The Forbidden Cabin stands abandoned, maimed and ruined amid tall weeds and overgrown bushes. Its windows are dark and reflect nothing; nothing inside, nothing outside. No glass. Black. Black weeds.
The counselors would probably skin us alive if they saw us go there. There would be a punishment of a special order. The Forbidden Cabin has a broken porch, they say. It is off limits, they say. It may as well not exist. It is a black hole. It is Forbidden.
It does not exist for me, personally. If you ask me, I have no desire to go. It is not on my map. I am ignoring it.
I would rather swing back and forth, back and forth for hours, as the dusk becomes thicker, as the day bears on and wears off, and I kick my legs up and down, up and down, and I look at the tops of the poplars come up and away, up and away. I would be on the swings all evening, and it would keep me busy, too busy to go to the Forbidden Cabin and do what I am supposed to. (And not supposed to.)
I did not ask to be sent to this stupid camp. And I did not ask to be anyone’s stupid girlfriend.
I am just happy on the swings. Not happy, but reasonably, manageably sad. I know that it will be fourteen more days, and I am just about done swinging this day into night. Fourteen days more, and they will take our moist mattresses and thin cold cotton blankets away; the blue-stamped sheets will be put in a pile in a corner of the counselors’ room; we will sweep moldy breadcrumbs and stray candy wrappers out of our shared nightstands, we will drink our final half-glasses of acidic apple juice in the drafty plywood canteen, and chuck our uneaten cold kasha with congealed margarine puddles on top into the trash, and we will be loaded onto the factory bus, the bus of my freedom and salvation, and we will be taken to the bus stop in front of the factory, and the hot city asphalt will greet me with its wonderful toxic breath, and my dad will pick me up and take me home, and I will be so happy for once to see my scary grumpy dad who never talks.
Manageably sad is not the worst.
Zhanna runs by the swings, giggling. Her face is red. She shouts something to me, but as she is shouting in secret, it comes out pretty quiet, and as I happen to be high on the swings and going really fast, I can pretend that I do not hear her, that I am very busy.
She runs along, and I do not get off the swings to run with her to the Forbidden Cabin.
Maybe I am no fun. Maybe they are no fun.
Zhanna is silly. When the bigger boys come to our bedroom after bedtime to tell us ghost stories, all the girls tuck themselves in under their blankets and lie there very modest, only their noses showing. Zhanna, in her nightie, sits up all the way hatched from the blanket, and drops one nightie strap off her shoulder, and just sits there with her naked shoulder and her missing teeth and her boy haircut, sticking out like a sore skinny tan thumb. Her nightie is like what grown women wear, blue, synthetic and thin-strapped; I don’t know where her parents bought it, I never saw these for sale for third graders.
There is thin lace on the straps, dirty, filthy-gray. There is nowhere for us to launder our clothes, or to shower, and camp is thirty days and thirty nights long. They don’t even let us swim in anything. The pool is drained, and the little creek is off limits. “You’ll drown and we’ll go to prison!” they say all the time. By the time camp ends, we are all crusty. “You’ll go to the Forbidden Cabin and be up to God-knows-what, and we’ll go to prison! You’ll let the older boys come into your bedroom after hours, and be up to God-knows-what, and we’ll go to prison!” Seems like there are a lot of pedagogues in prison.
Zhanna brokered this stupid girlfriendship, and now she wants me to go the Forbidden Cabin and do it all properly.
I am not getting off these swings. If I get off the swings, someone else will get on them, and I will have to while away the hours before bedtime on the ground, which is seven times slower.
I only agreed to be his stupid girlfriend for Oksana, by the way.
Oksana has freckles all over her face. Oksana has curly brown hair. Oksana has plum eyes. Oksana is great. Oksana was my best friend in preschool. I was so surprised and happy to meet her again in this stupid camp.
Oksana’s parents lifted her from camp, barely a week in, and took her to a Black Sea resort.
Oksana had a boyfriend in camp. His name was Sasha, and I did not even know what he looked like, although he was in our troop. And I had zero interest in what he looked like.
Not getting off the swings. Do whatever cursing and shouting you have to do, you small asshole boy underneath. I am kicking higher. Yeah, try throwing pinecones. Ha! You missed, dumbo!
And then, a couple of days after Oksana left, on a dusky evening like this one, I was sitting on my bed, which is the fourth counting from the door, just one away from the window, and I was glad it was not right by the window because, if in the middle of the night the boys break in through the window, it’s the girl in the window-side bed who gets it, whatever “it” is.
And so, I sat, reading Jules Verne and feeling very hungry, and I was just about to ask if anyone had a piece of candy or bread, without much hope, because parent visit day had been two days before and all the care package food was long eaten.
And Zhanna walked in with a silly mysterious smile on her face, and waltzed up to me, and said in a special secretive voice: “The boys want to talk to you. Will you talk to them?”
The boys? To me?! What in the hell would boys ever want with me?
And then she went back to the door, and opened it, and beckoned in three boys, first Igor, then two more, with no names and no lines, behind him.
Igor sat down on my bed and looked at me with his electric galactic glacial gaseous mystical chiffon blue eyes which he could turn on and off. They were like a fridge light: sometimes you open the fridge and the light comes on, and sometimes you open the fridge and it doesn’t, and you never know which it is going to be.
And he turned his eyes on. And he said:
“Sasha, as you know, is without a girlfriend now. Since Oksana left. He is asking you to be his girlfriend instead. Please, agree. Please, agree. Please. We all have girlfriends.” He motioned to his own girl who was far, far, far prettier than I would ever, ever, ever be. “Don’t be a meanie? Please, agree?”
That was how I got suckered into being a girlfriend of someone whose face I did not even know properly.
(And it turned out I did not like him in the slightest.)
And now I have to go to the Forbidden Cabin, if I dismount the swings.
Zhanna is running past the swings again, in the other direction. Her face is shining happy and she is dramatically fixing her clothing, which is in ostensible disarray.
“See?” She rubs her face red. “See? I have to rub all this off before the counselors catch me! Or they will see I was kissed all over!” Fast words, glee and little bits of spit tumble out of her mouth where half the teeth have been lost to cavities. “Oh, and Sasha asked me! To tell you! That he is breaking up with you! Because you won’t go kissing in the Forbidden Cabin! And he does not think you are pretty! And he said Oksana was so much prettier! And he does not love you anymore! I am his girlfriend now!”
She runs away, rubbing her neck to remove the telltale signs of neck kissing.
The Forbidden Cabin of Dissolution and Ecstasy is drowning in late shadows, its green plywood back crumbling into darkness.
The mosquitoes are on the prowl.
I am going to pee, and look for a piece of bread in my bag, and put on socks before I go to bed so that I freeze slightly less underneath the voile blanket, and re-read Jules Verne, and have trouble falling asleep, and lie awake in the pitch-black room, and wait for the reveille.