Page 22 of That Summer Feeling

When all the names had been called and everyone had put their color shirts on over their other clothing, I looked around at the sea of red, yellow, green, and blue. Stevie was right. Camp would end. And I wanted to savor each moment before it did. Even though all of this was completely silly to me, it still warmed my heart to see everyone participate. Some of the team members were way older than me. Into their fifties or sixties, by my best visual guess. And they still wore their color shirts.

“Scouting the competition?” Stevie asked.

“You know me,” I said. “Always looking for ways to win.”

“I don’t care about winning,” she told me. “We just have to beat Mason. That’s all.”

It took only three seconds of looking at Mason to know he was good at most physical things. And all of twenty-fourhours with him to know he loved to be the victor. “I’m pretty sure beating Mason would require winning.”

Stevie smirked. “Exactly.”

“Then let’s win,” I said, fighting off the urge to run into the forest until the campgrounds disappeared.

Stevie was my ally.

For her, I would try.

9

The woman who’d shushed Stevie and me yesterday was on our team, because why wouldn’t she be? Why wouldn’t this competition I didn’t really want to participate in have yet another challenging element to it?

Her name was Julianne. She was married to a man on Yellow Team, and they had matching Mickey and Minnie Mouse tattoos on their calves. For reasons unknown to me, she wore three different water bottles on a tool-belt-style fanny pack. I didn’t recognize her at first on account of the fact that my head still hurt a bit, and it was embarrassing to look at the faces of all these people who knew me as the life of the party when I couldn’t come up with their names without glancing at their name tags. But as soon as our teams gathered by color outside the main hall and I heard her quick, disappointed hello, I knew exactly who she was. All week we’d be wearing the same color—temporarily bonding us against our will.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Stevie told her as we stood around in an awkward semicircle with our new teammates. “No hard feelings?”

“Yeah,” Julianne said in a clipped tone. Then she walked off to talk to her husband over by Yellow Team.

Stevie shrugged. “Well, I tried.”

If I were her, and someone I didn’t know quasi-rejected my apology like that, I’d probably start digging until I created that lightless hee-haw cave for me to live inside.

We’d been asked to pick a captain, and luckily we had an enthusiastic candidate in Aja, Dara’s cabinmate. She was the exact kind of outspoken extrovert who went out of her way to introduce herself as an extrovert. Her hand shot into the air as soon as the prospect of choosing captains was announced. She ran uncontested, because she had an infectious energy we collectively knew could not be topped when it came to choosing a leader. Her excitement even tricked me into believing I liked this. If not the actual competition, then the community that came from being a part of a team.

“I can do this,” I said aloud, riding the temporary high of my joy.

The two camp employees who’d passed out our shirts turned out to be the color-game referees. They instructed us to follow them to the site of our first competition.

Stevie put her hand on my head as we walked. “Of course you can. Julianne might kick your ass if you don’t.”

When Stevie and I laughed, Julianne whipped her head around and glared. There was no way she’d heard us, but it was like instinctively, she knew.

Tommy caught up to us and said, “I hope you two are being nice.”

It mortified me that anyone would think I was anything but, even if it was a joke. “I am!” I said, clearly too emphatically, because Tommy laughed in aThat’s our Garland, always worryingway that made me feel very exposed.

“That’s just how Julianne is,” he said. “At least, I think. I don’t actually know her, but from what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think it’s personal.”

“Oh, no. It’s personal,” Stevie told him. “I was being an asshole and talking over you guys yesterday when you were taking us around the campgrounds, and she got mad at me for it.”

Her admitting such a thing to Tommy’s face made me consider how I could order flowers for him and have them delivered to camp, just so he knew we didn’t mean to offend him.

He shook his head and said affectionately, “You really have not changed.”

“Yes I have,” Stevie told Tommy. “I’mmuchgayer now.”

“Please,” Tommy snapped back. “Don’t forget that picture of us when we were like twelve, and you’re in the overalls, backward cap, and cowboy boots. It’s in the gay rights museum now.”

She laughed heartily at that one. “Right beside the image of you as the yellow Power Ranger from costume night.”