“Seriously. Singing, s’mores, goodwill, camaraderie. It’s right up your alley.” I cracked up.
“Maybe.” Jack pushed back from the table, looked between Teddy and me, and said, “I’ll leave you two alone now.”
I was about to protest that there was no reason to leave us alone, but I thought better of it. Protesting would only make me seem guilty.
Guilty of what? Of wanting to be alone with Teddy?
Iwasguilty of that.
It was a good thing I was out of here at the end of next week.
I was late for the campfire because I’d gone to the dance cabins to report to the counselors on Tristan’s firing, and we’d gotten to talking. The kids were in bed, if not asleep, so the three of us went and sat on the porch of one of the cabins.
“I wish you were staying for the next session,” Grace said.
“Me, too,” Brianna said. “You handled the Tristan situation like a pro.”
I was chuffed by their praise. “Honestly, I thought I was fumbling it.”
“I wouldn’t have had the guts to confront him like that,” Grace said.
“Me either,” Brianna said. “Or I would have gotten Marion involved. Regardless, I would have lost a ton of sleep over it. You justhandledit.”
“I did lose some sleep over it,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking lately about how we—women, I mean—sometimes go to extreme lengths not to offend men. Or boys. Do you agree?”
“Yes!” they said in unison.
“I’ve been trying to stop doing that.”
“Though to be fair,” Brianna said, “I think there are situations where youneedto not offend men, you know? Situations in which you might actually be in danger.”
“Oh for sure,” I said, alarmed. I didn’t want to radicalize my counselors such that they got themselves hurt. “You have to read the situation. And I’m not saying any of this to tell you what to do. I’m a lot older than you. This attitude, which does not come naturally, by the way, has been a lifetime in the making.”
“I wonder,” Grace said thoughtfully, “if part of the problem is that sometimes, in the moment, it can be hard to distinguish between situations that might become violent and situations that probably won’t. Maybe our bodies, our fight-or-flight responses, don’t always know the difference.”
“Yes,” I agreed. Silence fell, and, sensing we were done with this heavy topic, I asked, “Will either of you come back next summer?”
Grace was going to, but Brianna wasn’t sure, as she was going into her last year of college. “It depends what I can scare up jobwise after graduation.”
I asked some questions about Brianna’s upcoming year—she’d mentioned previously that she would be taking a choreography course. Hearing about it all was fascinating. I was a little jealous, actually, but I quashed it. There was no point in getting lost in the what-ifs. I’d done what I needed to do to survive, and that hadn’t included an expensive four-year degree.
“Will you two keep in touch after this summer?” I asked.
“Oh for sure,” Brianna said, and Grace agreed.
“So you’re actual friends rather than just camp friends.”
“Yeah,” Brianna said. “Though I never went to camp as a kid, so I don’t really know about the whole camp friend thing firsthand.”
“Oh, I did,” Grace said. “Every summer. Not arts camp like this, just regular camp.” She smiled at Brianna. “But we’re real friends, you and I.”
“So you’re an expert on the camp friend phenomenon,” I said to Grace. “Tell me about it. Why can’t camp friends port into the real world?”
“It’s not that theycan’t. They just usually don’t. You go back to your regular lives, you go to different schools that might not even be in the same city. If you want to keep in touch, you’re reliant on your parents for logistics and transportation.” She shrugged. “So you see your camp friends at camp, basically. You have this intense but time-limited friendship.”
“What if your camp friend doesn’t come back the next year?”
“It’s sad. But you get over it.”
