Crickets, a short story by Michele Filgate
We were young, and some of us were rebellious. Alice started out by stealing socks from the clothesline, but she moved on to underwear a week later, and we all got a kick out of seeing her run around the campground with bright pink panties over the top of her head, a makeshift bonnet. The adults didn’t find it amusing. They sent her home for being too outspoken. “We will not tolerate outrageous behavior,” Fennel, the camp director, announced the morning they sent Alice home, as we shoveled pancakes saturated with viscous maple-syrup into our mouths, and Tara snort-laughed and repeated that mantra that evening. “Ladies, we will NOT tolerate outrageous behavior,” she said in an exaggerated firm voice as she dangled her skinny legs over the top bunk and twirled her training bra in the air.
We were young. We coated our lips with Lip Smacker Dr. Pepper gloss, and our mouths shimmered in the summer sunlight. We traded tiny stickers and lined our envelopes and stationery with them: smiley faces and peace signs and sparkly ladybugs. We wrote letters to our best friends back home under our blankets with flashlights, as if we were afraid our cabinmates could hear our private thoughts. We shrieked and giggled and the world was endlessly amusing even when it wasn’t. We all had a crush on Anthony, our drama teacher, because he was charming and reckless. He reminded us of Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo & Juliet—he had a brooding beauty about him, tragically handsome—and he was a theater major at Emerson College. He could do a killer impression of Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Our counselor Laura was the person who comforted us when we were tired or scared or sad. We loved the gap between her front teeth and her positive attitude, even when we didn’t have one. She led yoga three mornings a week and we liked how during the end of class, she’d hover above us like a delicate bird, her fingers transferring energy to our forehead chakras.
***
“We can’t keep living like this,” Tara said two days after Alice was sent home. The mess hall smelled like dirty dishwater and minestrone soup. Our elbows were propped on the sticky table, and Eula dragged a tofu dog through a mound of ketchup and drew hearts on her plate. The dining hall was a swamp. Our shorts clung like saran wrap to the back of our thighs. The dimpled wooden benches were as warm as radiators. Maybe it was the early-August uninterrupted heat, or maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was the collective curiosity of a bunch of 12-year-old girls.
“Like what?” Eula asked. One of her overall straps dangled dangerously close to the ketchup. She scratched underneath the sleeve of her tie-dye t-shirt.
Tara slammed her plastic glass down, and some lemonade splashed on her veggie burger and tray. “You of all people know what I mean.”
Eula had a problem with everything: our strictly enforced bedtime of 10:00pm, the rowdy girls in the cabin next to ours who blasted Mariah Carey first thing in the morning, how muddy the campgrounds were after it rained.
“I hate when you’re so vague,” Eula said.
“We can’t keep spending our summer doing the STUPIDEST things,” Tara half-yelled. “If I have to make another bead necklace or sit through more group meditations, I’ll die of boredom.”
Eula unzipped her backpack and took her Discman out. “I can listen to music, or I can be like Stacy and read a book. What I can’t do is continue to hear you whine.”
Tara pulled her frizzy blonde hair back in a high ponytail and snapped a rubber band around it. “I’m not whining. Whining implies that I’m complaining about something that can’t be fixed. I can fix this.”
We needed a leader, and Tara had assumed that role when she stole a pack of cigarettes from our drama teacher, Anthony, two days before. It was her first summer at Camp Sunshine, but she acted like she owned the place. The previous summer Eula had set the tone for our group, but in the past year she’d grown scabrous and thorny, and we worried we’d catch her bad mood as easily as brushing up against poison ivy.
Tara cleared her throat to get our attention. “I think we should sneak into Fennel’s cabin during dinner,” she said.
We glanced toward the front of the cafeteria, where Fennel sat with the other camp administrators and counselors. The director of Camp Sunshine was older than most of our moms. Her brown hair was streaked with silver streams of gray. It snaked together in a long, loose braid that caressed the middle of her back. She was speaking to Anthony with one hand resting on his arm, and her dreamcatcher earrings bounced every time she moved her head. Her silver and turquoise rings seduced us.
We knew that we’d get sent home if we were caught, but we were girl-women, easily tangled in each other’s bad ideas. We wanted to be seen, but we also wanted to be invisible. We wanted the agency that Fennel seemed to have: the ability to command a boy’s undivided attention, the confidence to place skin to skin, the authority to claim what we wanted.
We wanted.
***
During the first week of camp, we jumped in the lake to prove our swimming abilities, and I tried to make it to the rock with my pathetic attempt at a doggy paddle. I kept going under and swallowing water and screamed for help before Anthony rowed over in his boat (“It’s okay, Stacy. I’ve got you!”) and attempted to pull me into the canoe, but the boat rocked one way and the other and we both fell in. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny then. I refused to put even my toes in the water for the rest of the summer. I became a fixture on the dock while the rest of the girls splashed around, my soft stomach rubbing against a scratchy towel while I squinted at the sunlit pages of a R.L. Stine Fear Street novel.
We were young, and some of us didn’t know how to move through the world but pretended to, anyway. Tara was our lodestar. She was tall and scrawny and paraded through her days with a false confidence. Nothing about her was graceful. She wore a bright yellow fanny pack everywhere she went and was always bumping into things: other people, the corners of bunk beds, sharp branches. Her legs were covered in scabs and bruises. But she could command a room just by sheer willpower. I will be seen. I will take up space. We imagined her saying these affirmations in the mirror each morning.
Eula came from a small town in Vermont, “no place you’ve ever heard of” she’d told us the summer before. Her strong opinions and the fact that she was a year older made me seek her approval, despite the fact that she was mean to me. She painted her nails with Wite-Out and wore Doc Martens even in the middle of summer. “I don’t want to be a bitch, Stacy,” she told me one night as we stood in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, brushing our teeth before bed, “but you need to get contact lenses if you want any boys to like you. They stare at you and all they see is a giant nerd.” My floral-patterned glasses took up a large portion of my face.
Madison lived in a doorman building on the Upper East Side with her mother. She didn’t talk about her dad. We all knew he left her mom for her babysitter. Madison was the first girl I met who wore liquid eyeliner. She coated her eyelids in thick purple flourishes. One day she did the same for me, and I touched my face, wondering who it belonged to, not recognizing myself.
And then there was me: a girl who wore glasses since the second grade, a girl who sometimes forgot to comb her hair, a girl who couldn’t even run a mile without taking a few puffs of her inhaler, a girl who preferred to stay indoors (the sun was too hot, the bugs were too numerous) but found myself on a lake in Maine for the second summer in a row.
***
That night, as everyone else in the camp gathered for another mediocre vegetarian meal, we followed Tara’s lead and made our way to Fennel’s cabin. The air felt oppressive, a hand clapped against our mouths. The grass in front of her cabin seemed suppler and greener than anywhere else. We took our shoes off and walked barefoot across it. Fennel’s screen door was unlocked. Tara peeked inside first and then waved us in. It was more luxurious than where we slept. We looked at the queen size bed and the white wicker rocking chair and the bookshelf overflowing with books about Buddhism and Astrology, and a record player. We saw future versions of ourselves sleeping in similar rooms, away from our parents and siblings and friends.
Tara opened her mini-fridge and found a six-pack of beer. The cans opened with a satisfying pop, and we forced the yeasty liquid down our throats.
Madison peeked in the top drawer of Fennel’s oak dresser and screamed.
“You GUYS. She wears Hanes Her Way underwear. I can’t believe it.”
Eula made herself comfortable on Fennel’s bed and dropped her beer on one of the pillows. “Shit!” She held it over the floor and watched as a puddle collected.
Tara opened the screen door and tossed the pillow into the woods. We were young and we were careless. We fixed things by pretending they didn’t exist.
Eula leaned against the headboard. “Ouch!” Something was poking her from between the mattress and the headboard. The pillow had hidden it. She pulled out a photo of Fennel and Anthony, stamped with a date from three weeks ago, during the first session of camp. Fennel had her head on Anthony’s shoulder and he had his arm wrapped around her waist. It was clear that Anthony took the photo himself, because it was crooked. Their eyes were closed and Anthony had a goofy grin on his face. On the back of the picture was a boy’s chicken scratch handwriting.
Because when I’m with you, I don’t need to open my eyes to see your beauty.
I whistled. “I knew Fennel had a secret!”
“Isn’t Anthony half her age?” Tara asked.
“He’s totally my brother’s age,” Eula said. “He’s 20.”
“When I grow up, I want to be Fennel,” I said. “I’m going to wear dreamcatcher earrings and have an affair with a much younger boyfriend.”
“It’s not an affair if you’re single, shithead.” Eula always liked to correct me.
“But it’s a secret romance,” I jumped up and twirled around the room, emboldened by the slight buzz from the beer. “That’s what I want. Something entirely my own that doesn’t belong to the rest of the world.”
We slurped more beer, and everything in the room seemed brighter, brightest.
An alarm beeped on Eula’s watch. “We need to get out of here, guys.”
“Hang on a second,” Tara said. She left the photo in the middle of the bed as proof that someone in the camp knew. A message to Fennel. But before we left, she grabbed a chunky lilac ring from the dresser and slipped it on her pointer finger. We slammed the screen door behind us and threw the crumpled aluminum cans in the same direction as the pillow. The trees towered over us, a threat and a comfort at the same time. We listened to the crickets, a sound we knew as intimately as our own heartbeats. We were dizzy with alcohol and with the thrill of getting away with something.
***
Fennel didn’t make any public announcement about the break-in. But she seemed to have aged overnight. She wore her hair in a tight bun instead of a carefree braid, and she no longer sat next to Anthony. Her mouth was frozen in a frown. Sometimes she paced up and down the mess hall, her arms folded across her chest. A counselor was stationed at the front door during all mealtimes, and they made us sign in.
Tara wore the ring around a chain underneath her t-shirt, because she wanted to know what it was like to hold on to a secret, to conceal something through a thin layer of clothing. She told us her heart would skip a beat whenever Fennel was near her.
We wondered if the ring was a gift from Anthony.
We decided to take turns wearing the necklace. It was a game we played. Maybe the ring would grant us some unspoken power to form secret romances of our own.
But one day the necklace was gone. It was Eula’s turn to watch it. “Someone must have stolen it while I was sleeping,” she said. We didn’t believe her. Without the necklace, we were just girls playing dress up. We no longer owned a part of someone else. We were back to pretending we knew how the world worked.
***
We were young, and we weren’t jaded yet. One night we snuck out to a clearing in the woods, trying but failing not to make noise in our flip-flops, and we sat in a circle and passed a cigarette around like it was something sacred, mimicking our older siblings and some of our parents and grandparents. We felt as though we were getting away with something instead of enacting a ritual.
We were young, and some of us were younger than others. Madison thought a blow job meant what you order at the salon, and we didn’t correct her. We dared her to offer a blow job to Anthony. We told her we’d give her treats from our care packages—even the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the most coveted candy. She shrugged and grabbed a hairdryer from the bathroom. We followed her to Anthony’s cabin and clustered outside of it like magnets that aren’t easily pried apart. That’s what it felt like to be a girl at that age: a force drove you that you couldn’t always control. Anthony answered the door, and Madison smiled at him and waved the hairdryer in front of his face. “Do you want a blow job?” Anthony stared at her with his mouth open, temporarily struck dumb. We laughed and we pulled Madison away, back through the malleable border of our group. She was one of us again, but she never fully forgave us.
We waited for letters to arrive from home and we kept track of who was the most loved. Our counselor, Laura, made a big deal out of handing the mail to us each night, delivering them to our bunks like a manic Santa. My mom sent me a letter every single day for the four weeks we lived there, and I kept them in a pile under my pillow, with a hot pink scrunchie wrapped around them. Tara never received any letters. “Who wants to hear from your dumb parents when you have to deal with them all year?” Tara said one day from the top bunk, a place she treated like a throne, and we looked down or out the window or anywhere where we didn’t have to meet her eyes. Most of us were homesick and didn’t want to admit it.
We read Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club Super Specials and we shared a worn copy of The Joy of Sex that Tara stole from her mom’s bookshelf. We read aloud all three volumes of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and the illustrations frightened us more than the actual words. We were terrified by the woman with a burst cheek and spiders crawling all over her face. We couldn’t escape the bugs in Maine: mosquitoes that left red welts on our skin and ants that invaded our stashes of candy.
We wore lanyards made out of neon plastic and mood rings and hair comb headbands and Cucumber Melon spray from Bath & Body Works. Some of us had acne and some of us were flat-chested and some of us didn’t know what it felt like to kiss someone, but we spent a lot of time thinking about it.
We had bodies and we didn’t know what to do with them. Gangly bodies and plump bodies and bodies still cocooned in baby fat. We slipped into our bathing suits and felt the spandex encase our skin. We paraded around our cabin, pretending we were beauty pageant contestants. We used our hairbrushes as microphones and danced to Madonna’s “Like A Prayer.” We wanted to be beautiful. We wanted to be seen.
We were waiting for our lives to begin.
***
A few days after Eula lost the ring, Laura took us up on a hill to watch a meteor shower. There were so many stars in the sky that the moment felt endless, and we wanted to stay in that moment forever, our own kind of snow globe. Tara held our hands and we looked up and kept looking, searching for where we would never go and where we would always want to be. She squeezed our hands hard, trying to tell us something, and she nodded her head in Laura’s direction. Laura was sprawled out in the grass and looking up, up, up; not at us. Because of her position, we could see a necklace nested there. Our lavender ring. Where it was meant to be. It always belonged to her. Fennel wore multiple secrets. Silence had never seemed so loud before.
I thought about her beer-stained pillow, softening in the woods like a slimy mushroom cap. I thought about Anthony and Laura and whoever else had shared it with her, their saliva spreading on the pillowcase like a spiderweb. I thought about my own head on my own pillow, wanting to know what wanting, and then having, felt like.
We were young, and then we were old, or older, the oldest we’ve ever been.
Michele Filgate is a contributing editor at Literary Hub and the editor of a critically acclaimed anthology based on her Longreads essay, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, published by Simon & Schuster. Currently, she is an M.F.A. student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship.Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, and many other publications.