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never enter this kitchen at all.”

CHAPTER TEN
    The campers arrived like a storm. They wore cropped halters that gave way to thick white rings of stomach, tube tops, miniskirts, and skintight jeans. They had the stretch marks and loose skin of the elderly. They flapped and jiggled and wrapped their arms around their middles. They had neon hair and acne. They had rows of tiny metallic rings running from their earlobes to the tops of their ears.
    The parents who dropped them off were fat. The fathers had sweat stains in the armpits of their T-shirts, mirrored sunglasses, and guts. The mothers wore stretch pants and tunics, voluminous sundresses with orthopedic shoes. And then there were the parents who weren’t fat: mothers who were gracefully slender, dressed in trim cigarette pants and fitted sleeveless blouses; their cool, manicured hands steering their children by the napes of their necks, as if to say, Here we are, just where I’ve always thought you should be!
    Sheena and I had five campers between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Since our hall had eight rooms, our campers were the only ones who didn’t have roommates. Although it was a privilege borne purely of logistics (our group was the smallest; each of the other five groups was roughly twice the size of ours), Lewis wished to be extolled for it.
    “Lewis Teller’s luxury hotel,” he said to me, clapping my shoulder. “Don’t say I don’t take care of you!”
    There was Spider, whose skin was dry and pink and diseased, who had a habit of crossing her arms to scratch at her rough, flaky elbows. Although she didn’t look the least bit Japanese, her T-shirt displayed a Japanese flag and was tucked into pleated shorts.
    “I want to make sure you understand,” her father told me, “that Spider’s allergies can kill her.” He handed me a computer printout list of seventeen items titled “Spider’s Allergies and Intolerances.”
    “Does Nurse have a copy of this?” I asked. “Does Lewis?”
    “You bet.” He wasn’t much taller than I, and he stood close, staring into my eyes as if to inject something into them. “But I want you to have one, too.”
    “One time my ears got all fat and hot after I ate birthday cake,” Spider told me. “Remember that, Dad?”
    Spider’s father turned from me to make Spider’s bed. “I do,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.”
    I flinched when he snapped the top sheet open; it floated to the mattress like a shroud.
    There was one unfortunately named girl: Harriet, who was hairy. She and her parents stood in a cluster, communicating inaudibly. They moved as a unit. They looked like triplets. They hugged good-bye in a circle.
    And then there was Miss, short for Mississippi, who had beautiful, creamy blond, hair-commercial hair and an angry white freckled face. Her mother and father looked nervous, more like personal assistants than parents, their arms weighed down with Miss’s belongings—an enormous stuffed panther; a hand mirror that looked to be framed in sterling silver, with Miss’s initials sharply engraved on the handle. “We want Miss to be comfortable ,” Miss’s father said. “Miss is very special.” He put an arm around his wife’s shoulders.
    “You’re going to make everyone think I have a dick,” Miss said.
    And there was Whitney, who was black and tough, her skin the brown of expensive oak furniture. Whitney was at Camp Carolina partly because she was shapeless—no waist, no neck, no discernible ankles—and partly because she was from the Florida Panhandle, where a hurricane had swallowed her home. Now her family lived with relatives—nine people in a three-bedroom house.
    “We thought we’d give Whitney a change of scenery,” her mother whispered to me. She held my elbow when she said it. “She has a touch of PTSD.”
    “Who doesn’t?” I said, cheerful as ever, but I stepped away a little. We stood together in Whitney’s doorway, watching her talk on her cell phone and