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TeleFanHour [21 hours ago]: breaking news!! Sources have confirmed that Allyson Hendricks has called it quits with her high school sweetheart. The pair started da-ting a year before Allyson was cast as our favorite space exile. We can’t help but wonder if the on-screen chemistry with Becca Wallis has anything to do with their recent split . . . #TelephoneHour
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SammyTheBadDog: you KNOW it does. I’ve shipped BecAlly since their first comic con interview
ABCece: my faith in love is dead
MarlyAndrews: SAMEEEEE
WhereIsPepper: ngl speculating about the dating lives of real, actual people sort of gives me the ick. Her poor ex must be so heartbroken
JuliePeterson: sending so much love to Allyson
KatieKat89: “on-screen” chemistry my ass. It POPS off-screen too!! they were 1000000% holding hands under the table during that promo for the next season!! Our ship is FINALLY SAILING
NatalieWaters: at the end of the day we just want to see Allyson happy. nothing but love to Ally, and her ex too
SandyBecks: Ally is so not okay i can see the pain in her eyes . . . stay strong!! We are here for you!!
LacyMills: #TEAMBECALLY FOREVER
I used to be named Ivy, and I used to be in love.
Now I’m just carsick, and the whole world has forgotten I even have a name.
The mountain road is made of spiked curves and sharp twists all the way up. The horizon dips and weaves with every jolt of the car. It’s a lot for a digestive system that can’t even handle gluten.
It doesn’t help that I can’t take my eyes off my phone. I’ve been in a free-fall scroll through the entire internet since our lunch stop, when the news broke. It’s a mira-cle I made it a whole week, nursing my tattered heart in the peace of anonymity, but now everyone knows, and everyone with an internet connection is free to air their hot take about my first-ever breakup. I haven’t had the courage to read the actual press release yet, but the fan reactions feel like poking a bruise. Swaths of people with fandom profile pictures have been renaming me all morning.
Allyson Hendricks’s ex-girlfriend.
Former middle school sweetheart.
That girl in the way of our ship.
Her ex.
Her ex.
Her ex.
Whoever doles out Social Media Main Character of the Day assignments has some serious explaining to do.
From her car seat in front of me, Georgianna lets out a massive shriek. She’s only eighteen months old, so she’s allowed to do that. I tried earlier, when Dad’s car started its slow wind up the San Bernardino Mountains, but it was frowned upon. Natalie shifts in the front seat to pat Georgianna’s squat legs.
“We’re almost there, Georgie,” she says. “I know it’s a lot of turns.”
“It sure is,” mutters Lacey, my older sister.
Natalie gives her an apologetic smile, and Lacey shoots me a knowing glance. Na-talie and Dad got married lightning fast after our parents’ divorce, and she’s con-vinced we hate her as a result. We don’t hate her, but we do accept her attempts to buy our love via takeout and coddly parenting.
“We’re not almost there,” Dad mumbles. He’s scared of heights, and he’s been darting glares at the ravine that plunges down one side of the road, peppered with pine trees that bury the horizon. “Which means it’s not too late to back out.”
That last bit is directed at me, so I roll my eyes. “It’s definitely too late to back out.”
“Reception is gone,” Lacey says, tossing her phone aside.
“No it isn’t.” Tara, who used to be the baby of the family before Georgie, has the back of her phone pressed against the window. “Wait. Yes it is.”
As if to prove her point, Georgie lets out another wail. Nugget, curled in the cramped space under Georgie’s dangling legs, throws his little puppy head back and joins in.
“You can always back out,” Dad says, raising his voice above the chaos of our fami-ly as Lacey fumbles through the diaper bag in search of a fresh pacifier. “Especial-ly in light of . . . recent events.”
Lacey tilts her head back, trying to catch my gaze again from her perch next to Georgie in the middle row of the family minivan we had to get when we became a four-kid family. I turn my attention back to the window, even though any hope I had of horizon staring curing my nausea has been buried by the pines. Recent events--which has been Dad’s second-favorite euphemism for my unceremonious dumping, after “The, well, um, you know . . .”--have nothing to do with anything. Dad has been trying to get me to back out of being a camp counselor since he found out that my new summer job coincides with our yearly family camping trip.
Of course, that’s one of the major appeals for this job. That and the fact that I fi-nally get to go back to my childhood theater camp. I haven’t seen these pines since sixth grade. They haven’t changed at all, like they’ve been keeping watch over this place for me in my absence. But I’d have taken a job rowing a small boat across the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of hurricane season to get out of camping with my family. They’re just all so . . . outdoorsy. They frolic up hikes to remote camp-ing grounds, never noticing that I’m always half a mile behind them, gasping for air like my veins are drying up under my skin.
Last year my tent concaved under the weight of unforecasted rain that flooded my sleeping bag. Soggy sleeping bag is not a hell I’d wish on anyone. Not on my step-dad, who I’ve only met one time, at my mom’s wedding. Not on Rynn Walsh, who ditched me in the most dramatic way possible for a sixth grader, right before we moved from LA to San Francisco. Not even on Ally, even though she dumped me out of absolutely nowhere.
I was already jumping at the chance to work at my old summer camp. When I saw that the dates would eat right into Dad’s campground booking, I called Ms. Patri-cia, the camp director, and begged her to hire me. Phone calls are my absolute nemesis, so that’s really saying something. She remembered me and hired me on the spot. Boom, no camping. Welcome to my summer of making money and pre-tending I’ve never even heard of Allyson Hendricks.
“I’m not backing out,” I tell Dad. “Besides, do you really want to make a U-turn on this road?”
He sighs but lets it go.
The road thins ahead of us, the curves sharpening so that even though I know ex-actly where I’m going, I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of me. My knuckles whiten as I grip the edge of my seat, fingertips digging into the cushion. I didn’t in-herit Dad’s vertigo, but the twisting heights are enough to get to me, and the nau-sea bubbles in my throat.
Lacey looks back at me again, forcing me to dodge her eye contact. She’s been do-ing that a lot in the past week. In light of recent events. But I don’t want to go through this. It’s just something that happened. It doesn’t need to define my sum-mer. It happened. It was a dark moment--a soul-crushingly alone moment. But the moment has passed. It’s over. Moving on.
Mercifully, Natalie was right, and we pull up Camp Acorn Hill’s driveway before my stomach has time to turn itself completely inside out. The car lurches to a halt, and the entire Raines-Hymond clan tumbles out of the side door.
The still-familiar sound of a golf cart whirring spins me around, and I smile in spite of myself when I spot Ms. Patricia. I planned to be professional--to prove myself at first glance as a true counselor-ready employee, my camper days behind me--but instead I launch myself at her as soon as she gets her ancient golf cart to stop. Broccoli, her dog, pounces at my knees, his paws dancing against my legs.
“How have you not replaced this thing yet?” I ask, straight into her ear, not ready to let the hug end yet. “Or at least fixed the brakes?”
“That’s what I hired you for,” Ms. Patricia says.
I can hear her smile, but I’m still hugging her too tightly to see it for myself. Ms. Patricia has a knack for knowing exactly how long a hug needs to last. When Mom dropped me off in the summer before sixth grade, Ms. Patricia let me hug her for almost six minutes straight. She may not have known yet that my parents were kicking off their divorce proceedings that afternoon, but she knew how long that hug had to be. If I’d known that was to be my last summer at Acorn Hill, the hug would’ve never ended.
Now I’m sure she knows why I need this hug. The whole world knows. She lets me sink into her wide-set shoulders, and keeps her arms in a tight squeeze until I pull away.
“If it’s my job to fix the brakes, that thing’ll never stop again,” I say as I clap my palms against my thighs, inviting Broccoli to leap onto me. He takes me up on it, his paws leaving dirt tracks along the hem of my floral skirt as I ruffle his fur. Nug-get, dangling from the car window, gives a jealous yelp. Which is probably exactly what I sounded like every time Ally ditched me to hang out with her costars. I cringe at the thought.
“This is where we leave you,” Dad says. “Unless . . .”
“It’s too late to turn back, Dad,” I say, looking over my shoulder. He already has his hiking boots on so he doesn’t have to waste a second between parking the car and launching himself up the nearest trail. It’s not a summer plan I fit into. Not like here. Acorn Hill still has a place carved out for me. The wind whistling through the pine needles might as well be carrying my extremely off-key sixth-grade rendition of “On the Steps of the Palace” from the first act–only production of Into the Woods that concluded my last summer here.
“It definitely is,” Ms. P says. “I need you. We’re understaffed this year as it is.”
Dad laughs. “All I’m hearing is the working conditions will be bad,” he whispers as he leans in to hug me.
At least the working conditions come with functional showers and easy access to gluten-free bread, which is more than his vacation conditions can say. The “gluten-free bun” on the burger at Dad’s favorite diner is so crunchy it might as well be a corn chip.
This feels like a good place to clarify that I have actual celiac disease. I am not one of those LA people who refuses to eat bread lest it give me a pimple. Those people are my absolute nemeses. They have given me and the other gluten intolerants who frequent findmeglutenfree.com such a bad name. My worst fear is having to explain this to waiters lest they judge me.
Well, that and the haunting, omnipresent void of loneliness staring back at me since the breakup. But those two are basically tied for first place.
Dad lets me go, his eyes already trained back on the car, his trip, and the family members who actually want to go. All of them but me. I ignore the way that stings as I wave goodbye to Lacey. She wiggles her fingers at me as she rebuckles her seat belt, but Georgie wails midwave, and she drops her hand to tend to her.
“See you in a few weeks,” Natalie coos from the front seat, with too much verve in her voice, trying to make up for Dad’s lack of enthusiasm at my gainful employ-ment. “Have the best time.”
They pull away, the car rattling down the winding driveway, and even though I asked for this, the moment still sticks in my throat, and I have to swallow hard to dislodge it. Ms. Patricia rests an arm around my shoulders as she guides me to the main office cabin, a rickety wooden structure that wouldn’t hesitate to give a mil-lion splinters to anyone who brushes against a wall. I love it.
“It’s so good to see you again,” Ms. Patricia says, her hand tightening against my arm. “How have you been?”
I think of my girlfriend--my ex-girlfriend--plastered all over social media, my name probably being reprinted on my birth certificate as “the dumb idiot who used to think Ally would love her forever even after she became the Allyson Hendricks” as we speak. “It’s going so super awesome, actually.”
“Convincing,” Ms. Patricia says wryly, but she doesn’t pry further.
I nudge her shoulder with mine. “How’s camp doing?”
“So super awesome, actually,” she says, raising her voice an octave to match mine, and I roll my eyes at her.
She pulls open the door of the main office, and the splintering exterior gives way to the cozy inside: hand-knitted throw blankets, a fraying couch with cushions so worn they threaten to swallow any sitter whole, and a hot water station that has soaked the whole room with the smell of hot chocolate. An ancient desk wobbles by the door, the ramshackle home to an even more ancient desktop computer.
“Sign in when the spinny wheel stops turning,” Ms. Patricia says, releasing my shoulder to gesture at the frozen computer screen. I slump in front of it, waiting for the form to load. Once it does, I set about checking a long series of boxes chronicling my past experience with the camp and my goals for the summer. I’m here in part--in large part, while I’m being honest--to prove to my dad that major-ing in education is a good move. My school’s college admissions counselor made the entire junior class draft our college essays during finals week, winning her the dubious honor of making the least popular decision in education history. Ever since my dad read it, he’s been fretting aloud about how “restrictive” an education ma-jor would be for me.
It only leads to one career path, he’s told me more than once in the ten-day stretch between the day my essay draft was due and this morning, when he squeezed it in one last time over breakfast. A pretty underpaid and underappreci-ated one at that.
He’s not wrong, though I’m pretty sure most of his fretting is fueled by resentment toward my mom, who as far as we know still teaches fourth grade. But if I can spend this summer proving that I’m good at this, that I can connect with kids and make a difference in their lives after two short months together, maybe the whole majoring-in-education operation will seem more viable to him.
Copyright © 2025 by Auriane Desombre. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
