Summer Camp

The blood in Clarissa’s head throbbed as she dangled upside down on the juniper tree. She imagined she was Athena as she pulled back on her bow and released, striking her neighbor in the butt with a ball-tipped arrow. She then hauled herself high, keeping still and quiet between the leaves like the Paleolithic hunters she read about in history.

Less than a minute later came three swift raps to a front door that wasn’t Clarissa’s. Loud.

“Jane! Your boy has been messing with those weapons again!”

The door opened, and Ms. Marjorie waved the arrow that interrupted her tulip-pruning in her neighbor’s face. The elderly woman, clad in gardening tans head to toe, resembled a ripe tomato, as she refused to be deterred from growing her prize-winning flowers by that summer’s persistent heat wave. The sweating grandmother was militant about her garden, which grew straight up in a square pen with four electrified sides. No squirrel, deer or rabbit dared approach the buzzing barriers.

“Mark! Come here!”

“Mom?”

From her perch, Clarissa could barely hear the exchange, though she could tell that most of the tongue-lashing came from Ms. Marjorie, whom Clarissa stung in the bum three times that summer. Maybe three times was enough. Clarissa wasn’t trying to be a menace, just a nuisance. Ms. Marjorie’s voice pitched higher, which meant she was almost done. She never stopped to ask if Mark shot the arrow. Then it was over. Clarissa knew with four other kids in the house, Mark’s mom was too exhausted to fight Ms. Marjorie. When the coast looked and sounded clear, Clarissa counted to thirty and jumped down from the juniper tree, landing like a cat.

“You’re awful,”

She twitched, startled by a voice that came from behind the trunk.

“Are you really that bored? You have to get me in trouble?”

Mark came out from behind the tree, his glasses round and sitting on reddened cheeks. His fists were balled up, but Clarissa knew her meek and mild-mannered neighbor wouldn’t hurt a fly. Still, she kept a safe distance from the high schooler. You never knew when someone would snap. That’s what she learned from the cop shows that ran at 2 a.m., when her mom fell asleep on the couch with the TV on. The perps always lied when confronted by the police, so that’s what Clarissa did.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, trying to throw off any air of suspicion with nonchalance.

“I could see you from my window. Your green is all wrong,” he said.

He crossed his arms. He had a pair of binoculars round his neck, and she figured he used them to spy on her up in the leaves.

“A girl can’t just sit in a tree? Perv,” she said. She didn’t know what perv meant exactly, but on Law and Order, any guy who looked at girls was called a perv, so she figured it was the right word for this situation.

“That’s not what a perv is,”

“Oh yeah? Then what is it?”

“You’re too young to know,”

“You’re only two years older than me, you perv,”

“Stop it,”

“Make me,”

“Look, you can shoot arrows all you want, just quit saying that. For real,”

The high schooler made his voice all deep and serious, like how Clarissa’s dad did when she stalled taking out the trash too many times. She made a mental note to look up ‘perv’ when she got home.

“Fine.”

She turned to walk away, the bow and arrows tucked away in her schoolbag. She was done with the mischief she planned for the day anyways.

Dinner. Three bowls of pesto pasta, one mini-bowl for the baby. It was pasta, pasta, pasta, nonstop. Her mom was obsessed with this summer salads book from the thrift store, and her dad was too tired to object. Besides, as long as he got a side of steak or shrimp, he’d eat any twist or spool or shell tossed with olive oil, spinach and cherry tomatoes.

The doorbell rang, and Clarissa’s mom got up to answer it. Clarissa shuffled the little pastas back and forth on her plate, making a line, then a circle, then a smiley face. Tonight was a chilled pasta salad, something to combat the heat. The baby mushed the noodles in her fist, babbling at Clarissa’s dad.

“What do you think she’s trying to say?”

“She’s sick of pasta,”

“I think she speaks for all of us then,”

Clarissa’s dad smiled, then quickly erased it. It wasn’t proper for Clarissa to make fun of her mom and he didn’t want to encourage her behavior further. Clarissa’s mom was back from the door anyways, but she didn’t look happy.

“Clarissa, have you been shooting Ms. Marjorie with your Christmas gift?”

Clarissa felt heat rise up in her cheeks.

“No,”

“Why would Mark come say that then?”

How dare Mark expose her?

“Mark is weird,” she said. Clarissa had little ammo against him, but she had one thing she thought maybe might get him in trouble.

“I’m sorry? That doesn’t answer my question, young lady,”

“It does. I was just reading out there. He was watching me from his window all creepy with binoculars,”

“What?” her Dad said, using the half-serious-and-deep voice, like he didn’t know whether to be mad yet. He looked over at her mom, who looked back at him. They seemed to have forgotten the bow and arrow thing quickly. Clarissa hopped on the opportunity.

“Mark was watching me earlier with his binoculars,”

Technically she wasn’t lying, even about the reading part. Before she took her bow and arrow to the trees, Clarissa sat on the porch with a book and a glass of lemonade. She first sat in the backyard, but couldn’t stand the sound of her neighbors splashing around in their pool. Ever since the twin girls next door went on to high school, they became too cool for Clarissa and too cool for one-pieces, which was made clear by the bikinis she envied all summer. So she moved to the porch to run away from the envy.

She could see that her mom and dad’s brains churning over what she just said, taking her seriously. Clarissa lied often, but made sure not to get caught. But she felt that she needed one more thing to tip them over the edge, draw the attention away from her.

“How would Mark know what I was doing if he wasn’t watching me? He literally told me I was wearing the wrong type of green to be sitting up there,” she said.

She abandoned picking apart her pasta salad. She looked at them dead in the eyes, straight-faced. Keep still. Keep still. Let it sink in.

Clarissa’s dad took one look at his daughter, who was wearing the same light green tank top she had on earlier, and got up from the table. He decided she was telling the truth. Clarissa heard the front door open. Big stomps down the stairs. She wanted to get up and see her father rap on Mark’s door like Ms. Marjorie did earlier. But she felt she had to stay put. The air was a little heavy. Serious. Hot.

“Mom?”

“Your father is taking care of it,”

“Okay,”