Death of a Lobster Lover

Some of the most exciting and memorable times of my young life were when I packed up my duffel bag and headed to summer camp. And not just any summer camp! I absolutely cherished the two weeks I spent at Camp Pine Tree.

What’s not to love about camp? Meeting new friends, swimming in cool scenic lakes, dressing up for skits on the outdoor stage, competing in sports competitions like archery and softball. But mostly I loved the festive nights by the campfire when all the campers and counselors would gather around and sing songs. To be honest, this particular activity stood out to me because the boys from the other side of the camp were invited too.

What made Pine Tree so special to me was the idea of arriving with a clean slate. No one knew you! Unlike back at school where kids perceived you a certain way, there was no peer pressure. You weren’t the target of any “mean girls” like Sabrina Merryweather, who was a constant thorn in my side. She would always pretend to like me, but then relish in any opportunity to sabotage me or make me look stupid!

The other huge upside was the presence of a fresh crop of boys from all over the state! It was a rite of passage to have a summer camp boyfriend! For a twelve-year-old girl, a summer romance was just about the coolest thing you could hope for because once you did go home, you could recount all the details to your friends, who loyally hung on your every word with rapt attention. Of course, the love story always got juicier in the retelling, but nobody seemed to mind. It was our responsibility to make it at least as exciting as the plot of Dirty Dancing!

This was my last summer as a camper because the following year I was scheduled to return as a counselor in training, so I knew I had to make these two weeks in July epic!

This was also the first summer my younger brother, Randy, was signed up to attend. He was not happy about it. Randy had never been to summer camp. He preferred spending his summers watching game shows on TV in the house, or if our mother forced him outside to get some fresh air, he made sure he had plenty of his comic books to keep him entertained. The idea of running around in the woods behind our house held little appeal. So the prospect of spending two weeks in nature, sharing a cabin with boys he didn’t know, eating camp food, or as he called it “prison slop,” or participating in organized sports was, well, in his words, “sanctioned torture!”

Randy had been waging war with our mother, Sheila, for weeks ever since she announced she had enrolled him at Camp Pine Tree. He threatened to run away, call the child abuse hotline, hold his breath until she relented, but no begging or pleading or tears streaming down his face caused her to change her mind. She was going to make sure he had this experience whether he liked it or not!

On our last night at home before embarking on our summer camp adventure, Mom served lobster tacos. This was not the way to get on Randy’s good side. He hated lobster! We both knew what was happening. She was testing the recipe because once we were safely spirited off to camp, she could entertain a promising new beau. Mom only bought lobsters when she was trying to impress a new man in her life!

After a two-hour drive to Camp Pine Tree, where Randy’s last-ditch efforts to wiggle out of going by pretending he was suffering from food poisoning from the one bite of lobster he was forced to try the previous night failed, we arrived at the registration tables just past the main entrance. I was already on cloud nine because across the parking lot was my last year’s summer crush, Nate Hall. Our eyes met and he gave me a playful wink and nod. I smiled back shyly, which in camp language meant we were officially still a camp couple.

As excited as I was, Randy was twice as miserable. After only two minutes in his cabin, he ran back to the parking lot hoping to catch Mom before she left, only to see her driving away (he swears to this day she spotted him in the rearview mirror and sped up). When a sympathetic counselor led him back to the cabin, he walked right through a small patch of poison ivy, and so for the next few days, he suffered from a rash on his face and arms, causing his bunkmates to avoid him like the plague. To make matters worse, he quickly became the target of a couple of bullies, who rummaged through his duffel bag and found his Big Jim action figure (yes, action figure, not a doll as he would loudly point out!). The next morning Randy woke up to the sight of poor Jim swinging from the cabin rafters by a rope with a hangman’s noose tied around his neck.

In the dining hall, he refused to eat the hot food and survived on cold cereal. One day, when it was his turn to be a table waiter for his cabin, he was carrying a large heavy tray with a full pitcher of bug juice (in the civilian world this is basically a very sugary Kool-Aid type of drink) and glasses to his table when he tripped over someone’s outstretched leg and flew forward. The tray of bug juice launched into the air, as if in slow motion. Everyone watched as it finally came down and crashed to the ground, drenching everyone in the general vicinity.

Kids started screaming and shouting, others were laughing and pointing at poor Randy, who was so embarrassed he got up and started to run out of the dining hall, but slipped on the spilled juice and went right up in the air and landed on his butt to more guffaws and howling. He tried to pretend he had a broken leg in the hopes of going home early, but the nurse dismissed his claim and sent him back to his cabin, where he wrote a letter to Mom threatening suicide, but couldn’t afford the cost of a stamp to mail it.

I wish I could say I was the ever-protective older sister keeping a close watch on my little brother, but I have to admit, I was too caught up in my Nate Hall summer romance of holding hands during our nature hikes, flirtatiously dunking each other while swimming in the lake, sharing s’mores and stealing kisses at the bonfire every night. I was completely oblivious to Randy’s pain until one week in, when I found him sitting in the parking lot with his packed duffel bag on turnover day, when some kids left and new campers arrived. He was hoping Mom might have a change of heart and pick him up a week early. In fact, he had faked a stomachache and gone to the nurse’s office, and while he was there, moaning on the examination table for effect, the nurse got distracted by a kid with a bloody knee. Randy crept over to her desk and called home. Mom wasn’t there but he left a message on the answering machine, informing her he was dying, and only had a week to live! Well, the nurse caught him and called her back when she got home and told her everything was fine. He was going to be an inmate at Alcatraz for another week.

I really felt bad for him, and gave him my best pep talk, how we were at Camp Pine Tree together, how we were bonded by familial ties, and how I would be more sensitive to his predicament.

“This is going to be the best last week of camp ever!” I declared.

“How do you know?” he asked, sniffing.

“Because for the whole week you can tell yourself, ‘This is the last camp week I’ll ever have to live through because I’m never coming back!’”

That made him smile.

Suddenly I heard a familiar voice shouting from across the parking lot. “Hayley! Hayley Powell!”

I squeezed my eyes shut, slowly turning around, all the while praying to myself that what I was hearing wasn’t true. But sadly, my luck had just run out. It was true. I knew that voice. And when I opened my eyes, there she was running straight toward me from across the parking lot, dragging a stylish L.L.Bean duffel bag on wheels in one hand and waving wildly with the other. It was Sabrina Merryweather! My arch rival and chief nemesis at school!

Of course, as she hugged me and with her fake smile told me how excited she was to be at camp with me, neither of us had any idea that the two of us would be trapped together in a life-or-death struggle for survival before the week was out!

To Be Continued