Shallow Wounds

I’m allergic to water. Not deathly, no anaphylaxis involved, just a skin-deep intolerance for that most life-giving of substances. Out loud, I address questions about my condition with the practiced factuality of WebMD, but in my head I’ve become a little more colorful. “How do you shower?” Like you, I want to say, naked. “How do you manage to be allergic to more than half of your own body?” I don’t know, how do you manage to have the most evolved brain in the animal kingdom and still ask such predictable, annoying questions? They ask how I go outside in the summer (I don’t), if there’s a cure (no), how I treat the hives that carpet-burn my body. I try not to scratch, but the pain demands it: feverish, rabid scratches, until my capillaries rupture into blackberry bruises.

So naturally, a job at a shoreside sleepaway camp sounded less than ideal. But ideal becomes a luxury when you have nowhere else to go, the college dorms closed to all who could not pay the summer fees. The only alternative—return to Reading, Pennsylvania to stay with my father—was not an option.

~

Tori drove with the windows down on her white Range Rover. She strained her voice against the stereo, honeyed strands whipping her skin, to emphasize for the hundredth time how thrilled she was to work together. The job had been her idea, and with her referral I quickly landed the position. For the next twelve weeks, we would inhabit a college-campus-turned-summer-camp in Long Branch and co-counsel a small group of preteen girls.

I tried to mirror her enthusiasm, but the proposition made me nervous, and not just for its proximity to the Atlantic. Tori and I had only been friends for a year; we’d never spent so much time together. I suspected she might be the kind of person best experienced in small doses.

We pulled into a tree-lined park. Cool air grazed my arms, the early June day not yet sweltering. The other counselors had already arrived, circling a sunny patch of grass.

“We’re here!” Tori sang. She slung her hair into a high ponytail, eyes tinted pink by oversized Pradas. “Everyone, this is my best friend, Irene.”

A chorus of welcomes surrounded me. I lifted my hand in a half-hearted hello.

“You two could be twins,” said a man standing across from us. He was blocking the sun from his eyes, smiling beneath his handmade shadow.

“Twinsies!” Tori interlocked her arm with mine. “You all have to promise to be nice to her, okay?”

We were accustomed to the twin comparisons. When we lived across the hall from each other, our freshmen floormates mixed us up constantly, swapping our names like Freudian slips. I didn’t see the resemblance beyond the surface: tall but not towering, blonde but not too blonde, green-eyed with golden flecks. Her hair cascaded in lush, hydrated layers; mine was brittle and dry like straw. Her body filled out and tapered; mine ran up and down in parallel lines. Next to her, I looked like a scarecrow.

The staff cycled through icebreakers. If you were an ice cream flavor, which would you be? Which Cartoon Network character is your spirit animal? Would you rather have toes for fingers or swallow a thousand bees? At the end of this exercise I learned nothing about my coworkers except their willingness to entertain inane questions. We then carried supply crates from a storage unit into a U-Haul driven by one of the lead staff members, a tanned sandy-haired man in his early thirties. His spirit animal was Johnny Bravo.

As we unloaded the crates at Monmouth University, the temperature climbed from pleasant to stifling, my armpits and forehead prickling with hives. Sweat could trigger the allergic reaction; so could tears. But I had tucked away a three-month supply of non-sedative antihistamines in my backpack, and the pills I’d swallowed that morning reduced my symptoms to irritating, but bearable. As for the hives, they hid behind bangs I’d snipped weeks ago with kitchen scissors.

At the end of the day, we crowded around a Domino’s pizza, the cheese half-solid and cold. “That’s amóre,” said the guy who’d called us twins. This produced laughter and knowing glances, and the conversation soon devolved into a round of “Remember when…?” Most of the staff, Tori included, had been campers themselves from the ages of eight to eighteen, their collective presence a wellspring of nostalgia. I struggled to imagine this, a whole decade’s worth of summers spent in sunrise-to-sunset schedules, islanded off to this ecosystem of kids supervised by pseudo-adults who were almost certainly sleeping with each other.

~

Tori and I unpacked from opposite sides of our shared room. Lip balms, beach reads, and swimsuits in every cut and color crowded her duvet. Meanwhile, I folded away my clothes and surveyed my few possessions: journal, phone, meds, umbrella.

My skin had accumulated a filmy layer of dust and dried sweat throughout the day, so I reluctantly endured a two-minute rinse-off in the bathroom, followed by a generous slathering of medical cream. When I returned to our room, towel-clad and fatigued, Tori hovered by the door.

“We’re going down to the shore to smoke,” she said. “You should come.”

I pretended to consider this. “You know that’s not really my thing.”

“So? You could still join us.”

Tori already knew I would say no. Arguably one of her best traits, it was maybe the strongest binding agent of our friendship, her short-term memory loss when it came to rejection. But when drugs were involved, I refused to take risks. I couldn’t afford to provoke my father, or compromise my scholarship—or, in this case, lose my job.

“What if we get caught?”

“We won’t. They don’t care. The head staff goes right to bed anyway.”

“But the wa—”

“It’s not like we’re going in the water. You’ll be fine. I promise.”

I stared at her with bleary eyes. “I’m really tired. I kind of just want to sleep, if that’s okay.”

“How else will you get to know everyone?” Tori sighed. “It’s really important to me that you have a good time this summer. I love this place, and I want you to love it too.”

I didn’t have the energy to fight her puppy-eyed resolve. “Fine,” I said, and fumbled through my drawers for a sweatshirt and leggings. I tried, as I got dressed, to ignore her celebratory squeals.

~

We met up with four counselors splayed out on beach towels: a mustached man strumming a guitar, a leggy girl with red-streaked hair, a guy in a Metallica shirt crunching on pork rinds, and the guy who’d called us twins. Their faces erupted into view, blue and grainy in the nighttime. As Tori and I strode up to their spot, their names escaped me, sounds I knew I’d learned but couldn’t assign to one face or the other.

“You made it!” The guy in the Metallica shirt held up a fistful of sand. “We thought you bailed.”

“Never.” Tori nudged me with her elbow. “I had to convince this one to come.”

“Hell yeah. Irene, right? Come, sit.” The mustached man patted the ground beside his thigh and offered me his weed pen.

“No thanks.” I crouched into a seat. “I’m, uh, just here to hang.”

“Suit yourself. Hey, Tori!” He snapped his fingers at her. “Did you bring the beers? So your friend can have some?”

“I also don’t drink.”

He gave me a look like I’d sprouted antennae, then turned to the girl with red-streaked hair. “Where’s Dave? Is he coming?”

“He’s probably trying to get one of the new girls to ‘get supplies’ with him,” she said, doing air-quotes. “You know, the skinny one with the nose ring? She’s definitely his type.”

The guy who’d called us twins grinned like a madman. “Dave, that dog. Hey Tori, remember when you guys had a thing?”

Tori took a drag on the pen and rolled her eyes. How could any of us forget, I wanted to interject. Classic Dave, am I right, guys?

They recounted past flings, love triangles, unrequited crushes. As they soared higher and higher, I trailed a twig across the sand, making wavy lines and geometric patterns.

“Hey, we should run into the ocean,” someone said.

“We absolutely should run into the ocean.” The mustached man turned to me. “Irene, you coming?”

I shook my head as casually as possible. “I’m good.”

“Damn, don’t you wanna do anything fun?” he teased, nudging me.

Tori softly socked his arm. “She’s allergic to water, you asshole.”

The group dissolved into laughter.

“I’m serious!” Tori said, though she was laughing now too. “It’s a real thing.”

“How’s that even possible?” asked the other girl. “We’re like, made of water.”

“So true.” The guy in the Metallica shirt gazed off into the distance. “We’re pretty much just huge sacks of water, if you think about it…crazy.”

“It’s just my skin. I break out in hives. I take really quick showers, basically.”

“That sounds so hard,” whined the other girl, but she was looking at Tori, not me. “I love hot showers. I would stay in the shower all day if I could.”

“In Irene’s honor,” the mustached man said, “I say we don’t go in the water.”

“You don’t have to do that for me, really—”

“To Irene!”

“To Irene!” they cheered, holding up whatever items were within reach.

I decided that would be the last night I joined them.

~

When I first emerged from a shower in searing pain, I was thirteen years old. Six doctor visits and a thick stack of medical bills later, one physician put a name to my suffering: aquagenic urticaria. I rushed home and immersed myself for hours in articles and Reddit posts until my father pried me off the family laptop. Online, I discovered a smattering of others, people like me who shared this stupidly rare diagnosis with less than one hundred reported cases worldwide.

I reacted, at first, à la the aggressive rhetoric of motivational videos. Your greatest challenge is your secret weapon! boomed entrepreneurs with throbbing neck veins, and accordingly, I resolved to spin my circumstances to my advantage. The allergy could be isolating, keeping me indoors in the warmer months and excluding me from sports, but isolation had one upside: plenty of time to study, to accrue the string of straight As and gleaming letters of recommendation needed to escape.

Miraculously, it worked. Once I secured that full ride to Cornell, my ticket out of that two-bedroom hellhole, I felt invincible—so invincible, in fact, that when the twins from the nicer side of town invited me to their end-of-high-school pool party, I convinced myself I could sprawl out on a lawn chair and attend from the sidelines.

That feeling died when I trudged home, scaled over with hives and scratching myself senseless. Pure roughhousing, claimed the boy who’d shoved me in the pool. Probably some pathetic attempt at flirting, explained a friend. I suspected I’d be punished for lying about my whereabouts, but only my mother was home, and her face collapsed when I walked through the door. She scheduled an appointment the next day.

The doctor recommended an expensive series of injections. My mother encouraged me to go through with it, her support unwavering despite my many attempts to question her sanity. I asked why she hadn’t balked at the price, which surpassed our household income on a good year. I hate to see you suffering, she said, and smoothed down my hair.

When my father discovered the bill, sliced open the envelope with a steak knife, and looked at us with coal in his eyes, I think she regretted that decision.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

He spoke softly, but I knew what lurked beneath. My mother and I, hunched in opposite corners of the kitchen, said nothing.

“Do you think we’re made of money? Do you think I slave away for you to be this irresponsible?”

“Irene is in pain.” The note of defiance in my mother’s voice surprised me. “I had to do something.”

“We can’t afford to do something!”

A half-empty bottle of High Life launched from his hand, sloshing the carpet and splintering the television. We barely flinched. My father never hit my mother or me, a fact he held in high esteem. Instead, he lashed out at everything around us, our home a collection of broken objects: chairs with fractured legs, plates in jagged halves, photos of us smiling behind shattered glass.

“No, you’re right, I’m sorry.” She flattened herself against the pantry door. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I know how hard you work.”

“Hard? He doesn’t even have a fucking job.”

The words flew from my mouth before I could stop them. In slow, heavy steps, my father approached me. “You wanna say that again?”

“Leave Mom alone,” I said. “I’ll stop the treatment, okay? You win.”

“I win? I win? You think I’m the bad guy, is that it? After everything I’ve sacrificed?”

“You’re literally a parent! That’s literally your job! And you’re not even good at it.”

“Oh wow, she’s telling us how to be a parent now!” He made sidelong glances at my mother. “You think you know so much, huh?” My father came closer, so close I could smell his cigarette-stained breath. “You don’t know anything. Do you hear me? You’re just a stupid, spoiled, self-centered child.”

I looked him right in his bloodshot eyes. “I wish you weren’t my father.”

That did it. He tore a picture from the wall and flung it at the ceiling, shouted at decibels that rattled the window panes. Ungrateful, worthless, bad-mouthed brat. Nothing I hadn’t heard before.

My father slammed the door and pulled away in his battered pick-up. His favorite coping mechanism, long drives that left us anxious he’d road-rage himself into a lethal accident. He often didn’t return until the early hours, coming from God knows where.

In the kitchen, my mother stared at dishes in the sink, looking small and breakable. She took my father’s side because she needed him to survive, I knew that, but still it smacked of weakness. She always folded so fast. I couldn’t decide whether it appalled me or inspired something like envy. She could discard her ego with ease, set aside her defenses, apologize to my father when he was clearly in the wrong. She would probably shoot her own foot to soothe his shallow wounds.

~

We kicked off training at 8 a.m. the next day with twelve straight hours of info sessions (common behavioral issues; how to perform CPR; Camp Apollo theme song!) The day concluded with Kraft grilled cheeses and sad cafeteria soup in a small cup. I felt relieved when they dismissed us, eager to crawl into bed as soon as we returned to our rooms. Tori, however, had other plans.

“If you’re not coming out with us tonight, will you work on the door decorations?”

Tori said this in her Daddy, please voice, the infantile, beguiling tone she used when asking for anything—answers to Psych 101 study guides, or help rearranging furniture for the twenty-third time. I’d only dealt with this side of her on occasion, the shameless way she molded the world to coddle her. A small price to pay, I thought, for the generosity she granted without so much as a breath: the fully comped dinners at upscale restaurants, the winter holiday at her family’s cabin in Vermont.

“Sure,” I said. How long could door decorations take, I figured.

“You’re the best.” Tori smooched the air beside my cheek, grabbed her tote bag, and flew out of the room.

That night, as I watched The Shining on my phone and crafted mermaids out of construction paper, I didn’t resent Tori. In fact, I enjoyed the time alone, the chance to tackle a creative task. But the late nights continued. The head staff stacked our schedules from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and reserved no time for other items on our to-do lists: organizing the supply closet, loading up on snacks and toiletries. I assumed the bulk of the labor, since Tori often wanted to stay out. Day by day, the sleep deprivation compounded into a persistent headache.

On the last night of training, I intended to pass out for a full eight hours, serene in the knowledge that our preparations were in place. But Tori tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Will you do the laundry, pretty please?”

I’d forgotten that our counselor polos, a crucial component of the welcome-day uniform, were soiled with sweat and campfire smoke. Tori stood halfway out the door, canvas bag slung across her shoulder.

“I’m so tired. Can’t you do it?”

“Well…I was going to go down to the shore tonight.”

“Again? Jesus Christ, how many times can you all hang out with each other?”

The sound of my own voice startled me. What was I doing? I couldn’t afford to pick a fight with my co-counselor, let alone my only friend.

“It’s just, these people mean so much to me. And I only get to see them once a year. You get that, don’t you?”

“But you’ve hung out with them every night this week.” I took a deep breath, tried to steady my heart rate. “You still have the whole summer left.”

Tori pouted. “It won't be the same when the kids get here. You’ll see—we’ll get busier, people will start going to bed earlier. This could be, like, our last chance for a while.”

The word no simmered to the surface. I was tired. I had done enough. But I shoved it down. “Fine,” I said, my voice not free of venom. But I twisted my mouth into a neutral line.

“Thank you so so much!” Tori gave me a bone-crunching hug. “You’re an angel!” She flitted out the door before I could so much as serve up a sarcastic you’re welcome.

I tossed my journal atop our combined laundry loads. In high school, I’d spent more afternoons in the counselor’s office than some kids did in class; the school counselor, a bottle-blonde soccer mom who worshipped Martha Stewart, shared many tidbits of what she called “mental health hygiene,” chief among them journaling. Don’t act when you’re upset, she told me after one of my outbursts. A girl had taunted me in gym class for “faking” my medical condition, claimed I’d forged my own doctor notes to skip track laps and burpees, and in response I’d hurled dodgeballs with enough force to crack ribs. Channel your anger into words, my counselor had said. Into art! Heck, you could join a boxing gym!

Machines vibrated and gargled in the basement as I heaved laundry into the nearest washer. My threadbare boy shorts tangled with Tori’s silk camisoles. As the laundry somersaulted, I sank into a butterfly chair and poured all my thoughts across the page. How I wished I didn’t have to be here, complicated by the guilt of knowing I should be grateful. And Tori, had she always been like this? At Cornell, we spent the better part of our free time together, but classes and extracurriculars drew a nice clean line between our lives. By the time we tired of each other, we would usually separate. We hadn’t been living in the same room, breathing the same air. Soon we would be responsible for the same set of twelve-year-old girls.

The journaling did help, though my rage looked suddenly pathetic on paper. The anger faded, leaving only fatigue, and the percussive rinse cycles doused me in drowsiness. On a current of whooshes and whirs, I drifted to sleep.

~

My ankles itched. I jolted awake. The scuffed gray tile had disappeared, submerged beneath a foot of water.

It took me a second to realize I wasn’t dreaming. The journal had fallen from my lap; I reached forward and plucked it from the detergent-frothed slurry. The pages buckled, blue lines bleeding over smeared graphite.

A small grief trickled in. At the beginning of freshman year, I had documented each of my experiences in this journal. The heady thrill of potential, the liberation of starting anew. Free from my father’s grip, from the reputation I’d developed in my hometown, I realized no one had to know about the allergy. No one had to know anything about me at all. For the price of solitude, I would’ve gladly traded the illusion of normalcy.

Then I met Tori. From the second we swapped snide comments at a mandatory floor meeting, she’d inserted herself into my life. She would accompany me to Psych 101, babbling with the saccharine energy of a Labrador puppy. She would invite me to gossip in the dining hall, to pregame in off-campus housing, to cram for finals at Mann, all without me asking. All those stories, moments, and memories, once carefully preserved, were now bloated into wet blotches.

~

Any hope for a reasonable night of sleep drained away with the laundry water. No one said anything hostile, but they asked questions like are you sure you loaded the machine correctly? Needless to say, they did not seem particularly thrilled to be called in at midnight, scooping plastic buckets into an industrial sink.

I took an extra dose of pills and found a pair of disposable gloves in the supply closet. But when I reached for a bucket, one of Tori’s friends batted away my hand, as if reprimanding a dog.

“What are you doing?! Aren’t you allergic?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I started this mess, I should—”

“No no no. Don’t even worry about it. We’ll take care of it.” His gaze fell to the patches of pink around my ankles. “Your skin! Oh my God, are you okay?”

“It’s fine. I took pills for it, I’m fine.”

Tori sulked in the corner, deflated by the premature death of her social hour—and, I realized, her possibly damaged clothes. I wrung out each sock and shirt before loading the dryer. While our clothes tumbled, I hauled water into the sink, though several staff members insisted I stop. Everyone, it seemed, had found out about the allergy.

After one cycle, our laundry had meshed into a damp, spongy mass. I re-ran the machine, praying I hadn’t ruined her designer items.

I wanted to apologize, but Tori thwarted my attempts at eye contact, her back angled toward me as she leaned over the sink. Before I could say anything, she slammed her bucket down, sighed theatrically, and plodded up the stairs.

~

To this day, I’m not sure why Tori chose me.

What could I offer to someone who had everything? What made her drag me to parties in Cayuga Heights, where she slipped into bathrooms trailed with toilet paper to do lines of cocaine while I traced the knife-edge of sober? What made her open up to me one night about what happened to her in high school? Her parents, both overworked doctors, paid so little attention to what she did, and so Tori had navigated the party scene well before college, had discovered its pitfalls early, had accepted a roofied Coke from a much older boy, had woken up the next morning with a hazy recollection of the night before and a plunging in her stomach.

Something about her candor compelled me to confide in her too. When I first explained my condition, she tilted her head. “Can you drink it?” she asked. “Or is it like being lactose intolerant? Dairy makes me violently flatulent.”

Eventually I told her about my father. I started with the inciting incident of my family’s downfall: my conception. Barely eighteen and both from conservative households, my unmarried parents were cut off from familial support when my father got my mother pregnant. In lieu of college, my mother accepted the role of stay-at-home mom. My father opted for breadwinner. But for a man who could make himself useful in so many contexts—construction worker, landscaper, mechanic—he couldn’t hold down a damn job. Eventually he would lose his temper at some small trigger, cursing out his superiors and damaging valuable property. It’s the people, he complained, time and time again, they’re impossible to work with. Always deflecting blame, incapable of self-awareness. I centered my stories around these faults, painting the most negative picture possible.

In truth there had been moments of humor, my father terribly funny when he wanted to be, blasting some crooked politician with commentary so ruthless, we laughed so hard it hurt to breathe. It seemed unfair that he had that power: to make us smile with tears in our eyes one day, to make us wary of stepping over some tripwire the next.

The first time I mentioned him to Tori, I expected a clipped, awkward response. Instead, she latched on, absorbed every detail in a way I never knew I craved. Not pity, not distant solace. A small part of me exhaled.

That’s when the charity started. Meals she paid for without a word, invitations to stay with her family when the dorms closed. She offered help with such grace that I never felt bad about it. I don’t know why Tori chose me, but I know—despite her infuriating traits, the grating sunshine of her princess personality—why I let her.

~

The onslaught of campers upended us. Days slurred into a panorama of recreational classes, cabin bonding, shared mealtimes. An eight-year-old wore star-shaped glasses and cried over a boy dribbling worms down her back. Older kids performed viral dances in the hallways. Chlorine wafted through dorms converted into cabins with paper decorations. In the afternoons I taught art classes, though my drawing skills had never progressed past basic shading. God knows I wouldn’t be assisting with swim lessons.

Our cohort of middle-school girls, with their naive sweetness and playful banter, diffused some tension, but no doubt things between Tori and me had shifted. She would only address me to coordinate logistics or relay directions, a cold edge in her tone. I tried to apologize for the laundry, but this she barely acknowledged, cutting me off with a curt, “It’s fine.”

One night Tori asked me to swap on-call duty so she could smoke again with her friends, a habit that had slowed but certainly hadn’t stopped. At 2 a.m. the emergency phone pierced through my sleep with its alarm. One of the younger girls claimed to be dying of a stomach ache, which, after a journey to the bathroom, we concluded was just gas. I escorted her back to her room and talked her down from any lingering health concerns.

On the way to bed I passed by the bathroom again. Muffled voices mingled with the rush of running showers. I paused, prodded the door open, careful not to make a sound. Inside, their words crisped and clarified. One voice, high-pitched and lilting, belonged to Tori.

She groaned and griped with a counselor I couldn’t identify as they washed the weed smell off their bodies. “Bringing her here was such a mistake,” she said. “She has no idea what she’s doing. I have to ask her to do everything. It’s like pulling dead weight.”

Her comments clouded my thoughts for days. I thought about confronting her, but in none of my imagined scenarios did this play out well. Without my journal, I resorted to the notes app on my phone, listing out grievances. Words I fantasized wielding against her. Texts I couldn’t send. Lines I would relish to deliver.

One day my screen flashed with a text from my father. Have you seen that new slasher film on Hulu? Absolute crap. All flashy effects, no substance. His appeal to our shared enjoyment of the horror genre was not lost on me. Part of a recent string of messages, feeble attempts at reconciliation, though likely fueled by genuine remorse. I considered not responding, though it felt surprisingly nice to hear from someone I knew. Someone who knew me better than all these strangers. I haven’t, I typed out, I’ll steer clear of it, thanks. My thumb hovered over the send button. Instead, I pocketed my phone. I wondered how he was faring alone, no one but the walls to absorb his moods.

~

Halfway through the summer, we hosted “Sunday Funday,” an afternoon of volleyball and corn hole by the water. The head staff excused me from participating, but I wasn’t about to give Tori any more ammo, so I supervised from afar. Kids stomped over sand castles and chased each other with plastic shovels. Thorns of laughter interspersed with forearm thwacks, sanitized pop blasting from a glitchy speaker.

At the water’s edge, Tori lounged in a foldout chair. One of her camp friends sat beside her, the girl with red-streaked hair, Erin or Karen or Sharon or something. She never spoke to me directly, only through Tori, so on principle I never bothered to learn her name.

Tori’s eyes flickered in my direction. I almost looked away, but she waved me over. When I hesitated, she waved with even more fervor.

“Aren’t you lonely over there?” Tori asked as I approached. “We could come join you.”

I didn’t know why she was being nice to me all of a sudden. It made me nervous. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t want to make you move from your spot.”

Tori turned to Erin/Karen/Sharon. “Irene never wants to hang out with us anymore.”

“Too good for us or something?” said Erin/Karen/Sharon. She was smiling, despite her deadpan tone.

“She’s always typing away on her phone. So strange. So secretive.” Tori frowned. “What are you even doing on there? Are you texting someone?”

Erin/Karen/Sharon gasped. “Maybe she has a lover.”

Tori’s eyes ballooned. She sprung forward and grabbed my phone. “Can we see?!”

I yanked it back, but she wouldn’t let go, her fingerprints smudging the screen. The last thing open on my phone was the note where I dissected every negative aspect of her personality. “Stop it. I have a passcode.”

“Oh please, it’s your birthday, I’ve seen you type it in a hundred times.” She tugged forward. “Why are you being so weird?”

“Weird?! It’s my phone!”

I wrestled the phone out of her grasp—and out of my own. It spun in the air and clattered to the ground. A wave rolled through, lapped it up, and deposited it back on the sand.

“I’ll get it.” Tori leapt to her feet. Before handing it over, she swaddled it in a towel like a newborn. It looked fine on the outside, but its components were soaked, already drowning in saltwater.

~

Over the next week, my phone suffered a crackly, pathetic death. The phone wouldn’t charge no matter which way I finagled the cord. In its final days, the colors inverted, the saturated pixels slowly corroding. A splatter of black opened into an abyss and swallowed the screen whole.

None of my data had been backed up. I mourned the photos in my camera roll, the thoughts jotted down in my notes app. I had no outlet for my complaints about Tori. Cut off from the staff group chat, I also relied on her more than ever.

The more I needed her, the more she asked of me. Requests turned into demands. I have a headache, I’m going to lie down. You take the campers for the evening. When the cafeteria broke out in mayhem, she batted her lashes. I’ll take them back to their rooms. You can deal with the mess.

To make matters worse, as the weeks dwindled, so did the antihistamines. I thought I’d brought enough to last me the summer, but some days I’d needed extra doses. Other days I’d dropped some, pills vanishing into piles of sweaty socks and shorts. These I went looking for, tearing through towels, rummaging through laundry, all to no avail. I rationed out the remaining doses for whenever I would need them most.

Few counselors had brought cars aside from Tori. With two weeks left in the session, I worked up the nerve to face her on the way to breakfast, campers trailing behind us, and asked if she could drive me to the nearest pharmacy. To my surprise, she agreed.

But the opportunity evaded us; the pharmacy closed at seven, well before our daily programming ended. I pleaded with her to find coverage, someone to sub in for our classes or supervise the girls. Of course, tomorrow, tomorrow, she’d say, then tomorrow would roll around and she’d slap her forehead, feigning remorse for her faulty memory.

Eventually I confronted her in our room, right before she slipped out for the night. “I know things are busy. I can ask someone else.”

“No, I can do it! Tomorrow, I promise. The kids will be packing, we can go then. Meet you in the art room at six?”

I nodded, though I no longer had much confidence in her promises. It boiled beneath my skin, this growing desire to lash out. To vent my frustrations with no regard for her feelings, for what little remained of our friendship. But I managed, for one more day, to resist the pull of destruction. Unfortunately, I knew exactly what kind of damage I was capable of causing.

~

The night my father found the medical bill and drove off, a palpable tension swelled in the kitchen. My mother made no sound as she lifted chipped plates from the sink and scrubbed in elliptical motions. I waved my hands around, but she fixed her gaze on the dishes.

“Well? Aren’t you going to do something?”

“What is there to do? You know your father. You know how he is.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep from punching the wall. “So what, he just gets to treat us however he wants? That’s bullshit.”

“Language.” She shut off the tap and shook her hands dry. “I’m disappointed in you, Irene. I didn’t raise you to be this way.”

“What are you trying to raise me to be? A doormat? He doesn’t give a shit about us, or my allergy.”

“Of course he does. He worries about you constantly.”

“He should do a better fucking job of it, then.”

“Irene.”

“And you should do a better job keeping him in check.” My fingers shook, the words surging forward without forethought. “You could’ve left him ages ago, if you’d been brave enough. We could’ve had a decent life without him. But no. You’re too much of a coward.”

I felt electric. Every syllable landed with such satisfying force. The second I realized what I’d said, the rush turned sour. But God, for that split-second when the words left my mouth, it felt euphorically, deliriously good.

My mother said nothing. She held herself delicately, like if she relaxed she might unravel.

Sometimes, when I startle awake at night, that memory etches into the fuzzy darkness. Her caved-in cheeks, the tremble of her lips—I might as well have slapped her. I retreated to my room, hid beneath the covers, as though I could sleep off what I had said.

The next morning, I found only my father at the table. He stared, silent and still, at a scrap of paper. Without his rage, he looked softer, younger, like a fully-bearded man after he shaves. His eyes were vacant and devoid of light.

“She’s gone,” he said. In the note my mother explained that she had taken my advice, packed up in the middle of the night and left our family for good. Irene, you’re an adult now, she wrote in her immaculate penmanship, so neat it felt premeditated. You don’t need me anymore. You’ll be fine.

My mother refused to tell us where she went. She didn’t want us coming after her, not that we didn’t try. It didn’t take us long to figure it out—she could only be in North Carolina with her sister, who, unlike her, had chosen a harmless mop-handle of a man, had done things the right way, had married at a respectable age, then had children. Still, I couldn’t imagine their lives were easy, both underpaid schoolteachers with three ravenous boys cramped in a two-bedroom ranch house. I couldn’t imagine they had room for one more.

Maybe it was for the best, now that my mom didn’t have to deal with my father. But it left me unbuffered from his rage. As I geared up to leave for college—the two of us trapped in that shitty saltbox, launching verbal assaults that prompted wellness checks from the neighbors—I knew I couldn't come back.

When I glance in the mirror, sometimes I flinch at the resemblance. Those same severe eyes, that asymmetrical jab of a mouth. I try to soften my gaze, to slope my lips into a smile. I try to erase all evidence that I could be like him.

~

After my final class of the summer, I tidied art supplies while rain drummed against the roof. The empty pill bottle mocked me from my backpack, nothing but my umbrella to protect me now. Above the door ticked the Platonic ideal of a wall clock: 6:01 p.m. Tori had agreed to meet me in the art room at six and drive me to the pharmacy, but without a working phone, all I could do was hope for the best and stare at the children’s scribbles.

A crayoned cow leapfrogging a Swiss-cheese moon. A princess with butterfly wings and a crooked tiara. The minute hand inched forward.

6:05. 6:10. 6:15.

An older camper’s charcoal drawing of her charm bracelet. A half-decent watercolor of a beach ball.

6:20. 6:25. 6:30.

Thirty minutes until the pharmacy closed. If only I could call her. If only I could call anyone at all.

6:35. 6:40.

I fished my stupid, useless phone from my backpack and hurled it at the door. The screen spiderwebbed into stupid, useless pieces. If Tori wouldn’t show up, I would go find her.

Outside it was shockingly sunny, the stormclouds outlined in yellow light. I speared open my umbrella, oriented toward the dorms, and ran as fast as I could without getting wet. An eerie mood had descended on campus, the fields and pathways completely deserted.

Back in the dorms, the hallways buzzed with silence. No sign of Tori. No campers in their faux-cabins. No staff members I could ask about her whereabouts. I ventured into our room, but she wasn’t there either. Had I forgotten some crucial detail? Some last-minute group activity? Where was everyone?

Faint laughter trickled outside the window. I pressed my face to the glass and peered around the corner. Behind the building, a group had gathered in a pinwheel of raincoats, dancing and twirling in the sunshower.

I clutched my umbrella and thrust myself back outside. My sneakers squelched through mud as I marched toward the group, and then I saw her: Tori, laughing, her ponytail stringy with rain. Even with her hair flattened against her skull, she still gleamed with an untouchable glow.

Tori glanced in my direction. Her face fell. “Irene. I’m so sorry. I was just coming to get you.”

“Really? Is that so? It’s a little late for that now.”

“It’s just, the girls said they saw a rainbow, and they wanted to play in the rain, and then everyone did, and I didn’t think we’d be out here so long, and—”

“And you could have, I don’t know, come by and told me?”

Tori chewed her bottom lip. “Well, I figured—I didn’t want you to feel left out.”

“Oh my God, how sensitive do you think I am? You think I’m not used to this? I don’t need you to protect my feelings. I need you to help me get my fucking meds.”

My voice slashed through rain and laughter. Campers paused, angling toward us.

“I’ll take you tomorrow, I promise. I just wanted to enjoy one last moment with the girls.”

I bit my tongue hard enough to puncture. My mouth bloomed with a metallic tang. “Of course you did. You don’t give a shit about anything other than getting high and doing whatever you want.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I told you I’m sorry. Calm down, you’re being kind of a bitch.”

“You don’t get to say that to me!” My vocal chords fractured. The umbrella quivered in my grip. “You make me do everything and I just shut up and let you. This whole time I’ve tried to be nice—”

“Well you could’ve tried harder! You really thought I couldn’t tell? Please, you’ve been acting passive-aggressive all summer. I was trying to be nice to you.”

“Well you could have actually done something for me for once. But no, you’re too much of a stupid, selfish bitch.”

Tori drove her words in like a dagger. “You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me.”

I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to hurt her because she was right. Faces crowded around us, faces of kids who returned here every summer, who frolicked in the rain and didn’t dread coming home. Among all those onlookers, my worst fear came true: the back of my throat blistered with tears.

In one impulsive pinch, I drew the umbrella’s ribs into its spine. It collapsed and fell to the ground. Rainwater flushed over me as I stood there, exposed.

Silence, save for the steady patter of rain, the almost-audible collective shock. In front of all those wide-eyed expressions, I managed, briefly, to maintain my composure. Somehow, in those seconds before onset, I tricked myself into thinking this time would be different. This time, I thought, I’d feel nothing, I’d be cured, I’d be a different person—only to be greeted by that familiar, needling pain.

Hives stubbled my collarbones, my arms, my shins. The rash blazed down my body, coaxing me to scratch, but I succeeded, for a second, in controlling myself. I clenched my fists, chewed the inside of my cheek. I breathed through the pain. The effort, at least, distracted me from crying.

And then the urge turned overwhelming, and I tore myself apart.

I scratched recklessly, violently, raked red lines across my forearms and thighs. I dug in with my nails, destroyed any hope of leaving the skin undamaged. I knew the internal bleeding would take days to fade. I knew I was making a spectacle of myself. I knew the self-loathing would shroud me as soon as I stopped scratching.

But God, in that moment, it felt euphorically, deliriously good.