Page 67 of That Summer Feeling

I tried to look at Julianne. Do a Rock Paper Scissors or something. She avoided my gaze, instead staring forward with her hands on her tool belt fanny pack as she said, “I’ll try.”

It was a generosity of spirit I had not yet encountered from her. “Oh my god,” I said. “That would be amazing. Thank you, Julianne.”

She nodded once and walked to stand beside Aja in some sort of symbolic acceptance. It took all of ten seconds for me to process that if Julianne, who for all of camp had been thoroughly lukewarm toward me, was willing to push past her fears for our team, why wasn’t I?

Why wasn’t I?

“No,” I yelled, so loud I startled Marge. “I have to do this.”I put my hand on Julianne’s arm and moved her over, taking the symbolic place beside our captain.

“Are you sure?” Julianne was so openly skeptical of me, I had to appreciate it. She did not have a single drop of faith that I could do this. Weirdly, it helped.

“No,” I told her. “Being sure is overrated, though. I know you don’t want to do this, and neither do I, really, but I have something to prove. Not just to myself but to our team. So let me go. Please.”

I looked at every person one by one. Exuberant Captain Aja to my left, who loved leading us. Softly serious Tommy, who was doing his level best to hide that he was still crying. Brassy Marge, with her hands in the air, saying “Welp” and sitting on the ground for the second time in a week, apparently unconcerned with getting dirt on her ass. Julianne, who’d started the week disliking me pretty openly and had offered to fall on her sword on my behalf. Sky and Laurie and their sweetly consistent camaraderie.

And Stevie. My sunshine.

“I’m going to be the sixth member,” I told them all.

Everyone reacted with the same skeptical energy Julianne had, albeit much softer versions.

“This isn’t the same as the ropes course,” Tommy told me. “This one matters for everything.”

“I know,” I assured him.

Marge rubbed her knee. “It’s gonna be a hell of a challenge. I’m getting sore just thinking about what you’re all gonna go do.”

“I’m ready to meet it,” I told her.

The obstacle course started with a dozen tires placed in a zigzag pattern, leading to a series of small walls, no higher than ten feet, designed to be climbed over. On the other side of that were tunnels to crawl through. From there, the ground opened up into a small body of water, where two long logs spun atop it like spit roasts. They fed out to a monkey bars setup that culminated in a quick zip line, not very high off the ground. The weighted sled push that followed stretched out roughly fifteen feet, finishing at the base of the main event—a fifty-foot-high rock climbing wall. Plastic rocks were scattered upward in varying primary colors, leading to a giant red buzzer on the top ledge. It could only be pushed when every team member had climbed the wall and completed the course.

Each team would go through the course one at a time. The team who finished with the fastest time would win. Simple as that. Since Green Team was in last, they’d compete first. Because the other teams were in a three-way tie for first place, the referees pulled names from a hat to determine the competition order.

Blue Team got picked to go second.

“You don’t have to do this,” Stevie told me when it was announced.

She knew me as someone who didn’t take many risks, and she was willing to let me live that way, even though losing would mean she’d walk away from this competition devastated. I’d never completely understand why it mattered to her that much, but I didn’t need to grasp all of it to know that I could be the one to help. What was love if not holding someone else’s hand through their chosen journeys? Our upsand downs didn’t have to match to matter. I never wanted to be Ethan askingWhy do you care so much?It was enough to know she did.

It would always be enough.

“Yes I do,” I told her.

31

At thirty-two, in a summer camp tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains, standing at the beginning of a long, challenging obstacle course, I finally understood that the questions I used to ask myself all the time were the kinds that had no answers. Like, why did my home always feel dark, even in the daytime? When would I learn how to make myself into a person who didn’t cause trouble by feeling too much? Life didn’t come with a guidebook, or a checklist, or a set of accomplishments that had to be fulfilled to succeed. I got to determine what success looked like for myself.

When the bell rang for the course to begin, I asked some new questions. How much more could I grow? What pain did I carry that I no longer needed? When would I stop judging myself?

I ran, charging toward the unfamiliarity. Greeting it with open arms.

Stevie kept up with me as she always had. The two of us leapfrogged from tire to tire in near-perfect unison. I felt freer than I’d ever been. More daring than I could have ever dreamed. It was a bit like my time on the Jet Skis, but better because I had Stevie next to me. Stevie to challenge me.

She made the hard things better. She made the scary things fun. Could she not see all the ways she’d touched me? Every inch of my skin had already been covered in her, long before she’d ever put her mouth over it.

When we got to the series of wall climbs, I let Stevie take the lead. I wanted to follow her strategy, re-creating her every lift and jump.

“You doin’ good?” she asked me.