Church Camp

I was sent to church camp the summer between fourth and fifth grade. I was ten. The church paid for me to go. I don’t know why. We were not “church-people”. I mean, we went to church on Easter and church on Christmas and occasionally church for no particular reason but realistically, that reason was probably so my parents could get a goddamn break. That’s how annoying me and my brother were — so annoying our parents would rather sit through church than hang out with us.

It was a week at overnight camp, sharing a cabin with six other girls, one camp counselor, one bathroom and four bunk beds. It was the longest I’d ever been away from home. I was homesick before I even left.

My mom told me to make a list of everything I was packing so that I’d be sure to bring everything back with me. It’s a smart idea. My mom is a smart lady who doesn’t like to lose things. I also don’t like to lose things. We both like to hang on to the things we came in with and neither of us has ever lost a purse or a set of keys in our lives which is a pretty big achievement I think.

I wrote a very detailed list because the more details, the better, I thought.

I have since abandoned that notion.

Camp day came and my mom and dad and my little brother all drove me out into the middle of nowhere where I was gonna have to pray three times a day but at least they had horses. (For aesthetics, I guess? I would find out later that no one was allowed to ride them.) They walked me to the cabin to meet my counselor and the other girls. They were rustic log cabins with a set of wooden bunk beds in each corner. I got a bottom bunk and my mom helped me make it up with the rainbow sheets I’d packed and the scratchy, stiff blanket that the camp provided. Our counselor told us that she intentionally picked all the girls with “weird names” for her cabin and I liked her for that.

I liked her so much that I confessed my budding atheism to her. I got her alone on the first day and told her how sometimes I think that maybe it’s possible that god isn’t real, with heavy emphasis on the sometimes, maybe and possible to make it seem like, you know, I was really just kicking around an idea and this was by no means a serious question to be mentioned to the preacher or the deacon or anyone else important, like Actual God (if he did, in fact, exist).

And damned if she didn’t say the best thing anyone could have said. I wish I could remember exactly but she quoted some bible verse about not having blind faith, et cetera, et cetera . . . and told me it’s basically okay, possibly even good, to question the existence of god. She totally let me off the hook. I felt a great relief and went about my day making tie-dyed t-shirts and a pair of earrings for my mom that weighed approximately 16 pounds each.

Three days later, I dove into the pool and hit my face on the bottom and came up with blood and cement burns on my lips and chin. My nose was broken but no one seemed to care so we just kept playing “synchronized swimmers” and I learned how to do a handstand under water.

A day or two after that, someone got hold of my packing list which, as I mentioned before, was very detailed. I don’t know how he found it, but at lunch, this bad boy stood on a chair and read aloud to every blessed child in the cafeteria the entire list, beginning with the title: Hilah’s Packing List

Purple polka dot panties Pink flower panties Plain white panties (4 pairs)

And so on.

I’d chosen the word “panties” because it sounded grown-up.

Everyone had a great chuckle and I wanted to turn into a bird and fly away and get sucked into an airplane turbine.

The last night of camp there was a dance. Wear your finest purple polka dot panties and don those dresses, gals, ‘cause the boys are coming over for a hoe-down! It would be my first dance ever and in a tradition that would continue through every other dance that followed for eternity, no one was interested in dancing with me.

But that’s okay! Because my favorite song (Lady in Red) came on and I decided to dance by myself. I gathered up all my plucks and chucked away my fucks and bobbed onto the dance arena: left arm arched out as if clutching an imaginary bag of groceries, right hand akimbo as if waiting indefinitely for a high-five. I don’t know. Nobody had ever danced with me before.

I’m moving around the dance circle, a weird single in a sea of couples.

And then. Some boy actually asked me to dance. He walked up next to me (and had to keep walking because I didn’t stop moving) and asked if I wanted to dance.

And do you know what I said?

“I’m already dancing with someone.”

And I waltzed away.

What a bitch.