Abby didn’t bother to reply. Both of her parents knew she’d been planning all year to go to theater camp in Maine. Abby had taped her own application, singing “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” which she’d learned playing Tzeitel in her middle school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. She’d loved the camaraderie of rehearsals, how all the kids, the actors and the crew, had become friends, and on the night of the first show, she hadn’t been nervous at all. She loved performing. Even though she’d been, at the time, a head taller than both the girl playing Golde, her mother, the boy playing Tevye, her father, and bigger than almost every other kid in the cast, she hadn’t felt ashamed, and everyone told her what a good job she’d done. Her father had had tears in his eyes as he’d handed her a bouquet. Even her mother had looked impressed.
Abby had been so happy when she’d gotten accepted to theater camp in March. She’d been corresponding with her fellow campers online, all of them trying to guess what the summer’s musical would be. Then Eileen had sprung the fat-camp trap.
Abby had gone to her father, begging him to intervene, but all he’d done was say things about shalom ha’bayit, which was Hebrew for peace in the house. Which, Abby knew, really meant peace between her parents, at Abby’s expense. And now here she was, in the middle of Nowheresville, New York, stuck in a cabin that smelled faintly of mold at a camp that didn’t even have a theater, preparing for six weeks of starvation when she should have been getting ready to sing her audition piece, which was going to be “Adelaide’s Lament,” from Guys and Dolls.
“Dad,” Abby said quietly. “Do I really have to do this?”
Her father pushed his hands into his pockets. The dusty shafts of sunlight coming through the cabin’s windows highlighted his potbelly, the weary slump of his shoulders, and the new strands of silver in his hair. Abby found herself startled by how old he looked.
“Your mother wants you to be healthy,” he said, a little woodenly, like an actor who’d memorized his lines but hadn’t yet figured out how to deliver them with any conviction.
“I am healthy,” said Abby. “Nobody’s saying I’m unhealthy. Dr. Raskin has never said I’m unhealthy. I’m just not thin. And neither are you! And neither is Grandma! And—”
“More active, then. Your mom wants you to be more active and make movement more of a habit. She didn’t think there was going to be enough physical activity at that theater camp.” This, too, sounded like something he’d been told instead of something he believed.
“There was swimming! And volleyball!” Abby’s throat was tight, her eyes felt hot. She still couldn’t quite believe that she was here, not in Maine; that her father wasn’t going to rescue her. That this was really going to happen.
“Abby.” Her father took her hands and gazed into her eyes. “Please. I am begging you. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, please just get through this summer, and next year you can go anywhere you want.”
“You promise?” she asked, thinking that the summer before eighth grade wasn’t too late. “You swear?”
“I promise,” said her dad, and he kissed her goodbye. “I’ll get your mother,” he said, once he’d reached the cabin’s door. “I know she’ll want to say goodbye.”
“We said goodbye already.”
“Well, then, she’ll want to make your bed.”
Abby shook her head again. “I can do it myself,” she said, and waited, in stony silence, until her dad hugged her again and walked out the door.
Abby unpacked her sheets and pillow and smoothed her comforter out over the thin plastic-covered mattress. When she saw that most of her bunkmates had stuck their “before” Polaroids to the wall beside or above their beds, she did the same. She put her clothes in the two drawers she’d been assigned, shorts and tee shirts in one; bras and underwear and swimsuits and socks in the other. Then she went outside to sit on the cabin’s steps to watch two girls play a desultory game of tetherball and take in her surroundings. The cabin looked like the pictures from the website, with pine wood walls, screened windows, and picnic tables out front, but the website hadn’t communicated the smell, a blend of must, mildew, and old bug spray—the essence of buildings that had been shut up tight since September. Abby slapped at a mosquito and opened her folder, scanning the sample meal plan—four ounces grilled chicken breast, one-half baked sweet potato with one teaspoon butter, unlimited steamed broccoli, one serving ice milk. She wondered if she was expected to measure things like a teaspoon of butter or four ounces of chicken breast, or if the camp would do that for her.