⌚ 6:00 AM ON THE DOT

Someone please explain how it's raining. In California. During summertime.

Not even a light drizzle, the strong pitter-patter of raindrops against the window two feet from El's sleeping head overrides the sound of the horn she hopes is drenched enough to have finally died. She doubts it, though. That thing has been here longer than she's been alive.

Maybe El's mother heard the horn's annoying blare when it was new and shiny. Maybe she woke up to it lying next to a forty year old Lionel. Maybe El should stop disgusting herself with her own thoughts.

Anyway, she immediately regrets sleeping naked last night, since it's the first cold morning she's experienced in months. What's worse is the air is still humid, so the cold is sticking to El's skin like a flea on a dog's coat. Goosebumps span across her arms and legs and she shivers. Born and raised a Californian, rain really isn't something she's used to. (Come on, look at her during the fall - she rocks thick scarves and Uggs in not even that cold weather like nobody's business.)

Cautiously, with her thin blanket around her, El peers up at top bunk and sees Grace sleeping soundly. This is what she's talking about with the breathing. Slow and steady, like that one fable about the turtle and the other animal - the Isaac-esque animal, cocky and annoying. Grace snores slightly, the sound of a little piglet. It's better than hearing her wailing in her sleep, though, and that's a comforting thought.

El crawls back into bed, planning to relish the warmth still leftover from where her body just lay. She twists and turns, trying to find the most comfortable position and when she does find it, she realizes she's wrapped herself like a burrito in her blanket. It's warm, though, so. There's that.

Grace does get up, eventually, and miraculously doesn't fall. She's shivering as she climbs down, flinching when her feet hit the cold hardwood floor. Barely even glancing at El, she heads to the bathroom and El thinks with dread that Grace will be using up all the hot water.

Great.

⌚ 8:35 AM

The thing with rain in California is that it usually doesn't last very long. So when the sky is still grey and the clouds are still crying as ferociously as El's mother was (or is...who knows), the entirety of Camp Ashwood has a mixed air of gratefulness and disappointment. The rain is a nice break from the extremely hot sun beating down on them, that is usually making their napes as wet as if it were raining, but at the same time, it makes everyone drowsy. Cold, humid air serves only to give one the urge to curl up in bed all day.

Not quite the mood that fits a summer camp.

Especially when a particular cabin that El is the counselor of has to go hiking today.

Judging by how despicably muddy the trail is and how the rain is coming down in sheets, that certainly isn't happening.

Lionel did make an announcement this morning, declaring that all activities will "follow through despite the circumstances. That's all, have a great day, campers." Normally, the end of the statement would be followed by an exclamation point, but it sounded an awful lot like a flat, straightforward period. The way his grey eyebrows were drawn together and a pink splotch still clung to his cheek really didn't make El expect an exclamation point anyway. Considering she was the one who put him into this sour mood.

(But he put her into this sour life in the first place. Ha. He wins.)

El makes an executive decision now to disregard what Lionel said. Fuck the other counselors who have activities today that require them to compete against each other. Cabin A just has hiking - sure, it's hell on a normal day, but on a rainy day, it's perfect.

"Okay, Cabin A," El says a bit too loudly. "How about we head over to your cabin first before we head out and go hiking? Nothing fishy! Hiking! Yay!" Well, that doesn't sound as sincere as she hoped it would.

Oh, El, always with her mouth and the blurting and the inconspicuousness.

Fortunately, no one really notices that and how Cabin A steal a bunch of mugs and packets of hot chocolate and tea bags, tuck them under their shirts and proceed to run to their cabin because they're too distracted by how rainy it is. Giddy, all fourteen girls pile into their cabin. El shuts the door behind them, struggling to keep the kettle she "borrowed" from the kitchen behind her back. Yeah.

El fills the kettle with water from the bathroom, plugs it into an outlet behind Bianca and Laura's bunk and tells the girls to line their mugs up on the floor. They tear open packets of hot chocolate or place teabags in their respective mugs. El is a hot chocolate person herself.

As she waits for the kettle to heat up, she looks up to see fourteen expectant eyes staring at her.

"What?" she asks, chuckling nervously.

They break into murmurs, urging each other to talk. El finds this simultaneously endearing and annoying.

Finally, Bianca speaks. "Are you gonna tell us why you're constantly pissed?"

"Language, Bianca," El says on impulse. Once she realizes she's actually said that, she snorts. Lionel seems to be rubbing off on her. "Sorry."

"There!" Tiffany says. "Exhibit A, people."

The kettle dings, signalling the water is hot enough. El fills four mugs with hot chocolate in them. "Uh, let's give this to Cassie, Sarah, Gwen and Anna, eh? You four can go...over there." El gestures carelessly to the far end of the cabin, at least good ten feet away from the crowd of girls. The four are the youngest in the cabin. If El does decide to tell what's been going on, they shouldn't know.

Good thing their young minds still aren't able to pay attention to anything for a long time, so it's no trouble for them to follow El. She tries to stall as long as she can, using the same strategy on a number of girls and as they ascend in age, the harder it is to drive them away. Eventually, all that's left is four mugs of tea and two mugs of hot chocolate. The tea goes to Laura, Brittany, Tiffany, and Maxine. One hot chocolate is Bianca's. The remaining one is El's.

El opens her mouth, about to say what she's been saying to the other girls.

"Don't even try," Laura warns her. "Now spill."

El sighs. "I figured. What do you want to know?" She takes a sip of hot chocolate. It burns her tongue. Sighing once again, she leans back against the wall behind her.

Brittany unplugs the kettle, holding up the plug and raising an eyebrow as if saying, you almost electrocuted your ass. "What do you want to tell us?" she counters.

"Nothing," El replies honestly. "But that isn't happening. Let's see..." Stalling. She wants to say she excels at it, but quite the opposite is true. "Do you promise to keep a secret?"

Maxine rolls her eyes. "Duh."

The other four others nod.

The words are already at the edge of El's tongue - they always have been since the previous day. She's wanted to tell someone about everything and that would usually be Grace. Grace won't listen to her, though. El looks carefully at the five young faces before her. Acne-ridden, curious, innocent. They seem genuinely interested in what El has to say. "LionelismybiologicalfatherweirdIknow," she mutters, the words still bunched up as they were at the edge of her tongue.

Laura's eyes widen immediately. The rest are confused.

"You're kidding, right?" Laura shrieks.

"Shh!" El hisses, pressing a finger against the twelve year old's mouth.

"Wait, what?"

"What's happening?"

"Who did what now?

"I am...confused."

"Lionel," El draws the word out, letting it crawl off her tongue and land on her lap, "is my biological father. That's what's fucking me over as of this moment."

"Ew!" Tiffany exclaims.

"Explain this," Brittany demands.

So El does. And as much as she would hate to think so, with every syllable that escapes from between her teeth, it feels as if a few more pounds have been lifted off her shoulders. Even if she's probably scarring the five girls for life, and totally divulging way too much for what's supposed to be a non-personal relationship between a counselor and her campers, she is relieved. The only thing that's making her hesitate is the looks of horror upon their faces (except Bianca - she's just been perpetually neutral throughout the exchange and that worries El even more), but even then, her mouth is still running faster than her mind and she's done.

She surveys the damage. Four jaws slack, one tight. Four pairs of eyes wide, one pair on the lap of the owner.

"So...yeah," El concludes. "There."

"Lionel - "

"Yeah."

"Your mom - "

"Yes."

"They - "

"Uh-huh."

"Together?"

"M-hmm."

Laura wrinkles her nose. "No wonder you haven't been giving any shits about winning lately."

Language, a voice that is way too much like Lionel's says in El's mind. "Sorry," she says. "I didn't have to tell you that." Apprehension clouds her chest. She wasn't supposed to tell them that. They're not supposed to know things like this happen. El didn't even know about porn until she was sixteen and it was never appealing to her anyway.

"Don't worry about it," Brittany says, the tone of which exactly like Grace's would be. "The least we could do is listen."

El shoots Brittany a grateful smile. "But you're all so young - "

"Please, El," Tiffany says. "Don't tell me you don't think we've seen this kind of thing on the internet."

El bites her lip. "That's Counselor El to you," she tries.

Tiffany giggles a bit uneasily. El wouldn't blame her. Even she is still kind of uneasy about this whole situation.

"Just...don't tell anyone, okay?" El begs. Well, not exactly begs. Asks desperately, more like.

"Obviously," Laura assures her. "You can totally trust us."

"Thanks. I - thank you," El says into her mug as she sips. Already, her hot chocolate isn't hot anymore. She shudders.

Brittany snorts at this, and again, this reminds El scarily of Grace. Her not-so-hot chocolate doesn't go down as easily after that.

⌚ 10:15 AM

Eventually, El is left with only Bianca beside her. She can't blame Laura, Brittany and the others - even she finds herself boring. The rain hasn't let up at all, in fact El feels like it's only gotten colder. Weird.

Laura is in the midst of having a makeover. Brittany has put curlers in her brown hair and is currently doing Laura's eyebrows. Laura grins at Bianca from across the room and the latter waves back.

"That's totally unnecessary," Bianca says finally after all the silence El has heard from her end.

"What is?" El rubs her hands together.

"Make-up."

"Be careful, Bianca," El says in a joking tone, "you might come off as a fuckboy."

"I just don't get it? Why do you have to cover yourself up? Shouldn't you be proud of what you look like?"

"Fair point," El says slowly. "But not everyone is proud of what they look like. Think of it this way - you don't use make-up to cover anything up, you use it to highlight what you're proud of. Like, look at the lipgloss Brittany's putting on Laura. Makes her lips look even nicer, right?"

Bianca turns a faint shade of pink. "Y-yeah. I guess." She clears her throat. "Fair point. About the make-up thing. I get it. Kinda."

"Man, you are whipped, aren't you?"

"What?"

"Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about."

Bianca gazes cautiously at Laura, who is now receiving a thick coat of mascara. "Pretty whipped," she admits.

"You two are cute," El says lightly and Bianca blushes even more. "Heard anything from Zac?"

"Who?" Bianca grins wickedly. "That boy's old news."

"Let me guess, you kissed Laura and now she's gay as hell," El says, cynical. Luke's triumphant face is still plastered at the back of El's mind, his salesman-esque voice still ringing in her ears.

Bianca couldn't look more embarrassed if she tried.

"I'm kidding," El adds.

They both stay silent for awhile as Brittany takes the rollers out of Laura's hair. Her brown locks fall in soft waves around her shoulders, and Bianca's breath hitches. Laura gestures to herself in a what-do-you-think? fashion. Bianca can only nod.

"Whipped," El whispers.

Bianca elbows her in the ribs. She sneers, addressing El, "So about the kissing and the turning into gay...any experience with that?"

This twelve year old better watch her mouth. El scowls, rolling her eyes.

"Ooh, cold, El. Real cold."

"Counselor El."

"As if." Bianca snaps her gaze away from Laura to look El square in the eye. "Seriously, though. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about," she says in a satisfactory impression of El.

"I don't," El replies earnestly.

"Yes, you do." Bianca cocks an eyebrow. "Grace?"

"Not you too."

"Yeah-huh, me too. No lying, Counselor El."

"I'm not lying."

"Yes, you are. You're lying. To yourself."

"That's way too profound to come from someone your age."

"People say I'm mature."

"Yeah, usually people your age don't go around kissing girls."

"Last I heard, you went around kissing a girl."

El tries not to let the panic rising in her chest get to her face. "And where did you hear that?" Good thing she's exceptional at the whole cold voice thing - she'd even go as far to say that she's better at it than Grace when she wants to be.

"Everyone's heard it," Bianca says nonchalantly. "Who knows where it started."

Don't panic. El steadies her breath. "Wow."

"So tell me about it!" The sudden eagerness in Bianca's voice catches El off guard.

"Th-the kiss?"

"What else?"

"Well." El realizes she really hasn't told anyone about it. In detail, at least. Why not a hormone-ridden twelve year old? (She's already pretty much scarred Bianca with the whole Lionel thing, anyway.) "We were drunk."

"Of course you were."

"Don't get drunk, by the way. Not fun."

"Yep."

"I'm serious."

"Got it."

"And Grace," El says the name with about as much hostility as Lionel said her mother's name, "was so much more drunk than I was. So she started spewing shit, you know? Told me she...liked me and all that." Even now, saying the words aloud for who knows what number of times, El still has trouble wrapping her mind around the concept.

"Naturally," Bianca says, nodding along.

"And it just kinda...happened." El feels herself blushing. "She kissed me."

"Did you kiss her back?"

"Y-yeah. Yeah. I did."

"How was it?"

"Nice," El admits, more to herself. It was nice.

"That's it?"

"This is so weird. Why am I talking to you about this?"

"Because I'm a mature twelve year old and I've got my shit sorted out, unlike you."

"Ha-fucking-ha, Bianca."

"But really? That's it?" Bianca repeats. "Nice?"

Strawberry lipgloss. Slow tongue. Smooth hands. Silky hair. "Really nice." And the words shock El.

Bianca smirks, the same sort of smirk Luke and Jason have given her. "You are whipped."

"You're one to talk about that." El juts her head towards Laura, whose brown newly-curled locks are bouncing along as she chats with Brittany, Tiffany, and Maxine. Her grin is wider than ever, her bright eyes animated.

Bianca bites her lip. Runs a hand through her pixie cut. "Fine. We're both whipped."

"I'm not saying that," El warns her.

"Trust me. You are. I can tell."

"You're twelve."

"I'm mature!"

⌚ 7:02 PM

"Nice sweatshirt," Louise comments offhandedly as El sits beside her.

Setting her bowl of carne asada fries (that's it. That's all she got) in front of her, El glances down at said sweatshirt. Thick, warm and pink. Bianca gave it to her earlier when she headed out to "borrow" some cookies from the kitchen of the Campfeteria and it was raining, with the excuse that it's her older sister's, she accidentally packed it, that's why it's pink, Bianca absolutely loathes the color. And seeing as it fit El and she really didn't want to get wet, she didn't protest. The pink is the same shade as that of one of Grace's favorite nightgowns - a subtle powdery pink that doesn't blind El as much as the bright pink does.

El didn't take it off because the rain has been relentless. It's still raining. It's let up a bit, but the clouds are still weeping - probably sent here by El's mother, on second thought.

Okay, that was a little cold.

Like the weather.

"Thanks, I guess?" El's voice rises at the end in question.

"That was a compliment." Louise smiles and steals a fry from El's bowl.

"I thought you hated pink," Will says.

"I do," El replies.

Grace snorts quietly, shielding the sound with cutting her seared salmon fillet, letting her knife skid across the metal of the tray. The pink cardigan she's wearing is a few shades darker than El's (Bianca's sister's) sweatshirt.

"But you had to wear it with hunter green shorts?" Mild disgust seeps into Luke's voice.

"Pink goes good with green," El says, smirking to herself. From the corner of her eye, she sees Grace roll her eyes. Finn whispers something into Grace's ear and she sighs. El doesn't read into it that much. Or, at least she tries not to.

Louise raises her eyebrows, a mischievous grin playing on her features. "Right. Of course it does."

"So, how did y'all do on your activities today?" Isaac cuts in, mouth overflowing with carne asada.

"He's just asking that because he actually won an activity for once," Louise murmurs.

"I heard that," Isaac says. "And we did! Cabin F fucking owned the basketball court."

"Yeah, because it was raining and none of us could barely see," Mari retorts.

"Either way, we won!"

El tunes out the back-and-forth and concentrates on getting her fries down. She's already feeling drowsy, but doing nothing in a cabin for an entire day does that sort of thing to a person. Not to mention Bianca's sister's sweatshirt is so soft and warm. And the sound of the rain hitting the ground and that grassy wet scent that comes with it -

"El?" Louise whispers, nudging her. "I think Lionel's calling you."

She looks up to see Lionel standing at the door of the Campfeteria, looking quite menacing with the sounds of thunder and flashes of lightning to accompany his solemn face. His moustache is also looking particularly diabolical. El meets his stare head on, all while popping two more fries into her mouth and approaching him.

Here's the thing about slapping someone in the face: you feel power over them. Especially if that someone is your father. As much as El is against violence, the feeling that came with letting her hand collide with Lionel's wrinkly cheek satisfied her. Finally, she'd retaliated. It's terrible to say so, but she doesn't regret it. That scares her.

They say nothing when El is in front of him. He merely hands her an umbrella and opens his own before leading her to his office. She'd probably run off to avoid this under normal circumstances, but that rush of triumph that came with slapping Lionel hasn't worn off.

There's a leak in his office, right above the entrance. El's scalp almost shudders at the drop of cold water trickling from the soaked wood to the top of her head. Lionel sits behind his desk and El doesn't have to be told to sit down in front of it. She doesn't, though. She stands, planting both her palms on the stained mahogany-or-whatever of his desk, nearly disarranging all the paperwork piled atop it.

"How was your hike, today?" Lionel asks carefully.

El senses the test. "Very wet. It was horrible," she says curtly - she knows she's failed the test.

"Was it?" Lionel plays along with the lie. "Tell me more."

Two can play at that game. "Well, sir, quite a lot of my campers nearly got the flu from being out in the rain for too long. It was cold. And hiking on a muddy path, not easy, let me tell you." Lies. Lies. Lies.

Lionel sighs. "Elizabeth."

"Seriously?" El nearly loses her cool. No. She can't afford to do that. The old man might end up dead if she does. "How hard is it to remove three syllables from my name?"

"Why do you care so much about that?" Lionel spits. It seems he, however, has lost his cool. "Elizabeth is your name. Your real name."

"El was my dad's nickname for me." She glowers at him, gritting her teeth so hard they might crack. "My other dad. The one who actually raised me." Too far. Who cares.

"You understand why it had to be this way," he pleads.

"No, actually. I don't. Do enlighten me."

Lionel lets out a large breath, almost a wheeze. "Your mom and dad loved each other. I made a mistake. Your mom made a mistake. That's...that's how we fixed the mistake."

"The mistake being me. I get it."

"El, you don't have to be so difficult - "

"I do, actually." It's amazing how El still hasn't let a single tear form in a duct, or how she hasn't raised her voice even a bit. Meanwhile, jolly old Lionel is freaking out.

"You don't."

"Ah, right. The situation is simple. I grow up thinking I'm some sort of abnormal mutant because I'm black when both my parents are white, when actually, a black man who is thirty years older than my mom got her pregnant at eighteen. So that leaves me feeling fucking stupid and gross. Pardon me for overcomplicating things."

"How many times do I have to say sorry for that?"

"Zero. I won't forgive you anyway."

"Why?"

"Because, Lionel." El shifts her weight. "You lied to me. You left me. You fucked mom up. You can't see boys and girls as equals. You put up this façade, like you're put together when you're a mess."

"I am," Lionel sobs. Okay, tears. Is it El or has the rain suddenly come down harder? "I'm a mess. I - I tried to put myself together for you. For Lisa. Ha! That didn't work!"

Something pulls at El's chest. Pity? Sympathy? No. It can't be. "It didn't." She's being too harsh. El is well aware of that but she tells herself he deserves it. El's family is in shambles because of him. Her parents are getting divorced because he let an intoxicated eighteen year old into his pants. The least El can do is torture him by dangling her shitty life in front of his face.

Still, as much as El is a sadist (not in that way), she doesn't like seeing people get tortured. He still is her father. Half of her - the worse half, she likes to think - came from the man in front of her. As much as she doesn't want to think so, she has an attachment to him. To the sexist camp director.

"Okay, hey," she murmurs and suddenly she feels Lionel's heaving figure in her arms. "I'm not even close to forgiving your sorry ass, got that?"

Lionel wails into her stomach, perpetually ruining Bianca's sister's pink sweatshirt.

"But I can't see you like this when you have a camp to run." Business. Strictly business. "Plus, I don't want this to affect how you're going to sign my community service form."

He kind of laugh-cries, the sound muffled.

"So I'm calling a truce," El says. A heavy weight disappears from her shoulders. She feels something she hasn't in quite awhile: relief. "Okay?"

Lionel nods. El finds it hard to believe the oldest man within at least a ten-mile radius is acting like a complete baby. It sickens her. But there's the faintest hint of pity in there and El doesn't know anymore, she just can't take this. This has to end.

"Right." El hums. She pries herself away from him. "I'm sorry for skipping out on the hiking. Kinda."

A wrangled chuckle escapes from Lionel's throat.

"And also fuck you. Once again."

⌚ 9:39 PM

El folds up her pink sweatshirt (Bianca gave it to her; she saw how attached El was to it) and places it in her trunk. Grace is humming Taylor Swift again as she climbs up to top bunk, her nightgown the same shade of pink as the sweatshirt. El doesn't know the exact title of the song, but it's slow and it's one of Swift's older ones. Grace's eyes flutter closed slowly, and eventually, the humming stops. Her breathing slows.

Bianca's words visit El once again: You are whipped.

Considering El finally owns something pink - she never even considered it in a million years - she admits, maybe she kind of is.

Oh dear god.

______________________________________

a/n: this was way too hard to write im done (it's almost 4 am i think im dead i will sort out the dedication and the banner tomorrow woo)