rivers_bend

Title: A little bit of green
Fandom: Original fiction f/f
Rating: Teen
Words: 3,000
A/N: this was written for the ever-lovely and ever patient littledrop, who wanted romantic coming of age under a tree for help_haiti . She encouraged me to share.
Summary: She said her name was Sippy, and I should have known right then I was smitten…



The summer I turned sixteen, I got to camp late for the first time in my life. Check-in was from eleven to three. Camp day I'd always be up at seven thirty so I could get mom in the car by eight fifteen, which gave us time to get to Camp Timber Lake at eleven on the dot, which was the only way to get the best bunk. But that year Mom's car broke down and we didn’t get there until almost two-thirty.

When I walked into Bear Track cabin, the only bunk not occupied with other people's suitcases and sleeping bags was the one that shared a wall with the bathroom. To make it worse, in this cabin that was the bunk that could be seen from the counselor's bed. "Stupid flat tire," I said. I thought I was alone, but a voice came from right behind me.

"Flat tire?" the owner of the voice said, dropping her things on the floor and holding out her hand to shake.

A little surprised—we were at summer camp. Hand shaking wasn't exactly the norm—I shook it, trying not to stare.

She said her name was Sippy, and I should have known right then I was smitten, because instead of thinking, Great, I'm sharing a bunk with a girl who seems perfectly happy to be named after a baby cup, I wondered if she dyed her own hair or if a friend did it for her, running fingers through the strands, picking out locks to be pink, or blue, or purple, maybe getting close enough to feel Sippy's shoulder pressing into thigh or belly… But I was practiced by that point at ignoring the little shows my brain threw for me, so I put those thoughts aside and decided the twist in my gut was envy that Sippy's pale, straight hair took so well to bright dyes, where my dark red curls rejected any attempts to change them.

"I love your hair," I blurted, instead of taking the more conventional route of saying hi, or telling her my own name was Max.

"Thanks! My best friend wants to be a photographer, and she was trying to make me look like a model. I used to just have these pink streaks—only they were fire-engine red when I dyed them."

I wanted to be a fashion photographer back then, and was instantly lost in the fantasy of being Sippy's friend, taking her picture, on the beach maybe, snapping frame after frame as she flirted with the waves, in a purple bikini that matched the streaks in her hair. I didn't even argue when she asked if she could have the top bunk, though I hadn't slept on a bottom bunk at camp since my first year when I was seven.

My head was still on the beach with my camera when back in the cabin she was suddenly right there, long, pale legs disappearing into faded denim shorts cut off just long enough to be decent, right on front of my face as she hoisted herself onto her bed with her arms instead of going around to the end and using the ladder. Even then I didn't understand the ache between my breasts or the fact that I couldn't manage a deep breath until I sat down on my own bunk and couldn't see her anymore.

After eight years at camp I already had plenty of friends—friends I'd been looking forward to seeing for months—but still, after the welcome-back activities that had us mixing with other cabins to play What's your name and what animal best describes you games, I found myself looking for Sippy to sit next to at dinner. My mother would have been proud if she'd seen me, thinking I was finally growing up and putting other people first, considering what it must be like to be the new girl when so many of us were veterans, but I wasn't worried about Sippy at all. I was desperate for her to have not forgotten me in the two hours since we'd unrolled our sleeping bags and put our make-up and blow dryers on the shelf in the bathroom.

The dining area was a covered platform on the top of a rise set back from the lake. People were just starting to arrive when I got there. From across the room, I spotted the Bear Paw symbol on a stick that marked our table, and was disappointed to discover my two least favorite people at camp were in my cabin. Lisa and Chloe, with their matching chestnut manes which they wore either in tight French braids—if we were out on the lake—or in high, swishing ponytails, were at the inside end of our table, for maximum access to the boys from Moose Track. While I was still about thirty feet away, I spotted Sippy heading toward the empty seat next to Lisa.

"Hey!" I called, jogging to catch up with her before she could sit down. "Come sit with—" I was going to say 'me' but then I spied Tamsin, Amy, and Maria heading toward our table and said "us" instead.

The other three were good friends, but not cliquish, and we'd all been in the same cabin before. We would usually hug hello, but I felt weird about it with Sippy standing there, so I just nudged Sippy toward the end seat and sat next to her, giving the other girls a little two-handed wave as they settled across from us.

"Maxie!" Tamsin cried, and before I could introduce Sippy to anyone, Tams leaned across the table and grabbed Sippy's hand. "Tamsin," she said. "But you can call me Tams. This is Ri-Ri and Ames."

"Amy," Amy corrected, giving Tamsin a dirty look.

"You met Maxie already, I guess?" Tamsin continued, ignoring Amy.

That's when I realized that I'd never gotten around to telling Sippy my name. And now she was probably going to call me 'Maxie' for the rest of the summer.

But, "Jesus, Tams. Stop with the nicknames, will you?" Amy said. Then, "Hi, Max."

Sippy looked at me and smiled, almost like we had a secret. I decided she could call me Maxie all she wanted.

But she said, "Max. Good to know. I think we got distracted before we finished introducing ourselves before."

She turned to Tamsin and gave her a wide, friendly smile. The one I learned later had steel underneath. "I'm Sippy," she said. "And I only answer to 'Sips' if you're eleven and my sister, so you don't need to bother trying."

I might have figured it out then, too, but my enormous crush on Sippy still escaped me at that point. Even though I didn't even glance at Tams to see how she took to being stood up to by anyone other than Amy; I was too busy staring in delighted awe at Sippy, being thankful for the nail that punctured my mother's tire making me late for camp, ensuring I'd be sharing a bunk with the cheeky girl with multi-colored hair.

The other three Bear Paw girls arrived then, none of them particular friends except Jenny, who had been my bunkmate our first two years at camp—though she mostly hung out with the archery crowd now. When they sat down, we did introductions all around, though Lisa and Chloe continued to ignore us. Amy whispered to Sippy that she shouldn't pay them any attention; they hadn't made a single female friend in the three years they'd been coming to Timber Lake.

When Sippy gave them a calculated look, I was hit with a sick dread that she would see that as a challenge and devote the next eight weeks to trying to break that pattern, and was almost relieved when I saw Chloe give Sippy a look and say, "Look at her hair. Who does she think she is, Cyndi Lauper?"

"Forgot to check the obits today," Sippy said, all honeyed sugar. "Who died and made you fashion police?"

That got nothing more than Lisa and Chloe's usual retort: giggles not in the least hidden behind their matching manicures.

Tamsin, however, threw her head back and laughed. "No papers at Camp Timber Lake. That will have to be a mystery 'til August."

I then became convinced that Sippy would abandon our just-budding friendship to spend the summer trying to get Tams to laugh at her jokes. But it was me Sippy looked at when she smiled. We were still grinning at each other when the Deer Heads, who'd pulled KP duty that first night, started bringing out the food.

After dinner, we went back to the cabins to unpack and get settled and changed for the bonfire. Sippy and I couldn't stop talking—about Timber Lake, and the camp she'd gone to in California before her mom got transferred to Pennsylvania at the beginning of the year, about school, and music, and movies.

From that first night, we were inseparable. We signed up for all the same activities, always shared a canoe on lake mornings, and three times in the first week alone, I got in trouble for not being in my bunk at lights out because we were sitting on her bed, backs against the wall, shoulders and legs touching, solving all the problems of the world.

Timber Lake tradition, the second Saturday of camp, as long as it wasn't raining, all of us dragged our mattresses and sleeping bags outside and slept under the stars. Now that we were in Senior camp, we didn't have to stick to our cabin groups; as long as we stayed in the circle of Star Field, we could set up wherever we wanted. Out of habit, I started to follow Tamsin, but Sippy tapped my arm and pointed toward a dip near where the field turned to forest. It was only a foot or so wider than two mattresses side-by-side, so if we set up there it would be just the two of us. The idea was both thrilling and terrifying, though I couldn't put my finger on what I was scared of.

One of the counselors came over while we were unrolling our sleeping bags and started to tell us we couldn't sleep there, but when Sippy turned around, the woman said, "Oh! You're both girls. That's okay, then."

And that, to my utter mortification, was the moment I finally figured out what all the stomach-fluttering and fascination and endless desire for Sippy's company meant.

I kept my face down, unable to look at the counselor or Sippy, concentrating much harder on getting my sleeping bag straight on my mattress than the activity actually merited. All I could think about was the fact that for all our conversation, Sippy and I had never talked about boys. Not the ones we went to school with, not the ones at camp, not even who we thought was the hottest movie star. I tried to think of a friend I'd had in the last four years who didn't want to talk about boys, and I couldn't.

"You okay?" Sippy asked me when the counselor was out of earshot.

I didn't know what to say.

"We can go sleep with the others if you'd rather." She sounded unsure for the first time since I'd met her.

"No!" I lowered my voice. "No. Sorry. I just—" I dropped down onto my mattress, sitting for a second before flopping back with my hands under my head. I didn't feel nearly as casual as I hoped I looked.

"You just..?"

"That counselor freaks me out. She yelled at me once." The lie sounded ridiculous; I was a terrible liar. But it was better than admitting that I'd suddenly imagined what it would be like getting caught sharing a sleeping bag with Sippy the way Apryl and Patrick did the previous summer. Naked.

"Okay," Sippy said. She lay down on her own mattress, hands behind her head, too.

Our elbows were touching. It felt like every nerve in my body was at that one point of contact. I tried to think about the nights we'd sat shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee and how I'd been able to breathe, and think, and talk, and see all those times, but for some reason now all I could concentrate on was how her elbow felt hard against mine, like it was just bone, and the heat from the contact had melted all my skin away.

Neither of us said anything for hours, or at least two or three minutes. Something heavy was sitting on my chest holding down my ribs, keeping me from taking deep enough breaths. Finally she said, "Someone told me people play spin the bottle on these sleep-outs." Her voice was tiny.

I'd heard the same thing, but I wasn't sure what to say.

"Not that I don't like kissing," she added. "It's just—" Her elbow was shaking a little, or maybe it was mine. "I just like to choose who I'm kissing."

"Yeah," I said. I'd kissed Bobby Guiziack in a truth or dare game at my friend Laurel's birthday party, and an exchange student named Armand had kissed me at a school dance, but that was all the kissing I'd done. Choice hadn't really come into it.

"We can go play spin the bottle if you want, though," Sippy said.

"I like it here." I could still feel one of us shaking, but then Sippy moved her elbow away.

"The person I want to kiss is you," she said, so quietly I almost didn't hear her.

I turned to look at her, but she had turned on her side facing the other way. I could hear the other campers calling to each other and laughing, but it was all in the distance. I could also hear the crickets and cicadas, the creaking of the sign that hung on a chain over the start of the path to the crafts hut, and the sound of my own heart beating in my arm where I was lying on it. Her shyness made me brave somehow, and I said, "I don't have a bottle, but we could play spin the flashlight—just the two of us—if you want."

For long seconds I thought she wasn't going to say anything, but then she rolled toward me. From no more than two inches away, so close it was hard to focus, she gazed at me, and then lifted a hand to my hair. "Or we could just skip the flashlight," she said.

"Or that."

Her hair was soft and fine enough to tangle around my fingers as I finally stroked the pink and blue and purple streaks. We were both waiting for the other one to move, and then we were both moving, bumping foreheads and not even caring as we adjusted so our lips could touch.

It was thrilling. I wanted to never move ever, and I wanted to roll with her in the grass, feeling her under me and over me, feel her touching me everywhere at once. We managed some kind of compromise, with Sippy pushing me onto my back and lying with one leg thrown over one of mine, her breasts pressing against my chest, one hand at the back of my neck, one at my waist. My own hands were buried in her hair, trying to pull her closer.

There was a shriek of laughter from just over the rise and we pulled apart, panting. Sippy shuffled back to her own mattress, propped on her elbows, looking at me eyes wide. "We should maybe wait until everyone has gone to bed?" she asked.

I could only nod.

Another shriek of laughter was followed by a shout of "get him!" and the sound of people running toward us and then, when a deeper voice shouted, "settle down!" away toward the lake. Sippy started talking. Something about the camp's canoes; I was having trouble concentrating on anything except her finger stroking the back of my hand. I'm sure she could tell I wasn't really paying attention, because she moved to stroke the inside of my wrist, and grinned when that made me catch my breath, but she kept up the conversation anyway, waiting for the other campers to climb into their sleeping bags.

Finally she stopped talking, and leaned in to kiss me again. I wrapped my arms around her and tugged until she was on top of me, our legs tangled together. We wiggled and squirmed until we were in my sleeping bag, and while neither of us were brave enough to take our clothes off that night, our hands did wander under tank tops and into sleep shorts. We were as quiet as we could be, and we didn't get caught.

For the rest of the summer we snuck off every time we could. I had my first orgasm behind a rack of life jackets in the boat house, and put my fingers inside a girl for the first time in the shower of Bear Track cabin while we were supposed to be at the archery field. They were the most amazing weeks of my life up to that point.

On the last day of camp we alternated crying and promising to write to each other.

We wrote letters filled with longing, and even managed to convince our parents to let us take the train to visit a couple of times, but then Sippy's mom got transferred to Chicago so Sippy wasn't back at camp the next year, and the letters started dwindling in number and finally stopped altogether about six months before we were due to go off to college. I still have them in a shoebox somewhere, but I haven't looked at them in years.

College brought a much bigger dating pool, and I had a lot of fun. But Sippy was still my first, and even now I still smile every time I see a girl with multi-colored hair.