into the adjacent bedroom. With his own lights off, he’d watched a female counselor, a chubby girl with small breasts, about his sister’s age, undress. She put on an oversized T-shirt with the logo from the camp on it, and got in bed to write in her diary. After only about three minutes of writing, she laid the diary on her chest and, with her lamp still on, began to touch herself between her legs. Alan watched, rapt and fascinated. He knew what masturbation was, and had shamefully done it himself, but hadn’t known that it was something girls did. The girl began to rub more furiously, then stopped suddenly, closed her diary, slid it under her bed, and turned off the lamp.
Alan lay in the blackness, straining to hear anything through the pine walls. He thought he could hear the rhythmic squeak of cheap bedsprings, but then it stopped. He heard a long sigh, the girl letting her breath out as though she’d been holding it. Then nothing.
The next day he spotted the counselor in the dining hall at a table with some of the younger campers. He’d barely looked at her face the night before, but he studied it now. It was all circles. She had full cheeks and round eyes, and Alan even noticed that her small ears, unpierced, were perfectly round as well. She was laughing uproariously at something one of the campers, a girl with red hair, had just said. The girl flushed, and the counselor put her arm around her, pulling her against her side. She was pretty, the counselor, especially when she smiled, and Alan could hardly believe what he had seen her do the night before. It didn’t exactly fit in with the way she was acting now.
“You okay there, little brother?”
Alan was eating at the visitor’s table, but Hannah, his sister, had come over to see him. “Fine,” he said.
“You looked like you’d been hypnotized. You wanna go on a blueberry-picking trip with cabin five today, or would you rather just hang out by the beach?”
Alan picked the beach, bringing a copy of Red Dragon that he’d found in the counselors’ quarters. He could swim in the shallow, roped-off section of the lake, but since he hadn’t taken his deep-water test, he was banned from swimming off the pier. It was fine with him. He was happy to sit on the beach with his book open in front of him, hoping to see the counselor from the adjacent bedroom. He never saw her by the water, but spotted her later giving tennis lessons to several campers and then at dinner, which was an outdoor barbecue. Each time he spotted her he felt a sickening but addictive rush of adrenaline. He could barely wait for nighttime, when he hoped to see her through the knothole again. He told his sister he had a stomachache and got back to his room early. He turned off his light and waited, feverishly imagining what she might do when she returned to her room.
But when she did show up, she grabbed her robe and a shower caddy and disappeared to the showers. When she returned she was wearing her nightshirt under the robe and slipped immediately into her cot. She was less than a foot away from the wall, and Alan could see the fine blond hairs on the tops of her thighs. She took a deep, yawning breath that turned into a coughing fit, then turned the light out. Alan lay back on his bed and listened to hear if she was touching herself again, but he heard nothing. He thought he could smell the faint, stale odor of cigarettes. She began to breathe deeply. Eventually, he fell asleep.
He never saw her again. If she was at breakfast the following morning he couldn’t find her, and after breakfast Hannah drove him to the bus station. Alan still remembered the gutted feeling he’d had as the bus chugged away from the station. He would never see the nameless counselor again. She was gone forever.
He finished his drink, paid, and walked out of the Sevens.
Outside, Alan noticed that the trees, starting to blossom, were newly wet. There must have been a passing shower while he’d been in the bar. The air smelled clean, and all the brick sidewalks had darkened.
He walked up the hill toward St. Stephen’s and entered through its frosted glass doors, telling himself to look casual and go straight to the bar, which he