Chad didn’t say hello to Sheera, nor she to him, but soon after he had lined up the canoes, she heard the quickened footsteps and easy laughter of kids coming down the same gravel road. She turned and walked away from the lakeshore, toward the oar house, to pick out a life vest and a paddle. She tried to blend into the pack of just-arrived kids scrambling for the newer-looking life vests rather than appear as if she’d already been there by herself. This was something she was still trying to balance: not coming off as a loner while still getting the solitude she so desperately craved.
After everyone had their life vests and their paddles, Chad told the campers to get into pairs and pick their canoes; they all appeared to have their partners instantaneously and, in a matter of moments, were walking down to the shore two by two. Sheera had hardly had time to scan the crowd. Something else she was learning about this camp life was that, while she signed up for activities alone, most of the other kids did so with friends. It felt like Sheera’s reason for coming to camp—namely, the opportunity to get out of suffocating, grimy city life, which included, by extension, a certain amount of space between herself and others—was in direct opposition to the reasons of the other campers. They never wanted to do anything alone. It wasn’t that Sheera didn’t want to make new friends—she did, very much. It was more that she thought there would be a greater emphasis on being outside in a more quiet, more peaceful way. Learning about nature, being active in the outdoors: These were things she always wanted more of, and she’d assumed everyone else did too.
“Hey, girlie,” Chad said to Sheera. She’d been at the lake every day the previous week, and he still had not managed to remember her name. “You wanna pick a group to tag onto?”
Sheera didn’t recognize any of the kids except for two girls who lived in her section. She began walking toward them, the load of the paddle weighing her down. How was she supposed to walk with this? Carry it above her head? Beside her like a walking stick? It was oppressively heavy.
When she got to the water’s edge, and the two girls from her section were loading themselves into their boat without acknowledging her, she heard Chad whistle.
“Girlie!” he shouted.
She could see Mikey Bombowski next to Chad, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses. The girls in Sheera’s tent had talked about Mikey before; Helen in particular thought he was cute. But Sheera found nothing attractive about his skinny body and his gel-spiked hair. Though Sheera had gotten her first period two years earlier and now had what her grandma called “a body that could get her in trouble,” she found herself mostly uninterested in the opposite sex. At camp, especially, she regarded the boys no differently than the girls: carefully, attempting to discriminate who had the potential to be her friend. She had three older brothers, and she understood through them what boys were like: fun, yes, and playful, but also crass, and dirty, and dangerous, the kind of danger her grandma warned her about. The way the girls in her tent talked about boys, it sounded like they were imagining an entirely different species, one that was affectionate and romantic and talked about its feelings. Sheera had begun to wonder if rich white boys really were like that, if they were really another species from the boys with whom she’d grown up.
Chad said something to Mikey out of the corner of his mouth, handed the boy a life vest, and nudged him with his elbow. Mikey walked slowly to the empty canoe next to Sheera. The two girls from Sheera’s section stopped paddling for a moment and looked over at her and Mikey curiously.
Sheera directed her gaze toward the lake to avoid Mikey’s, watching the canoes gliding slowly from the shore and the paddles chopping the water. She heard splashes, giggles, was amazed at how the sound traveled over the distance. It had something to do with still bodies of water and echoes; she’d learned this in school once.
“You wanna get in?” Mikey asked. “I’ll push.”
She settled onto the wooden seat that had been indented by hundreds of bodies of campers before her. A puddle of cold lake water sloshed around her feet, and she rested the overbearing paddle on her thighs, which had promptly spread and stuck to each other. Facing the open lake—a motorboat pulling a water-skier, the roped-off swimming hole to their right—she wondered, as she often did, what lay across the way in that densely green and wild forest beneath the Berkshires. She felt the canoe scrape the soft bottom of the lake and turned to see Mikey wading knee-deep through the water, getting their boat out of the muck. He hopped in.
“No paddling past the buoys!” Chad yelled from the shore.
They didn’t discuss steering or a plan of where to go. They paddled out into the center of the lake, and when Mikey stopped, so did Sheera. He exhaled, looking around in wonder at the lake and back at the camp in the distance, like he was seeing them anew. The girls from Sheera’s section paddled beside her and Mikey’s boat, trying to catch Mikey’s attention by splashing each other, looking over, hoping he’d laugh or even look in their direction. He didn’t.
Chad had gotten into a boat with two younger boys and was helping them paddle just past the dock, not paying attention to any of the other campers.
“It’s your first summer here, right?” Mikey asked.
Sheera nodded. Growing up, she had gone to some day camps in the city, and they’d taken field trips into the country, but this was her first summer at a sleepaway camp. She didn’t know any kids from home that went away to camp, but she’d watched a reality show on Nickelodeon about a camp in the Berkshires, and a bunch of the kids on the show were from the city and looked and talked like her. They climbed rope courses and rode horses and hung out with one another and with the white kids—which she wasn’t used to seeing, all the groups mingling like that. Most of her friends at school were black or Hispanic—because most of her school was black and Hispanic—but something about the appearance of seamless diversity intrigued her, as if nature itself was some kind of great equalizer.
So she looked up “Berkshires summer camp” on the Internet, and she found Camp Marigold, which had a website with happy diverse kids too. Her dad refused to let her go until she did enough research to find out there was scholarship money. And once they got a bunch of it, he was okay with the idea. It would be one less kid he’d have to worry about that summer.