Sydney Koeplin
Later, they will debate who saw the snake first. The girls won’t agree on whose shout warned of the danger in the water, though Renee will insist that whoever it was screamed like a little bitch, and Julieanne, who really did think it was her who first saw the snake, will say that the reaction was perfectly appropriate for the situation, and besides, they were all scared, so who was Renee to judge? But the general order of events they will recount with increasing dramatics in the weeks and months after they return home from Bay Bridge Wilderness Therapy for Girls is this: Eva—who had stolen no less than seventeen lipsticks, twenty-four nail polishes of varying blues, three eye-shadow palettes, and six liquid eyeliners from her local drug store before finally being caught—was a weak swimmer and closest to shore, so she scrambled up the rocky incline on her hands and knees to get away, not noticing an embedded pebble in her palm until the next morning. As a city girl, she was most afraid of mosquitoes and bears when she heard she’d be spending six weeks in the Canadian backwater, until she learned there was also a snake that could kill her. Keira and Devon, both truants needing to repeat the eleventh and tenth grades, respectively, fled the water hand in hand, Keira nearly dragging Devon with her longer legs. They were tent partners and had gotten very close, ostensibly because they were sent here for the same thing, but Julieanne, who slept in the tent closest to them, knew they kissed when the flashlights went out. Julieanne just liked to drink and smoke weed and thought that she didn’t belong on this trip with girls who had actual problems. She always wore a long-sleeve performance top, even in the water, because her pale skin burned easily, and also to cover the scars on her arms. Julieanne had still been sitting on the rocks with only her feet dipped into Huron’s cool waters when the snake glided by, and she yelled at Anne Marie to get her attention. Anne Marie’s parents had threatened to ship her off to her grandparents’ house when they caught her with a 21-year-old boyfriend in the back of their Toyota Sienna, and a summer in the wilderness sounded better than attending Mass three times a week and watching Roseanne reruns in an unairconditioned double-wide in Skidway Lake. She swam away from shore to avoid the snake, figuring it was better to have nothing solid beneath her than put herself in the path of encroaching danger. And Renee, who turned to see the serpent coming at her, its long brown form easing across the water as languid as a dancer, could think of nothing else to do but quickly drop below the surface, rocks digging into her back as she flattened herself to the lake bed. Renee was there because her younger sister ended up in the ICU while she was babysitting. The other girls called her Baby Burner behind her back, and she pretended it didn’t bother her. It had been an accident, an accident she repeated over and over again to the nurse and her parents and then CPS until the word lost its meaning, and she couldn’t remember if it had been or if she really was convincing herself, after all. The girls’ hysterics drew their leader, Katie, down to the shore, a recent graduate of Smith who wanted to do something meaningful before she started the publishing internship in New York her godmother arranged. Because she was so fortunate, she felt she should give back in some way. Or at the very least, Katie told her mother, it would make for a great book one day. She told the girls all about the eastern massasaugas at the start of their trip. Explained how they would have to check their boots every morning, be careful where they squat to do their business, listen for a rattle. It was best, really, to be cautious of any snakes they saw, because eastern massasaugas can look a lot like the northern watersnake if you don’t know what you’re looking at. A brown mottled snake was a brown mottled snake, and none of the girls could distinguish the dangerous patterns from the harmless ones, and apparently, neither could Katie. As the girls screamed and pointed, she couldn’t tell if it was a massasauga or watersnake, or if Renee was just holding her breath that long or had drowned, and not for the first time, she regretted her decision to lead this trip. And Renee, still underwater, opened her eyes to see how the sunlight filtering around the snake’s lithe body cast her own in dancing shadow, almost as if they were one. She didn’t know what type of snake it was, whether it was dangerous or not dangerous, good or bad, and maybe it didn’t matter anyway, because people always react the same, but all she could think about as her lungs started to burn was how beautiful the reptile looked from down below.
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Sydney Koeplin is a writer from northern Illinois. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is the former fiction editor of Mid-American Review. Her writing is published in Passages North, New Delta Review, phoebe, and elsewhere. You can find her work at sydneykoeplin.com.