by Peyton Marshall

\When the Camp Stoneybrook brochure arrived in the mail, I thought there’d been a mistake. It included an acceptance letter and a detailed packing list that recommended campers bring extra underwear, plastic bags, and an industrial-strength insect repellant for mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers. This didn’t sound like any place I wanted to go.

“Mom?” I said, wandering into the kitchen, holding the offensive list in front of me. “What is this?” It was 1982. I was nine years old. “Oh, sweetie,” Mom said. “You’re going to have so much fun.” She stood at the stove, reheating a flank steak. Her stained, yellow apron was held together by a clothespin. “Bonfires and sing-alongs,” she said. “You can toast s’mores and tell ghost stories.” “I can do that at home,” I said. “Not the bonfire,” my brother, Fields, pointed out. He was eleven. He sat at the round oak kitchen table, inspecting a similar brochure from Stoneybrook’s boys’ camp, which featured campers shooting rifles and wearing what appeared to be war paint. Dad sat beside him, still in his office clothes, his necktie loosened. Pens poked out of the top pocket of his white dress shirt. “They’ll have archery and crafts,” Mom said. “You can go for hikes in the woods. You’re absolutely going to love it.” Fields and I exchanged a nervous glance. I was already a firm believer that children my own age were to be avoided in high concentrations. I didn’t even like going to other kids’ houses and being subjected to their strange rituals and siblings. “I’m definitely not going,” I said.

When dinner was ready we gathered at the table to say grace. Fields squeezed my hand, crunching the bones together in an effort to make me cry out. “For what we are about to receive,” said Mom, “make us truly grateful.” “When I was a Boy Scout,” said Dad, “Dan Terrell drove our troop to Mexico in his Chevy Suburban. We slept on the side of the road and ate food from farms and orchards.” “Sounds like a kidnapping,” said Fields. “Didn’t you almost die in Mexico of an infection?” I asked. Dad frowned. “Camp builds character,” he said. “It puts hair on your chest.”

Later that night, Fields and I huddled in his room, flipping through the brochures. “Why don’t they ever show girls shooting things?” I asked. “Because they’d miss,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss,” I said. My brochure pictured smiling, pink-cheeked girls playing tennis and hugging each other with careless enthusiasm. They looked rich and pretty and they wore ribbon barrettes with beads on the ends. You’d never know they were slathered in chigger and tick repellant. “They want to get rid of us for a month,” Fields said. “It’s their vacation.” I realized he was right. Nothing we said or did would make any difference. We were going to summer camp.

We’d recently moved to suburban Virginia. Dad’s promotion at work had lifted us out of our little stone house on the outskirts of Philadelphia and dropped us into a mansion with an acre of forest around it and a two-car garage. Everything in Virginia was different. Gone were the quaint, child-filled homes of our past, and instead there were 1960s interpretations of the Southern plantation house. People arrived and departed by car. Lawn-mowing services took care of lawns and I could wander the neighborhood for a whole day and never see another human being. Sometimes, I crept up to people’s windows and peered into their houses—hoping for glimpses of families in action. Mostly, I found darkened living rooms with china figurines and silk flowers that never died but never lived. The day after the brochure arrived Mom drove us to The Treasure Trove—the local thrift store—to procure the bulk of our summer wardrobe. We shopped in the boys’ section so that I could inherit what my brother outgrew. Mom’s thrifty habits hadn’t caught up with our new circumstances. We attended private school now, and my dated clothes—polyester pants and wide-collared shirts with loud prints and mismatched buttons—really stuck out. It didn’t matter so much with my brother; he couldn’t care less what he wore. But all the girls in my year understood the importance of clothes. They appeared to molt like birds—shedding, in unison, their lace- collared angora sweaters in favor of purple satin roller-skating jackets, or argyle kneesocks with denim shorts and braided headbands. When our date of departure for camp grew closer, Mom pulled two giant aluminum trunks out of the basement storage room. She painted one pink and one blue, taped the packing lists to the insides of the lids, and stocked them with our summer clothes. My trunk included camouflage pants, stained Shazam! Underoos, and a red T-shirt with a big-eared monkey on the front asking: Is that your face or did your neck throw up?

“You’re going to learn so much,” Mom said. “You know, I would have given anything to go to camp.” “Then take my place,” I said. “It’ll be a chance to reinvent yourself,” she said. “Raise some hell.” She reassured me that sleepaway camp would be no different than a day at school. “Just longer,” she said. I didn’t find this notion reassuring. While I disliked school, I could retreat at the end of the day to hide in my room or wander in our silent neighborhood and feel a semblance of myself returning. If the kids at school disliked me, then at least they couldn’t follow me home and spit in my food and short sheet my bed. That was my brother’s job.

I arrived at Camp Stoneybrook on July 1. It was an oppressively hot North Carolina day. My pert, blonde counselor, Jackie, helped me lug my sleeping bag and teddy bear up the hill to cabin three. She had a thick Southern accent and tanned skin that glistened with baby oil. She wore silver star earrings and a purple dress that, instead of straps, had a series of knots and beads. Our motto, she told me, was “Cabin three: the place to be!” We also had a special song that we were encouraged to shout like maddened warriors. I was assigned a bottom bunk, where I unrolled my red and orange Garfield sleeping bag. It smelled like mothballs.

Just before dinner, the cabin “circled up” to discuss the camp rules. “There is no leaving your bunk after lights-out,” Jackie said. “If you have to use the bathroom you must wake me and I will walk you over to the facilities. But, please, only if it’s an emergency. Secondly, the space under a counselor’s bed is sacred. You are not to touch anything there, especially care packages or first-aid kits. If you want access to your care package, let me know and I will pull it out for you.”

On that first night, my cabin mates and I were supposed to go around the circle and introduce ourselves—say who we were and where we were from. But I wasn’t listening. I was already fascinated with only one girl. Her name was Lynn. She had short, brown hair and wore vanilla-scented lip gloss and shorts that had drawstrings and little bows on the sides. She was from South Carolina and had the vocabulary and mannerisms of a much older girl. I knew without asking that she had a big sister or two. She was the friend I wanted. I spent the first few days of camp trying to determine the best way to capture Lynn’s friendship. She seemed to have many suitors and I was working with a deficit. The monkey T-shirt was a horror, as was most of my wardrobe. I’d recently been diagnosed with a drooling problem, the result of being unable to close my mouth around my jumbled and jutting front teeth. I was skeletally thin; my limbs looked like those of a marionette, widest at the joints, which stuck out like knobs. And I was prone to braying loudly at my own jokes, then going fearfully quiet as I realized that I’d have to explain why I thought they were funny. Still, I felt some hope. I was aware that identities would be formed in the first few days. Nobody knew whether or not to like me yet, so I was still eligible for the role of best friend. But then—on the fourth day—I awoke before dawn to find that my sleeping bag and sheets were ominously damp. At first I didn’t realize what had happened. I’d never wet the bed at home. I thought perhaps I was just hot and sweaty under my polyester sleeping bag. And then I caught the unmistakable whiff of urine. It was a tangy, minerally, animal smell. I sat up in a panic, my heart thudding as I surveyed the cabin. Everyone was asleep. Lynn was curled on her side, snoring softly, her brown hair spread against her white pillowcase. There was no up side to being a bed wetter. It was not just a social deficit; it was a ghetto.

I changed into some clothes, crept from the cabin, and ditched my reeking sheets and pajamas in a supply shed. When I returned, I attempted to conceal the bare mattress by spreading out my sleeping bag. By reveille I was perched on my bunk, reading The Stoneybrook Handbook for Young Campers, feigning a deep interest. I kept glancing at Lynn and the other girls going about their morning rituals. Counselor Jackie energetically filed the calluses on the balls of her feet, sawing at them with what looked like a little blue paddle. The girl in the bunk above mine counted aloud to fifty while brushing her long, red hair. I concentrated on my pantomime. I was pretending to be myself.

My pajamas were discovered later that day. A counselor found and returned them during the afternoon siesta. She carried them on the end of a stick. Cabin three was instantly abuzz. Somebody gagged at the smell. I made myself stare at the small, neat letters my mother had drawn in indelible ink on a seam. She’d written my name on everything. This is what I’d forgotten. Nothing I owned could be lost. “We found some linens, too,” the counselor said, letting the pajamas fall to the floor in a heap.

I couldn’t actually see the story circulate through camp, spreading out from the end of that stick like ripples on a pond, but I know that it did. I felt it moving through the woods, piercing the canvas walls of the activity huts, sloshing in the green, algae-thickened pond. Nobody teased me directly, but I was aware of furtive looks and giggling knots of girls who went silent and breathless at the sight of my approach. I counted the days until I could go home.

I lived for Mom’s care packages and even the occasional message from my brother—though his letters were always the same: stationery bought at the camp store, with the camp letterhead and a dozen preprinted sentences that could be completed when the writer chose from a list of three adjectives: Camp is [ ] fun! [ ] terrific!! [ ] too short!!! Fields usually crossed out one of the choices and wrote “Chunky Dinners!,” which was a phrase he’d recently encountered on the back of a dog-food can. It had become part of our private lexicon—the perfect retort, the perfect expression of joy, or irritation, or dismay. We’d shout it at the pubic pool as we jumped into the water, and we’d accuse my parents of being nothing but.

Each night before I went to sleep, before Jackie stopped by my bunk to ask if I needed to use the bathroom, before the cabin lights winked out, I thumbed through my collection of letters, touching each one like a talisman. My parents wanted to know how my soccer and tennis classes were going. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I’d skipped every one. Instead, I’d spent that time at the arts- and-crafts hut, fashioning clay animals—including a little ceramic duck for Lynn, who liked ducks.

Soon after the bed-wetting incident, cabin three was told to prepare for a very special evening activity. Jackie disappeared to get ready and another counselor stepped in to quiet us. “Girls, girls,” she said. “This is what’s gong to happen. You will all hold hands and follow in a line. No speaking. No giggling. I want it absolutely silent. Okay?” We reached for each other’s hands and she marched us on a circuitous route through the forest. A pink ribbon of sunset hung in the sky. Birds settled in for the night—filling the air with their sweet, shrill good-byes. We passed the soccer field and then followed the creek to a small meadow. A series of lit candles formed a circle in the middle of the clearing, each candle stuck in the throat of a soda bottle. Inside the circle, sat three figures wrapped in bedsheets, their faces hidden beneath low-hanging hoods. The chairs on which they perched were adorned with leaves and wildflowers. Fireflies pulsed, filling the gray air with little phosphorous stars.

One of the figures stood and said, in a low, stentorian voice: “This circle is a courtroom and all who enter will be judged and punished.” Suddenly, I wondered if the activity was optional. But I kept my mouth shut and moved to the back of the crowd. One by one, girls were compelled to enter the courtroom. The vain girl was sentenced to wear her camp uniform, a white sailor- themed top with a red cravat, all the next day. The phobic girl was ordered to swim in the algae-choked lake. The sporty girl would wear press-on nails. We were all being punished for who we were, or, more precisely, who we appeared to be. It was eerie how easily our personalities could be distilled into a single word.

Finally, everyone had been sentenced—except for myself and Lynn, who was glancing at me, her expression puckered with worry. One of the hooded figures stood and pointed at us. “The two remaining girls will enter the circle,” it said. To say that I was reluctant would be an understatement. I took small, leaden steps. My mouth was dry. It was fully dark now and the candles had long wicks with tall streaks of flame, like yellow flares. I knelt in the grass. “Lynn and Peyton,” the figure said. “Tomorrow before breakfast you will be tied together at the wrist and the ankle, and you will not be untied until after dinner. This is your punishment. Do you understand? All day tomorrow—you will live as one person.” Lynn’s head fell forward, her long bangs covering her face. Outwardly, I assumed a similarly contrite position. I’d spent the past hour imagining my pajamas, those reeking rags stuffed in the bottom of my laundry sack. I’d been afraid that I’d be forced to wear them again. Walking back toward cabin three, I felt lighter and better than I had all summer.

In the morning, Counselor Jackie had reappeared, and she cheerfully cut up a pair of nylons and tied Lynn and me together. Lynn was wearing yellow socks with little ducks on them and there were so many friendship bracelets on her wrist that finding a good spot to tie the nylon was something of a challenge. We waited for the rest of our cabin mates to get ready, to put on their punishments—the fingernails, the uniform. We stood together by the door. “Oh my God, this is crazy,” I said. My voice was squeaky and just a mite too loud. Bed wetters should try to modulate their voices. “Do you have soccer first?” I asked. “Or we could go to the crafts hut? I like to make stuff there.” “Whatever,” Lynn said. “We could go swimming,” I said. “Although we should probably stay in the shallow end.” Lynn turned to her bunkmate. “Do you believe this?” she said. She had mastered the snide remark and I was in awe of this achievement. I, too, longed to sound sophisticated and weary.

“Okay, let’s go!” Jackie called. Lynn and I walked like a palsied horse. I couldn’t wait to spend the morning wrestling powdered egg into each other’s mouths, cutting each other’s food. “This is going to be hilarious,” I said. But we never even made it down the hill. Lynn kept slipping and falling. Halfway to the dining hall, she collapsed, bringing me with her. I thought she was laughing, but then a raw sob escaped from her throat. She was leaning away from me, trying to roll away, panting as if in pain. Jackie came running over and untied us. “I can’t do it,” Lynn sobbed. “I just can’t.” She tried to catch her breath and started to hiccup. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t make me.” “It’s okay, honey,” Jackie said. She rubbed Lynn’s back. “It’s just for fun. You don’t have to do it.” Our cabin mates encircled Lynn. A few of them hugged her. They escorted her to the cafeteria as if she had just sustained some injury. I sat there on the hill, watching them move away as a pod. The pantyhose still hung from my arm and leg like a shed skin. And that’s when I realized that I was Lynn’s punishment. I was a way of inflicting pain.

At the time, I thought our counselors were adults. I thought of Jackie and the others as sophisticated arbiters of fashion, impartial enforcers of rules, the dictating leaders of our little tribe. But they were really teenagers and my problems were theater for the camp, worthy of an evening activity. There was no adult supervision.

I lay in the grass, staring at the empty, blue sky. In all the confusion, the counselors had forgotten me, and so I listened to the usual morning songs, each cabin boasting and challenging the others. The little-girl voices quacked and chattered. Something large and invisible pressed on me, pinning me to the hillside. Eventually, someone realized I was missing and marched me inside. Steam wafted off the tubs of scrambled eggs. The grits had a grayish skin. I watched people’s mouths opening and closing in song.

After breakfast, instead of going to soccer, I wandered slowly back to cabin three. I wanted to be alone. I’d never been inside the cabin when it was empty, and I took the opportunity to look through my cabin mates’ lockers and the shelves built into the walls beside each bunk. I admired and inspected their clothes, their Sweet Valley High books, their Bonnie Bell lip glosses, their jelly shoes, their skeins of embroidery floss and half-knotted friendship bracelets. I found notes and drawings and all the little paper-and-ink games I’d seen passed from bunk to bunk during the afternoon siesta. It was a new neighborhood to spy upon, this landscape of girlhood and normalcy. And then I slid underneath Jackie’s bunk and pulled out the care packages.

I didn’t mean to eat everything. It started as a nibble. Then I conducted a more comprehensive sampling. I lined up the opened boxes and went through them, breaking off big chunks of fudge, devouring stacks of cookies and wedges of homemade peanut brittle. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to intercept all the homemade love and put it into my body, where nobody could see it. There, I could break it down, turning it into my skin and hair and nails. If I had to be the bed wetter, if I had to recite her lines and inhabit her body, then I wanted more. I wanted a secret.

When evening came, Jackie brought out the care packages, and there was a collective shock. “Oh my God,” said Jackie. “This has never happened before.” She paused and looked around the room. “Everybody stop what you’re doing. I think there’s been a theft.” I had the satisfaction of watching girls rush to their empty boxes and paw through the shredded wrappers and opened cards. “One of you has broken the rules and helped yourself to what does not belong to you.” Jackie’s voice lowered in anger. It became more serious and slow and I recognized it from the night before. “Would anybody like to explain her actions?” We all looked at one another. I feigned heartbreak over my missing cookies. Suspicion turned toward Tracy, the tough girl who chewed gum and liked to spit. There was also the plump girl who took thyroid medication. Jackie took each of them outside for questioning. But the bed wetter? She wiped the drool from her mouth and settled in to read quietly on her bunk. She was beyond suspicion.

Over the next two weeks, I transformed into a human locust. I systematically worked my way through every cabin and every care package. Because I was an exceptionally trim child, I could easily slither beneath bunks, and since my clothes were all secondhand, nobody noticed the additional wear and tear. The camouflage pants actually came in handy. My absences weren’t noted because I’d never attended the majority of my scheduled activities or classes, and so I was free to spend an increasing number of hours each day underneath the beds of various counselors. I scrutinized letters from home, including Lynn’s. Only her mother wrote. The content was bland and cheery but the handwriting was that of a little girl, puffy, as if the letters had been made of dough and baked in the arts-and- crafts hut. I got to know my cabin mates through their letters. The tough girl’s parents were divorced, and her mother had a boyfriend. The plump girl had a whole host of allergies and medications that she took every day. She was terrified of bees. I began to treat information the same way I treated chocolate: it was there to be digested and hoarded.

The thefts became a campwide scandal. Counselors began patrolling the cabins at regular intervals, which I considered a courtesy, as it enabled me to better plan my day. They posted signs. They held meetings. The director appealed to us to come forward if we knew anything at all. Girls began writing to their parents about the problem and now the cookies and treats had notes saying, “I hope you get this!” I worked those boxes over the most. They were full of love and hope and those treats always tasted best. Suddenly, the bed wetter was no longer a role but a necessary disguise. I welcomed every slight, every derisive laugh because it let me know whose care package needed attention. I destroyed the clay duck I’d made for Lynn. I buried it in the woods along with her favorite ribbon barrettes.

Once, a patrol arrived while I was midfeast. I heard the cabin door creak open and two counselors discussing boyfriend troubles as they knelt to shine the flashlight under the bunk. I’d taken the precaution of lying close to the wall, behind a barricade of boxes, and the beam passed overhead as if I wasn’t there.

By the time camp ended on the last day of July, most cabins were locking up their care packages. I was nine years old and flush with a sense of power. I might not know how to dribble a soccer ball, but I could slither under a bunk and inhale a box of snickerdoodles without breaking a sweat. With every new patrol, every outraged parent, I felt myself to be increasingly real—no longer peripheral, no longer helpless, no longer controlled.

When my parents picked me up, Fields was already in the car, having been fetched from the nearby “brother” camp. He was deeply tanned and had a purple soda ring around his mouth. He greeted me with a punch on the shoulder. “Chunky Dinners,” he said. “So,” Dad said. “Did you have a blast?” “Of course,” I said. “Archery and swimming and dinner under the stars?” Mom prompted. “Aren’t you glad you went?” My parents had just returned from sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. They looked happy and rested and tanned. “I didn’t grow any hair on my chest,” I said. “Next time,” Dad promised. He tied the pink trunk to the roof rack. Counselor Jackie came by to shake their hands. She was wearing dangly earrings, perfume, and makeup—all things I hadn’t seen since the first day. “It’s been such a pleasure having Peyton in the cabin,” she said. “She was so much fun.” Jackie looked me in the eye and I wondered if she knew my secret. I was eager to leave. “Don’t you want to say good-bye to your friends?” Mom asked. “I already did,” I said. I settled into my seat. Mom and Dad argued about the level of the air-conditioning. Fields asked if I wanted a charley horse or an Indian burn. “You have to pick one,” he said. “Or I will.”

We drove down the unpaved driveway to the exit and the extra weight of the trunks made the car bounce. I felt the bed wetter disappearing. We drove past the algae-choked lake and the blackened crater where the camp held its farewell bonfire. Girls had wept and sworn fidelity. Good-bye, bed wetter, I thought. Good-bye.

I never told anyone what happened at camp. Partly because I was ashamed; my parents enjoyed their imaginary daughter, the one who sang songs and made friends. They couldn’t see what was apparent to everybody else—and I didn’t want this to change. But they were right about one thing: I’d reinvented myself at camp. I’d tasted the power that came from taking what I wanted. I was greedier now. I was hungrier than I’d ever been.

Just before school started, I pressured Mom into taking me to the juniors section of Woodward and Lothrup and there I rebuilt myself in the image of my Stoneybrook cabin mates. I knew all the right brands and styles. I had studied girlhood up close, and by the first day of the new school year, I was in deep camouflage. Finally, I looked like everybody else.