiconscious puddle of obedience, they make you do lines.”

“Lines?” Ben whispers.

I muster up the most solemn face I can possibly arrange under the circumstances. “Yes. You have to write ‘I am a pathetic excuse for a sixteen-year-old boy who will believe anything anyone tells me’ one million times, until you’re not so gullible.”

For a second, Ben just looks confused. But then Mason and Andrew burst out laughing, and I guess he finally gets it, because: “Hey!” he shouts. “That was fucking mean!”

Mason holds up his hand for me to fist bump, which I calmly ignore. “I try my best,” I say. “But seriously, calm down. This isn’t boot camp. That’s Palmer’s thing, you know? He thinks all that crazy intense stuff does more harm than good. That we should have normal camp experiences just like everyone else. I think secretly he wants us to get together in the middle of the night and break all the rules.”

“So what are we doing tonight?” Ben says, looking incredibly suspicious. “Are we going to run through the woods naked or something?”

“Or, like, a time capsule deal?” Andrew says.

“Spin the bottle?” Mason asks hopefully.

“No, no, and almost,” I say. I whip the blanket off my bed to reveal the bottles. “Who wants to take the first shot with me?”

This is when I am reminded, despite my best efforts to pretend otherwise, that I am not, in fact, at a normal camp for normal people who want to engage in some perfectly normal illicit-substance-aided bonding, and am instead stranded in upstate New York with a bunch of lunatics.

“Oh, God,” Ben says. “Does everyone here think they’re in Wet Hot American Summer?”

“Uh,” Andrew says.

“Fuck, yes!” Mason says. I try to restrain myself from throwing something at him.

“Clarisa?” I ask, slightly desperate.

She looks at me. “I’d love to,” she says. “But then I’d have to take six more to make it an even seven, and I’m not so sure that that’s a great idea for my first night at camp.”

I look back at Andrew, who’s still staring at the bottles with an uncertain expression on his face. “I don’t think I can,” he says.

“What do you mean, you don’t think you can?” I say. “Aren’t you the one who wanted to do this in the first place?”

He shifts and looks away from the alcohol, to the floor in front of my feet. “I wanted to bond,” he says. “And, like, come over and hang out, and stuff. But drinking... Alcohol is just so unhealthy. It totally screws up your metabolism, and...and there are just so many calories, even in one shot, and—”

“Jesus Christ, guys,” I say. “Ben. We are clearly not in Wet Hot American Summer because if we were, we’d all be plastered and I’d have killed Mason already. And, Andrew, I know that it feels like if you take this one shot—because a shot is, what, a hundred calories?—everything you’ve ever worked for is going to be meaningless and you’ve failed. But everything you’ve ever worked for is meaningless, anyway, and it’s not like you’ve never failed before!”

“That was a terrible motivational speech,” Ben says. “I recommend more political dramas.”

I glare at him.

“But I’ll take the shot with you.”

“Yeah,” Andrew says, sighing. “I guess I will, too. But not more than two.”

“Fuck, ye—”

“I know you’re taking the shot with me, Mason. Jesus!”