Skin Fold by Alex Myers

     They never rested during rest hour.  Naps were for the junior campers, the little girls who cried with homesickness, who wore frilly pink suits to swim lessons, who adorned their arms with the lumpy macramé bracelets they made in arts and crafts. 

     But they were the senior campers, fourteen years old, and they never rested.  Their counselor, Beth, herded them back to the bunk after lunch – the heat of the day – waited until all twelve of them had lain down on their beds, grown quiet, before she left them, easing the screen door shut behind her.  A moment of stillness, heat, in which one of the girls, genuinely tired, might drift asleep, slipping instantly into a dream of home or flying, the brief twitch of eyelids before Michelle’s footsteps woke her.

“She’s gone,” said Michelle from beside the door.

Once, their counselor had waited on the cabin porch, caught them out of their beds, and they’d had to wash lunch dishes as punishment.  Michelle had been furious at Beth, pouted, complained behind her back that they weren’t babies, didn’t need to take a nap.  Another time, Beth had fallen asleep on her own bunk, exhausted in a way that made her seem indefinably old to the girls.  She’d slept, even snored softly, the entire rest hour, and only Michelle had dared to stir from her bunk, walk quietly past the sleeping form of the counselor, pausing to make a face at her.  The other girls giggled quietly from their bunks before they resumed reading or writing a letter home, careful not to fall asleep themselves.

Jen joined Michelle at the door.  “She’s gone.  All clear.” 

The other girls slid from their bunks to sit on the dusty wooden floor of the cabin.  Some days they played cards, sprawling games of ‘I Doubt It’ with two decks mixed together.  Early in the summer, they’d played truth or dare, but by now they had no secrets left to share.

Michelle always decided the day’s activity.  Lately, she’d left behind the games, the cards, the twenty questions – “too babyish,” she’d said.  Instead, she sat them in a circle to give each other back rubs, Michelle gently scraping her fingernails along Jen’s neck, “Bet I can give you the chills.”

The others were already sitting, waiting, when Michelle came back from the door. Amy was fiddling with her braid, Kate was picking at her cuticles.  Michelle sat down, grabbed Jen’s hand.  “Let me tell you your fortune.”  They all crowded close, watched as Michelle turned Jen’s palm up, traced the line that ran from the wrist to above the thumb.  “A long life.  80 at least.”  She gently rubbed the crease across the middle of Jen’s palm.  “Twisted, but not broken.  You’ll struggle in your marriage, but it will last.”

None of the other girls questioned what Michelle said. They never did.  She was the first out of the cabin every morning, the first to declare what food was too gross to be eaten in the dining hall, or the dessert that only a fatty would consume.  If Michelle wore a tank top, everyone wore a tank top.  A few girls had even written home, asking their mothers to send up a certain type of sandal that Michelle had proclaimed the best.

Amy watched Michelle’s fingers move across Jen’s palm.  Her own fingers tugged at the braid that sat, thick and heavy, on her shoulders. She picked at the loose brown hairs, fought the urge to put the end of the braid in her mouth, gently chew the fibers.  It was a habit Amy had had since kindergarten when she’d given up sucking her thumb.  But on the first day of camp Michelle had seen her chewing the braid and declared it disgusting.  “You’ll get split ends.  And your hair will smell like spit.”  So Amy just tugged and picked, let the loose hairs fall to the cabin floor and blend in with the other dust.  She doubted very much that Michelle knew anything about reading palms; she doubted that the future could be read from palms at all, but Amy kept her mouth shut.  It was better to be quiet and unnoticed, part of the group if only by proximity.

A few of the girls leaned in to study the lines on Jen’s hands; one of them, Susan, said, “There are so many little lines. How do you know what it all means?”

“There’s a system for everything,” Michelle said mysteriously.  “You have to look carefully at each line and wrinkle.  The future is really written there.”  She drew her finger across the top of Jen’s palm.  “This one’s money.  And this one is health.  I can even tell how many children you’ll have.”

The other girls giggled.  “What if I don’t want any kids?” asked Susan.

“It doesn’t matter what you want, or think you want,” Michelle said with great authority, “Your hands tell what’s written for the future.”  She took Susan’s hand, pushed it into a fist, counted the wrinkles below her pinky.  “See,” Michelle insisted, “three.  Three kids.” 

Just as the other girls began to reach out their hands towards Michelle, eager to know what could be told from their palms, the screen door opened.  Beth had returned.  “Back on your bunks.  You girls need some rest.”  She moved from the door to her own bunk, watched as everyone retreated to their beds.  “You’ll be doing dishes tomorrow.’

“And then our hands will be too wrinkly to read,” said Jen.  Michelle laughed.

“Quiet,” said Beth.

Amy stretched out on her bunk, glad the palm-reading had been broken up.  If Michelle had grabbed Amy’s palm no doubt she would  have been informed that she would die early, unmarried and poor, and, oh yes, fat.  One of Michelle’s favorite words.  Fat.  The second day of camp, during another unsupervised rest hour, Michelle had used Amy’s thighs to show how if you pinched a wad of skin you could see the fat cells.  “Cellulite,” said Michelle, her fingers squeezing hard.  “It looks like oatmeal.”  She opened her fingers, releasing Amy’s flesh.

“Gross,” everyone in the bunk chorused as Amy tried to rub away the red finger marks.

 Fat, fat, fat, Amy thought to herself, her eyelids heavy in the heat of the cabin.  Before this summer, she’d never really thought of herself that way.  She’d grown five inches during eighth grade, which made her taller than most everyone, boys and girls.  But she’d always been tall, always played sports.  That’s why she had let her mom talk her into coming to camp, where she could ride horses, swim, play soccer all day long.  But she hadn’t counted on someone like Michelle, or on being in a bunk where you couldn’t possibly avoid the other girls.  There was no getting away.  They ate together, slept together, sat on the same bench during campfires.  Michelle’s blond pixie-cut hair, her tiny stick-like legs even haunted Amy’s dreams.  There was no getting away.

After rest hour were swimming lessons down at the camp’s sandy beach.  Amy was a good swimmer: she was in the shark group while Michelle was still a minnow, a triumph that buoyed Amy’s spirits.  At the end of swimming lessons, Michelle and Jen, along with the rest of the minnows, sat on the dock, watching the shark group race.  Amy made it to the dock first, her hand slapping the wood triumphantly.  As she pulled herself up to sit beside the minnows, she saw Michelle look at her, lean over and say loudly to Jen, “She’s only good because fat makes you float.”  Amy let go of the dock, slipped back into the water, entered the cool world where she could turn flips with ease, where her feet dangling below looked pale and eerie, where the only noise was the whine of a distant motorboat crossing the lake, or, better, a silence that pressed on her ears.  She held her breath, pushed herself deeper into the lake.  By the time she surfaced, Michelle was gone.

After the campfire that night, all the girls returned to the bunk along the path that ran from the beach to the cabins.  Amy had stared, mesmerized, at the fire for so long that she could barely see a foot in front of her as they walked through the pine trees.  Her vision was dotted with streaks left from the final flames, and she kept stubbing her toes on roots, stumbling in the thick darkness.

Back in the cabin, Beth supervised idly as the girls brushed their teeth and hair, changed into pajamas.  She let them read in bed for a bit before telling them to turn their flashlights off.  She waited for the bunk to grow quiet, for some mysterious amount of time to pass before she deemed them asleep or grew bored with her vigil. A few light steps, the door opened and closed softly.  Amy listened to Beth’s diminishing footsteps, imagined she could hear them long after it was impossible to do so.

Michelle’s flashlight snapped on, a thin beam that pooled, white, on the cabin floor.  “Who wants their palm read?” she said.

“Don’t you think we should be quiet?” Whispered Jen. “The counselor might come back.” 

Michelle  snorted.  “She was wearing her nice earrings and she put on the one pretty blouse she has.  She’s going to town tonight.  Don’t you notice anything?”  The flashlight beam moved around the cabin.  “C’mon.  Who wants their palm read?”

“I do,” said Kate, keeping her voice low, as if she wasn’t quite sure about Michelle’s claims. 

Kate slept in the bunk below Amy, and Michelle padded over to them, her bare feet slapping lightly against the wood floor. Amy felt the metal frame shift as Michelle sat down on the bed below her. 

“Hold your hand out,” she said. 

Amy rolled over to the edge of her mattress, stuck her head out to peer down.  She watched as Michelle moved her fingers slowly along the lines of Kate’s palms.  If she hadn’t traced them, Amy wouldn’t have known the lines were there; the concentrated beam of the flashlight erased all shadows, made Kate’s palm look pale and empty.

“Oh, you’re going to be rich.  Look at that wealth line.”  Michelle drew her fingernail along the top of Kate’s palm. 

“Will I be pretty?” Kate asked.  “Can you tell?”

“Let me see your thumb.”

Amy watched as Michelle looked at the wrinkles on Kate’s knuckle, slowly turning her fingers, bending her thumb.  Kate watched, her face broad and flat, looking anxious. 

“Will I be fat?”  She whispered.

Michelle dropped Kate’s hand, laughed. The flashlight beam bounced on the floor.  “There’s an easier way to tell that than your palm lines.”

Amy heard the girls in the other bunks stirring, the rustle of blanket and sheet.  Everyone wanted to hear, to see. 

“Lift your shirt,” said Michelle.  “Just show me your stomach,” she insisted.

Leaning further over, Amy saw Kate grab her shirt, lift it a few inches to reveal her belly. 

“Now bend over,” Michelle commanded, “and let me count the folds.  That’s what shows how fat you’ll be when you’re older.”  Kate hunched over, back rounded.  “Two,” Michelle declared.  “So you’re not going to be fat, but you won’t be thin either.  Two is okay.  One is better.”

Amy could see other girls lifting their shirts, bending over in their bunks, trying to count.  The bed creaked as Michelle stood up, walked around.  “Who’s got one?”  The flashlight beam moved across the room, stopped on another bed – Susan – her pale belly almost seeming to glow. One.  Michelle moved the flashlight to Jen, who bent obligingly.  Two.  “That’s okay,” said Michelle, heading back to her own bed.  “Two’s okay.  It’s three that’s bad.  Or, God, four.  Does anyone have four?”  The bunk was quiet.

In the near-blackness that came after Michelle turned her flashlight off, Amy sat up in her bed, silently lifted her shirt, bent over.  She could not properly see her stomach, but instead ran her hand over the scrunched flesh.  One, two three, certainly.  There was a pucker, not a full line, around her belly button.  Did that count?  Did that make four?  Amy lowered her shirt, turned her pillow to the cool side.  Three or four.  Her unbraided hair spread in waves across the pillow.  Amy shut her eyes, wished she was underwater, slowly drifted off to sleep before she could realize that Michelle hadn’t lifted her own shirt to show her stomach, her one perfect fold.

On the last day of camp, Amy’s mom helped her lift the trunk into the back of the station wagon.  They drove down the camp’s dirt road, bumping along past the lodge, the dining hall, the lake becoming a distant sliver through the trees, then vanishing.  The tires hummed softly as they turned onto the paved road leading to the highway.  In the front seat, Amy kicked off her sneakers and propped her feet against the dashboard.  Slouching in her seat, she watched the summer cottages fly past, the outside world she forgot existed while she was at camp.  Her mom talked about their house, how it had just been painted.  “I want your opinion, Amy.  The painters said they used the same color as before, but it looks darker to me.  You’ll see it with fresh eyes and know for sure.”

Amy nodded, slouched lower to get her thighs away from the hot vinyl of the car seat.  Her flesh stuck as it pulled away, a hot, wet sound, and Amy thought fat, fat, fat, imagined the oatmeal of cellulite right below her skin.  She rolled her window down, let the air flap at her.  “Where do you want to stop for lunch?”  Her mom asked.  “We’ll pass that clam shack with the lobster rolls you like.”

White bread, mayonnaise.  “I’d rather just get home,” Amy said.

The house looked the same to her when they arrived.  If her mother hadn’t told her it had been painted, Amy would never have guessed.  She walked around to the back of the car, turned to her mom.  “It looks like the same color to me, Mom.  I can’t see any difference.” 

Her mom smiled, opened the back of the car.  She reached out with a hand, touched Amy’s braid.  “I’m so glad you’ve stopped chewing your hair.  The ends look much neater.”

High school began two weeks later.  In the confusion of a new school, the press of people in the hallways, the demands of her class schedule, the memories of summer camp faded away.  Sometimes, stuck in a hot classroom, Amy would wish she could be back in the lake, cool and floating.  Or she’d catch sight of someone across the cafeteria who looked like Michelle and feel her stomach clench, imagining that she’d moved into town.  Amy’s friends were other ninth grade girls, other soccer and basketball players.  They watched movies together on weekends, called each other when they needed help on homework, sat together at lunch.  They were not the pretty girls, not the popular ones, but Amy wasn’t jealous; she was happy not to have to share a table with girls like Michelle.  At lunch, Amy carefully unpacked the food her mother had made for her: sandwich, crackers, fruit, cookies, chips.  Slowly, deliberately, she offered it to the other girls, eating an apple herself, drinking some juice, giving everything else away.

Fall was soccer season for Amy, hot afternoons on the field behind the school.  Theirs was the last field out, past boys’ soccer, past the practice football field.  Amy dragged the mesh bag of balls, which bounced along, sending up poofs of dust.  Ahead of her, two teammates carried a large jug of water between them.  She watched them walk, the dimples of their elbows, the shin guards flapping loosely on their dusty legs.  She knew they looked like her, tried to evaluate them objectively.  Were they fat?  What would someone say to describe them: solid?  Heavy-set?  Did they have an athletic build?  It depended on who was saying it, how nice that person was.  The cheerleaders practiced on the next field over and even without their skin tight uniforms, the difference between the two teams was apparent.  Solid versus wispy.  It was like an English class analogy:  heavy-set is to lighter-than-air as girls’ soccer player is to cheerleader.  Amy shook the balls loose from the mesh bag, joined the team for a warm-up lap.  She felt light-headed already.

In a month’s time, the last of the summer heat had faded, and in biology class, they were studying the systems of the body, preparing for the fetal pig dissection, a rite of passage Amy heard about from all the older students she knew.  Mr. Foster led the class easily through the respiratory, cardiovascular, and digestive systems.  He ran into a few snickers with the endocrine system and really suffered during these last two weeks as he presented the reproductive system.  Amy’s notebook was filled with carefully labeled cross-sectional diagrams.  She’d copied them down from the board, double-checked them in her textbook and knew they were right.  But somehow she couldn’t believe that she was full of these sponges and squiggles, that miles of small intestine lay curled beneath her belly button, that her lungs hung like two damp wings inside her ribs.  It wasn’t gross, but it wasn’t her.

At the front of the room, Mr. Foster began lecturing.  “Prenatal Development,” he wrote in large letters on the board.  Just yesterday, the class had been led through the basics of conception.  Even from her seat in the third row, Amy had heard the boys in back adding their own, not so scientific, terminology.  Today, the class was on safer ground, inside the womb.  Mr. Foster launched into a description of the trimesters of pregnancy and the developmental hallmarks of each.  Amy divided her blank notebook page into three neat sections.  She wrote quickly, trying to keep up with the terms Mr. Foster put on the board as he continued to lecture.  “Around the twentieth week, really interesting things start to happen.  Up to this point, the fetus has developed into the barest blueprint of a human: organs, limbs.  But now, for the first time, the fetus becomes an individual, unique.  How?”  Mr. Foster barely paused; he’d taught long enough not to expect an answer.  “Fingerprints form – each person’s unique – because the skin of the fetus and the liquid in the womb rub against each other.  And,” here he paused, turned out the classroom lights and started the slide projector.  In the darkness, the class fell into a deeper silence.   A picture of a fetus appeared on the screen.  “See here,” Mr. Foster pointed with his yardstick to the fetus’s clenched fists.  “In addition to the fingerprints, characteristic grooves start to form on the palm, making the lines that will mark the folds of the hands for that individual’s entire life.  In fact, you could say that the fetus, for the first time, plays a role in its own development.  How it curls up, where it puts its arms and legs, that’s what determines these permanent skin grooves – where and how the flesh will fold for the rest of your life.”  His pointer moved around the slide to the neck, stomach, knee, foot, where thin gray lines, like pencil marks that had been poorly erased, were barely visible.

 In the slide, you couldn’t tell that the fetus was floating; it just sat there, sightless eyes staring straight ahead.  Amy looked at the overlarge head as Mr. Foster continued on about the development of the nervous system; she studied the tiny clenched fist, where lines that determined the future were starting to grow and twist, the friction of water and flesh.  Behind the knees that were tightly tucked to the chest, Amy examined the fetus’s tummy, counted one, two, three folds.  Too bad.