“That looked fun,” Nate said as she flopped down next to him.

“So you don’t like to swim?”

“I swim,” he replied, not looking up from his phone. “I’m really good at it. Captain of my junior high team. Varsity my freshman year.”

“Shut up,” Stevie said, reeling.

“It’s true. I stopped because I don’t like competing, but I swim really well. But that . . .” He nodded out at the expanse of lake in front of them. “Looks cold and gross. I like pools. They’re managed.”

“How come you never mentioned this before?”

“Never came up,” he said.

“We once spent the night in the pool house at Ellingham.”

“Not to swim, though,” he replied.

The concept of Nate the Athlete was so astonishing that Stevie found she had nothing more to say. People could be surprising, and that unnerved her. She wanted to believe she could see to the bottom, spot the hints. But she had never so much as suspected that Nate was a secret champion swimmer. She had failed this one.

Dylan and some others came out of the water and sat down not far from them. The gesture was entirely normal and friendly; they were making an effort to be social. Stevie knew this, and even appreciated it on some level. On another level, though, and one closer to her surface, she shied away from such approaches. She was never sure why. It’s not like she had trouble talking to people. Maybe it was more the fact that her parents had always pushed her in that direction, told her to make friends, as if the quantity of friends somehow determined your worth. She already had friends—Nate and Janelle. She was with one of them now.

So instead of looking at the new people, she looked over at the imposing rock on the other side of the lake.

“That’s Point 23,” Dylan said, following her gaze. “They call it that because twenty-three people have died jumping off of it.”

“It wasn’t twenty-three people,” said a girl. “People have died, but not that many.”

“It’s twenty-three,” Dylan repeated. “Why else would they call it that? I jumped it last summer. It was awesome.”

“You’re an idiot, Dylan,” the girl replied. “Besides, if you get caught jumping off that rock, they kick you out of camp.” She snapped her fingers dramatically. “Like, you’re gone.”

“Raptured?” Nate said in a hushed whisper.

The girl wrinkled her nose, indicating that the joke was not all it could be. It was time to turn the conversation to something more Stevie’s speed.

“Do people ever talk about the murders?” Stevie said.

The girl poked out her lower lip a bit in thought. Another girl, dressed in a black bathing suit, with black hair and nails to match, leaned in.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “The Box in the Woods thing. That was a serial killer from the seventies called the Woodsman.”

Stevie fought back the urge to editorialize.

“They caught the guy,” the girl went on, wrongly. “You can go out into the woods and see where it happened, but there’s not much there. I went the first year I worked here. It’s really weird. You can still see stuff that was there from when they were murdered.”