We cooked for the boys every night that week of camp. Huge, deep pans of tater-tot casserole on Monday. Grilled chicken and a baked potato bar on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we made breakfast for dinner: blueberry and chocolate chip pancakes, bacon and hash browns fried in the leftover grease, grits, fluffy scrambled eggs. We boiled vats of angel hair pasta and made tomato sauce from scratch on Thursday, we chopped cabbage and romaine and shredded carrots for a beautiful salad. Friday was “We Caught It, You Cook It” night in the dining hall. Pastor and the boys had boated and fished on the lake that morning. They came back to shore with a mess of bruise-colored fish, their bodies limp and laid out on ice. We watched while they gutted and cleaned the fish so we could cook them. Several of us looked green around the gills, the smell of innards and flesh was overwhelming. Still, Mrs. Julie taught us how to use the deep fryers and we fried the fish until they were golden and beautiful. We served everything alongside fries and coleslaw, I remember the smell of bread too. We really enjoyed dinner that night. We talked and laughed while we ate. Pastor went to the front of the hall and read to us about Jesus feeding the four thousand with bread and a few fish. His jeans were smeared with greasy fingerprints. We were glad he liked the food enough to have a second serving, then a third. This was until the screaming, when we turned to see Lainey wriggling like she was trying to escape her skin. Shouting laughter rose in choppy waves as the boys removed handfuls of fish scraps–guts, eyeballs, skin–from their pockets and went after us. Their eyes were wide and wild and burning into our backs as we ran into the kitchen and pushed ourselves against the large swinging doors. Lainey’s yellow blouse was wet with fluid and tinged a weird shade of bodily pink, Yara combed guts out of her dark curls with one hand, used the other to press the door shut while the boys pounded at it. When we pushed and shoved out of the kitchen’s back door, there was nowhere to go but the lake. We couldn’t make it back to our cabins through the unlit woods, we were afraid of the boys spreading themselves out amongst the trees to grab us as we ran past. We ran–full-force–toward the water. We could hear each other’s hearts drumming, we could hear the boys yelling at us over the hill. On the beach, we kicked up clouds of sand with our sandals.

At age six, I climbed the ladder attached to our above-ground pool on a November night and flung my body into the center of the water–which was covered with a huge blue tarp. I was convinced the tarp would catch my body and snap me into the dark sky like a trampoline. For a second after I jumped, it held, and I imagined I was lying in a hammock over the sloshing water. When I fell into the pool, the tarp cocooned around me, and I couldn’t untangle myself or find my way to the surface for breath. Almost eight years later, I thought to myself that walking on the lake was like walking ona tight-stretched tarp. As we sprinted toward the water, I prepared myself for the suck of sand on my feet and up to my ankles, the cold stab of water. But when we each hit the lake, we kept running as if it was something we had been born to do. I heard Reese scream in disbelief, felt her stumble and nearly fall next to me, I caught her arm and steadied her. We ran to the center of the lake, where we all stood. No one said a word while we listened to the water lap around us. I expected that, at any time, the tension of the surface would snap, and we would collapse into a bundle of thrashing limbs into deep, opaque water. But the lake continued to hold us even while the boys stood on the shore and hurled rocks into the water, we bobbed only slightly as if standing on a water bed. They were scared, we realized, to leave the bone-dry beach. As if we had put some sort of curse on the tepid lake. It was a delicious feeling, to defy everything we knew about ourselves, the world. Finally, we could do something that the boys couldn’t do. I felt the brush of curious fish against my feet. The flesh in my stomach stirred. Flashlights flickered on the beach as counselors pleaded with us to come ashore. Soon, pastor got on a megaphone and told us that if we didn’t come back to the beach, we would suffer major consequences. For what? We wondered. Hadn’t Jesus walked on water? Pastor began to pray. At one point, he got down on his knees, turned his palms to the starlit sky and sang hymns. We debated on what to do in hushed whispers. Mary Margaret wanted to go back to the beach, but also didn’t want to go alone. She begged us to come with her, she looked at me with her big brown eyes and said please, Sasha. But we were scared of the way pastor was singing. He sounded like a wounded animal. We refused to move and our counselors called the police. Even from the middle of the lake, we could see three cruisers speeding down the unfurled ribbon of the long driveway up to the camp gates, lights blaring and turning the water red and blue and red again.