Ben whispers.
I muster up the most solemn face I can possibly arrange under the circumstances. “Yes. You have to write ‘I am a pathetic excuse for a sixteen-year-old boy who will believe anything anyone tells me’ one million times, until you’re not so gullible.”
For a second, Ben just looks confused. But then Mason and Andrew burst out laughing, and I guess he finally gets it, because: “Hey!” he shouts. “That was fucking mean!”
Mason holds up his hand for me to fist bump, which I calmly ignore. “I try my best,” I say. “But seriously, calm down. This isn’t boot camp. That’s Palmer’s thing, you know? He thinks all that crazy intense stuff does more harm than good. That we should have normal camp experiences just like everyone else. I think secretly he wants us to get together in the middle of the night and break all the rules.”
“So what are we doing tonight?” Ben says, looking incredibly suspicious. “Are we going to run through the woods naked or something?”
“Or, like, a time capsule deal?” Andrew says.
“Spin the bottle?” Mason asks hopefully.
“No, no, and almost,” I say. I whip the blanket off my bed to reveal the bottles. “Who wants to take the first shot with me?”
This is when I am reminded, despite my best efforts to pretend otherwise, that I am not, in fact, at a normal camp for normal people who want to engage in some perfectly normal illicit-substance-aided bonding, and am instead stranded in upstate New York with a bunch of lunatics.
“Oh, God,” Ben says. “Does everyone here think they’re in Wet Hot American Summer?”
“Uh,” Andrew says.
“Fuck, yes!” Mason says. I try to restrain myself from throwing something at him.
“Clarisa?” I ask, slightly desperate.
She looks at me. “I’d love to,” she says. “But then I’d have to take six more to make it an even seven, and I’m not so sure that that’s a great idea for my first night at camp.”
I look back at Andrew, who’s still staring at the bottles with an uncertain expression on his face. “I don’t think I can,” he says.
“What do you mean, you don’t think you can?” I say. “Aren’t you the one who wanted to do this in the first place?”
He shifts and looks away from the alcohol, to the floor in front of my feet. “I wanted to bond,” he says. “And, like, come over and hang out, and stuff. But drinking... Alcohol is just so unhealthy. It totally screws up your metabolism, and...and there are just so many calories, even in one shot, and—”
“Jesus Christ, guys,” I say. “Ben. We are clearly not in Wet Hot American Summer because if we were, we’d all be plastered and I’d have killed Mason already. And, Andrew, I know that it feels like if you take this one shot—because a shot is, what, a hundred calories?—everything you’ve ever worked for is going to be meaningless and you’ve failed. But everything you’ve ever worked for is meaningless, anyway, and it’s not like you’ve never failed before!”
“That was a terrible motivational speech,” Ben says. “I recommend more political dramas.”
I glare at him.
“But I’ll take the shot with you.”
“Yeah,” Andrew says, sighing. “I guess I will, too. But not more than two.”
“Fuck, ye—”
“I know you’re taking the shot with me, Mason. Jesus!”
“I’m going to sit this one out,” Clarisa says. “But, Stella?” She looks at me with big, sad, hopeful eyes, which means that the best course of action for me to follow right now would actually be to flee. “Make sure I do this at least once before camp gets out, okay?”
“Er,” I say. “Mason will do it. Right, Mason? Don’t say, ‘Fuck, yes,’ I swear to God.”
I pour out four shots of vodka and one of water, for Clarisa.
“And so our five dissolute campers make a toast to the experiences of their future,” Ben suddenly says. “It is stupid, it is night, it is youth. It is hope, it is rashness, it is liquid courage. It is—”
“Dude,” Andrew interrupts. “What are you talking about?”
“Sorry,” Ben says. “Do you ever think, like, if life were a movie with really dramatic voice-over, what would that voice-over be saying? You know, like, if Morgan Freeman was—”
Ben catches the expressions on our faces and cuts off. “Yeah, never mind. I think I’ve seen too many movies. Just ignore it.”
This is why I can’t pretend I’m at normal camp, I think. But I hand out the shots and raise mine, anyway. “To pretending we’re at normal camp,” I say.
We take the shots.
HERE’S THE PROBLEM: the first shot, the excitement of it all, the rush—it all makes me ridiculously happy. Which in turn makes me ridiculously stupid.
It’s not even just the alcohol that does it—it’s the entire situation. I mean, here I am, in the middle of the night, surrounded by people I barely know, after sneaking out of our room and risking CERTAIN DEATH. Well, maybe not CERTAIN DEATH, but definitely CERTAIN DISAPPOINTED LOOKS, and when you’re the literal antithesis of cool, like I am, that’s bad enough to make you pretty nervous.
I didn’t even want to come at first. I know better than anyone that putting me in social situations with a bunch of strangers is like sending a firefighter into a forest fire with a watering can. But Andrew wouldn’t shut up about “bonding” (no, thanks) and “haven’t you ever done anything exciting in your life? You know, just for the thrill of it?” (definitely not) and “please don’t leave me alone with Mason” (I begrudgingly gave him that last one). So here I am.
And I guess Andrew must have had a point after all, because I’m feeling surprisingly good. Shockingly good. Better than I’ve felt since watching Fast & Furious 6 a couple of years ago and having every negative thought obliterated from my brain through sheer force of CGI. It’s the first shot that does it, I think—the taste, lingering in the back of my throat, the burn that follows it all the way down my chest and into my stomach. This is why Nicholas Cage becomes an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas. I finally understand.
So I take another shot—because Stella and Mason are still going, so it can’t hurt, right? And then another one—“to not letting ourselves reach Norman Bates levels of insanity”—with Andrew. And then another one—“to motifs in movies,” I vaguely remember saying, “because they’re all we can derive meaning from!”—at which point nearly everyone is in hysterics, except Clarisa, who merely looks tentatively amused. Even Stella has managed to break out a genuine smile.
“I’m done, I’m done, I
