The whole four-hour drive to camp, I willed myself not to cry. My father seemed to sense my misery, because even though he was usually very strict about kids in the back seat, he let me sit up front. So I could enjoy the White Mountains, he said. He didn’t talk much, just a halfhearted description of camp traditions and what a good time I’d have.
Usually on long drives I liked to peer into the passing cars, to try to glimpse something private, like a woman stroking the neck of the man driving, her fingers burrowing inside his shirt collar, or a baby sleeping in a car seat with drool glistening on his chin, or a teenage boy squeezing a zit. But driving up Route 16 that early July morning, I stared into the side view mirror, where the clouds froze sharp in the sky and the trees slipped backwards, retreating from the car’s forward motion.
The Harriet Tubman bunk was a dump. Initials and names and drawings carved or scrawled with magic marker on every inch of the walls. Wooden cubbies wedged two-by-two between the beds. Striped mattresses with yellow-brown stains heaped with duffel bags and stuffed animals, inside-out sweatshirts and baseball caps.
A counselor with even more freckles than me introduced herself as Crystal and pointed to the empty cot near the far wall. My name was printed on masking tape stuck to the metal headboard. I let my backpack slide off my arm, scratching the mosquito bites on the way down, onto the trunk of folded blankets and sheets, each with a “Molly Green” label that Esther and I had ironed on.
Jake wandered off while Crystal showed me around the bunk. The worst part was the bathroom. Toilet cubicles without doors, just shower curtains hung on rusty rings, and an outhouse smell. “Remember me?” I wanted to yell at Jake. “I’m the kid who refused to use those stink-a-poo places on family camping trips.” Instead I listened to Crystal tell me about the orientation session coming up and about how everyone got a special shampoo. I told her I had to go find my dad.
“Come back after you say goodbye,” Crystal said. “I’ll introduce you to your bunkmates.”
I found Jake sitting on the grass in the center of the camp buildings, staring at the peace monument. It was even more amazing than the photograph on the camp brochure. Hundreds of shiny metal birds shaped like origami cranes on toothpick-thin steel stakes perched at different heights, exploding out of a thick patch of day lilies. The cranes swayed in the breeze, dark against the summer sky. After a while he stood up and announced he had to leave.
“Just three weeks to visiting day,” he said. “You’ll have a great time.”
He hugged me longer than usual and for a minute it seemed like he wanted to say something more, but he just kissed my nose and walked away. I watched the Subaru jostle down the rutted road until it disappeared behind a cloud of gray dust. Walking slowly back to Harriet Tubman, I kicked gravel and wished I was home with Rachel and our friends. I wasn’t sure how I ended up at camp when Jake didn’t want me to go and I certainly wasn’t interested. Why did it matter so much to Esther?
The night last spring when Esther announced I should go to camp, after Oliver and I had been sent up to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I had walked back downstairs to tell my parents I really didn’t want to go. Their voices seeped out from under the closed kitchen door, so I sat on the dark stairway landing, hugging my knees and trying to follow the argument. I could hear the peepers from the pond, but it was hard to make out the words from the kitchen. I scooted down a few steps on my bum to get closer.
“Anywhere but Loon Lake,” I heard Jake say.
What was so special about Loon Lake? I know my parents met there, but what did that have to do with me? I slipped down to the bottom step, right behind the kitchen door that could swing open at any minute if someone had to go to pee or Esther had to throw up.
“I need to make my peace with her,” Esther said. “In case I die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Jake shouted. Then Esther’s voice got soft and smooth and covered up his yelling. It made no sense. Who was “her”?
I tiptoed back up to my room and re-read the brochure Esther gave me. About how these two Italian guys in Boston were framed for murder a long time ago. After they were executed, some people who had tried to save them bought land at the base of Crooked Mountain in New Hampshire and started a camp to teach kids about justice. On the front cover of the brochure was a photograph of the peace monument, the one I found Jake staring at. For two months I had studied that brochure every night, until the paper crumbled at the fold and I had to tape it together. I liked that a girl my age designed the peace monument, based on the story of Sadako, the Japanese girl with leukemia whose friends folded a thousand origami cranes.
When I was young, like fourth grade, I was seriously obsessed with Sadako. My first research paper was about the belief in Japan that cranes live a thousand years and represent happiness and hope. If you’re really sick and you fold a thousand paper cranes, they will save your life.
Seeing the photo of the cranes monument in the camp brochure when I had been so into paper cranes was a creepy coincidence, but it also made me comfortable. Like Loon Lake Camp and I already had something in common. I was twelve, and the girl who designed the sculpture had been twelve, and Sadako was twelve when she died. The week before camp, I found my old Sadako story on the bookshelf and re-read it a couple of times. But when I packed, I left it at home, and I tucked the brochure back into the frame of the mirror over my dresser.
After that one dinner, there was no more discussion about my going to camp. In my family, we talked about all the things you’d expect from a pediatrician father and a schoolteacher mom. About how masturbation wouldn’t hurt you but smoking would. About the importance of being truthful and contributing to your community. No one argued much in my family, or talked very much about feelings. I always figured we were a pretty regular family, except that my parents insisted that Oliver and I call them by their first names, which my friends thought was way cool. Anyway, it wasn’t a huge surprise when Esther called me into her bedroom a few weeks later.
“I really want you to go to camp this summer,” she said. “Is that okay with you?”
It wasn’t, really, but Esther was so sick and seemed to want this so badly. So I agreed. It was only for a month. How bad could it be?
Back in the bunk, I sat on my cot waiting for Crystal. Three girls came in, elbowing each other and goofing around, their hair wrapped up in towels.
“Can you believe the stink of that stuff?” the chubby one said.
“Why do they have to shampoo all of us? I certainly don’t have lice.” That was the blonde girl. Right away I didn’t like her.
“Do too, I can see them jump,” the tall one said.
“You live in Brooklyn—you probably have lice.” That was blondie.
The tall girl, the one who lived in Brooklyn, plopped herself on the cot next to me, her wide smile showing a gap in her teeth. She introduced herself as Carrie and started drying her hair.
“They’re Sharon and Poose.” Carrie pointed to blondie and her friend.
“I’m Molly. What about lice?”
“On the first day they treat everyone, whether or not you’ve got the buggers. So no one feels bad.”
“Treat how?”
“Don’t worry. Nothing toxic at this place. They’ve got organic shampoo that smells like rotten broccoli. It makes the lice run away, holding their noses.” Carrie laughed, demonstrating. Then she dropped the towel on the floor and tugged gray sweatpants and a fluorescent green T-shirt over her bathing suit.
The other girls jostled each other in front of the narrow wall mirror, spraying water squirts combed from wet hair. They gathered their clothes and towels in their arms and started toward the door.
The blonde, Sharon, glanced at me and spoke to Poose in a loud whisper. “Can you believe the new girl’s a Twelver?” They tried to squeeze through the cabin door at the same time. “She doesn’t look older than ten to me.”
Carrie ignored the comment and waited for me while I got my dead broccoli shampoo. Then we joined the rest of the bunk for orientation. Crystal talked about the awesome spirit of Harriet Tubman bunk and All-Camp Share and the Charlie King concert planned for Sunday and how we should start thinking about our skits for visiting day.
One girl caught my eye right away. She sat cross-legged in the crabgrass, straight across our circle of campers. Her skin was super tan, halfway between Carrie’s brown and my redhead paleness.
“Returning campers, please pair up with the new folks for the skits,” Crystal said. I wasn’t really paying attention because I kept peeking at that girl, whose hair tangled around her head like a halo run wild. When the girl glanced up and saw me looking at her, she grinned. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but there was something about her.
“Who’s the girl over there, with the curly hair?” I whispered to Carrie.
“That’s Emma.” Carrie’s voice sounded different. Impressed maybe. “She lives in Greenwich Village. She’s been coming here for years. Her mom is so famous they named a bunk for her.”
The girl named Emma intertwined long stalks of clover in and out around her bare toes, leaving the lavender flowers sticking up like dollar store rings. The two girls flanking her wove her wet curls into a dozen tiny braids. Watching her, I understood what Esther meant when she said a person should be comfortable inside her own skin.
While the counselors talked, I sprawled on my stomach in the grass, my chin heavy in the V of my hands. Carrie chewed on the sweet white part of shoots of grass she eased from their roots, making a pile of the discarded stalks limp with tooth marks. Maybe it was because her skin was dark, but Carrie had the whitest teeth I had ever seen, which made the gap between her top front teeth extra noticeable. She stuck a bunch of the stalks into the extra space and that made me laugh.
“OK, new campers,” Crystal said. “We have a camp tour before Free Swim. Returning campers, you’re welcome to join us.”
Six of us set off with Crystal: four newbies plus Carrie and Emma. “I’ll come along in case you forget something,” Emma told Crystal with a grin.
“This is the center of camp.” Crystal opened her arms to embrace the egg-shaped field with the peace memorial. “It’s called the Heart.” She pointed out the Sacco & Vanzetti dining hall and the Lillian Hellman Theater and the Jackie Robinson ball field. We followed the packed dirt path past bunks named Anne Frank and Elizabeth Gurley Someone toward the infirmary. Walking along, we met two other groups of campers. Everyone seemed to know Emma, so we kept stopping to talk.
“These are the three Rosas.” Crystal pointed to a cluster of buildings in a clearing of white pine and purple lupine. Back home, lupine grew lush along the back fence in Esther’s garden. “Rosa Parks, Rosa Luxemburg and Red Rosa.”
There was so much to remember. Except for Anne Frank, who I’d read about, and Rosa Parks, who I studied in fifth grade social studies, I had no clue who those other people were. At least the infirmary didn’t have a fancy name and the nurse was a regular person named Sue.
Crystal pointed to a building set in a grove of white pines. “That’s the CIT bunk, Emma Lazarus,” she said. “She wrote the poem about the Statue of Liberty. You know: Give me your poor, tired masses yearning to be free.”
“Were you named for her?” Carrie asked Emma.
“No, for Emma Goldman. She was an anarchist who believed in free love. My dad used to tell me stories about her when I was little.”
Anarchist? This camp was a foreign country and I didn’t speak the language. I kicked a stone along the path, trying to keep it from rolling out-of-bounds into the grass.
An hour later, I sat alone on the shady end of the dock, a leafy tent of willow branches shielding me from the noisy chaos of Free Swim. The branches skipped across the water with each puff of breeze. I watched a group of girls from my bunk—Carrie and Poose and Emma and Sharon—splashing in the roped-off swimming area with some boys. They went all blurry until I wiped a lake splatter off my glasses with a dry corner of the towel Esther had labeled so it wouldn’t get lost.
“The camp laundry is terrible,” Esther had warned while she packed my stuff. “And the food isn’t wonderful. But everything else about camp is great. You’ll love it there.”
I hated it. Camp was weird and a dump.
Then Emma yelled, “Hey, Molly,” from the shallow water. She half-swam, half-splashed her way to the dock. She heaved herself up, coughing and snorting and trying to wipe her face with her wet arm.
I offered my towel.
“Thanks.” Emma wiped her face and then her hair, which still smelled a little putrid. “One of these days I’ll learn how to swim.”
“But Carrie said you’ve been coming here for years.” I shifted my position on the splintery dock. My bare feet bobbled to the rhythm of the waves.
Emma nodded. “Forever. You want advice on surviving Loon Lake?”
“Sure.”
“First lesson: ignore the rules about the toilets. Camp can’t afford the composting ones, so they tell us to conserve water by flushing less often: If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah. The second major danger is the dining hall. Say you’re a vegetarian so you never have to eat Mystery Meat. The pasta’s not bad.”
“Got it,” I said. My best friend Rachel tried not eating meat for a few weeks because she loved animals and wanted to be a vet, but it didn’t work out because she hated vegetables and tofu made her gag.
“Come on, Emma!” Poose and Sharon called from the swimming area, where they were splashing a boy and laughing.
Emma waved at them.
“Everyone here knows you, don’t they?” I asked.
“Yeah. My parents came here ages ago. My aunt was camp nurse until a couple years ago and I came with her when I was a baby.”
“Is that how come you know who all those people are, the ones the buildings are named after?” My face burned as I remembered how stupid I felt on the orientation tour. I picked at the scabs on my thigh. The mosquito bites looked like the big dipper with an extra star in the handle. My parents came to this camp too, but I doubted they would have known important people like Emma’s mom.
Sharon swam over to our shady spot. “Come on, Emma,” she said, splashing Emma and ignoring me. “We have to plan our skit for visiting day.”
“Just a sec,” Emma told her, then turned back to me. “Most kids here come from left-wing families. We grow up knowing this stuff.”
I watched my hair weep drops of lake water onto the big dipper.
“Aren’t your parents political?”
Emma asked. “What do you mean, political?”
Emma tilted her head and looked at me. “You know, activists. Demonstrations and stuff?”
The only time I remembered ever going to a demonstration with my family was a pro-choice rally a year or so before. Esther seemed petrified, even though it was dinky and not scary at all. Nothing like the stuff we saw on the news. One time, when Rachel’s parents invited me to go with them to New York to protest against Three Mile Island, my parents wouldn’t let me go.
Emma slid off the dock into the water toward her friends. “So why are you here?”
My parents wanted to know all my secrets but they didn’t tell me anything. Like why they sent me away to a weird camp four hours from home, even though Esther was sick, even though I didn’t want to come.
“I have no idea,” I admitted.