AVERY: Camp Kawawa was the closest thing to heaven on earth.

CRESSIDA SCHROBENHAUSER-CLONAN: Camp Kawawa was the lost tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno. Just when I thought I’d finally gotten away from all the nightmare drones I was forced to interact with in school, guess who was the first person I saw at Camp Kawawa, sitting on top of a picnic table like she owned the place. Avery. Freaking. Dennis.

AVERY: I missed Coco terribly, of course. But there were so many new friends to make! And new boys to kiss! And oh, yeah, Cressida was there, too.

CRESSIDA: I didn’t even want to go to sleepaway camp, okay? I wanted to spend the summer reading in my room! But my mom made me.

COCO: I would have loved to go to Camp Kawawa, believe me. But my mom is convinced sleepaway camps are nothing but expensive breeding grounds for bedbugs and lice.

CRESSIDA: Did I have a camp boyfriend? Hilarious. No. I ate lunch with the counselors every day and faked a horse dander allergy.

HUTCH: I googled Kawawa—it means “pitiful” in Tagalog. Clearly a case of unfortunate cultural appropriation. What kind of camp was this?

Editor’s Note: An awesome camp, Hutch, okay?! We can’t all have gone to Space Camp for nine years in a row. And I really doubt that Space Camp had the same wide variety of paste-based arts and crafts that Camp Kawawa did.

AVERY: I knew talking to my camp boyfriend was going to bring on extreme clarity, because Charlie was basically three boyfriends in one. He’d been my boyfriend every single summer I went to Camp Kawawa—until ninth grade, when my dad declared that summers were for internships or competitions. Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly know Charlie’s last name. But it turned out, I didn’t need to worry—all his contact information was on the Camp Kawawa website. All these years later, he was still going to Camp Kawawa. I mean, he wasn’t a camper anymore, he was a counselor now—but still.

CHARLIE “CAMP KAWAWA” KASPEROWICZ, ex-boyfriend, professional camp counselor: Oh, yeah, Avery Dennis! I remember her. She was my first camp girlfriend.

Editor’s Note: First?! Not only?! There were others?!

CRESSIDA: I only went to Camp Kawawa that one summer. Once was more than enough. You would have thought Avery could have bothered to say hi, or ask me to sit with her, or something. We weren’t friends at San Anselmo Prep, but we were in a strange environment and we knew only each other. That should have counted for something! But no, she was too busy making goo-goo eyes at Cute Charlie all summer to pay any attention to me.

Editor’s Note: OMG, did people call him Cute Charlie?! You go, middle school Avery! Although I did feel bad about not being nicer to Cressida at camp. I thought she liked sitting with the counselors because she appreciated their more mature intellectual ceiling. She was always complaining that there was no one in her cabin who was familiar with Proust.

CHARLIE: I saw Avery sitting on the picnic table on the very first day of camp. That blond hair, it’s hard to miss. I just asked her to be my girlfriend, and we fell into the same pattern every year she was there.

HUTCH: So AD didn’t initiate this relationship? Well. There goes my whole hypothesis.

CRESSIDA: Once I saw them kiss in a canoe, and I threw up. But then I got out of swimming for the whole day, so I guess it was a win.

COCO: All of Avery’s letters home were full of Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. He sounded seriously adorable. Once she tried to draw a portrait. It bore a striking resemblance to the red M&M, but with hair. But when I finally saw a picture, it confirmed my suspicions—he was seriously cute and looked nothing like an M&M.

AVERY: Charlie is so much of my memories of Camp Kawawa, they’re inextricable. Canoeing and archery and bonfires and holding hands and Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Just that total summer feeling of freedom, you know? Maybe I should have tried to make it work. Although what middle schooler could make a long-distance relationship work?

CHARLIE: Do I still have a camp girlfriend? Ha-ha, we don’t really call it that anymore. But if Rowan comes back to work at Kawawa … yeah, I’d be interested.

Editor’s Note: Coco must find this Rowan person on Facebook immediately. And find out if she’s blond. And prettier than me.

CRESSIDA: I remember the last day of camp. You’d have thought Cute Charlie was leaving for the first manned mission to Mars. Avery was weeping into his shirt like he’d abandoned her for the red planet.

CHARLIE: Why’d we break up? Same reason every year. She dumped me because camp was over, but I wasn’t too bummed. Camp relationships are just that—camp relationships. You go into them knowing they’ll end. And in some cases, start up again the next year. Or end forever. It’s all good.

AVERY: Charlie wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t exactly helping me, either. Clearly, Luke Murphy hadn’t … ugh … dumped me because of geographic complications. It’s not like he ended things just because the school year was ending. If that was his reason, he could have waited until after prom like any normal person who goes off to college well aware that long distance is the wrong distance. I was feeling remarkably over the whole Luke Murphy situation, all things considered, but I was still confused about why he’d dumped me. And I hate feeling confused. It’s why I write such clear lab reports.

HUTCH: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: AD’s lab reports are of a professional caliber. You should see her data tables.

AVERY: At the risk of sounding like Hutch, I wondered what we’d learned from Camp Kawawa Charlie, then, if he broke my pattern.

HUTCH: I was pretty sure I knew what the lesson of Camp Kawawa Charlie was—that it’s really easy to be in a relationship when you’re basically on vacation and doing nothing but swimming and eating marshmallows all day. It’s when real life happens that relationships get complicated.

AVERY: Speaking of complicated, it was time to move on to seventh grade.