The Ghost of Danny McGee by Quinlan Grim

Author:Quinlan Grim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: California Coldblood Books
Published: 2022-07-04T19:09:39+00:00

Sam

Poppy lies curled in her sleeping bag. Her eyelids are heavy, sinking downward. Magic marker smudges, the shadows of a button nose and whiskers, streak gray across her flushed face. Regardless of the theme, the Hummingbirds decided they would dress as kittens for the dance. Katie helped them make felt ears and tails in crafts and Sam colored their faces. Poppy’s tail, the glued seams ripped and bleeding fluffed white cotton, lies next to her on the pillow.

“What was your favorite part of the day?” Sam kneels at her bunk. She reaches out to smooth a wisp of hair behind her ear.

“Dancing,” Poppy whispers.

“You had fun at the dance?”

“Mmhmm.”

“I saw you out there. You’re a good dancer.”

“I’m gonna be a dancer when I grow up. And a singer, too.”

Sam laughs. She lets her face fall to the flannel sheet, her hand resting on Poppy’s hair. “Yeah,” she says when she lifts her head, “I bet you are.”

The rest of the girls are asleep already, snoring into their pillowcases. They are greasy and dirty, dry and chapped and sunburnt. They are happy. No one has cried all week, not even Rachel. Sam pats Poppy’s cheek as she stands up. She flicks off the light switch and is sitting on her bunk, tying her shoes in the dark, when she hears Poppy rustle and turn in her sleeping bag.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Sam drops her shoelace. “Good night, Poppy.”

Rosie and Elias are already waiting on the trail outside. The two of them are bickering about something; they have been bickering about something all night. Their matching costumes cut bizarre, puppet-like silhouettes in the moonlight. With tools from the crafts shack, they managed to splice together a pair of each of their shirts and sweatpants, vertically, so they are both wearing half-and-half: girl on one side, boy on the other. Elias has one side of his hair up in a taut pigtail and Rosie has half of hers tucked into a low bun. The full effect is honestly remarkable.

“God help me,” Rosie had sighed as she posed in their bathroom mirror. “Promoting the gender binary like it’s the nineties.”

“But you look good,” Sam told her.

Rosie sighed again, defeated. “I do look good.”

Between her office work and meetings with Richard Byron and her preoccupation with Poppy, Sam had no time to put together a costume. She wound up dressing all in orange and hanging an old warning sign from the boathouse over her neck: DEEP WATER: No Swimming Beyond This Point. “Are you a girl or a boy?” campers asked her. She answered: “Boy? I thought it was girls versus buoys!” The joke went largely underappreciated, though it got a hearty laugh out of Gus Campbell.

“You’re such a pig,” Rosie is saying as Sam comes toward them on the trail. “No one even sounds like that. Name one girl who sounds like that.”

Elias, squinting up at the sky, carries on with his embarrassingly pornographic impersonation until Rosie smacks him and he chokes on his own laughter.

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