July 2019: Summer Camp
When I was a kid we went to a summer camp at our elementary school. There was a weird thrill to being inside our school in the summer. The bulletin boards had been stripped of artwork. Furniture stayed in the hallway while the custodians rearranged classrooms. Sometimes you could even catch Mrs. Andrews or Ms. Stephenson in shorts and a t-shirt, their hair tied up in a bandana while they painted doors or sorted textbooks.
We weren’t there for the teachers, though. This was a day camp, a few weeks long, for the kids whose parents worked or at least wanted their kids out of the house. They gave us matching t-shirts, served us ruby red Kool Aid from a giant vat in the cafeteria and planned games for us to play every day. If it rained we stayed cooped in the cafeteria, the sour smell of bologna and plastic now one of bleach and sugar. The day I remember the most is the day we played capture the flag. They split us into teams and let us loose into the fields that lined the side of the school. One team was given a neon green flag, and the other team had one that was bright orange. I was orange. The big kids said they would guard the flag. The rest of us were on a hunt for the other team.
I wasn’t a popular kid. I had a few friends - Barbie Daugher, whose mom was the town mayor; Angela Santos, who lived on my block and was the first girl in our fourth grade class to tell us what sex was. I either hung out with my brother or I hung out by myself. For capture the flag, I decided to go off by myself. Fantasy was my first love - I could create whole songs in my head, stories I was the star of, other worlds only I understood. In the heat of July, as I went deeper into the woods, it felt like it was just me and the grind of crickets, sun breaking through some branches, the occasional cool spots of mud on the ground. I was wandering along when I realized I had found the other team.
Behind a clearing, one boy stood near the neon green flag. It was on a tree stump, and he circled around it, lazily checking the sky, the branches. At one point he scratched his ankle and spent a whole minute staring in the opposite direction.
I could do it. I could surprise him and capture the flag. I would be the hero, the champion. I could picture the older kids - is that Courtney? - as I came screaming through the woods, whooping with victory.
I stayed hidden behind a tree while I watched the boy by the green flag. Between him and I was a short thicket, framed by branches, almost a picture window through which I could leap to win the game. I waited for what could’ve been seconds or minutes or a whole half an hour. I was good at making myself invisible. For this fantasy, I could have patience.
The boy made his lazy circle around the flag. He stayed with his back turned to me. I took a deep breath and I ran.
The stinging hit my shins first. I was wearing pink shorts and all of my legs were exposed. I was still pushing through the thicket as my body realized where we were. It was a thicket of pricker bushes, sharp tacks on every branch. I knew how to recognize poison ivy and stinging nettle, but I had forgotten about pricker bushes. Red dashes appeared on my thighs, my knees. I was only halfway through the thicket when I started to wail. The boy guarding the flag whirled on me, shouting. Other kids came running. Is that Courtney? One of the older kids laughed. The green flag stayed on the tree stump.
The camp counselors were just teenagers, although in my head they were so cool and so much older than us. Jake was a high school sophomore and had a haircut like J.T.T. I had stayed frozen in the pricker bushes, some clinging to my shorts, my shoelaces. Jake saw me and I could see the little panic on his face. I felt guilty. “It’s okay,” he said, “it’s okay.” This was his mantra as he lifted me from the thicket, my shorts pulling at the thorns. I thought he was going to put me down, but he hesitated, and thus we began the long walk back to the school with me in his arms. The older kids had stopped laughing. One of the girls with the whale’s tail ponytail looked jealous. I remember being consumed with the worry that I would get blood on Jake’s camp counselor t-shirt.
In the quiet cafeteria, Jake rummaged in a cabinet until he found a first aid kid. He began to unspool things from the box - gauze and Bandaids and tweezers - until he found a brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a stack of cotton pads, the kind my mother had on her dresser besides sample bottles of perfume and cakes of blush. Jake asked me things as he worked, wiping down my legs with the peroxide. What grade was I going into? Did I have any pets? Did I like camp?
“I’ve never played capture the flag,” I said in a shy voice. This made Jake laugh.
“I bet you won’t play anytime soon, yeah?”
I said no, because I thought that was the right punchline to the joke. Even so young, I wanted to make myself small. Sometimes the heat of July can become a sense memory, young Courtney crouched behind a tree, so close to victory, to surprise, to capturing the flag. She wants to break through, to erupt, to save the day. I can pause on my block on a humid morning in the future, the far future, and remember.
xo,
c