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David isn’t awake 5 minutes before whips out his phone to text Gwen. His head is pounding, his ear hurts, and worst of all, everything seems like it’s spinning. He barely manages to get dressed without getting himself killed, so he can’t imagine how tough a day at camp would be. They’d scheduled a hike today, and that’s certain death.
Hey, can you watch the campers today? Not feeling well.
He hopes the text wasn’t too dramatic, or worse, than he’s ruining he entire day. But he can’t help it. There’s no way he’s gong to get through a whole day like this.
When Gwen wakes up and checks her phone, she’s not surprised to find a text from David. He’s always sending her things first thing in the morning—sun emojis, overly cheerful greetings, pictures of puppies. She kind of likes the puppies, though she’d never admit it.
What she doesn’t expect is the text he’s sent. Trying to call in sick. No. Immediately, her stomach starts churning with anxiety. She can’t handle them alone. They’re horrible. What’s she supposed to do? How can she keep all of them from burning the camp down all at once?
Predictably, she’s knocking on his door the second she gets the message. When she opens it, she looks nervous. Scared, even.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asks, pressing a hand to his forehead before he can even reply. She finds it surprisingly but relievingly devoid of heat. “You don’t feel warm.”
“I think it’s an ear infection,” he replies.”It hurts and I’m so, so dizzy.”
“What if you just kind of supervised? You wouldn’t need to do much. There needs to be at least two sets of eyes on these future criminals at all times.”
“Gwen, I really can’t. Everything’s spinning.”
“Please don’t leave me alone with them,” she begs with horror in her eyes. “They’ll eat me alive.” David sighs. While he really doesn’t want to do this, he feels for her. Running the camp solo is certainly difficult, which is why David never ever takes breaks. He’s never asked for a single day off in the history of his employment at Camp Campbell. She must know it must be bad if he’s asking at all, but obviously, her fear is winning out over her logic.
“Okay,” he concedes. “Would you mind grabbing me my uniform? I can’t move around that much or I feel nauseous.” She must see the red flag. It’s not even a flag; it’s a banner. But she ignores it, rifling through his drawers to find his clothes and setting them next to him on the bed.
“Thanks. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“You’re a life saver,” she says. She’s never this happy with him, and that makes it a little more worth it. But it’s still not quite there. The short walk to the mess hall nearly wipes him out. He should have asked her to stay and walk with him. By the time he reaches the door, he’s got to lean on it to reorient himself. When he finally no longer feels like he’s going to throw up, he opens the door and uses the wall as his guide to get to their table in the corner.
“Woah,” she says. “You really look awful.”
“I feel like I’ve been spun in circles.”
“You’re gonna be able to make it though, right? I mean, I want the help, but I don’t want to kill you.”
“Worst case scenario, I throw up from the vertigo.” He hopes that will make her reconsider. If she said something like that, he’d never in a million years expect her to help him run the camp. He’d personally see her to Urgent Care for medicine, then get her back to the counselors’ cabin and settled her in bed so she could sleep it off. That’s what he hopes for, but he’s got no such luck.
“I can live with that,” she says. She can live with it? She’s acting just like everyone else had always acted when he got sick—treating him like a burden. Maybe he is. Perhaps he should stop complaining so much and suck it up. People deal with worse. He can do this.
“Thank you,” she says. “Really.”
And that makes it worth it.
“Yeah. No problem,” he lies. After the campers eat breakfast, Gwen makes an announcement.
“Alright, goblins. You all know we were supposed to be hiking today.”
A chorus of groans comes from the crowd, running a knife straight into David’s heart. Some day, they’ll understand the beautiful and therapeutic qualities of nature.
“Change of plans. David’s sick today, so we’re going to do something easy and not bother him. Anyone I catch bugging him gets their dessert taken away. Capiche?”
“If he’s sick, why’s he here?” Neil asks. It’s a fair question that David is sort of wondering, too.
“You demons are not a one person job.”
Well, it’s sort of fair. He just had hoped this could be the one exception. He’d never ask for anything again after this. Still, he doesn’t want to complain more than he already has, so he sucks it up and watches her set up for collage making. She takes out magazines—a whole stack of ones she’s read and torn out whatever pages she wanted to keep—and construction paper and scissors and glue and everything else he can imagine.
David can’t decide which is more disorienting: eyes shut or open. He tries both, but both are awful. He wishes he were lying down. Maybe he wouldn’t be so nauseated. He doesn’t bother to open his eyes when someone sits at the table across from him, assuming it’s just Gwen.
“Sup, camp man?”
Oh, shit.
“Hi, Max,” he greets, reluctantly forcing himself to make eye contact. “If you need something, would you mind asking Gwen?”
Max seems a little taken aback by that. David swears he seems a little concerned.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He smiles. “Nothing you need to worry about one bit.”
“Who says I’m worried?” he asks. He gestures vaguely around the room. “This is almost worse than hiking.” When he follows Max’s gesture and glances around the room, a wave of dizziness sweeps over him from turning his head, making his stomach churn. He shuts his eyes again until he can stand to open them and by the time he does, Max is gone but Gwen is approaching,
“Hanging in there?” she asks. The concern is just a courtesy. She only expects an affirmative, so he gives her a thumbs up, too afraid to nod. “Good. This should keep them busy for a while. Can you watch them while I get ready for lunch?”
God, that’s the last thing he wants to do, but what he says is, “sure. No problem.”
Within minutes, chaos ensues. They’re holding Space Kid down and gluing googly eyes to his helmet. Nurf has managed to make an origami dagger and has already drawn blood on Neil. Max has his feet up on the table, happily watching the scene unfold. He has no choice. He’s going to have to stand up.
“Kids,” he scolds, “let’s not maim each other.” On his feet, everything spins. He stumbles forward in an attempt to keep his balance and catches himself on a table, to which he desperately clings while he talks. “Arts and crafts are for expressing yourselves, not for harming others.”
“I express myself through harming others,” Nurf says. David sighs, massaging the place between his eyes. The pounding headache is all he can think about.
“Let’s, please, just for today, not try to kill each other?”
There’s a desperation in his voice that Max has never heard before and it freaks him out a little bit. He really must be sick if he’s pleading like this.
“Max, this is our chance,” Nikki says, tugging on the sleeve of his hoodie. Max jerks it away.
“What are you talking about?”
“We could do whatever we want! You think David would notice if we left?”
Max glances over to him and recoils. David’s barely standing, eyes unfocused and face ashen. He looks about to fall over.
“We could steal the bus and get out of here for the night!” Nikki exclaims. “Go wherever we want!”
David looks so pathetic that, when Max thinks about pulling the wool over his eyes and getting away with something, it doesn’t feel like a victory. It feels like… well, he’s not sure. Bad. It makes him feel bad.
Still, he’s got a reputation to uphold, and if he goes easy on him now, they’re going to know he’s got a soft side.
“Alright. Let’s do it.”
They wait until David’s shut his eyes again to slip out quietly. Neil sneaks to the supply shed to grab the keys off the hook, then joins them outside. Max braces himself, but no one pursues them. Perfect.
It’s a short walk to the bus, and when they arrive, they’re relieved to find that the doors are unlocked.
“Alright,” he says, climbing into the driver’s seat. Of course he’s the driver. “Let’s get out of this shithole camp.”
Max’s foot can’t reach the peddle. Nikki climbs underneath, ready to press the gas. However, the sound of the engine starting must alert David, because not a second later, he’s stumbling out the door. It takes him just long enough to take in the scene and process what he’s looking at that Nikki has time to press the gas flat to the floor, which brings the bus screeching to a start.
“Kids! That’s not safe!” David shouts, running after them in a drunken gait. “Come back!”
“Nikki, wait—”
But they’re already going. Max is too slow, too paralyzed with fear to react in time to keep them from hitting the tree in front of them. Unsecured because they can’t wear seatbelts in their wild configuration, the kids tumble about the bus. Max shuts is eyes for the impact and when he opens them, he’s upside-down in the first seat, limbs intertwined with Neil’s.
“Ugh,” he groans, disentangling himself. Before he’s finally situated, David is stumbling to the car, breathing hard and looking panicked. His hands and knees are bleeding badly, meaning that at some point, he fell trying to get to them and just got back up and continued his pursuit.
“Kids, are you alright?” he asks desperately as soon as he pries open the door. He picks Max up and sets him rightside up in the seat, then does the same for Nikki, setting her in the driver’s seat and stealing the keys from the ignition to keep them from trying it again. “Where are you hurt?”
“We’re fine,” Max grumbles, but it doesn’t extinguish the fear in his eyes. Max meets them and finds that, to his horror, they’re filled with tears.
“I’m so sorry,” he apologizes for some reason. It’s baffling to Max.
“Why the hell would you be sorry? We’re the ones who stole the car.”
“I’m supposed to keep you safe, and I—and I—” he has to take a knee, clutching his temple as an unbearable wave of vertigo crashes over him in response to the running and the fall.
“David?” Max calls, but he sounds so far away. His stomach is churning with the spinning feeling.
“I’m sorry, I’ll--sorry—, just one—”
With that stammered half excuse, he stumbles off to the bushes, catching himself on a tree before he falls face first again, and throws up. Max cringes. Perhaps this was a mistake.
“What the fuck is going on?” Gwen demands, apparently having missed the entire scene. “Are you kids okay?”
“Fine,” Max reassures. “But David, he’s—”
She follows his gaze to David’s hunched body, still dry heaving into the brush. She gasps.
“Jesus Christ,” she exclaims. “What happened?”
“Just dizzy—the kids,” he manages through coughing gags.
“The kids are fine. You should sit down a minute. You’re bleeding.”
“Doesn’t matter. Get the kids.” She turns on them and points to the ground beside her, which they all read as a command. They line up one by one.
“See? They’re okay.”
“We’re fine, David,” Neil says, finally feeling a little bit of regret about the whole thing. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Gwen says harshly. “You’re all in big trouble.”
David collapses into the dirt as he turns around, his head spinning like nothing he’s ever felt before and places a hand on Nikki and Max’s shoulders, pulling them together for a tight hug.
“I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“We ruined the car.”
“I don’t care.” His scraped-to-hell knees are in the gravel, which has to kill.
“Gwen needs to clean you up,” Max says harshly. “You’re getting blood everywhere. You shouldn’t have been out here today at all.”
“No, I’m—”
“He’s right, David. I fucked up. You’re really, really sick, and I ignored you. I’m gonna get you patched up, then you’re going to bed.”
David nods. It’s what he’s been hoping to hear all day. He lets her lead him to the mess hall, guiding him along the way so he doesn’t fall again. There, she breaks out the first aid kid and begins to tend to his injuries. He winces at the antiseptic spray and bleeds through the gauze so quickly that she has to replace the ones on his knees before she’s even done bandaging his hands.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
He smiles faintly. “I’m just glad everyone’s safe.” She glances down at the gauze again only to find that the blood is still seeping through.
“I think we should take you to Urgent Care and have someone else look at this. You’re really bleeding.”
To her surprise, he nods. “I probably need some antibiotics for the ear infection, anyway. It’s not a bad idea.”
“I’ll get the—oh, shit. The bus.”
“I think it’s still drivable,” he says. “Just a little banged up.” She takes his word for that and stands him up, supporting him all the way to the bus.
“Kids, if you pull something like this while we’re gone, I swear to god—”
“We won’t,” Max promises. “Just fucking leave already.” It’s clear that he’s anxious, and she sees why he would be.
“He’ll be okay,” she reassures. He rolls his eyes and pretends not to care. With that, she hops into the driver’s seat and drives off.
“I’m sorry I let this happen,” he says.
“This is my fault for making you stay,” she says. “I should have known you wouldn’t ask for a day off unless you were, like, dying. I’m sorry.” He should be mad at her, but he can’t muster the energy to be, nor does he want to. She’d been asking for what she needed, too—just a little more loudly than David had.
“It’s alright. It could have been worse.”
That’s true, but it does little to assuage her guilt. “Once we get you checked out, you can take all the sick days you need.” He smiles at her gratefully, then shuts his eyes, now fighting both vertigo and motion sickness. The next day, he takes his very first sick day, and because of the scare, the campers are actually pretty well behaved.
But they still don’t get dessert.