Tadpoles

Mom leads us to the bathhouse. Campfires light the way. The day's sun scorched our skin pink, but now the moon glows fierce like a giant hovering eyeball. Pine trees stretch high overhead, branches croak in the cooling breeze. I cross my arms over the pink-and-white-striped cover-up Mom made from beach towels; Jenny's is blue, but pink remains more desirable and belongs to me, I believe, because I am older. There are sounds of laughter, logs snapping, the smell of roasting hot dogs. Air slips beneath my cover-up and it's odd: the place between my legs. I hadn't noticed it before.

Our flip-flops churn gravel and fling rocks in our wake. We've stopped twice because a pebble slid between Jenny's foot and her flip-flop and she started crying, which annoyed me. While I don't much care for bathing, I like lingering in the bathhouse where I can watch the other women line up in front of the sinks to dab tan-colored cream onto their faces or coat their lashes with inky wands. Mom wears denim culottes and an oversized sweatshirt with Hawaii in cursive across the front. Her makeup is a tube of ChapStick, and the only reason she wants us to visit the bathhouse is to get clean.

It is late July in Michigan. We are at Three Braves, where we camp most weekends and holiday breaks. I am nine or ten. My fingers are sticky with marshmallow. Beneath my fingernails are bits of humus from the Styrofoam container of worms we purchased from the camp store, in a chest beside ice cream sandwiches and Dreamsicles. We didn't catch any fish earlier in the day, but a painted turtle snagged our bait and now he sits at our campsite in a large bucket with a rock, a stick, and an inch of water, raking the plastic sides with his claws. Tomorrow we'll beg our parents to let us take the turtle home, like all the other animals we have previously captured. We once filled a fish tank with tadpoles scooped from the lake, kept a plastic tablecloth over the top to keep the water from sloshing over the sides as we drove home. Within weeks the tadpoles' tails grew stunted, the heads larger, more angular, and they began to crowd the water, their glistening shapes slithering over each other, making the water appear thick as motor oil. As Dad heaved this into the creek near our house one evening, the morphing tadpoles spilled out in one slick stream.

Before that there were snails and a box turtle. During another Michigan campout farther north, we made the mistake of placing a sunfish and crayfish together. They didn't even last the night. We placed them in a bucket, and then rushed off when Mom called us to dinner. After we had eaten our hamburger patties wrapped in foil and scarfed down slices of potato, we returned to the bucket to discover the sunfish floating on the water's surface, its scales glinting bits of late sun.

We ladled the sunfish with a net, a sudden rage filling us, and pushed the bucket over, water darkening the gravel. We grabbed rocks, circled the crayfish, aimed. We stoned it. Cheered each other when our rocks connected with its shell. When it tried to scurry off, we pushed it back into the middle of the road with a stick and continued pelting it. When we were done its bottom half smeared separate from its midsection and two of its arms were severed. We dropped its remains into part of the lake overgrown with lily pads. Fish food, we joked.

But now, inside the bathhouse, we must rid ourselves of the smell of fish. Mom directs us to the handicapped stall. She locks the door, tells us to take off our robes while she places shampoo and a plastic caddy of soap inside the stall, then leans over and presses the nozzle. It mists to life with a babbled murmur. Our flip-flops squeal on the stall's concrete floor...