Crush

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The arts-and-crafts room had screened windows that gridded the bright mountains into little squares of color. From this distance, even the reddish rocks looked blue. My group of eight girls, the Kit Foxes, had been pulled in for a private meeting on the first day of camp. We waited to be told why. On the hill in front of the main lodge, a few boys were hitting each other’s hands. Below them, one of the older groups of girls was starting on a day hike, their packs heavy, their socks pulled high. I could see the edge of the lake with the zipline, the forest at the edge of camp, and far away, the snow on top of the peaks. 

The Kit Foxes were all talking to each other. It was the kind of summer camp where people returned year after year. Scent of crayons, sunscreen, vanilla perfume, and on the hot morning wind, dry, crumbling rocks, a rising tang of herbs and urine.  

The director of the summer camp, a sporty woman with ironed white hair and a vest patterned with a cascade of horse heads, came in with a woman who was introduced as Samantha’s mother. “Some of you know Samantha,” Samantha’s mother said. “This summer, you can’t roughhouse with Samantha. Not that there’s any reason to. She sits out during athletics.” Samantha’s mother reminded me of my mother: tired and old. 

“No throwing things,” the summer camp director added. 

“We want her to have a great summer,” the mother said. 

The mood in the room was solemn. I imagined the other Kit Foxes were going to compete about who could best take care of Samantha.

The director opened the door to the hall and shouted, “Monty! Okay!”

The man who appeared was enormous and tall, and the girl with him was small, smaller than me, with beautiful light blond hair.

“Here’s your counselor, Monty,” the director said. Both she and Samantha’s mother looked at him admiringly. Monty had his hand gently on Samantha’s back. His hand was about as big as the entire lower part of her back. Then he squeezed her shoulder. “All right, Foxes,” he says. “Let’s introduce ourselves.”

We went around the circle. I said I wanted to be a trapeze artist because it would be fun. I found it easy to imagine the flying clench and unclench of another’s weight. “It’s my first year at camp,” I said, “just in Boulder for the summer so my mom can do research at the college.” After I mentioned this trapeze artist idea, I remembered that it was precisely the kind of thing that Samantha could not do.

“What’s she researching?” Monty said.

“Stagecoach stops,” I said, which was indefinably embarrassing. My mom loved all kinds of vehicles except cars. Even sedan chairs. 

Next was Zoe, who looked more like a teenager than the rest of us. She had four butterfly clips across the crown of her head and blue mascara that had flecked onto her eyelids. She said she’d been at the camp since she was eight. She wanted to be a brain surgeon because she wants to help people. This made me feel stupid. But Monty did not react any differently to her than he did to me, no “Wow.”

Samantha said it was her third year at camp and she wanted to be a veterinarian. She especially liked horses.

Next, Monty gave us a general safety talk, stay hydrated, check in with your buddy on hikes; he kept an Epi pen in his pocket, and he knew how to use it. I was noticing that it seemed important to everyone not to mention Samantha’s safety again. “I used to work with prison kids,” Monty said. He smiled. He had a big bear-cub smile and one gold canine. Thick curly red hair and curly stubble, light freckled eyes, round cheeks. “Don’t piss me off,” he said, interlacing his fingers and pushing them out. I glanced at Samantha’s mother and the director. They were both smiling, with their hands playing around their mouths.  

Monty was wearing shorts made out of jeans that had been cut off around the knee, and they were all soft and fraying. His t-shirt was black with a gray print of an animal that was peeling off. His arms were red from the sun, with blond curly hair over them like foam. His left forearm had big scars, taut and shiny, in a pattern. He had a tattoo of a girl sitting on a chair. 

While the other girls talked, I saw what his forearm scars were. They spelled out the word “ILL” in capitals. The “I” was three cuts. The “L’s” were each two. The cuts were narrow on the ends and wide in the center.

The other girls were staring at him rapt as he explained the camp schedule. We had never seen a man like him before. Different from any high school boys we had ever known, football players, brothers, or fathers. I myself didn’t have a father. Just a mother who liked “anything that chugged or neighed.”  

Finally, Samantha’s mother and the director left the room. As soon as they were gone, Zoe said, “What’s that on your arm?” 

I already knew what was on his arm; I was paying better attention than she was.

“What, this?” he said. He shows us the tattoo on his upper arm. “It’s a woman in a chair,” he said.

“The other thing, further down,” said Zoe.

“It says ‘ill,’” he said. “I carved it on my arm.”

“You carved it on your arm?” said Zoe.

“Because I was ill,” he said.

I watched his upper arm. I thought about how he said “woman” in front of us.

“Does anyone have any other questions?” he said. 

“I actually have a question,” I said. I turned to Samantha. “Could you tell us why you can’t do athletics?”

She had a look of surprise on her face, but when she spoke, she smiled. “No one usually asks,” she said.

I just waited, looking at her. She didn’t say, “Leave me alone,” and Monty didn’t say anything either. She said, “After a car accident, I’ve had a few concussions and they made my head fragile and if I hit it again I can easily damage my brain.” 

“Oh,” I said. She looked curiously at me. 

My mother loved Thomas English Muffins, the fashion brands Coach and Hermes, and Budweiser, for keeping horse-drawn vehicles in their logos. And of course she loved Wells Fargo. After my first day at camp, she showed me her discovery, a Wells Fargo branch that had an original refurbished stagecoach in the lobby. The stagecoach was roped off, with a little plaque in front of it that she ignored. The spoked wheels were yellow, the body of the carriage red, with gold ornamentation. On the top, tied to the luggage railings, were vintage suitcases. She waited for a woman to leave the ATM, then whispered at me, “Let’s get inside!”

I went under the rope, and she went over it, hitching up the stiff tunic she’d sewn herself. 

She pulled open the door, and we entered to sit on the tiny, cramped leather seats. The stagecoach smelled richly of varnish. “Can you imagine sitting in here for 25 days?”

“No,” I said.

“No stopping even to sleep,” she said. “Just to change drivers, of course. And horses.” She rolled down the leather flap at the window. “Everyone writes about the dust.” She looked immensely happy. In the cold, sterile bank lobby it was impossible to imagine the dust, the rocking on narrow paths through canyons, the plundering.

“It’s so nice,” I said.

“You know what would be more authentic to the passenger experience,” she said. “You should climb up on the driver’s seat, Simi, and get on the luggage rack. Go! Go!” she said urgently, but as I pulled myself up onto the roof of the stagecoach, I saw the guard coming out with a look of great confusion. 

Most days we just went from one activity to the next, from ten in the morning until six at night, with a half-hour on either end for the bus. We shot BB guns into aluminum plates. We rode horses. I ended up behind Samantha one day. Her long wavy blond hair matched her horse’s long wavy blond hair. Their ponytails twitched back and forth in the same rhythm. I wondered what it looked like under her hair, the fragile brain bouncing against her skull. I wondered why she was so sure the horse wouldn’t buck her off. My hair was short and brown. It was not short because it looked good: it was short because I tried to cut it myself and messed up. 

We had archery three times a week. Halfway up the cottonwood’s trunk, there was a blue fiberglass arrow lodged in deep and horizontal, with its plastic feathers almost all frayed off. Monty had shot that arrow into the tree last year, he told us, from the top of the hill.

Once in the second week while we were waiting for the bows and arrows, Monty showed us that his head had a dent in it—he pulled back his hair and showed us the mark, right at the top of his forehead. He told us he had a metal plate in his head. “Why?” we asked. “From when I ran into a brick wall,” he said. “Why?” we said. “I was going too fast,” he said.

He told us he could pick up radio signals with his head, and demonstrated with a Rockies game. Here’s Todd Helton, the Toddfather, two men in scoring position and nobody out…and Helton fires it into right field…there it is, in the lower deck…and how do you like that, the Rockies jump to a four to three lead… “You’re kidding,” said Zoe maturely. He told us he was not kidding at all.

Each day after lunch, we had rest hour, and laid blue and red mats around the lodge and surrounding fields. During rest hour I usually stayed by the porch in the shade, listening to the screen doors opening and shutting, and watching flies crawl on my knees. Zoe, Samantha, and a few other girls played cards. Once they invited me because one of the other girls was out sick. The game was called Kemps and they needed an even number of players. My partner was a girl named Jessica and the game went fine, but the conversation turned to families. Zoe’s dad owned a souvenir store on the Pearl Street Mall that sold little jars of gold dust and mugs with the Flatirons on them. Samantha’s dad was a schoolteacher and had just finished using his wheelchair after the car accident. Jessica’s dad did vinyl siding. I hadn’t realized that my mother, being a professor, was unusual, even snobby. 

“Your mom works?” Zoe said. She and the other two girls wore the same white elastic headband. Her fine dark hair curled at her forehead and temples. Sparkles from her eyelids had fallen onto her cheeks.

“Yes.”

“So your dad stays home?”

“I don’t have a dad.”

“Divorced? Or,” she said quietly, with a sympathetic frown, “passed away?” 

I should have agreed, “passed away,” and made up a sad story. But I felt like I owed Samantha, at least, the truth. I said I was a test tube baby, my mother hadn’t fallen in love so she just picked some stranger she never met. 

The other girls had never heard of this. “She never met him? How did she choose him?” 

“From a binder,” I said. 

“What did he look like? How tall was he?” Filled with regret, I didn’t answer.

“So he put his sperm in a test tube?” Zoe said. “How?”

“I don’t know, by masturbating?” I said.

“That’s disgusting,” Zoe said. 

They all sat there thinking about how I didn’t have a father, only this anonymous, masturbating man. In Chicago I actually knew a few other kids like myself. I licked the sweat off my upper lift, and checked out the canoes on the bright blue lake.

“Did other women pick him too?” Zoe said. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. 

“You probably have a hundred siblings you’ll never meet,” Zoe said. 

“Why would that be?”

“If your mom liked him, maybe a bunch of other people did too,” Zoe said.

“I think it’s one to one,” I said, though I did not know. I had never thought about it. 

Monty came over. “I’m hearing a lot of conversation during rest hour,” he said. 

“Simi is telling us about how she doesn’t have a dad,” Zoe said immediately. 

“That’s nice,” he said, “I think I heard your voice the loudest, Zoe.” 

What was strange about this was that I would have preferred him to scold me. She had been trying to get me in trouble. What did I have to do to get in trouble? I wouldn’t have minded his teasing me like that. Zoe seemed angry, however. 

“Come on, Simi,” he said. “Up.” He gave me his calloused hand, and pulled me to my feet. “Come with me,” he said. He walked with me towards the lodge. He stopped on the mess hall steps, sat, and patted the step above him. He was so tall, even seated. Through the screen I could hear the cooks listening to the radio. “I don’t have a father either,” he said.

“You’re a test tube baby?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. 

“Do test tube babies have hundreds of secret siblings?” I said.

“Why does it matter?” he said. 

I felt like crying. 

“Are they being mean to you?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“That’s what I like to hear,” he said. He settled back on his elbows. I looked at his big tight chest then looked elsewhere. The girl in the chair. The ILL mark. I looked at his frayed laces in his brown boots. The laces had broken, and he’d tied them in short knots. “I’ve worked with a lot of kids,” he said, “And my number one piece of advice is, get yourself to a point where you don’t care about others’ opinions of you. Okay, Simi?” 

“Okay.”

“High five!”

My soft moist hand met his hot stony one. Maybe he could tell I kept the contact a bit too long. He sat up. “Need to go do the Nilla wafers,” he said. 

“I care about your opinion of me,” I said. 

“Everyone cares about my opinions,” he said. “You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m tall.” 

“Do you think I’m a good camper?”

“You’re top notch,” he said. 

I needed to think about this.

After rest hour we had a snack—cookies from a box and bug juice, usually, neither of which I liked. There was a sing-along every afternoon. My favorite song was the carousel song. The counselors divided us into four by our age groups, 8–9 to 14–15, and we all had to make the noise of part of the carousel. The youngest kids sang m-pah-pah as the chugging baseline. The next youngest sang m-bzz-bzz like the motor. We, the Kit Foxes and the Pronghorns and the other two groups of 12–13-year-olds, sang m-tweedleet, the whistle. And the oldest kids sang the carnival waltz and acted like it was stupid. I looked at all the faces around me, hot and sweaty, babyish and gawky, and wondered if any of them could be related to me. 

Often in the afternoon it was hot, the mountains holding the sun like a bowl, and Monty took off his shirt. He had a big sunburnt chest, and curly light chest hair. I heard one girl wondering if you could hitch things to his nipple rings. I wanted to tell him to take them out.

At the end of each day, before the buses back to Boulder, we stood in a huge circle around the flagpole and listened to the director’s son play taps on a silver trumpet. Some days right when we formed our circle, the ball at the very top of the flagpole had peach-colored sun on it which slid away during the song.

Top notch, top notch. The problem was I wanted something more personal. What if he’d said, “You are a bit quiet, but I can tell you’re observant?” What if he’d said, “You are marginal but have a certain dignity about you?” What if he’d said, “I think that you really have an evil heart deep inside you and I want to straighten you out and teach you to walk in the light?” 

In the second week during rest hour, Zoe and one of her friends were caught smoking cigarettes at the edge of the woods by the front hill. From my position on the porch, I heard an outraged counselor telling Monty the news, and I watched as Monty strode off to get them. I casually walked out from the side of the porch and drifted across the hill, as if I’d just seen something interesting on the mountain behind. The girls had already walked out of the woods, giggling and bumping shoulders, when Monty reached them. He grabbed them both by the upper arms. He started to pull them up the hill, but then relaxed. Samantha was watching the scene too. She gave me a nervous smile. “Monty’s so scary,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Terrifying.”

“You know, Zoe really likes you,” she said. She reminded me of my mother. Anyone could see that Zoe didn’t like me.

“Do you think Monty likes me?” I said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “He’s a counselor.”

I pictured crying in front of him. I pictured him making me cry. I wondered what would make him that angry. Maybe if I pulled his nipple rings or pushed a fellow camper into the lake. 

It was a day camp, and the other girls lived full parallel lives in the evenings and weekends, with boys and birthday parties, shopping trips for glitter tank tops, shorts with “Cheer” or “Cutie” on the seat. For me, most of the time, my mother was too tired. We ate noodles and watched Jeopardy. One weekend my mother and I went to the Pearl Street Mall. A man had laid out the outline of the United States in jump rope and asked us to point to where we were from and he would guess our zip code. I entered the outline and pointed to the place just outside of Chicago and he got the zip code right on his first guess. Then my mother and I both got hair wraps. We picked three colors and three beads each. After that, we sat on a bench in front of a fiddler and ate granola bars. My mother had big soft ears and short, gelled hair. 

“Do you think I have hundreds of siblings that I don’t know about?” I said. “From the donor?” 

“Um,” she said. “It varies, but there are limits, because it would be bad if people accidentally met and fell in love with their own half-siblings.” 

“So maybe I have a couple half-siblings?”

“Maybe,” she said. “It’s better not to think about it too much.” 

“Do you think I would recognize them?” 

“I think we all meet people who feel just like siblings,” she said. She was very tired. “Blood relations aren’t so important.”

“Then why didn’t you just adopt me?”

“I never could have adopted you,” she said. “You wouldn’t have existed.” 

“I wish I didn’t exist,” I said experimentally.

“What?” she said. Her voice had gone sharp. 

“Never mind,” I said.

My mother seemed relieved to let it go. 

“I got this advice the other day,” I said. “‘Get to a point where you don’t care about others’ opinions of you.’ What do you think of that?” 

“Who gave you that advice?” she said. 

“One of the summer camp girls,” I said. 

She put her arm around me. “You’re doing a very good job, you know, Simi, with all those new girls.” 

“Do you think I am in general a good daughter?” I said. 

“Of course, you’re a lovely, brilliant person,” she said. She looked happier. I asked her about stagecoach stops. She said many of the stops had been forgotten, burned down. No one kept adequate records, which just showed how integrated stagecoaches were in their lives.

It was very easy and natural to figure out what would make people happy. Be mostly quiet, smile a lot, ask questions, follow instructions, and offer praise. It was a lot harder to figure out what would make people angry in precisely the right way. 

It was impossible to punch myself, but I kicked my horse when we were already trotting. For a brief moment, until the counselor somehow called to the horse, or the horse realized I was misbehaving, we galloped over the tawny meadow at insane, leaping, jingling speed. I had to change horses after that, and the counselor kept apologizing. I felt sorry for the horse, a yellow one named Popcorn, who shambled with her head down to the stable. 

Once I tried to fall on the giant trampoline. The way to do it was to attempt a flip. I got a bloody nose. Zoe gasped and pointed, taking Samantha’s shoulder to show her, and I turned away. This wasn’t for them. It especially wasn’t for Samantha. I didn’t want to taunt her, remind her of her own condition. In the nurse’s office the radio was tuned to a call-in advice show. “Just open your heart, take a risk,” the host said to a girl who called in about her pregnancy. The organ music in the background rose gradually in breathy cords. “There’s a higher power out there watching over you.”

After that, I reverted to the zipline that dropped into the lake. It was too cold for the zipline to be popular during free time like the giant trampoline. I climbed up the dilapidated wooden tower at the non-canoe end of the lake where a junior counselor hooked me onto the line with a carabiner. The two junior counselors who worked at the tower, two skinny boys, let me go as many times as I wanted. They were unaware of the fact that we could have been related. I was glad that I didn’t have to worry at all about whether they were paying attention to me: I could see they were not paying any attention. 

Once I was hooked in, I walked to the edge of the wooden platform, where the wood looked melted from so many wet feet. The very edge of the wooden planks was swollen and rounded and cold with drips. I stared at the dark lake and the mountains, and the zipline that fastened one to the other, and then I jumped off and whizzed along in a narrow tunnel of energy. I pulled the cord and my harness unpopped, and I fell into the water. 

Every camper who was old enough to use the zipline had had to get a twenty-minute safety lecture, the message of which was, don’t pull the cord too early!

We were supposed to unpop the harness when we were about one foot above the water. I tried it at five feet, then ten. The water was ice-cold. When I landed in it, I could not breathe. All my air turned into white light. That was the whole point.

Zoe told me during archery one day that she’d watched me take a turn on the zipline and she’d been worried. “You looked,” she said, “like a rag doll.” I was flushed with embarrassment the rest of the day. I did not want anyone to see what I was up to. But when Zoe got a splinter she cried so much, for attention.

One weekend, my mother drove me to the ghost town of Caribou. She let me sit in the front seat. Caribou had been a silver mining town, and now there were just some stone walls and a collapsed cabin buried in meadow grass and spiky purple flowers. We waded in a small clear creek, then ate granola bars sitting on boulders in the juniper-scented field. 

She asked me what I thought. I said from the name ghost town I’d expected a haunted house kind of set up, some screaming white faces in black cloaks. 

“Oh dear,” she said. “Would you have preferred that?”

“No.”

“I never saw why ghosts should be vengeful,” she said. She looked quietly at the wavering field. The edges of the grass were white with sun. As a historian, she loved ghosts. 

We found a black gate over an old mine entrance with a “keep out” sign. A little further in the creek, a pair of small railroad tracks ran into the water. The wind in the evergreen trees made me think about the other people who could have been made, instead of me, the other people in the binder that my mother didn’t choose, all the kids springing into life then collapsing down as she turned the pages. 

At camp, I was no longer maintaining hope about the card-playing group because Zoe had made friends with a group of boys, the Pronghorns. Soon, I expected, she and Samantha and Jessica would be paired off, and kissing.

Monty had enormous arm-veins that were weirdly fragile-looking. I imagined pressing down on them, and the flow stopping. I imagined him getting angry, one way or another.

At lunch I asked him about blood relations. “Never had much use for my blood relations,” he said. “You can make the family you love.” He and my mother agreed on so much, and he’d never even met her. “You’re still thinking about your half siblings?”

“No,” I said quickly.

“You need to chill out,” he said with warmth. 

I wanted everything to look and feel like an accident but not be an accident. I imagined his first punch. I imagined losing my breath to it. And what then? Would he realize his wrong? Would he apologize and embrace me?

No: I would laugh in his face. He would be startled that I was so unrepentant. (Also, it would make him angrier.) 

But what would happen next? Sometimes I went back to the beginning. I imagined being in the woods. Or how the scene would be in the morning. Or on a cold cloudy day. An isolated moment when no one was looking but maybe cougars and birds of prey. 

Sometimes I imagined waking up in his counselor cabin. He would be sitting near me, chair drawn up by the bed. And his expression—my concept always wavered there. Outside it would be raining. The rain would batter the roof. I didn’t exactly want him to look at me. I wanted him to be working. Whittling or mending. Attention in the past, attention in the future. But the moment, like a vein pressed on: nice and empty.

How else could I occupy my time? Thinking of what pixie stick I would buy at the camp store at the end of the day? I seemed like I was often looking at the mountains.

It was the last week and I had to try something. I didn’t know how to get it to happen with Monty. But it had been three weeks of building courage—I needed to act. 

We had to play sharks and minnows during canoe lessons, but I just let my fingers dip into the cold water. My canoe partner and I ignored each other. Capsizing? Jumping out? 

We went on our final day hike, to Royal Arch. Tripping? Hiding? Monty pointed out a golden eagle holding a squirrel. I saw it before it flew out of sight, enormous flat wings and a limp dangling thing below, but some of the girls didn’t see it and were disappointed.

We were walking back to the lodge from archery, and at the edge of the woods, as we came out onto the big front slope, I saw a fallen branch, rotting, large around as my arm. I wondered if I could pick it up casually, as though just to look at it. I reached down and grabbed it as I passed, not wanting to lose my distance from the group. The white bark slithered off, exposing a row of blobby fungi like orange eggs. The branch was as tall as my shoulder.

So now I had to catch up to Samantha. I had to create an accident. It had to feel accidental to me as well. Now that we were off the path and onto the wide grassy slope, the girls fanned out. Zoe had her arms around two friends. Samantha was walking at the right side, bouncing on her toes. Monty was way at the other side, shirt back on now after archery. I knew I had to move fast with the branch.

I came up behind the group, skipping up trying to seem playful. Just holding this big branch, playfully, and no one was looking. I held the branch like a javelin, pointing it straight forward, looking at the ground next to Samantha. I knew to look at the place I want to aim for, so I didn’t look at Samantha. I threw the branch around her, quickly, but it was very heavy. I was not trying to hit her. I was trying to leave a wide berth. I didn’t care about hurting her. But the branch hit her head. Not hard. Not direct on. Grazed her head on its path elsewhere. Nonetheless her head snapped forward. It was just an impulse.

The girls’ heads all turned at once, toward the branch, as it hit the ground and made a place in the tall grass, then toward Samantha. 

The air was quiet. Samantha stumbled forward, then turned around, ponytail swinging. She couldn’t tell it was me—it was like she was looking for the tree the branch came from. She looked surprised. She brought her hand to her head, the left side, and touched her head and then looked at her hand. The group had stopped walking. I looked towards Monty. His forehead had a dent in it, I noticed again.

“Who the fuck threw that log,” Monty said. 

I had never heard anyone say the f-word out loud. My entire body had vanished.

The girls all were looking at one another. Then they were all looking at me. They were surprised all around. I didn’t see any anger. I did not want to stare back at them. I turned away. I had to be resolute.

“Samantha,” Monty said. “Are you okay?” 

“I think,” she said. 

“We better bring you up,” he said. He was taking out his walky-talky. I wished that he would just use the metal plate in his head. “Here, Samantha,” he said. “Let’s walk up. I’ll help you just in case.” And they were going up the hill. “Stay here, girls,” he yelled. “Everyone has to stay right here. No one move.” 

His hand was on Samantha’s back, and they walked slowly up the hill. Of course she would be just fine, because she could walk up the hill just fine. Of course, just fine! My head was burning and burning. 

And where had Monty gone? My desire was so strong that I spoke. “I did it.” He was probably too far away to hear. The other girls had backed away into a little group, even the ones who were so pathetic that they canoed with me. No one was looking at me now. My hair was dull around my face and I let it fall and cover my eyes.

The camp director walked down the hill to where I was sitting on the ground. “It was an accident, right?” She had a trembling white ponytail and a narrow face, and all the horses on her vest ran leftward.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes.”

“Are you all right?” she said.

“I feel a little weird,” I said.

She seemed concerned. She touched my forehead, which I found disgustingly invasive. “You’re burning up!” she said. “Let’s call your mom. Let’s go up to the lodge.”

“Is Monty there?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “He knows it’s not your fault. He’s a good guy.”

She pulled up my arms, and we walked to the lodge. 

The lodge was dim and quiet. Samantha was nowhere around but Monty was sitting on the log bench against the long wall. The mountains were bright out the window behind him. I could not see his face.

But he was looking at me now and I walked away from the director over to him like I was going to apologize. Now that I could see his face it caught me by surprise. He was not looking at me like I was evil or strong. He was looking at me like he was sad. And so I didn’t think he ever understood me. The light was caught in his curly hair. He looked pitying and sad, and still. I knew he would never hug me and love me, but I had thought he might at least overflow with anger, break away, punish me. But now I could see he was not going to grab me by the neck and drag me away and crush me. He was just looking at me. At that point my heart seized up and floated away.

I went home then, and then I was the one who was ill. I was under blankets on the couch. My mother thought I must have caught a terrible fever in the cold lake. She called the camp to tell them how irresponsible they had been. I was too exhausted to understand how you could catch hot from cold. She brought me tea. Monty would bang my hot chest with the heavy knob of the spoon till I bruised. He would kick me while I was down. I shook and yearned for a good solid beating, a solid feeling, a mark, some pain to calm and cling to.