Camp Utopia & the Forgiveness Diet (9781940192567) (20 page)

L8r, Bee

Ps Jackie's number is 4106958383. She'd love to hear from u.

36

TWEAKER

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, it arrived. Resting on the forearms of a dude—our handsome cardboard box. Cambridge paid the delivery guy, but he kept trying to peek behind us into Olive's room. He wore plasticky looking glasses and was obviously going for a rockabilly theme with his Elvis hair, cuffed jeans, and bowling shoes. There he stood, puffy pizza-warming bag hanging uselessly by his side. Then he introduced himself as Glo and said he was looking for Olive. “But I guess I'll just catch up with her later. Anyway,” he said, finally turning away, “enjoy your pizza.”

“Were you looking for a particular chocolate brownie?” asked Cambridge, nose in the Tupperware bin.

“No,” said Glo, a little too quickly. “Well, who are you guys anyway?”

“Olive's cousins,” said Cambridge. “And ours is a family business.”

If I had to guess, I'd say Glo belonged to the
slacker
summer student category because he fell for this line like a common jackass. Glo said, “I see the resemblance. On second thought, I'd like to purchase two of these brownies.” He walked in and closed the door behind him. “These are the brownies made with the, um, special ingredient, yes?”

Cambridge asked him, “Do we look like the kind of girls who'd skimp on ingredients?”

I doubted Olive would want us to turn down a sale, so we collected his sixty-nine dollars, and Cambridge fished out two chocolate squares. I couldn't help but notice there were only two left. Weren't there a dozen or so before? “Mind if we follow you to the party?” Cambridge asked, presenting Glo with the treat. “We're supposed to meet our cousin there, but if you're headed over, we could just go together.”

Glo scratched his head. “Well, OK,” he said. “Let me just eat one first.”

Cambridge shook the Tupperware bin and out dropped the last brownie. I thought she was about to pawn the last psychedelic square on this customer, only to my surprise, Cambridge didn't. Shocking me completely, Cambridge shoved the entire brownie in her mouth

“Tabitha!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

She shushed me, spraying chocolate bits in the process. “According to
Medicinal Purposes of Psychotropic Botany
, I should be feeling something by now.”

With a mouth full of brownie, Glo mumbled, “How many did you eat?”

“The book said a one-hundred-eighty-pound man should feel the effects after one hour. I weigh one eighty-eight, and it's been forty-five minutes.”

Glo smiled chocolate-coated teeth. “Not more than one, I hope.”

Cambridge appeared to be in deep thought. She opened the pizza box, and the smell of grease and pepperoni wafted out. “I'm not even hungry,” she said, looking at our specially created-for-us pizza. “How strange.”

On the front of Cambridge's tank top and scattered on Olive's sheets, I made out heaps of crumbs. I walked over to the bed, feeling the sheets in a blind, raging hope the crumbs were anthills. They weren't.

“How many brownies did you eat?”

Cambridge wouldn't look at me. “Your voice sounds funny,” she said. “Are you under water?”

“Oh Jesus.” I grabbed her face and turned it toward mine. Her pupils were as big as M&M's. “How many, Tabitha?”

“I've never done drugs. Not even pot. I've always wanted to.”

“How many?”

“The book said to eat one until you feel something.”

Glo tried not to laugh, “You don't get drug advice from a textbook.”

“I didn't take the advice. I had three or four. Five?”

Getting off campus was proving more impossible with each passing second.

“You just ate five brownies?”

Cambridge counted on her fingers. “I believe you're right.”

OK, Bethany,
I told myself.
Don't freak.
It wasn't like I knew exactly what was in the brownies anyway. Maybe Olive really had infused them with a supplement. Ginseng. Gingko? Aside from her constant blinking and weird cheek biting, Cambridge looked messed up, yes, but not that bad.
Calm down,
I told myself.
I've seen worse.
My roommate stood up, a little wobbly, sure, but she did stand, walk to the mirror and look.

“I see dead people.”
Oh God
. “You ready, Bee?”

“Ready for what? We're not going anywhere.”

She clipped her hair back in a ponytail, missing half of it. “The party, silly. Glo here's our escort.”

“Tabitha, we can't go. Someone could see us.”

Cambridge blinked about a billion times. “Of course we can,” she said easily. “It's our summer, Baltimore. We're here. We might as well.” She fingered her dreads. “I want to go to a college party. Aren't you in the least bit curious?”

I could have lived with my curiosity. “We don't have costumes!” I exclaimed, as if that were the least of our worries.

Glo stood between us. He was shorter than us by a good margin. “You don't need costumes.”

“Olive said it was a costume party,” I argued. “A mandatory costumed affair.”

Something odd flitted across his face. “Tell you what, you can change at the party.”

Cambridge cleared her throat. Twice. “I believe I am starting to feel things now,” she said academically. “Tingles and such. We should leave. Please come, Bethany. I don't want to go without you.”

And before I could argue, before I could grab a slice of pizza mountainous with our toppings, she was pulling us out the door, down the stairwell, and out into a cool, cloudless night. Glo steered us toward a party he predicted would be righteous, man. Unforgettable.

37

COME AS YOU ARE

OUTSIDE, THE STARS were fierce and pointed. I had lots of time to observe them too, because Cambridge stopped every three feet to examine something. She described how the night sounded
wider
to her than ever before. Then Glo encouraged her to listen to the crickets. I didn't hear a thing, and I found Glo increasingly annoying.

“So the earth isn't moving?” asked Cambridge, staring at the cement.

“No, Cambridge. The earth is moving, but we can't feel it.”

“I think I can,” she replied, lying down on the path. She raked the pinpricked sky with her fingertips. “I definitely can.”

Glo lay next to her. “There's Uranus,” he said, snickering.

How did this guy get into college anyway?

“Are you mad at me, Bethany?” asked Cambridge, now propped on her elbow.

“No.”

“Yes you are.”

“I am not!”

But I was—a little.

I couldn't shake the feeling that behind every recycling bin or hidden inside one of the dark buildings towering alongside the walkway was a pissed-off Miss Marcia or Hollywood watching us through crosshairs. One wrong step, and we were toast. I wanted to be back in Olive's dorm room, not out here watching Cambridge and her Elvis sidekick log rolling down hills.

“Please don't be mad,” she called, mid-tumble. “I just love brownies. So good they are.”

The rare times TJ and I smoked pot, we ate boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese and watched DVRed
American Envy.
Once TJ paused on The Levitator for so long, I feared his after-image would burn in the TV. Even the macaroni had gelatinized by the time we broke out of our inertia. My point is that was about as exciting as things got. Honeysuckle never spoke to me. I never saw tracers or doubted gravity. Cambridge's effects were more on par with crack or meth—not like I'd done them—but I'd never missed an episode of
My Drug Intervention
either. As she lagged behind, lighting the wrong ends of cigarettes and smoking them anyway, I should have been more worried than I was. She turned to me at one point with a fistful of honeysuckle and said, “They are trying to tell me something.”

“You're frizzled, that's what they're saying.”

“No,” she said. “Something different. Something about sweetness.”

According to our guide, Glo, the party was just beyond Polymer Park, the university football stadium. We had already cut across the field and started into the woods when the dirt gave way to cold sand. I could barely make out the sounds of tiny waves. No sooner did we clear the woods when I almost walked face first into a mountain of clothing: T-shirts, sweat socks, hippie dresses, shoes.

Glo crossed his arms. “Here's where you can change into your costumes,” he said, smirking. “Your
birthday
costumes.”

Faced with the Everest of fabric, I was sure I'd walked into a nightmare.
Impossible.
So impossible was the situation, I barely registered Glo's tangled chest hair next to me, his skinny white legs, his tube socks, and even his boxer shorts that he happened to be peeling off right now to publicize his pale white butt. And then he turned around. OMFG.

Before us stretched the mighty Lake Pacifica, which looked as big as the Chesapeake. Bonfires edged the shoreline and gathered around them were people. A lot of people. Maybe even a hundred people, and yes, my eyes did not deceive me. These students I mentioned, around the fires? Completely nude. Every last one of them. Including Glo. Butt naked.

I stood on the party's threshold and developed a keen interest in my flip-flops, not like they held my interest for long. I looked up. I had to look up. It was like a nudist colony had formed eight paces in front of me.

People really do frolic when they're naked, and all the fine folks celebrating the third of July, they frolicked with their glow sticks and body glitter and neon body paint. There were definitely a lot of Thespians because the crowd had the uncomplicated grace of nudity that could only come from spending time on stage. Boys held plastic cups of beer unselfconsciously, cell phones in the other hand, penises dangling. Long-legged girls stabbed at smoking logs, orange embers swirling dangerously close to their glitter-coated breasts. One guy, further back, contemplated the summer sky while he pissed in the sand. So many navels, armpits, the backsides of knees white as snow, buttcracks.
Don't look. Don't look. Don't look.
So many penises.

As bodies bounced and jiggled near me, I wondered if these were the kinds of costume parties they threw in Ivy League universities everywhere. Well, community college never looked better for this girl.

While I didn't have a badge that read,
Hi, my name is: I DO NOT BELONG HERE
, I waited for someone to slap one on me. I tried to cultivate intention like, oh, I was supposed to discard my clothing in that pile? I didn't get the memo. But it was no use. I was a fat girl at a college party, which felt a lot like being a fat girl at a high school party. Only difference was everyone was naked. Not me. No way. I didn't even like swimming without a T-shirt. I should have prepared myself for all the bodies gyrating near me. I should have taken drugs. Maybe then I wouldn't care.

I turned around to whisper something like “Let's go” to Cambridge, whose prep school sensitivities must've been way compromised, but she was gone. So there I was, on the party's outskirts, wearing a hooded California University of the Pacific sweatshirt, short sweatpants with the football team's name, polymers, inscribed in an arc across my butt, and my everlasting flip-flops. I might as well have been wearing a snowsuit.

I picked up a red cup that a naked imp had abandoned on a tree stump. Luckily some beer sloshed in it, so I chugged it down. Then, for the first time in my life, someone directed the words, “Take off your clothes,” to me. I pretended not to hear them. I found a picnic table chained to a pole, climbed on top of it, and interviewed myself.
Would you do it for a thousand dollars, Bethany? No, Bethany, I would not. Would you do it for a steaming plate of crab and cream cheese dumplings? Shrimp lo mein? I would not, could not … How about peanut butter Snickers pie? Well. With a side of moo-shoo pork? Forget it. What if TJ was here? No. And he wouldn't either.
He'd be next to me, fully-clothed, trying to convince me I wasn't the only person in the world who always felt like the only person in the world.

Sipping my lukewarm beer, I was aware of chemically altered eyes resting on my ensemble. Thankfully, further down the beach, I made out another person—also fully clothed—only this doofus wore jeans. OK, there were other people here who preferred clothing. Let the crowd go harass him then. At least my ankles were showing. Desperately wishing my beer would regenerate itself, I searched the throngs for Cambridge.

Someone had strung speakers in the trees and an ambient music played. Evidently I was supposed to be dancing. Cambridge, in her stupor, knew this because when I finally spotted her by the keg, she was dancing, nude, like her life depended on it.

I watched her for a while, amazed not so much by her nakedness but how well she wore it. Her arms swayed above her head as if rocking the moon to sleep. Her legs were strong and her shoulders broad; her waist curved in like a cello. It's a weird thing to see someone who's about your same height and weight, only they look better than you do. Watching her sweep her naked butt down, down, down to the sand, I could see she loved her body in a way I didn't love mine. Or couldn't. If she looked fat, I didn't notice, and I don't think anyone else did either. There had to be some heady algebraic formula for the number of pounds I'd have to shed versus an increase in confidence added with illegal substances before I'd dance naked in front of an audience. Mid-calculation, a forest sprite stepped right in front of me. It was Olive. She was naked, but that wasn't why I flinched. For some reason, I never imagined we'd run into her.

“What in the hell are you doing here,” she asked and searched my eyes.

I willed myself to sound calm. “Hi?”

I guess it's hard to stay pissed off when you're standing there naked. Olive sat down next to me on a picnic bench. “What took you so long?” she asked, and smiled. She tilted her cup of beer into mine. “I was sixteen once too, you know. I never listened either.”