The Bad Thing
May 15, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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N.C. Happe | Longreads | May 15, 2025 | 7,199 words (26 minutes)
It’s a brilliant day when I first meet Eliza and Sammy. The clouds are parted. The sky is blue. In the periphery: feathery waves of the lakeside, the simple dazzle of sunlight hitting the water. I’m 11 years old at the Crystal Lake sandbar, a hot, murky beach 15 minutes east of my day camp. Around me, the other campers have rolled out their towels. I hear the sounds of a pea whistle, the dizzied prattle of children.
I’ve been sitting in the nosebleed section of the beach for a while now, my towel draped over the roots of an oak tree, pharaoh ants scouring my backpack for sugar. The water on this stretch of the beach is brackish; algae floats in tectonic clots, cattails stripe the surface. Minnesota is full of lakes that look just like this one: brown as brown comes and chock full with minnows, stinking of algae and earth and decay. Not far off, a group of girls my age play. It’s bright where they are and the water is clear. They volley a striped ball that they found in the shallows.
I don’t try and join them. I’m awkward; I know it. It’s my shaggy brown bowl cut and multipack T-shirts, my Pokémon cards, and my big, meaty thighs. I’m one of the few girls that still wears a one-piece, and my balloon of a belly makes it obvious why. But unlike at school, these girls simply ignore me; at camp I don’t feel attacked but simply marooned. Instead of swimming I dig a stout hole in an alcove, where a fat vein of clay waits. My cuticles darken. My hands draw me deeper. I dredge up slippery fistfuls of earth.
When I first catch Sammy and Eliza walking toward me, I pretend not to see them. They’re a mirage in the distance: part shadow, part light. Of course, I recognize the two instantly. They’re younger campers, at least a few grades my junior, and their contrast is noteworthy. One girl has milky skin and the other mahogany; one has blonde hair and the other has black. Eliza, the latter, is cut like a gemstone, whereas Sammy is doughy, without any angles. I’ve often found myself watching them haunt the periphery, circling group activities but refusing to join. Beyond this I know very little. Each girl is an unanswered question, a cavern, a void.
Both carry towels under their arms. They are backlit in darkness, their faces inscrutable. I watch as they close in on me under the oak tree. Neither girl speaks until their shadows are on me.
Each girl is an unanswered question, a cavern, a void.
I fixate on the ground and the things right above it. There’s the fresh hole, some crabgrass, and now Eliza’s legs. She’s still dripping wet from a plunge in the lake. Her tiny brown feet are grouted with mud.
“What are you doing?” she suddenly shouts, seemingly unaware of her volume. I flinch and look up at her. She’s tiny but looming and there’s a hand on her hip. She’s wearing an indigo swimsuit with floral print, framed by a yard of black licorice hair. Her eyes—dark and massive—iridesce like an oil slick. I can’t tell from her face if she’s happy or not.
“I’m digging up clay,” I say. There’s dirt up to my elbows and my face starts to redden. I feel apprehended, like a pig in the mud.
Eliza throws a glance over her shoulder to Sammy, who, until now, has been nearly eclipsed. She’s a short girl like Eliza, but a pale, ghostly negative. She has livid blue eyes and a bikini to match them.
They pause, then lay down their towels and sit.
“We want to do that,” Eliza announces, so loudly again that it stuns me.
The two girls position themselves directly across from me. I can see them both clearly now, made degrees less severe by the bisected shadows. Eliza appears earnest, her expression fiery but warm. Sammy’s face is as plain and cool and round as a raindrop. They nod and lean forward, awaiting instructions. I pull my hands from the hole that I’ve dug.
For the rest of the afternoon we sit by the oak tree together, wrenching up clay. We coax sticky mounds into misshapen vessels, sculpting loose vases and handle-less mugs. There are teapots and bowls and a disfigured flower vase, though one piece hardly looks distinct from the next. The clay—if it can be called clay—is wet and unwilling: Each shape we impose it slowly rejects.
It’s studious work, undertaken in quiet. Even so I become cognizant of a certain camaraderie building: our dry elbows rubbing as the hole grows between us, our mingling fingers as they poke through the muck.
After some time Eliza leans back from the pit. She’s covered now; flecks of mud stain her swimsuit, freckle her shoulders and legs. She looks at me. For a moment her expression is illegible, steady. It is the same face she wore when she approached me much earlier.
The clay—if it can be called clay—is wet and unwilling: Each shape we impose it slowly rejects.
“Why do you always sit alone?” she asks. Her voice is bright, clear, and loud enough to carry. For a few gut-wrenching seconds I scan the periphery, wondering if the older girls are listening in. When I’m satisfied that no one can hear her or us, I look back to the girls and square up my shoulders. Both have stopped digging. Sammy watches my face from the wedge of a blue eye, pretending as though she isn’t listening keenly.
“Well,” I say. It’s a good question, one that I’ve wondered about for most of my life. It’s not that I don’t like being alone, exactly, but that I’ve never seemed to have much of a say in the matter. I don’t look for friendship, nor does it ever arrive.
“Maybe because I like to do this kind of stuff,” I venture a guess. I gesture to our pots and I shrug. It’s a stupid reply, mostly because I know it’s not true. Whatever wrongness exists is buried deeper within me. Still when both of them nod my shoulders release.
“Well, we like hanging out with you,” Eliza announces and the two of them grin. She punches my knee with her dry, muddy fist.
“Cool,” I say. “That’s cool.” I let out a laugh. I’m reticent, thrilled, humiliated, giddy. “Me too.”
I study the pinch pot in my hands. It seems suddenly urgent not to see them seeing me. Heat crawls from my cheeks to my hairline. I hear the furious thrum of blood in my ears. With my fingers I smooth down the walls of my pot. To my utter relief, no more questions follow.
Some hours later, after we’ve made more pots than we can possibly keep, the counselors call us back to the bus. They stand at the edge of the beach, their arms waving overhead like wild antennae. Our camp’s name, Camp Empower!, now razors the air. Camp Empower head out! Back to the bus! The three of us stand and shake out our towels.
We abandon our pottery at the roots of the oak tree. Beside them the pit yawns, nearly funerary, its void as misshapen as each of our pots.
“Do you want to sit with us on the way back?” Sammy asks. She is grinning. Each of her teeth is small and round like a Tic Tac.
“Sure,” I say, and shrug for effect. All my synapses are firing with pleasure.
We gather our things and begin our march toward the idling bus. As I go I take note of the last of my pots, and its walls—like the rest—seem to sag with relief, slowly collapsing into the shape of its emptiness.
June leapfrogs over us, then so does July. Eliza and Sammy drag me through the heat of the summer, yanking my wrists like the reins of a pull sled.
We play games. Before I met Eliza and Sammy I had no idea how many games a person could play. There’s playmate and hopscotch and bobo ski watten. We design our own handshakes, secret nicknames for counselors. When the talent show comes we do a dance on stage, lip syncing to “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow. When the chorus begins Eliza throws candy into the crowd, and the kids beneath us squabble over the pieces.
It’s not that I don’t like being alone, exactly, but that I’ve never seemed to have much of a say in the matter. I don’t look for friendship, nor does it ever arrive.
Our camp goes on field trips at least once a week. We do everything there is to do around Burnsville, Minnesota. As a rule, there isn’t much. We adopt highways, pick strawberries, pull books from the library. We walk along paths with long, trigger-operated arms, picking up wrappers and cigarette butts. We throw water balloons at the park down the road, the sun scorching our skin shades of pink and tawny.
I’ve noticed, as the months pass, that I’ve begun to lose weight; my shorts are beginning to hang at my hip bones, my T-shirts grow roomy around my belly and chest. These results are a part of the goal of our day camp, which is geared toward living a “health-conscious lifestyle.” Each day we exercise past the point of exhaustion, pick at rabbity meals that lock in our deficits. I’m not skinny yet, but even so I feel narrowed; as the summer rolls past I grow smaller and smaller.
By the second half of July all of Burnsville turns brown. The sun is so hot that the leaves on the trees fall, the grass stiffens and becomes sharp underfoot. It’s during one of these weeks Cascade Bay appears on the agenda, a water park located 20 minutes east of our camp. For days we’ve been playing hot games of tag in the park, our shirts tented with sweat, our hair thrown up into ponies. The Bay is the balm that everyone has been waiting for. Once it appears it’s all we can talk about.
“I want to do all the slides,” Eliza announces one day at lunch. Her voice is as loud and abrupt as a bullhorn. The three of us are sitting in a misshapen triangle, sandwiches and SunChips fanned out in our laps.
“And the lazy river too!” Sammy replies.
“I want to do the wave pool,” I say and the two of them stare at me. “If we have time after everything else.”
“Right,” Sammy says and her expression walls up. The conversation reorients back to the river.
We’d gone to the Bay earlier that summer, before the three of us became friends. But now that we were together everything would be different. I resurface the memory of its gasping blue waters, the slides, the wave pool. The anticipation of swimming whips us all in a frenzy. We make plans we won’t stick to, design games we won’t play.
“And Dan will be there!” Eliza finally shouts. The two of them clasp hands and Sammy releases a giggle.
Dan is the camp’s only bus driver. He’s an old, knobby man that everyone likes. On hot days, Dan doesn’t wait on the bus. Instead, he joins the trip with the counselors and campers. At the sound of his name my excitement deflates.
Ever since becoming friends with Eliza and Sammy I’ve seen Dan often. He talks to the girls as they’re boarding the bus, though he’s never attempted to say hi to me. I can never put why I hate him into words. It might be his old age or his wan, eyeless smile; his thin, knobby figure or his dumb, clownish laugh. That Eliza and Sammy could be drawn to him floors me.
Even so, Dan is universally beloved by the campers. On the surface, I suppose it isn’t hard to see why: He’s friendly with everyone, and seldom riles like the younger counselors. Instead he bends a knee when a child comes to speak to him, cupping the hollow of his shriveled pink ear. Sammy and Eliza are among his favorite campers. I cannot convince them of my shapeless disdain. “But he’s so nice,” Sammy tells me, then laughs her small laugh. She finds my hate funny and it makes me feel crazy. I resort to standing aloof whenever they crowd him, watching the two squeal at the top of their lungs.
But I know better than to moan about Dan. He’s a moot point, a nuisance, and no one believes me. Instead I wait for the conversation to turn.
Eventually Eliza brings up a dream she had last night. I watch as her brown eyes electrify, widen. Her hands beat midair like two featherless wings.
“I fell really, really fast,” she says, the marbles of her temples showing. “As fast as a bowling ball. I couldn’t stop.”
She has some version of this dream every night. New details, same ending. She never seems to get the thing she wants out of telling us, so every day she tries to tell us again. Beside me she sits pin-straight in her chair, her eyes wide and mouth rigid. She seems awake but not awake, staring down something that’s not in the room. Sammy nods along, elbows on the balls of her knees. She’s interested—she always is. Her sunny hair curtains forward, obscuring her features.
Like always, I try to follow but can’t. The details are plotless and never cohere. Instead I think of the water park, the cool thrill of the waves. All week we’ve been pent up doing nothing but sweating. I’ve missed the fresh air, chlorine’s chemical smell.
As Eliza speaks she begins to pull apart the soft parts of her sandwich, pilling the bread into balls with her fingers. She flicks crumbs of dough to the floor, the laminate steadily speckling.
“Do you want this?” Eliza finally asks, thrusting her sandwich my way. Today she has bitten it only with her fingernails, a sign of restraint that I only dream of possessing. I stare at the sandwich. Apart from one end, it remains wrapped in its original film. I don’t know why I take it—I’ve already eaten. My stomach is cavernous, an unfillable pit.
Eliza turns toward Sammy again while I’m eating. “I don’t know what happens after that,” she says, putting an end to her story. “Whenever I hit the ground I always wake up.”
When I wake up it’s another dog day of summer, sunny and cloudless and already warm. Later that morning Eliza, Sammy, and I line up at the bus for Cascade Bay Water Park, our beach towels clutched to our chests. It’s early, 9 a.m. at the latest, but the heat has already descended. The lot smells of baked tar and dry mulch, of pipe water drying in the raised bollard planters. The campers are wearing swimsuits under their clothes, the counselors green ball caps that read Empower! Down my chest runs a lone finger of sweat, which I dab at with my towel when no one is looking.
I hate the feeling of sweat on my body. I hate the feeling of my body, period. My swimsuit is a size too small for me, and its elastic bites down on my shoulders and groin. My legs ooze through the holes like two bright loaves of dough, pitted with bruises and dry, itching scabs. From behind the paneled glass I glower at Dan, who stands in the way of our imminent shade. He is checking his mirrors with glacial slowness.
Finally the bifold glass doors accordion open. Campers mount the black stairs. Today Dan is wearing swim trunks and a white cotton T-shirt. As we approach the front of the line I notice how the cloth clings to him, as if charged with some sort of static electricity. I spot the toothy comb of his rib cage, his hip bones, his sternum. Both his shoulders articulate like the spurs of a boot. When it’s our turn to board the girls race up the stairs. Eliza has already begun shouting hello.
“Hi!” Dan flashes a smile that seems genuine. “How are you two doing?”
Dan has never said hi to me outright. It’s a mutual silence, one I don’t dare try to breach. I stand to the side as the line clots behind us. I feel the weight in my legs at the top of the stairs.
A kid behind me taps me hard on the shoulder. “Move it,” he says. Other campers groan in reply.
“I’m going to go grab our seat,” I say, to no one in particular. I shoulder past Eliza and Sammy and into the cabin. A steady trickle of kids follow my lead.
I choose a seat toward the front where I can call to them easily. In the meantime I wait and observe my friends chatting. Amid the din of the campers I can’t catch any particulars; there are some gesticulations, broken fragments of sound. Eliza is doing the bulk of the speaking, Sammy emitting rare yeahs of support. Beside them Dan tilts his eggy head forward, close enough now to feel the breath leave their lips. It is a horrible proximity, but not one I recognize. My stomach drops. I can’t seem to stop looking.
“Hey!” a camp counselor finally shouts out toward the front. “Get a move on, you two.”
They soon slide in beside me. The motor erupts to life.
The ride to Cascade Bay is miserable. The bus isn’t air-conditioned, and by the time we cross into Eagan, the seats are sweat-slick and musty. We open the windows as far as they go, venting hot air into the bus. Eliza, Sammy, and I take turns wagging our hands in front of our faces. “It’s too DANG hot!” Eliza says, her version of swearing. Sammy groans and unsticks her thighs from the seat bench. The two play hand-clap games in the swelter while I press my cheek to the shuddering window. My legs sag like pillows on the brown rubber seat. I stare down in misery for the length of the ride.
Sammy and Eliza, on the other hand, look frustratingly perfect: Their frames are fleshless and narrow, their suits laced like frills on a sheet cake. Later, as we step out of the bus and onto the blacktop, they smile at each other as if sharing a secret; the camaraderie of thin and beautiful girls. I smile too, though at no one in particular. I am desperate to appear on the inside of the joke.
Dan tilts his eggy head forward, close enough now to feel the breath leave their lips. It is a horrible proximity, but not one I recognize. My stomach drops.
Wristbands are passed out and we walk toward the entrance. Dan drifts with the counselors beside us, though both of my friends are too busy to notice. And it isn’t long before I forget his company, too. From over the fence I glimpse the lip of a tube slide, hear water gushing into the shallows. Beside me, Eliza and Sammy are walking through the map of our day. We have plans for the jungle gym, the slides, the sandbar. Slowly I forget my body and my unflattering swimsuit. A smile surfaces, then a glow. Yes, I decide. I will have a good day.
Despite all the planning we’ve done through the week, the three of us settle on one game and one game only: dolphins.
This is how the game goes: We act like dolphins. We swim. We splash around in the water. Each time we play it devolves into chaos.
I like dolphins because it isn’t anything, really. It’s just swimming. Eliza’s springy hair grows glossy and wet in the water, laminated down the arch of her back. She drags Sammy and I through the shallows of the park, her chin high, constantly dictating the terms of a new, better game. Each time, after Sammy and I have each sworn on our lives to play by the rules, the game lapses back into dolphins. We’re just splashing again, rolling around in the water, our heads cocked to the halogen daylight.
Hours of the day wear on just like this. Open-mouthed laughter, the sensation of water and turf underfoot. When the three of us grow hungry we wander out of the pool toward the dry knoll where the camp counselors sit on coolers. They spread out on beach towels, kick their legs into the grass, and watch the park from beneath the shade of their sunnies. Dan has joined them; his body, thin and pernicious like a weed, sits tangled beneath the shade of a canopy tent. White tufts of hair fur his scalp like a fungus. He smiles as Sammy, Eliza, and I select our sandwiches and eat.
When we finally return to the water, Sammy and Eliza are officially tired of dolphins. I, in turn, am officially tired of them being tired of dolphins. We haven’t been to the wave pool, and we’ve hardly spent any time on the slides. But they are my friends, my only friends, so I relent. The three of us sit along the shallows as Eliza describes the rules of a new game. In it, she is a dolphin but also a princess, and Sammy and I are charged with saving her. From what? We aren’t exactly sure. All that we know is she’s in terrible danger.
It isn’t long, however, before we are interrupted. At some point during Eliza’s exposition a long knife of darkness emerges overhead—its shadow casts past my knees, then my chest, then finally my eyes. Our gazes slant upward. An egg-shaped head eclipses the heat of the sun; around us, the lightless water grows cold.
“Hey girls,” Dan says, smiling. “How’s it going?”
Eliza and Sammy brighten, the spell of their focus broken. “Goooood,” they echo back. Eliza beams. Sammy’s eyes narrow to pins in the sunlight. Without answering, I smile and draw a finger through the water. I’m impatient to swim again. Dan interrupts this.
“Just have lunch?” he says. The girls nod and say yeah. Eliza begins to narrate our day while Sammy bobs along in agreement. Our trip, in her mouth, sounds more fun than it has been. I’m in awe of how quickly she can remake a story. I watch her Tic-Tac teeth wink in the light as she speaks.
Around us the afternoon pales in comparison. It smells of baking chlorine, of mildewing towels. The conversation wears and with it my patience. From the hard, glittering edge of the pool I watch other kids as they traipse through the water, poking their heads through the free-falling streams. No one I recognize from camp is nearby. I imagine they are still eating lunch, or drifting down the lazy river, or playing their own game of dolphins. I begin to jiggle my leg as I wait. My agitation with Dan, and by extension Eliza and Sammy for entertaining him, is palpable.
After what seems like an eternity, Eliza seems to exhaust every possible avenue for conversation. The talk peters out. I eye Sammy, who shrugs a small shrug of enjoyment. She seems just as happy here as she is in the water.
Finally Dan clears his throat. His eyes draw wide circles around the park, his smile flattening. As I watch him an old instinct plucks at my belly. I notice that Dan does not seem to have any eyelashes. None whatsoever. His expression, as a result, appears uncomfortably naked; stripped down to its raw parts, its most vulnerable wantings. For whatever reason, this detail is what cements my feelings of urgency. I want to be free of his presence immediately.
“Do you guys want to go get a drink?” he says.
“No thanks,” I say.
Sammy and Eliza lock eyes. Immediately I am struck by the memory of our original meeting; the two girls suspended in wordless conversation, engrossed in a world I am unable to penetrate.
“Sure,” Eliza says.
I’m so irritated I nearly groan. As they shake water free from their legs and stand, I grab Eliza’s hand. I still don’t know why I do this. It could have been impatience, it could have been anger, it could have stemmed from fear I hadn’t learned to articulate. The skin of her wrist is cool like soapstone. My thumb presses hard on the throb of her pulse.
“Come on,” I whine. She laughs at me and shakes her head. Dan has already begun to lead them away, Sammy trailing quickly behind.
She slips from my grasp like a thought.
I don’t remember seeing Eliza or Sammy again that day, though I know already that this isn’t possible. Perhaps I see their towels in the changing rooms, or hear their voices while waiting in line for the bus. Perhaps we even find time to talk to each other, though details of these last conversations are lost. My memory offers no final flickers: When I let go of Eliza, I let go for good. On the bus home I sit alone, forced to wedge myself—wet, dejected—beside two other campers while Dan shuttles us back to the day camp. I press my face to the shuddering glass. A hot blur of road passes. My hair dries and brittles. I’m exhausted. My skin is burnt and my muscles are pulsing. I huddle under my beach towel and fall into a black, thoughtless sleep.
When my friends don’t return from their water break, I don’t go looking for them. I don’t know that I ought to, how to listen to the feeling their absence announces. The silence that succeeds them is not jarring but soft; it’s the same one, after all, we learn to ignore our whole lives. After 10 minutes of waiting in the shallows I begin to suspect they will not return, and a swell of relief surges up through my body. The day is my own again, everything suddenly feels possible. I migrate to a spot Eliza and Sammy were too scared to swim, a deep stretch of pool with an untouchable bottom. I wade to my ribs, then my shoulders, then the lobes of my ears. I’m standing on my toes and then I’m standing on nothing; the vinyl floor plummets, then completely falls out beneath me. I dive and pop back up like a cork. I’m gasping for breath and pumping my hands. The water is dark now, the kind of blue that lacks oxygen. It’s a cool, certain color like a bruise or a vein.
I know that I’ll have to come up with a story. When I see the girls later, I will act like I lost them—a plain enough lie I know I can sell. In the meantime I luxuriate in the sudden gift of alone time, which, until this very moment, I didn’t realize I’d been missing. For the first time in months I can do what I want. The day relaxes open like a fist to a hand.
She slips from my grasp like a thought.
I go to the water slides alone. I go to the wave pool alone. I swim and spit water and cannonball into the pool. Eliza and Sammy become daytime ghosts, thin mirages of heat and light. I hardly think of their absence as it steadily lengthens. The larger it looms the less it seems to disturb me.
I still play dolphins, but elaborate on its rules. I decide that this time I will exist at the center of the game that Eliza had described in such agonizing detail—a princess, but also a dolphin, in need of being saved. Because there is no one to play with me, I make adaptations. I recast myself instead as an animal avoiding capture. Traps are set all over the park, and a hunter lurks in the darkness and waits.
From structure to structure I circulate through the grounds, imagining the hunter hot on my trail. At the top of the waterslides I picture that the princess-napper—a hooded figure, an undefined malice—is only moments away. Then, bam! I slide down the tube in a frenzy, my dolphin-self gliding through the rivering water. With feigned relief I plunge into the deep pool below, kicking my legs in broad strokes like a tail. Each time the figure closes in, the threat is more daunting than the last. Every time I make my narrow escape.
I hate to admit it, later. But my day is good. Everything about it.
Days pass, and the absence of my friends extends through to the weekend. In the meantime, a charge builds that no one explains. Back at camp counselors speak in low, urgent whispers. They clump by the break room, take long walks to the fountains. Our field trips into next week have been mysteriously canceled. No one says why and none of us asks.
Each day the campers are left in the gym, where we do workouts together or play supervised games. We run suicide sprints, play hopscotch, jump rope. We blare “Hips Don’t Lie” over the old FM radio. Around me the older girls practice their hipless gyrations, while the rest of us dance and do step-up aerobics. When it comes time for lunch I sit alone in the corner, taking small, practiced bites from my sandwich.
“No little friends today?” a girl named Dani asks when we cross paths in the lunch line. She’s a tiny, weasel-faced girl with a blunt-cut Rihanna bob. She grins in my direction, her narrow incisors flashing. I hesitate, my embarrassment frothing to anger. I want to do something heinous like pour juice in her hair. Instead I shrug a small shrug and defeat washes over me.
It’s not Dani I’m angry at, but Eliza and Sammy. For leaving me here without explanation. How could they not tell me they’d be gone for this long? We had games we had planned on, field trips we were scheduled to take. The betrayal is soon the only thing I can think of. My friends are like pulled teeth, their voids bloody and fresh.
For the next week all I seem to be able to do is mope around camp. I do not join group activities. I hide in the bathroom. The counselors seem too busy to notice. In the meantime I obsess over how I’ll demand restitution. I won’t share my SunChips, I’ll sit in the window seat through August. Anything to make them pay for their crimes.
But these efforts prove pointless; they don’t show up.
I never see Eliza or Sammy again.
My childhood home is full of tile that runs from entry to kitchen to hallway. I remember the touch of cool stone under my feet that night, my mother in the kitchen with a knife and a cutting board. She is fixing something simple for a 6 o’clock dinner. Her hair is a dry, golden color like wheat chaff or flax. She is singing so softly it sounds like a whisper.
I pull up a chair to our kitchen island and watch her. This is so often our posture—her cooking, my watching—that I don’t originally notice the tension that hangs in the air.
At some point the song stops. The knife is laid supine on the cutting board. My mother clears her throat and I feel her eyes narrow on me.
“Natalie,” she says, as if beginning a missive. Our eyes meet across the island and I can see I’m in some sort of trouble.
“What?” I ask, which is short for what did I do? I wait for some harbinger of her anger, but nothing arrives. Instead my mother softens. Her face grows sad and expressive, her lips pressed together with feeling.
“Did you hear what happened last week at your camp?”
I don’t understand what she means by this question. Nothing has happened at camp, at least nothing out of the ordinary. I frown and shake my head in reply.
For a moment my mother’s face seems to flatten, the tension removed from the stoop in her brow. A kind of practiced composure, if not relief, crosses her features. She begins describing an email she received earlier from the camp organizers. Dan, the camp’s bus driver, had done a bad thing to some girls on our trip to the water park. He has been arrested, she says, and was fired shortly thereafter.
Here she pauses, as if waiting to see how the information will land.
It doesn’t. Or, at least, not the way she seems to expect it to. I wait for her to say more, but no information arrives. The room feels suddenly cavernous, carnivorous. There is a small lease of blood from where my father cut the venison earlier, pink and round like the petal of a flower, that has pooled and dried in the grain of our cutting board. Its mark looks something like my very first period, the stain on my linens when I woke in the morning. I study it now like I studied it then, wondering which part of my life it foreclosed.
My mother seems to find some aspect of my confusion relieving. She sighs. Slowly her expression walls up, along with the sadness that lingers behind it. I feel guilty and sick but I cannot say why. I don’t tell her about the park that day, at least nothing of particular substance. Instead I am lost in my own recollections. I think about Dan, the water, the girls. About the part of the story I now hold and can’t share. A silence opens up like a trap door between us.
“It’s a shame,” my mother finally says. “It’s really a shame.”
I can see she has nothing left to tell or ask. Her eyes return to the cutting board, her hand to the knife. The two of us sink into the quiet of the room.
I think: some girls.
And then I think: a bad thing.
I am lucky, as each of these phrases means something imprecise. I fix my eyes on my mother, my mouth dry and insensate, and my thoughts peter out. Some girls and a bad thing. What could have possibly happened? I think about Eliza and her small, perfect wrist. The way that she laughed and the way that I didn’t. From the stool I can’t touch the floor underneath me.
Some girls and a bad thing.
It’s a phrase that’s so empty it nearly means nothing.
For years I don’t think of it again. I spend the remainder of camp that summer socially unmoored, drifting from activity to activity. I exhaust the stockpiled step aerobics videos, rehearsing the routines I see on the screen. I always marvel at the beautiful women, their sinewy television bodies bedazzled in sparkling outfits. I mime their movements and imagine myself as their glitzy, bouncing counterpart. I will not be, cannot be, fat and ugly forever. My adult self, whose waist is as thin as a branch, whose eyes glitter and roll in her sockets, waits for me somewhere in the darkness beyond. It is unclear how one self will connect to the next, or what hurdle between girl and woman remains. Still I am certain it is there waiting for me, each day its threat drawing closer and closer. My future. A door that shuts tightly behind me.
The names and faces of my friends quickly lose definition. They begin to exist only in concept—two girls who are, then aren’t. I finish out the summer at camp, and then—at the time, inexplicably—it closes for good. On my last day a counselor hands me a pile of old merchandise. Basketball shorts, T-shirts, branded lanyards, and socks. Clothing sags over the lip of my elbows. I climb into my mother’s car that afternoon like it’s Christmas day.
Nearly two decades later, when I turn 29 years old, I sit down and unravel what’s left of the story. Or, what minuscule part of it I currently hold. The girls are unfindable on account of their ages, but records of Dan are all over the internet: He’s in the courthouse directory, case texts, the news. The single report is slim, falling just under 200 words. Camp bus driver guilty in sex case.
On the Department of Corrections website I find Dan’s mugshots. One is a front-facing view and the other a profile. He is wearing a white T-shirt like the day I last saw him, he has a dowager’s hump and two dead, bombed-out eyes. I spot a twist on his mouth that suggests he is smirking, but it’s an insincere asymmetry that does not touch his features.
I stare for a while, not that it helps me. Trying to draw anything from these photographs—if indeed that is what I am doing—is like trying to let blood from a stone. His nose is a little straighter, I suppose, than I originally remember it. But beyond this, he is my memory’s striking identical. When I look at his face all I see is an absence. My friends are not here nor in this website’s vicinity. To use Dan as their coordinate was an insult, a wrong.
I stop searching for Dan, and with him the girls. For months I lay the story to rest.
It’s during this time I sign up for a pottery class near my apartment. Sessions are held out of a drafty brick warehouse in the brewery district. After the last class each evening an open studio follows, which—as it so happens—only I seem to attend.
I spend many nights at the studio, in the dark, by myself. I like the work, the alone time, the beer that I bring. Still my pots, despite practice, are lumpy and terrible. Over the course of 10 weeks I miss nearly every class milestone: I don’t make a mug or a candlestick, a plate or a chip bowl. Instead I practice the same, fledgling shapes I once attempted in my girlhood.
It’s in these dark, failing hours that the two girls return to me. I feel them in the sensation of each structure collapsing, the wobbling cavities my clay builds to surround. I remember the beach where the three of us met: the soft, glittering edge of horizon, the grass stiff and yellow and hungry for shade. For years I have wondered if we were better off never meeting—had I never abandoned them, nor learned the shape of their absence. It’s a difficult question, inflected both by my guilt and my sadness. The hole that they left is one I’m not sure I can fill.
Weeks pass, and so do nights at the studio. Nearly every pot I make I promptly destroy. It’s a skill issue, one that my teacher calls “centering.” It’s as impossible to learn as it is to teach. Before coning the clay walls, the clay body must find the middle of the wheel’s spinning surface—any small variation and the pot may wobble or collapse. You’ll just know, my teacher says when I ask her for tips. I spend the next several weeks perfecting this skill. When the clay body nears center, I collapse it and start over.
And my teacher is right. I really do know it when I feel it. When I finally reach center it’s a physical truth, like tuning an instrument or striking a jab. The clay spins in a perfect brown circle beneath me, its edges softened with water and the folds of my hands. I try again and I lose it. I try again and succeed. I make a pot and destroy it, then return to center again. It is the first time, since starting, that I enjoy making pottery. It’s no longer about the pots, but the process behind them.
I really do know it when I feel it. When I finally reach center it’s a physical truth, like tuning an instrument or striking a jab.
I think of my afternoon spent with Eliza and Sammy, our pots as ugly and thick-walled and caved in as the next. It wasn’t the pottery we enjoyed, but the shaping, the friendship slowly building between us. There was the wind pushing inland and dappled light overhead, the rippling water and the prattle of children. We’d walked to the bus together, later, with our arms hooked at the elbows. Nothing was kept beyond the laughter between us. I come to realize that there is no vacancy, no loss that still asks to be filled: I have never forgotten the friendship they showed me.
As I read through Dan’s court documents, I find myself wondering which details I have chosen to push to the center, which lopsided facts no longer belong. For years I have sought out Eliza and Sammy, both online and in my own failing memory, believing that to recover their story is to recover parts of my own. But this principle no longer seems as true as it once did, and—despite my failed efforts—I feel no closer to the girls than I did as a child. The truth slowly dawns that it might not be their story I’m seeking, but one of my own that precludes their perspectives entirely.
I sit down one night and try to write it again, picturing the girls as they once were: fiery and thrilling and ebullient and kind. I want to believe that in writing everything down—from the beginning of my memories to the end of them—I can find something honest in my own raw material.
Things return first in piecemeal, then a deluge. I remember Dan’s translucent skin, his dry, crackling laughter. The smallness of a wrist in my hand, and the appalling smallness of its disappearance—carrying no heft at all, the easiest thing to let go of. It isn’t the girls that I think of now, but the girl that I once was: tugging at her swimsuit, her eyes burning and red with chlorine. She is drifting to the deeper end of the pool, her feet losing traction on the blue floor beneath her. She is swimming alone and her two friends are gone. The meaning of their absence, its importance, eludes her. It is this spectacular innocence upon which I find myself fixated, this final luxury of girlhood letting slip through my hands. A meaning emerges, comes slowly to center. It isn’t the girls I discover, but just one girl, just me.
As I am writing I ask myself this: Does it make any difference at all, putting words to the thing, hitching language to its swift, slippery undertow? Can words do a single thing I have been asking of them: heal a guilt that has already calcified, rescue girls who are already women? Rescue myself? There was a pit on a beach, a tree with roots in the sand. There was a bus with a glass door. There was blood on a flat sheet. There were three girls arranged in a triangle, sandwiches in hand, chlorine water drying to sugar in their hair. The entire day was ahead of them. They stood together, lined up shoulder to shoulder, their feet pink shells. They ran toward the open water.
N.C. Happe is a memoirist currently residing in Chicago. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Guernica, and Indiana Review, among others. N.C. is the grateful recipient of the 2025 Luminarts Fellowship in Prose, the StoryStudio Chicago Emerging Writer’s Award, and the 2024 Disquiet International Literary Prize.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/15/child-predator-minnesota-summer-camp/
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