By Peyton Marshall

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.

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