My new friend Ashley, a sporty blonde who was dating the heir to the Utz potato chip fortune, lent me a neon tube top and twisted my hair into tiny fashion dreadlocks. As I returned the favor, applying blush to her already rosy cheeks, I noticed something: “You have an eyelash,” I told her, and brushed it away, only to realize the long black hair was actually growing out of her cheek.
We were all in various stages of puberty. Charlotte had full-scale breasts, so big that they hung down, casting a half-moon shadow on her rib cage. Marianna seemed unaware she was growing hair in her armpits, or maybe they didn’t care in Colombia, where she was from. I was flat as a board, hairless too, and fine with it, but I couldn’t stop eying everyone else, staring at their round asses as they dressed, the dusky hairs emerging from their bathing suits. “You are so bicurious!” my counselor Liz shrieked at me when she caught me watching her tits swing as she changed.
My greatest obsession was BO. I smelled it everywhere: in the bathroom, on the wind during kickball, on Emily’s hairbrush, which I borrowed because my old one was growing some kind of mold. I couldn’t imagine a life where that smell, just enough like onions to be truly confusing, came from your own body. Then one afternoon, sitting on my own bed at rest hour, I swore I smelled it. Not too strong, but there, on my t-shirt. A bit of research led me to an area near my right armpit. I got it from hugging Charlotte, I thought. In fact, I was sure of it. I wrote home immediately, explaining the whole dreadful situation. “How do I tell Charlotte without being mean?” I asked.
In a letter back, my father gently explained that BO was hard to transfer and that, just to be safe, I might want to ask for a natural antiperspirant on the next run to Walmart.
The first social of the summer took place at Camp Skylamar, a forty-minute drive from Fernwood Cove, in a barn full of pimply boys in short-sleeved button-downs and boat shoes. *NSYNC and Brandy played on a weak stereo system. The girls danced nervously in a cluster while the boys hung around the edges of the room pounding fruit punch. At some point in the night, I opened the door to the bathroom to find a boy hunched over the toilet, furiously masturbating.
After dusk, I fell into conversation with a fourteen-year-old from New Jersey named Brent. He was handsome, with a baseball hat and a boxer’s flat face. I told him I went to school in Brooklyn and he said he didn’t know where that was because he wasn’t “so good at geometry.” After the longest twenty minutes in history, he asked me if I’d like to come to the back porch with him, which I understood was code for mashing our beaks together like baby birds.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel we know each other well enough,” I told him. “But if you want my address, you can have it, and we can see what develops.”
As I left, Emily said she saw him give me the finger behind my back.
All night at Skylamar I’d had this uncanny sense of recognition, like déjà vu but unceasing. I had been there before, knew the contours of the place; the bunks dotted the hill in a familiar way. The cafeteria building welcomed me. And as I lay in bed that night, I realized: this was Wenonah. Skylamar was built on the site where my mother’s camp had once stood.
This was the place that my mother had called home for ten summers, where she had met the women who were still sisters to her today despite the geography and ideologies that divide them. This was where she had played Rhett Butler on the summer stage, been introduced to the joys of instant macaroni and cheese, and contracted a case of lice that necessitated cutting her hair into a jagged bob. This is where her parents left her when they decided to take a seven-week boat trip around Europe, wearing their finest hats.
After my first summer at Fernwood Cove, it seemed pretty obvious to my parents that I would not return. Despite moments of pleasure, I had sobbed hysterically on every phone call home, wailing, “Please come get me. I’m begging you.” I felt ganged up on by my bunkmates and misunderstood by my counselors. I had developed an “allergy to wood.”
I was a quitter: of play dates, of dance class, of Hebrew school. Nothing in my history indicated I would stick it out. But when December’s enrollment deadline rolled around, I shocked my parents (and myself): “I think I want to give camp another try.”
“Are you sure?” my father asked. “You didn’t seem happy.”
“No, you didn’t,” my mother agreed. “You can do day camp. Or no camp.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I think it’s important.”