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There should be different words for secrets you keep with someone and secrets you keep to yourself, from everyone. Shared secrets need a cozy word, like heart, or hearth, or home.

Secrets you don’t tell get bigger, sometimes growing so much you stop noticing they’re there. Like the ground until you stumble.

Until Javi Amy will have no one to share secrets with—not for years. And so she will add picture after picture to the collection she’ll still keep in a manila envelope that will begin to bulge and tear, and she’ll be sure until the afternoon she gets the letter she’s been hoping for but not expecting—the response to the suicide not she could not write—that in a way she knows where she is going, and that all these worlds she has explored, loved and recorded have become her home.

That night she will not sleep. She won’t be lulled by Javi’s breaths against her neck. In the morning as he’s shaving she’ll grab the envelope from underneath their bed and scatter out its contents all across the bedroom floor.

I’ve pored over every image trying to pinpoint how I lost you—when, where, how

Every summer the girls go to Camp Waluhili with their mom, who works there as a counselor

It’s for members of the Camp Fire Girls, which is like Girl Scouts only different. The girls are technically too young to go when they are five and two and six and three and even seven and four, but their mother promises to watch them like a hawk. You have to be careful at camp because it’s full of poisonous things: snakes, spiders, scorpions. Some of them can kill you. 

The girls always nod when she says this, but they don’t really care. They run around and around the meadow until they fall down in the bright yellow flowers and laugh and laugh until they can’t breathe.

Amy learns to tie knots, and she is good at it. She learns directions, and she tries to get Zoe to repeat after her: north, east, south, west. You can remember it by saying: never, eat, soggy, waffles, she tells her, but Zoe can’t remember all that yet. Amy learns how to build a fire: you put together three pieces of wood in the shape of an A, which is easy to remember, and then you put tinder all along the middle part, but not too much because fires need air. Their mom doesn’t let her light the fire, but they sit there with the older girls and eat the s’mores together. Zoe likes to smear the marshmallow on Amy’s legs instead of eating it. But then she asks for more.

The girls learn to swim. Amy’s long body slips into the water like a fish thrown back. But Zoe keeps sinking and getting water in her nose. They give up. They do somersaults in the meadow instead. They play hide and seek. When it takes too long to find Zoe, Amy calls her name, or she says, A to Z, A to Z, over, like a Walkie-Talkie, and then she says that it is time to take pictures. Amy takes pictures of Zoe in the trees. She fixes her sister’s long light hair that gets tangled when they play. Sometimes she only pretends to take pictures.

In the sun Amy gets freckles, and Zoe turns brown. Together they try and count the freckles on Amy’s left arm: twenty-seven, or twenty-eight, or twenty-nine, because they always lose count. The right arm is impossible. Amy and Zoe examine their elbows. They ask their mom what elbows are for. Their mom says to bend their arms. The girls try to do cartwheels in the meadow, but they can’t because of their elbows. Zoe tries harder than Amy.

Amy has Zoe help her look for arrowheads and fossils. Zoe finds plain rocks and brings them to Amy to ask if they are fossils. Amy knows all about the Cretaceous Period and that we don’t know what color the dinosaurs were so they could have been all the colors, even pink, even hot pink. Hot pink is Amy’s favorite color, although she pretends it is blue. Amy’s favorite dinosaur is the brontosaurus. Amy explains to Zoe that arrowheads were what the Indians used to catch food when the Indians lived in Camp Waluhili, too. Every summer they find at least one arrowhead, but it takes a lot of work, because arrowheads are little, and you have to look hard between the grass and underneath the dirt.

The fossils are seashells because in the old days all of this was underwater. Sometimes there are fossils with the imprints of different sea plants. The seashells look just like what seashells look like today. They know because their grandmother collects them.

Sometimes the girls play games with the campers like Red Rover and tug of war. The older girls like to have Amy on their tug of war team because Amy never lets go. Even if she ends up getting dragged through the mud. Zoe is better at Red Rover because it is easier for her to go berserk, become a human missile, and being so little still, she can often take them by surprise and break right through.

Amy is allowed to learn archery. Zoe complains until something comes along to distract her. The camp teems with butterflies, birds. The older girls stay up late telling ghost stories, but Amy covers her head with a pillow because she likes to wake up when the birds wake up. Sometimes you can spot a bluebird if you’re out early, or even a tanager.

Amy takes a picture of the little red suitcase Zoe uses to run away from home

Zoe runs away from home once or twice a week. She takes the dog and goes and sits beneath the pear tree that every year at the tail end of summer produces inedible pears that their dad picks up and throws away. The pear tree is in between the front yard and the backyard, a no man’s land, where Zoe believes that no one will think to look for her.

She whiles away the fifteen to twenty minutes it always takes her to run away from home playing with the plastic animal figurines she has packed and distributing provisions evenly between her and the dog. To the dog she gives the brown treats, which are flavored like lamb and vegetable. For herself she reserves the green treats, which are chicken. The peanut butters they share.

On the side of the suitcase containing the figurines and the Milk-Bones is a little drawing of a girl in front of a white picket fence. Above her float the words Going to Grandma’s.

But the picture Amy takes does not show this, because what interests Amy is the things the suitcase contains. So while Zoe is in the bathroom she snaps it open and lays it splayed atop their rumpled constellation-print sheets. She points her Polaroid down but can’t fit it, so she gets on the bed and stands over it, points, and pulls the shutter swiftly with her forefinger.

Of the numerous plastic animal figurines in her collection, Zoe has chosen one elephant and a family of giraffes. Then, in addition to the small box of Milk-Bones, there is a toothbrush, one sock with a friendly-looking shark that prowls the ankle, and a framed five-by-seven photograph, black and white, of Dorothy holding Toto up to her cheek, the two of them gazing off into the distance. The photograph takes up a massive percentage of the space inside the little red suitcase, and Amy wonders why her sister takes it when she runs away from home, since it is just a piece of someone else’s junk they got at a garage sale.

Then Zoe comes back from the bathroom and catches her red-handed, still standing over her stuff, and she screams and hollers like a wild banshee until Amy offers her a piece of tropical fruit punch gum.