Camp
The summer after fifth grade, her parents packed an enormous black trunk and drove her up to camp. The girl had been begging for years, left to her own devices at day programs while her friends summered at the Jewish Pocono sleepaways. She was small for her age (same size as her brother, three years behind) and immature in the ways one can be, while clinging to the intangible loss of being unaccountable.
At best, she was what people call “funny looking.” Not plain, which would have been the preference. Aside from her stature, she had hair that resembled a mushroom when blown straight, and she wore thick glasses to remedy strabismus and monocular vision. She talked non-stop, mostly negligent to the artless shifts her body made as she interacted with the world. At her birth, things had Gone Wrong, and the young parents spent her infancy getting second opinions. Now, adolescence crept upon her, and the already sharp tongues of other children would not be silenced.
“Watch your neck” her mother repeated, all through her youth. As morning would wear to afternoon, the girl had the unfortunate habit of throwing back her head as if to get a better look at an eclipse. Her mother, a nurse, had explained it to her many times. “This is why the other children make fun.”
Camp, though, camp was the great unknown. It was not just an eight week sleepover, although the promise of that, to the girl, was reason enough to go. Camp had a secret language (color days, breakout, flagpole, amphitheater), and reunions throughout the school year with your Camp Friends. Camp was away.
Was she frightened? She had never been far from home, not for more than a night. But something inside her might have said, “I am ready.” Maybe she had never thought to ask her inside self at all. She had a penchant for doing this, not thinking in reasonable ways. But the girl enjoyed the Camp Things already (swimming in deep chlorine, crafts with pungent glue, watching movies when it rained, sticky orange soda to drink all afternoon), so why should this not be her triumphant arrival—to a place somewhat loftier. She asks these questions as an adult, still being able to dig and find the edge of how she felt, all summer long.
Some weeks before the first day, her parents took her on a tour of the closely manicured grounds; pristine bunks waiting to be filled with the noise of girls playing mancala, a vast lake where she could learn to kayak. Here is what an amphitheater is. Remember to put bug spray on your legs. Her mother asked worried questions, like who would help the child comb her hair. The young counselor must have done a double take. This child was eleven. Could she not brush her hair?
There was another child there, on the tour. Sarah was a girl with a shiny blonde ponytail, and piercing aqua eyes. She was, well, standard pretty, and friendly to their faces in a way that could have been called folksy, if the girls had known that word back then. The two sets of parents and the two girls spent the afternoon admiring the tenderly adorned facilities—where so much was just about to occur.
What happened, though….
It happened just before they started. Just before the tour started. The girl, having just arrived and practically leapt out of the car, found herself in a solitary moment of bliss, basking in the late spring sun, imagining all of the iridescent days she would spend here, all of the later times when she would look back on this and think of how much she had become (color days, breakout, flagpole, amphitheater). She arched her back and head to the sky.
“Mom, what’s wrong with her?”
From somewhere behind her, she heard a voice ask, “Mom, what’s wrong with her?” The girl turned around, but there were lots of children nearby, and it wouldn’t be until the tour started, when a girl introduced herself as Sarah, Sarah in her soon-to-be-bunk, that she would know for sure who had spoken.
It was then that she was reminded of how the world worked.
Camp would not be convivial, would never be any sort of refuge, although she would be sent again and again (“maybe you’d like a Jewish camp”; “what if we found a camp that didn’t emphasize sports?”) until she was old enough to work. Camp is where she would learn about boys and sex and what a real sunset should look like. What it feels like to be totally alone in the world. How to row a boat.
Camp was yet another place for which she was unprepared, having not yet learned that she could harness despair and make it joy.
Amy Cook (she/her) has work in Bird Bath, great weather for MEDIA, Suprepresent, La Piccioletta Barca, Disruptors, Thimble Literary Magazine, Apricity Press, COALESCE Community, Queer Families: An LGBTQ+ True Stories Anthology