“You’re sixteen now, Joy,” her parents had told her. “Don’t you think you should do something more with your summer than just lay around the house?”
She didn’t, but it hadn’t actually been the kind of question they expected an answer to. It was a question not unlike, “Don’t you think it would be good to learn a musical instrument?”, which had been asked of her nearly a decade earlier, after her parents had already signed her up for piano lessons. Or, “Don’t you think public schools are getting too dangerous nowadays?” after they’d already signed her up at a private school.
So Jolene had just mutely nodded her head, trying to hide her annoyance as she waited to hear what her parents had gotten her into this time. There wasn’t much in the way of jobs in the little town they lived in, certainly nothing she would be qualified for that she’d want to do. Would she be stuck in front of the fry vats at McDonald’s all summer, coming home smelling of grease and despair? Would she be at Kroger’s instead, stuffing other peoples’ groceries into bags and carting them out to their cars day in and day out?
The answer, it turned out, was both better and worse than any of the possibilities that ran through her mind – Thousand Oaks Summer Camp. It wasn’t something she really saw herself doing, spending a summer looking after a bunch of twelve year old girls, but it got her away from home, and her parents, and that was always a plus. She felt awkward around the little girls for the first few days, not quite sure how to talk to them – twelve seemed so young, and sometimes they acted that way, but other times they seemed almost more mature than her.
The morning of the fourth day, she’d been unable to sleep, and, not wanting to disturb the still slumbering girls in her cabin, she’d snuck into the bathroom – the light of which was kept on all the time, with the door kept just a bit cracked – and sat down on one of the toilets, propping her feet up on the stall door, and started to read. She was a bit of a bookworm… She’d been hoping to be more of one that summer, as she’d started a particularly long fantasy series as soon as she’d gotten home from the last day of class, planning on making it all the way through before school started back up again, but she was only on the fourth book. To be honest, they were already getting a bit repetitive.
She had made her way through only a few pages when she heard someone else shuffle their way into the bathroom. She didn’t think much of it until she saw a pair of small, flip-flop clad feet make their way past the door in front of her once, and then twice, not going into the stall on either side until they had done so. It was a small bathroom, especially to have three toilets jammed into it – though even after just four days, Jo knew it would have been madness for there to be any less with eight twelve year olds, plus her and the other counselor, there at the same time – so she didn’t have to be paying much attention to hear the lack of noise.
After a minute or two, she heard the shuffling footsteps leave the stall, heading off to one corner of the room, then, after a pause, one of the sinks started up. Curiosity got the better of Jo, and she slowly lowered her feet, leaning a hand forward to keep the door from swinging open too suddenly and surprising whoever was there. She pulled the door open just a crack and peaked through, getting just the tiniest glimpse of a retreating shock of bright red hair that could belong only to Mary before the outer door closed, all but a crack.