THAT SUMMER I went away to summer camp for the first time. Mr. Cartwright recommended a theatre camp in upstate New York, on Lake George, where he’d taught when he was young. Jodie and Jensen were planning to do it too, but it turned out to be too expensive, especially for the two of them, so I went without knowing anyone. My parents drove me there, my gear in the back of the station wagon, and they forgave me for shooing them away almost as soon as we’d entered the camp gates. “We’d think it was strange if you wanted to know us, bunny,” my father said—how could he call me bunny when someone might hear?—and my mother waxed sentimental. She’d loved camp as a kid—Archery! Canoeing! Campfires!—but also found this world of aspiring actors, many from New York, alien and a bit intimidating.
I loved it: the dusty cabins that smelled of old wood and the light on the water in the early mornings. Even the bad food and the slimy shower stalls with their industrial rubber curtains seemed part of the charm. Above all I loved the people, and the plays. I gouged a hole in my middle finger while striking a set, and even now I look at the thick white scar with pleasure and a little pride. I was as entertained as I was annoyed by “the Teflon crowd,” a set of oddly good-looking almost-successful child actors with headshots at the ready and blue-white teeth. But they were a small proportion of the broader group that included six scholarship kids from inner-city Chicago, a Canadian farmer’s daughter, and the heroically nerdy and myopic son of a trendy New York fashion designer. Forever pushing his bottle-bottom glasses up his bony nose, he was famous for his bad puns.
Our counselors too were an odd band of high school seniors and college kids who knew obscure monologues by heart. One girl, dressed like a druid, could recite all of Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”; another had seen Angels in America fourteen times; still a third wandered around singing the songs from Wicked at top volume. The techies were computer wizards and master carpenters who could transform the stage into a downtown disco or the Forest of Arden, with colored lights, burlap, and painted plywood; and for a black-box production of Cloud Nine put on by a troupe of older campers, the set designer and her team constructed a raked diamond-shaped stage with checkerboard parquet—all in four days—that made the whole play seem like a fantasy from Lewis Carroll.
There was, in that place, a different social order, where particular skills—solving a Rubik’s cube in less than ten minutes; sewing a Maid Marian dress out of five yards of turquoise polyester chiffon and some Christmas ribbon; having perfect pitch or a photographic memory for lines or the ability to do accents of many lands—had way more social currency than good skin or an expensive pair of sandals.
It was my first year—some kids were on their fourth or fifth, even—and I didn’t get the biggest part in my main play—I was the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet—but I did perform Ann in a staged reading of Albee’s At Home at the Zoo. And in truth, I had just as much fun being a props assistant on the musical.
That month, Royston fell away: for the first time I could picture myself elsewhere, doing something consuming and unexpected. It didn’t seem impossibly beyond reach.
When I came home, I kept telling my parents and friends stories about camp. They smiled and pretended to listen, but I could see their eyes glaze. I sent too many emails and texts to my new camp friends, and was as thrilled to receive their replies as if each were a new boyfriend.
In August, I went with my parents for two weeks to a rented house on Mount Desert, where we went boating and hiked in Acadia National Park and swam in the freezing sea. I read, and started writing a play I never finished—about two friends who go camping together and one of them gets injured—and I planned all the ways I’d be different in high school, how I could transform myself: be an actress, maybe start a rock band. I started listening to Amanda Palmer, a favorite of Shu-Lee, my bunkmate at camp. I decided I’d start wearing eyeliner, dress differently—vintage seemed right, some combination of ’50s or ’60s dresses and work boots. I asked my mother if I could get my hair cut in Portland, or even Boston, somewhere more sophisticated and trendy than the Supercuts next to the Target in Haverhill, and she said sure, she’d take me to the city before Labor Day.
We made a girls’ outing of it, manicures and lunch at the Copley Plaza in addition to the haircut, done by a young guy with at least six piercings on his head alone, and his arms so brightly and fully tattooed that you could hardly see any bare skin. Once he layered my dark curls, the shape of my head looked different, and my face appeared delicately rounded rather than blockishly large. He’d been able to see my vision of my actress self—tough but soft, outgoing but cool—without having to be told. Like he got me, somehow. He assured me I had gorgeous eyes, which meant a lot to me even though he was gay and talked nonstop about his new boyfriend. My mother didn’t have her hair cut, but she did buy a peacock-green cocktail dress in a boutique on Newbury Street after trying it on twice—both before and after lunch—and agonizing mildly about the price.
“Where will I wear it?” she fretted. “It only makes sense if I wear it.”
“You can wear it to sleep in, if you like,” I said. “You can wear it to any dinner party. It’s not that dressy.” I could tell she really wanted it and needed to be given permission. My mother veers between extravagance and unexpected stinginess. When she’s putting out disintegrating leftovers for the third day in a row, she refers to her own parents’ wartime childhoods as if that explained it; and she’ll persist with the slippery nub of soap at the sink until it’s too small to hold. But she can turn around and blow hundreds of dollars in a single day on things that aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. She calls this spontaneity. She’s probably worn the dress three times.
I was pleased to see her get the dress, and we ate lobster salad off white linen for our ladies’ lunch, and I felt beautiful and new after the care of the tattooed stylist. On the way back to Royston in the car, I said to her, as we looked out at the highway (even the interstate verges were rendered beautiful by the mottled late-afternoon sun) that I felt thankful for our day together, and fortunate that she was my mother.