“push me back into a tree/ bind my buttons with salt
fill my long ears with bees / praying: please, please, please
love, you ought not! /no you ought not!”
-Joanna Newsom, “Sawdust and Diamonds”
Ophelia was late.
This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence– the pale, fey teen was prone to sleeping through all but the most klaxonlike of alarms– but it still managed to motivate her to pedal faster as she skimmed down the gentle slope of road leading to Camp Corona. She breathed a labored sigh, thankful for the fact that while she lived in one of the most boring towns on the West Coast, at least it was only a 45 minute ride to the sand, sea, and– well, whatever camp brought for her, she supposed. And while it was inconvenient that she’d had to carefully pack her large backpack full of the essentials she’d need for the summer and somehow balance it between her shoulder blades as she biked the 8 miles to the coast, at least she was traveling light.
She had refused her parents’ offers to drive her to Camp Corona. They’d asked her several times over a breakfast that seemed to last the entire morning, but she waved them off each time, smiling weakly and attempting to prove her fitness with a few sips of orange juice and a hard-boiled egg. It was all lie, of course, and a bad one, but it had worked. She had to stop several times on the way to catch her breath. Her skull buzzed like television static and she’d had two cigarettes out of the emergency pack of Marlboros tucked into the smallest zipper pouch of her backpack. But she’d made it.
As she slowed into the wide area in front of what she figured was the admin building (or registration?), she leaned into her left hip and dragged the sole of her sneaker across the ground to brake. A sudden drop, likely a pothole– she lurched forward and left, her body struggling to maintain balance of the bicycle– a slight miscalculation, born of fatigue or maybe just resigned apathy– and she felt the harsh bite of loose gravel on her palms. Wincing, Ophelia rolled onto her side, hoping nothing in the backpack had broken in her brief moment of clumsiness. A quick glance at her palms. They stung, and the skin was raw in places, but nothing was broken or bloody, and that was good enough. The rest of her was, she noticed, in similar condition. She got to her feet unsteadily, feeling the familiar pressure in her head and blur in her vision that came with nearly an hour of biking and a diet of cigarettes.
Nothing was permanent.
Ophelia adjusted her backpack on her shoulders, scooped her tangled brown hair into a low ponytail, and brushed the worst of the dust off her black leggings. It would have to do, she decided. Though I’d prefer to make a better first impression. She didn’t have time to change her now dirty clothes, so the first her new companions would see of her would be a ruffled, sickly girl smelling of smoke whose carefully-chosen outfit was caked in the trappings of the dirt. But it could be worse. Ophelia walked her bike up to the side of the building, noting the sounds of a fire and muffled conversation in the distance before she entered, pulling a piece of paper out of her shirt pocket.
“Looks like we have a straggler!” The chirping voice came from behind a desktop monitor, and Ophelia approached, painfully conscious of how disheveled she looked. “Welcome,” the receptionist continued, looking up at Ophelia expectantly. “Your name, dear?”
Ophelia could feel her pulse in her temples, but her mouth opened as if in reply– and nothing came out. Her throat tightened. She reminded herself to file this away in her “Times I Fucked Up” cabinet inside her consciousness. Then, in a flurry of movement, she unfolded the piece of paper she had tightly gripped in her right hand, and shoved it in an unintentionally violent manner towards the woman. To Ophelia’s relief, the receptionist held back a questioning glance towards the bedraggled teen and peered at the paper.
“Oh, you didn’t need to turn in this form, honey, it was just for y–“
Ophelia cut the receptionist off with a silent gesture to the spot on the camp registration printout where she’d scribbled her name.
“Ah. Katherine Fisher, is it?” Before Ophelia could nod her head in resignation, used to unaware adults using her formal name, the receptionist continued. “You’re actually the second Katherine who’s registered today, dear, so if you’d like to make things easier, do you maybe have a nickname so we can tell you two apart?” Ophelia’s hazel eyes lit up as she grabbed a dull pencil from a jar on the desk and hastily scribbled ‘Ophelia’ next to her printed name on the paper.
“Ophelia… that’s from Shakespeare, isn’t it?” the receptionist said brightly, then without waiting for a response, nonverbal or otherwise– “Here’s your key, honey. You’re Cabin Five.” Ophelia pocketed the key silently, hefted her backpack higher up on her right shoulder, and waved a gesture of thanks to the receptionist as she turned to leave.
“And everyone’s having a little mixer by the bonfire, so if you want to first put your things away, you can head over there and meet the other campers if you like!” the woman called as Ophelia exited the registration building.
Might as well go now and deal with the cabin situation after everyone’s quieted down, Ophelia thought, rubbing her palms gingerly on her leggings. But first–
The third cigarette of the day came like a messiah.
