The Camp

That night I barely got any sleep. Mostly because I was being yelled at all night.

“How could you put these things in your body?!” My dad yelled, throwing the pack of cigarettes on the ground and stomping on it in disgust. I don’t blame him, those things were nasty.

Mom just cried. I felt real bad, making my mom cry. I just let my dad go on his rant without so much as a second thought. There was no way I was going to do one again – which I had established to them, it was my first one and it tasted awful – but that didn’t matter to him.

“Who gave you this?! I know no store around here would sell these to you!” My dad continued yelling. I stayed silent. Why should I agitate him with the news I had a girlfriend without his permission while he was still mad about the smoking?

“Fine, don’t tell me!” He continued to yell. Yeah, that was kinda the plan.

The next morning my parents woke me up at 8am even though it was a Saturday for a “family meeting”. They handed me a pamphlet labeled “Summer Troubled Kid Help Camp”.

Summer? But it was…

Oh, man. It was May 17th. One more week of school. On the front of the pamphlet it said:

Camp session June 4th – August 10th

Oh, man. Julie, of all the times to use me as a guinea pig, why now? There was no way I was going there. It was an empty threat, right?

“We’re going to send the form attached to this off in the afternoon. The enrollment fee’s cheap thankfully.” My mom said.

No.

“Please understand that we only want what’s best for you in this situation, and since you’ve been silent about this whole ideal we have no choice but to do what we think is best.”

Yeah, I know what’s best too – that was the only cigarette I was having, ever. Also I hadn’t been silent. I had pleaded my case multiple times – “I only tried it once and it was nasty, so I’m not gonna do it again!” – but no one seemed to be listening to me.

There was no fighting it. I’d be spending my summer at a troubled teen camp. I immediately called up my friend Mike, who was not amused.

“What?! Dude, please tell me this is some kind of joke.” Mike said. I could hear the sounds of loud chatter and coffee machines in the background – he probably stayed at a motel with another “lady of the night” again. It would be about breakfast time. “Out of all the bad times to walk in…hold on, babe, I’ll be right back.” I could hear Mike walking away from the coffee machines.

“I know, man, it sucks. Hey, where are you?” I asked. I probably had a good hunch as to where he was but I wanted to confirm it.

“I’m…at a nursing home.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Fine. The No-Tell Motel downtown.”

I let out a loud, dramatic sigh. “How old is she this time?”

“Twenty.” Mike replied.

“Twenty?!” I yelled out of shock. “How’d you grab that one?!”
I wasn’t sure why I was so shocked – Mike had always had a thing for older women. His first sexual encounter was when he was thirteen with one of his dad’s hot female coworkers, who was probably in her late 20s of so – until her husband found out, and he beat Mike into next week. “It was worth it,” Mike still tells me to this day.

“Coffee shop. She thinks I’m nineteen, though.” Mike replied, as I could hear his girl in the background asking why he was taking so long.

Mike was pretty tall for being sixteen. I could see how she could think that.

“How come your parents don’t care where you are or what you’re doing?” I asked. “Meanwhile, I get a ten-hour lecture for trying one cigarette and then swearing to myself never to do it again!”

“They figure I’m sixteen. I’ve got my own car, got my own job, I deserve to be treated as an adult.” Mike replied. “Also they’re like, never home long enough to care, except for on holidays.”

“Lucky. I mean, not the second part, but…”

“You don’t have to take sympathy on me, dude.” Mike laughed. “I’ve gotten used to raising myself. It gives me a lot more freedom anyways. I could walk around my house naked blasting 50 Cent all day if I wanted to – at least until my parents got off work at ten.”

I laughed. “If I did that I’d probably be kicked out.”

“Anyways, that totally sucks. I had the most awesome summer plans for our group.”

Our group consisted of Summer, a seventeen-year-old black-with-blue-highlights haired girl who pirated movies and burnt them onto DVDs for us, Mike, who you can see above, Jason, a fourteen-year-old buff kid who brought us lunch and snuck us into bars (it’s worth noting that all I ordered was Sprite at the bar while everyone else was getting drunk out of their mind), and me, the scrawny little awkward boy who got mixed up with them somehow.

I was glad to have some friends, at least. My parents probably think I’m friends with the geeky type like me. Another secret I’ve gotta keep from them.

“What kind of plans?” I asked.

“Things you’d never believe.”

“We weren’t gonna go like, rob a bank, were we?”

“No, not that unbelievable. I’m just saying it was going to get crazy. Guess it’ll just have to be three of us.”

“I’m not gonna be gone the whole summer, y’know.”

“I know, but most of the cool stuff happens in June or July. How long did you say you were gonna be stuck there again?”

“The beginning of June through a quarter of August.”

“That's it. I’m going to bust you the hell out of there.”

“I don’t think you can.” I said with a laugh.

“Why not?!” He shouted back.

“For one thing, I looked the place up on Google Maps – it’s pretty tightly secured. You’d likely get electrocuted if you tried to breathe on it without permission.”

“Crap. Well, um…see you in August?”

“We’ve got a wh…oh, yeah.”

“What?”

“My parents said I’m grounded until camp starts. Can only go to home, school, and running errands with them.”

“What?! That’s such a load of s…sorry, gotta go. My honey’s getting a bit ticked. Hope you can survive through hell.”

“No problem. Glad we could talk one last time. Bye.”

With that, I clicked off the phone, wondering why I was being punished by the universe so much.