At first, it felt like a normal family vacation. There was the late-night packing, the airport breakfast, the fighting with my little brother over the window seat, the chewing of three pieces of gum as the plane took off so my ears wouldn’t pop.
But there was nothing normal about the camp director, Ron, who met us at the baggage claim area in Laramie, Wyoming. Tall and gaunt, he was wearing a black felt hat, a roughly woven shirt, and boots he could have borrowed from his cousin Frankenstein. Back in sixth grade, I had to do a report on the Amish, and Ron looked like one of them, except the Amish usually drive buggies and make pretzels, and Ron was holding a sign that said “The Welsh Family”—that’s us—as if he were some kind of celebrity limo driver gone wrong.
Two hours and one bumpy ride down an endless dirt road later, we met Ron’s wife, Betsy. As we were tumbling out of the van she was standing on the porch of their house, and we could see right away that she was no Frankenstein. Instead, she looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Or woman. Or whatever. There were blond curls poking out from beneath her bonnet, her cheeks were red like they’d been scrubbed, and in her long, light brown dress and flowery apron, she could have been one of those women who work at the historic places you go to on field trips—you know, they show you all about spinning wool or baking bread, but you can see that underneath their dresses they’re wearing sneakers and sweatpants.
“Welcome,” Betsy called down from the porch, “to the year 1890.”
And that’s when it hit me. Those women who work at the historic field trip places? Betsy wasn’t one of them. These weren’t costumes she and Ron were wearing. Their clothes were for real. And in about five minutes, all of this would be real for me too.
My mom and I had the biggest fight of my life when she told me we’d be going to frontier family history camp—this place in the middle of nowhere, where you live with your family in a one-room cabin, you work all the time doing housework and farm stuff, girls have to wear dresses, there’s nothing for kids to do, and anything you’d want to bring is not allowed—no iPods, no phones, no computers, no sports, no friends, no games. We’d be pretending to live in the time before even Monopoly was invented, not that I like that game.
At the end of the argument, which I guess it’s pretty obvious I lost, I stood at the top of the stairs, looked down at my mom over the banister, and shouted, “It’s not fair. You can’t make me go!”
My mom shouted right back, “Genevieve, you will thank me later.”
Have you ever noticed that when people say you will thank them later, you never do?
In the van, Ron had explained that we were the last of the four families to arrive—the others had come in the day before. We’d get our camp clothes, and then meet everyone at a picnic before going to our cabin. “Come,” Ron said to my brother, Gavin, and my dad now. “I’ll show you the barn while the ladies here get all feminized.”
My dad turned off his BlackBerry for the first time all day. I don’t think he had any idea what we were getting into—I doubt he’d even read the camp brochure. You see, my dad generally likes it that my mom makes all the dinners and most of the decisions, and he can go to work, come home, and then just roll around on the floor with Gavin or come stand on the sidelines at my soccer games. He always says “Ask your mother” when we’re bugging him to bend some of her rules—like, whole-wheat bagels instead of regular, soup before candy on Halloween, no cell phones until college. But I know—I can just tell—that if my dad were our only parent, life would be much less complicated. For example, I’m pretty sure that if my dad had planned this vacation, we’d be back at Club Med, where we went last year and had hands down the best time ever because when you get bored, the counselors will take you windsurfing and you can eat anything you want.
As my dad and Gavin trotted off with Ron, my mom almost broke into a run going over to meet Betsy on the porch. The fringes on Mom’s suede cowgirl jacket brushed against her jeans and her long hair swung in the same happy beat. This vacation—frontier history family camp—is my mom’s dream.
Or one of them. She has a lot of dreams—to be a marathon runner, to build her own furniture, to visit the Galapagos Islands, to have children who perform in school plays (ugh). She was a Little House on the Prairie addict as a kid, and you could tell from the way she was walking, the way she was holding out her hand, the way she was smiling, that she couldn’t wait for our family’s very own Little House adventure to begin.
When my mom finished shaking hands with Betsy, Betsy turned to me. “You must be Genevieve,” she said, and my mom gave a little gush of appreciation that Betsy had learned my name in advance. “You’re about the same age as my daughter, Nora. I’m sure you two will get acquainted as soon as she’s back from the milking,” Betsy said.
“The milking?” I repeated, on the outside chance that if Betsy heard how absurd she sounded she’d take it back. My best friends, Kristin and Ashley? They would be choking with laughter about now.
But Kristin and Ashley weren’t here. They were in school for three more weeks of eighth grade, and then they’d start the routine of mornings at soccer camp and afternoons at the rec-center pool that has defined our last few summers. I should have been with them.
Betsy held open the door and motioned for us to enter the house. “We’ll get you dressed,” she said, “then you’ll get to meet everybody at the picnic.” Her smile was contagious, like a yawn. My mom smiled back, and even I caught myself mimicking Betsy’s grin—I could tell because my jaw hurt.
But after we entered the house, I felt my smile fade. For a second, I could only stand there and stare, forgetting that I was being rude.
I’ve always thought of our own house as ordinary. Gavin and I each have a bedroom; there is a room called the living room that no one goes in; there is a family room where we spend most of our time; there’s also the basement, where we watch TV; in all of these rooms there are regular-size windows. That let in light, which is the whole point of windows, right?
But Betsy’s house? It was tiny. Downstairs, it basically consisted of one room—the kitchen. And the windows were so few and so small, it was dark inside though it was the middle of the day.
At least it was warm, I thought, and then I noticed how great it smelled—like a bakery. It smelled even better than the Cinnabon at the mall. We hadn’t eaten anything since our Au Bon Pain muffins on the plane, and now it was well past lunch. I was starving. “Whatever you’re cooking smells awesome,” I hinted.
My mom turned to me and smiled her isn’t-this-fun? smile. I think she was excited that I had made a positive comment, so I quickly flashed back my don’t-kid-yourself frown.
“I’m baking pies for the picnic,” Betsy explained. “Strawberry-rhubarb and dried apple.” She took a big whiff. “It does smell wonderful, doesn’t it?” Again: big smile. “Oh, Genevieve, I just know you are about to have the experience of a lifetime,” she said. “Don’t you feel it? You should thank your mom right now.”
“Yeah, right,” I mumbled. I slung my knapsack over my shoulder and followed Betsy up the stairs.
What I wanted to tell her was that instead of feeling grateful, I felt a little bit sick. That all during the bumpy van ride, I’d been trying really, really hard not to cry.
I had cried the night before, when I was packing. After putting all my summer stuff away—the tank tops and T-shirts there was no point in bringing, the ribbons Ashley and I had been talking about braiding into our hair, my Eugenia V. Crebs Middle School Soccer sweatshirt, signed in indelible marker by every single girl on the team at the end-of-the-season pizza party—I burst into the kitchen in tears and told my mom that as much as I’d hated the idea of Camp Frontier from the outset, I’d only now felt the full depths of the horror. I told her that I flat out wasn’t going to go, that I would live with Grandma in Florida and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and go to the science museum every day if I had to.
It was then that my mom let me open the present she’d planned to save until we returned. And once I opened it I was like, “Wow.”
Because inside the organically composted Native American wrapping paper (my mom is totally into all that stuff) was my very own cell phone, something that she has forbidden since I started asking for one around age ten. I started to gush, but before I could even open the box she took it out of my hands. She laid it on the kitchen counter and said, “If you cooperate, this”—she paused as if to swallow her personal distaste for technology—“this thing will be waiting for you when we get back. It’s linked up to our service plan. It’s ready and waiting to go. But if you don’t cooperate, I’m selling it on eDay.”
“You mean eBay,” I grumbled, but she wasn’t listening. Because as usual, my mom would get what she wanted. She was right. I wanted that phone more than I wanted to cancel our plans. Ashley and Kristin are always calling and texting each other, and I wanted to be able to do that too. I wanted it in the way I’d wanted a bike when I was five, or to be friends with Ashley when we were eight and her family had just moved to town.
But did I want it this badly? As I trudged up the stairs after Betsy, I wasn’t so sure.