I hated it. I had to look up the word lascivious later (I’m certain Jackson didn’t know it either), but even without a dictionary on hand, the gist—and your intentions—were clear. It took my breath away. I’d never been the butt of your jokes before. You were thoughtless with plenty of people, but you’d never been thoughtless toward me. And for what? To impress Jackson for five seconds? Was that worth humiliating your best friend?
My cheeks burned in the dark and I considered getting up and leaving, but then you pulled away from Jackson. You reached for my hand and squeezed it. “Sorry to tell them your secret,” you said. “You know it’s that I live my life in truth.”
Nitin snorted. Jackson looked confused. “It’s okay,” I said. I squeezed back. “People were bound to find out eventually. All that gushing. The randy waterfalls. The way I talk about sex twenty-four seven.”
You shook your head solemnly. “You need help, Randy. But I still love you.”
“I love you too. You and your groovy, groovy nipples.”
Your laughter then was real.
I looked for Groovy Nipples Eaton online today, wondering if she could possibly exist. I couldn’t find her through Google or on social media, but if I were named Groovy Nipples, I would use a nickname or go into hiding. I did find a real person named Gruvi Nipples Paulekas, who was born in 1967 and had a little brother named Freakus (or Phreekus), if the internet is to be believed. Maybe you’d heard about her and removed the degrees of separation. Not a complete lie, exactly.
Like you said: Truth is stranger than fiction.
At any rate, with that hand squeeze, you squashed my irritation. It was you and me versus them and everyone else again. Maybe you’d never meant to humiliate me, only to keep the others out of what was ours. It was none of Jackson’s or Nitin’s business why you called me Randy. You’d offered up a lie to protect our secret.
You were under Jackson’s spell, but not completely—not yet. It wasn’t too late then to pull you back to me.
Sometimes I think maybe it’s still not too late. That if I can find the right words to get through to you, we will find our way back to how things were before.
But what if we can’t?
Fuck Jackson for all that came after.
Love,
Kayla
Camper and Counselor Interviews, Statements, and Posts
August 14–November 24
“I never noticed Jackson before he started hanging with Lainie and Kayla. Then it was like, Oh yeah, there’s that guy who has a thing with Lainie. I assumed he must be cool for her to be into him, but I don’t know. She could have gone out with anyone.”
“I don’t think their relationship was actually all that imbalanced. You never know what’s really going on in someone’s head, right? Or what a couple is like when they’re alone together. I’ve known lots of couples who break up and get back together and break up and get back together. We’re in high school. It’s like that. It didn’t seem weird or outrageous to me, and I don’t remember anyone saying that stuff at the time. I think people just look at it differently now because he’s dead. Once something like this happens, you only remember the extremes.”
“I never actually spoke to Jackson, but I hate him over what he did to Emma. Not the hookup, but the way he treated her after. He told the guys in his cabin, ‘She’s hot but she kisses like a fish.’ Which, first of all, what does that even mean? And second, way to be a total asshole. His friend Nitin stepped up and said, ‘Not cool, man,’ which stopped the laughter, and a few other guys backed Nitin up. Jackson said he was only kidding and Emma is great, and switched to insulting Nitin.
“It got back to her and of course she was completely humiliated. She said it was fine, but it wasn’t. I saw and heard her crying. I hated that guy. I’m not sorry.
“I’m pretty sure he was the source of those stupid rumors about Chef Beverly too.”
“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead or whatever, but what you see of Jackson on the news isn’t the whole story. Nobody’s perfect and he was just another teenage guy—he could be a real jerk sometimes, and he was pretty smug and self-centered. Or maybe that was all posturing because he was deep-down insecure, I don’t know. I shouldn’t psychoanalyze him. But the way he treated Lainie sometimes, I don’t know why she put up with it. I guess she didn’t, in the end. I’m not saying he deserved to die, that’s ridiculous. But he wasn’t some perfect saint like you’d think from the eulogies. He wasn’t even especially nice. Or, he was fine, but he was kind of a jerk to his friends—always sarcastic, and making ‘jokes’ that were really just insults—and shouldn’t your friends be the people you’re nicest to? I don’t know. I guess he wasn’t my type of person. I avoided him as much as possible, which was hard since we were in the same cabin.”
“My mom says some women like to be treated badly because they can’t see their own self-worth. That sounds like victim-blaming, but I think maybe with Lainie it was true. She seemed so confident and untouchable with everyone else, but Jackson was her weak spot. Her Achilles heel. It was like the worse he acted, the more she wanted him. Maybe she put up with his shit because on some level she thought she deserved it. Until the end. Then she just snapped.”
“This one time I saw Lainie throw a soda in Jackson’s face. Just sloshed it right at him. They were fighting about something and he started mimicking her voice, like ‘mih mih mih,’ all high-pitched and stupid, and the next second he was sitting there, dripping wet. Soda and ice.
“Everyone froze, super tense, and Kayla looked back and forth between them like, Oh shit, here we go. Then Jackson cracked up out of nowhere and Lainie did too. Someone clapped and Jackson stood up and took a bow, but . . . it could have gone very differently. They both had tempers, and honestly, they were kind of attention whores. If she hadn’t killed him, I could just as easily imagine the opposite: that he’d be the one to kill her. And if she did really do it, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was self-defense. There was a lot more to both of them than meets the eye.”
September 24
Dear Lainie,
The idea of you killing Jackson became a thing pretty early on. I think it started when he told us about his allergies. “So if I wanted to kill you, I should just eat a PB&J and slip you some tongue?” you joked one day at lunch.
“The kiss of death. At least I’d die happy,” he said. You two were having a good day. On again, for the moment.
“Or you could wear a cat-fur coat and rub up against him,” I said. You blinked at me like you’d forgotten I was there.
“Nah, then I’d just get itchy-eyed and snot-nosed. Maybe break out in a rash,” he explained.
“Sexy,” you said.
“That’s my middle name.”
“Weird. I wonder if we’re related,” I said. It worked. You laughed.
Sometimes I wonder if you and Jackson would have kept getting back together if I’d refused to play the third wheel—the kind that smooths out the ride and keeps the tricycle steady. I was the reliable anchor that allowed you to spin faster, faster, without worrying whether you might topple over and crash.