“Hey, Izzy,” she whispered. She was wearing the lanyard bracelet I made her, the one that earned me a blush all her own. For a moment it was like the movies, the branches rustling in the warm breeze, the sweet-metal smell of our stolen Cokes — if I ignored the surgical marker dotted down her sternum, an unerring path to the heart.
“You’re late,” griped Abigail, babying the flame she’d coaxed from a contraband lighter and a demolished Seventeen magazine. My bunkmate was exceptionally good at building fires. She used to be exceptionally good at everything — Girl Scouts, debate, algebra — except being thin. Now she prodded the ashes with an arm that had barely enough muscle left to do it.
“Technically, we’re all late.” Abigail flipped me the finger, skinny as a popsicle stick.
It sounded like a sweet deal, right? After you died, you went to summer camp. Camp Killowee (“Where Young Ladies Are Made!”) had a tennis court, a rock wall, and a canteen with an old-school soda fountain. It had a lake, flat and glistening as a sick child’s forehead. It had a float called The Blob, which looked like a badly taxidermized jellyfish and made hoarse throbbing wails in the wind.
It had the infirmary, with the sign over the door that read Be the Best Version of Yourself.
Summer was endless taffy, the days stretched out and stuck to the back of your teeth. Counselors taught us to dab our lips after meals, to purse them around embroidery thread, to smack them after applying gloss. They led smiling practice before bed until our mouths ached and split. If we complained, they reminded us that we could go home only when our treatments were finished, when we were perfect.
But in the woods, nobody had to smile except the shadows, which made slow, rippling grins across the lake. We tore the guts out of marshmallows and licked smeared fingers clean. We traded dirty jokes until flashlights winked on in the distance, sending us scattering back to our cabins; back to the furious, sweltering confines of girlhood, or whatever it was in the dark.
• • •
My first time in the camp infirmary, beneath the fluorescent lights and the doctor’s expectant stare, I felt myself swell, the worst parts of me bulbous, ballooned. It was the Easter dress all over again. I was a lung filled with water. I was the way words like buxom and woman sounded on my tongue. The doctor frowned.
“Don’t you want to be pretty, Isabela?” he asked, meaning Don’t you want to be normal?
The nurses rushed parts up from storage — ballerinas’ slender calves, starlets’ demure lips — but my body rejected them all, flexing like a snapped electric wire in a storm.
The doctors tried everything: experimental glues, catalogs’ worth of eyelashes and ears, the pearlescent French manicure of a former hand model, shipped in from Europe. Nothing stuck. Not until I kissed Mariah under the lakeside bleachers and her lip gloss clung to my chin, and Texas Tammi from Cabin 7 saw it and snitched on us, because I was a wrong thing in a camp full of wrong things.
Nineteen states had outlawed internal replacements. This was not one of them.
The next week, Mariah told me they were taking her heart.
• • •
Mariah looked away. I peered at my co-conspirators. At Yulissa’s hearing aids. At Tonya, whose adoptive parents had expected her skin to be lighter. At Courtney, so young no one dared to ask how she died; she never spoke, just jammed her stick straight into the coals.
Maybe that’s what gave me the idea.
Maybe I just had to get creative, with no gators around.
• • •
When Camp Killowee closed indefinitely, the locals had their theories: the lanyard cord melted around the exit door handles, the tampon jammed into the creaky firetrap of a fuse box, the pickup truck abandoned across state lines. But the first responders refused to describe for the press exactly what they found inside, and they didn’t mean the blackened lawn ornaments.
They meant how careful our stitches were, how neat and ladylike.
We asked the doctors and nurses, you know, as we plied our needles. Fair’s fair. We even matched the colors of lipstick tubes and cream blushes to the skin we sewed shut around them. When the flames smeared upward, a million shades of Pop-Your-Cherry-Red and Luscious Lemon and Babydoll Pink and Pucker-Up Pink and, as it turned out, open-mouthed, fleshy, Yowling Pink, we asked them:
Don’t you want to be pretty?
But we forgot their answers as soon as we peeled out of the lot, our faces hideous with soot and tears and snot, and barreled whooping down the road and toward the moon — an imperfect gibbous, raw and fat as a marshmallow in the midnight’s laughing mouth.
