Four Weeks, Five People

* * *

Here is the denouement:

BEN (V.O.)

I am waiting for the screen to fade to black.

STELLA

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN awful at this first-day-of-camp business.

Even in middle school, way back when “camp” was still synonymous with rope swings and tennis courts and swimming pools, I was always the girl scowling through introductions and rolling my eyes every time anyone said anything particularly stupid—which, because this was middle school and middle schoolers are uniformly idiotic, was pretty much the entire time. Now camp is synonymous with being cut off from the rest of the known universe and being yelled at by therapists who won’t even let us swear, and it’s even worse. The problem with the first day of camp, see, is that I’m always the only one who’s realized how utterly miserable camp is going to be, and done the logical thing and just given up. Everyone else is all bright-eyed and hopeful as we introduce ourselves and get to know each other and learn about our next four weeks at camp! We’re supposed to put in a good-faith effort to be positive and friendly, which is sort of a problem for me on account of the fact that I am not very good at positive and downright terrible at friendly.

Needless to say, I’m pretty relieved when we finally finish introductions. “Does everyone remember each other’s names, or do we need to go over them again?” Jessie asks, and I have to resist the roll of my eyes and get myself yelled at again. Clarisa is the one who stammers through most of her introduction and has to be asked to speak up five times, Andrew is so skeletal that it’s not exactly a mystery what his issue is, Mason has the most punchable facial expressions I’ve ever seen in my life, and Ben looks so zoned out it’s like he’s on a permanent acid trip. There’s five of us. It’s not exactly rocket science.

After Jessie is done extorting deadpan yeses from all of us, she and Josh walk us all to The Hull, which is what everyone calls the residential building. “The Hull” sounds like a really, really stupid nickname for a building, I know—but once you see it, everything makes sense. For starters, it’s literally shaped like a ship’s hull: only five floors tall, but seems to extend on and on forever from one side to the other. Second, the entire thing got painted over in a really tacky wood stain when they started Ugunduzi so that it would fit in with the whole “camp” theme, but whoever was in charge of painting the building over didn’t do a very good job: the paint is completely uneven, and there are patches where it’s peeling off completely to reveal the gray, occasionally mossy, occasionally moldy blocks of concrete behind it. Needless to say, the building is fucking hideous.

Each floor of The Hull is designated a number and divided into a left wing and a right wing. Our group name, 1L, means that we’re housed on the first floor, on the left side. Like I said: the Ugunduzi founders may have been kindhearted and well-meaning and all that bullshit, but they sure as hell weren’t very creative.

Jessie and Josh lead us into our common lounge—where there’s a pool table, a bunch of sofas, and a kitchen area—and tell us that we can hang out until dinner and “bond.” I, of course, would rather impale myself on the pool stick they’ve left unwisely unattended, but my plan to spend the time sitting by myself and making a comprehensive list of all the ways I might be able to escape is ruined when Andrew plops down on the couch next to me.

“Hey,” he says, as if we’re two old friends hanging out in someone’s living room and catching up. It takes me a minute to realize that I am not, in fact, hallucinating.

“Hi,” I say flatly.

“So...” Andrew says. He bites his lip nervously. I’m starting to get the idea that Andrew is coming to me with the hopes of getting some sort of wisdom or advice, which is sort of a bummer for him, because I have no wisdom, I have no advice, and I have no inclination to share anything of the sort with random strangers I’ve just met, anyway.

“So...” I say back, hoping he’ll leave.

“So what’s it like here?”

No dice.

“Hmm,” I say. “Exhausting. Aggravating.”

I give it a few more seconds of thought.

“And soul-suckingly oppressive,” I add.

“No, seriously,” Andrew says.

“No, seriously,” I reply.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as Mason walks over to Ben and badgers him into playing a game of pool.

“But it’s so nice!”

“Nice? Are you fucking with me right now?”

“No! All I’m saying is just—Look out the window! It’s like having one of those travel brochures right outside, except it’s not a travel brochure, it’s actually what’s outside—do you know what I mean?”

“We’re never allowed to be together unsupervised, just in case we accidentally end up murdering each other. The counselors do bed checks every two hours after lights-out. And every day of every week is planned with some dumb therapeutic activity that’s supposed to make us confuse exhaustion with actually feeling better. I’m going to go with no. No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“But don’t you feel kind of hopeful about it all?” Andrew says.

“Being hopeful didn’t work out so well for me last year. So I’ve abandoned it for a better strategy.”

“What’s the better strategy?”

“Unadulterated apathy.”

“Oh,” Andrew says. He looks down at his hands. “I guess that works...”

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s the fact that Andrew genuinely looks like all of his hopes and dreams have just been dashed. Maybe it’s the way he starts looking out the window again, all wistful and earnest and full of feelings. Maybe it’s that the kid just came up to me and started telling me his life story, for fuck’s sake, as if we’re best friends as opposed to strangers tossed into the middle of New York for a month. Whatever it is, before I can stop myself, the words come tumbling out of my mouth.

“But hey—don’t be too upset. It won’t be miserable, like, a hundred percent of the time. I’ll get us drunk. And there’s always The Ridge, even though no one—”

“You brought alcohol?” Andrew whispers, awestruck. His faith in humanity restored.

“Were you expecting to get through this experience sober?”

“Isn’t that kind of against the rules?”

I sigh. If this kid has spent his entire life trying to avoid going against the rules, it’s no wonder he wound up at Ugunduzi.

“Yeah, it is, so stop yelling about it. Look, are you in or not?”

“Like, now?”

“Yes, right now. Right now, right here, in front of Jessie and Josh standing across the room, both of whom will promptly see us and expel us from this lovely camp that our parents have pinned all their hopes and dreams on. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

Andrew looks taken aback.

“No, not now. Later, after lights-out.”

I pause. Is this really something I want to do? I was planning on waiting until the end of the first week of camp to break out the alcohol, when everyone is especially miserable with the realization that they still have three more weeks of camp. But right now we all have four whole weeks of camp left, and isn’t that even more miserable?

“Yeah, let’s do later tonight,” I say. “Look, you guys just have to sneak into our room. It’s really easy. We literally never got caught last year.”

“I don’t really—” Andrew starts.

“All you have to do,” I continue, cutting him off, “is wait until right after they finish the first bed check and then walk across the right wall of the common room to our side of the hall. Then as long as you’re back before two hours, it’s all fine.”

“That’s not what I was saying. What I was saying was—”

“Look,” I say, exasperated. “All you have to do is come over. It’ll be fun. And could you please stop looking like someone murdered your family pet? It’s making me uncomfortable.”

“All right,” Andrew says. “What’s the plan?”

Once I explain the camera blind spot and how foolproof the entire process is, Andrew is actually pretty down with the plan. He gets super into explaining all of the times he and his band mates snuck into various parks, or museums, or stores, which is impressive, I guess, considering it took three solid minutes to convince him to come over and drink. No, Andrew is all right. It’s Clarisa who ends up being the bigger problem.

“So,” I say to her when we’re alone in our room after dinner. “You ready for the initiation?”

Clarisa looks up at me, alarmed. “Initiation?” she echoes.

I take the last pile of clothes out of my suitcase and open up the compartment at the top. There, I’ve hidden eight water bottles full of vodka, obtained from one of my older brother’s friends through a potent combination of charm and cleavage (that is to say, ten percent charm, ninety percent cleavage), and six shot glasses.

“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!”

“I’m going to sit this one out,” Clarisa says. “But, Stella?” She looks at me with big, sad, hopeful eyes, which means that the best course of action for me to follow right now would actually be to flee. “Make sure I do this at least once before camp gets out, okay?”

“Er,” I say. “Mason will do it. Right, Mason? Don’t say, ‘Fuck, yes,’ I swear to God.”

I pour out four shots of vodka and one of water, for Clarisa.

“And so our five dissolute campers make a toast to the experiences of their future,” Ben suddenly says. “It is stupid, it is night, it is youth. It is hope, it is rashness, it is liquid courage. It is—”

“Dude,” Andrew interrupts. “What are you talking about?”

“Sorry,” Ben says. “Do you ever think, like, if life were a movie with really dramatic voice-over, what would that voice-over be saying? You know, like, if Morgan Freeman was—”

Ben catches the expressions on our faces and cuts off. “Yeah, never mind. I think I’ve seen too many movies. Just ignore it.”

This is why I can’t pretend I’m at normal camp, I think. But I hand out the shots and raise mine, anyway. “To pretending we’re at normal camp,” I say.

We take the shots.

BEN

HERE’S THE PROBLEM: the first shot, the excitement of it all, the rush—it all makes me ridiculously happy. Which in turn makes me ridiculously stupid.

It’s not even just the alcohol that does it—it’s the entire situation. I mean, here I am, in the middle of the night, surrounded by people I barely know, after sneaking out of our room and risking CERTAIN DEATH. Well, maybe not CERTAIN DEATH, but definitely CERTAIN DISAPPOINTED LOOKS, and when you’re the literal antithesis of cool, like I am, that’s bad enough to make you pretty nervous.

I didn’t even want to come at first. I know better than anyone that putting me in social situations with a bunch of strangers is like sending a firefighter into a forest fire with a watering can. But Andrew wouldn’t shut up about “bonding” (no, thanks) and “haven’t you ever done anything exciting in your life? You know, just for the thrill of it?” (definitely not) and “please don’t leave me alone with Mason” (I begrudgingly gave him that last one). So here I am.

And I guess Andrew must have had a point after all, because I’m feeling surprisingly good. Shockingly good. Better than I’ve felt since watching Fast & Furious 6 a couple of years ago and having every negative thought obliterated from my brain through sheer force of CGI. It’s the first shot that does it, I think—the taste, lingering in the back of my throat, the burn that follows it all the way down my chest and into my stomach. This is why Nicholas Cage becomes an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas. I finally understand.

So I take another shot—because Stella and Mason are still going, so it can’t hurt, right? And then another one—“to not letting ourselves reach Norman Bates levels of insanity”—with Andrew. And then another one—“to motifs in movies,” I vaguely remember saying, “because they’re all we can derive meaning from!”—at which point nearly everyone is in hysterics, except Clarisa, who merely looks tentatively amused. Even Stella has managed to break out a genuine smile.

“I’m done, I’m done, I have to be done,” I say, and I’m so happy I can barely think straight, but then Mason fills my glass and shouts, “To not being a pussy!” and the four shots I’ve taken already are enough for that to actually force me into action.

The really stupid thing is that I know exactly how this ends. I’ve been to enough therapy sessions and sat through enough boring health classes to know that I really shouldn’t drink like this, especially here, with people who now probably think I’m a total dumbass, for the first time ever. I’m not fun. I’m not anywhere near cool. I’m pretty much the last person anyone would invite to a party. In the fifteen minutes during which I am feigning sleep after we sneak back into our room, I realize that a) I have been an idiot, and b) more urgently, I need to throw up, now.

It’s hard to describe the emotional sequence that follows, not least of all because I am excessively inebriated for most of it. I make it to the bathroom in time to spend the next half hour alternating between puking, feeling all the positive feelings gradually drain away from my brain, and wishing, wishing, WISHING that I could feel like I’m inside a movie again like I did on the first day of camp, that this entire disaster didn’t all feel so capital-R Real. I hate alcohol, I think. I hate alcohol, and I hate that it did this to me, and I hate myself for being stupid enough to drink even though I knew this would happen, and I hate myself for being ridiculous enough to be crying right now because of something so stupid, and I hate Stella for bringing the alcohol, and I hate Mason for calling me a pussy, and I hate myself for proving him right. I had one chance and I fucked it all up—

“Yo,” Andrew calls from outside the bathroom. “Are you okay? Dude, open the door!”

“And can you quiet down?” Mason adds. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“I’m fine,” I shout, but I must not sound particularly fine, because Andrew opens the door and barges in. Pathetic, I think. He must think you’re so pathetic.

“Dude!” Andrew says. “Are you crying? Ben, what’s going on?” He pours me a cup of water from the faucet and hands it to me.

“What’s going on,” I repeat. I take a drink from the cup and then dry heave. “What’s going on? Our dissolute camper, once so filled with hope and youthful energy, is paying the price for his impulsivity, for the belief that he could ever—“Well, I feel terrible,” I say after catching the look on Andrew’s face.

“You have to stop doing that,” he says.

“I can’t,” I say. “And I drank too much.”

“Yeah, that happens sometimes,” he says.

“And they taught us in health class that alcohol is a depressant,” I add.

“Yeah, that happens, too. But I don’t think that’s what that actually means. Like, I don’t think alcohol actually makes you depressed, if you know what I’m saying. I think it just—”

“And I hate myself.”

Andrew shuts up.

“Oh, God,” I say. The nausea is beginning to fade now, into a constant, throbbing misery—the sense that I would be better off anywhere else, anyone else, or perhaps not at all. To make matters worse, Mason chooses this moment to walk into the bathroom, clutching—I kid you not—an issue of Playboy.

“I thought you were trying to sleep,” I say.

“I gave up,” he says.

I stare at him, speechless, before deciding that the best course of action is to pointedly ignore him.

“I shouldn’t have let myself do this,” I say, turning to Andrew. “People like me can’t do drinking.”

“‘People like me’?” he says. “What does that even mean? Depressed people? People who have emotions? People who do stupid things? People like us, Ben. Now shut up and drink water.”

“People like us?” Mason replies, not looking up from his magazine. “People like you guys, Andrew. Leave me out of it.”

I stumble out of the bathroom and climb into bed, thinking that camp so far has been far, far worse than Wet Hot American Summer.

CLARISA

THE SUNDAY SCHEDULE says we’re supposed to be up by 10:00 a.m., but waking up at a time like that is practically asking to have a terrible day. I set my alarm for 9:31 instead, and I’m feeling surprisingly well rested when it goes off. It’s going to be a good day, I think to myself. I’m going to get out of bed and brush my teeth. I’m going to write my mom a letter. I’m going to try to make friends. I sit up, open my eyes, and—//

—Freeze. There are four shot glasses pushed into the back corner of the room, definitely unwashed. Pieces of paper that Ben and Mason had been scribbling on all night, now crumpled up on my desk. Somehow, Ben managed to forget his shoes in our room. It’s not even the clutter that gets to me, which isn’t as bad for me as people always think it is—it’s the fact that everything is wrong; the sense that that’s not where those things are supposed to be, not on the floor, not on my desk, no, no, no, and then I’m up and throwing away Ben’s nonsensical scribblings and putting Stella’s shot glasses back on her desk where they belong. Equally horrifying is the fact that it would have been this easy for us to get caught: the shot glasses are inconspicuous, sure, but all it would have taken was one careful walk through the room with a flashlight to notice them. And what if the counselors realized that the pair of flip-flops in the middle of the room wasn’t actually mine or Stella’s? //