Free The Inverted Forest by John Dalton

after midnight. Straight to the pool , they said. No time to stop by the cabin for your suits. Such weak logic: the girls didn’t argue too hard against it. There’d been rumors the night would end like this, with everyone peeling off their clothes. No doubt, like Harriet, the girl counselors had chosen their underwear carefully when dressing for the party.
    She’d stopped by the infirmary and checked on James. He was fine, coiled in his bedsheets, unaware. And yet some of the spell of the bonfire had been broken. She was a mother, after all. She was five years older than most of the counselors. She was black. They were white and, by and large, considerate, even welcoming, people. Yet they thought of her as having lived a reckless, even desperate, urban life. In truth she’d grown up in the countryside west of Durham, North Carolina. Her father, college-educated, worked in the earth sciences labs of Duke University. Her mother trained Sunday school teachers for the Baptist Church.
    By the time Harriet got to the pool, nearly everyone had undressed and gone in or lined up at the diving board. They seemed to be actingout some sort of prank or challenge or drunken dare. Of course Harriet felt ungainly disrobing alone in the shower room, but for a foolish reason: she’d been teased about her name in grade school and thought that somehow it might be true, she might be, well, hairier than most young white women. But this wasn’t the case, at least not judging from Eileen Haupt, who ran to the woods to pee, or from Wendy Kavanagh, who patrolled the pool deck naked, sober, and unshy.
    How might it have felt to leave the shower house and pad naked across the pool deck with others watching? Awkward. Maybe even humiliating. Or delicious. Hard for Harriet to be certain. She never got that far. Schuller Kindermann appeared at the top of the steps, made his unsteady descent. A sobering moment, but what Harriet felt—and what many of the laughing counselors must have felt, too—was a sense of extreme dislocation. All night long they’d worked hard to create a cabaret atmosphere of sexual daring. Then to see Schuller Kindermann, and be reminded that there were those—the elderly, the soon-to-arrive state hospital campers—who weren’t in on the joke. The night’s rowdiness and camaraderie seemed to deflate all at once. The Garden Ladies, who’d been Harriet’s confidantes, turned their backs on her and resumed their rigid ways.
    The next morning Schuller fired fifteen counselors, two of them members of the senior staff, though not his camp nurse. Not Harriet Foster.

Chapter Five
    N o time to dawdle. On the gravel pathway, with their belongings for the summer balanced on their shoulders or dragged roughshod at their heels, the new counselors fell into a loose, half-jogging regiment. Enough like an army regiment for someone in the back ranks, a jokester, to shout, “Sound off! One, two. Sound off! Three, four.”
    They all laughed, just as the pathway veered into the woods. From high above, a canopy of evergreen branches threw down its shade. An entirely pleasant surprise to be under the roof of this woods, with its dewy air and a spaciousness that felt intimate and many-chambered. Dogs could be heard, panting and furrowing in the underbrush. One moment the pattern of tree trunks looked endless; the next, it was possible to recognize, crouched almost shyly behind a scrim of trees, several hulking, gray cedar buildings: sleeping cabins one through four.
    Here the regiment of new counselors broke apart. Young men to the right and up the walkways leading to Cabins One and Two, youngwomen a hundred yards deeper into the woods, to the walkways and creaking porch doors of Cabins Three and Four.
    Later they’d learn that each cabin interior was identical: a screened porch, two long sleeping barracks, a large fluorescent-lit bathroom—a latrine really, with latchless toilet stalls and musky wood showers. There were no counselors’