I loathed summer camp. Yet this did nothing to deter my parents from sending my brother and I to the same Christian sleep-away camp in South Carolina every summer until we turned seventeen. I won't tell you the actual name of the camp, because I don't want to implicate myself in the event that some crazed arsonist burns the wretched place to cinders sometime in the near future. For now, let's call it Camp Disney Sequel, because everyone hates those.
Camp Disney Sequel was a foul and fiendish place, and not in the good way like a Cradle of Filth music video, it was in the bad way, like Mordor. The rolling hills, fresh mountain air, and arboreal verdancy were an insidious disguise for what I am pretty sure was actually a bona-fide level of Hell.
Many summer camps, you see, are filled with people. Like, a lot of people. In the hundreds. I'm talking about a metric shit-ton of people. And you're consigned into a 'cabin', a group of about eight other people of your age and gender, presided over by a couple of counselors and a wretched creature called a C.I.T (counselor in training), and you spend literally every second with these people. You wake up surrounded by your 'cabin', you have breakfast with them, you do activities with them, you eat lunch with them, you do more goddamn activities with them, you eat dinner with them, you go to bed with them, you sleep with them, and then you start the whole thing over again. You don't get a second of solitude even in the bathroom, because you are not allowed to walk the five feet to the shower house by yourself lest you suddenly forget how to breathe or something, and when you go to heed Nature's call you have to listen to your entire cabin pounding on the door and telling you to hurry up because the little wooden shack you all share has only one toilet. And you can't be like, "Okay, fuck this noise, I'm gonna split for a couple of days. I'm gonna go off and live in a tree all alone to return my heart rate to normal and enjoy some goddamn peace and quiet. Smell y'all later."
Also? These people are terrible and devoted to making you suffer.
A List of Atrocities Committed Against My Person by Employees and Fellow Inmates at Camp Disney Sequel, In No Particular Order
1.
In my second-to-last year, the sixth Harry Potter book came out right before I was to arrive at Camp Disney Sequel, so I was all jazzed to read it. But one of counselors overseeing my cabin that year (let's call her Bitchtaint) decided that she didn't like my face or something, and would not let me read this book that was mine because I had purchased it and therefore was within my legal right to do whatever I damn well wanted with it.
Bitchtaint first caught me breathlessly absorbing Chapter 2: The Unbreakable Vow (and having swoony-swoons over my boyfriend Professor Snape) at the opening campfire instead of listening to the camp director play his guitar and sing 'One Tin Soldier' for the eleventy-billionth time. Bitchtaint told me to stop. I stared at her like, "Fool, this is Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince and I think 'One Tin Soldier' is the only song this guy knows." and went right back to reading.
Bitchtaint repeated her request with the addition of a low, menacing, "I'm serious."
I made a show of sighing and putting my book on the ground, and the second she looked away, I propped the book open with my feet and leaned forward to continue reading. In retrospect, Bitchtaint was not making an outrageous demand, but in my defense this was a Harry Potter book and it had just come out. If it had been any other book I probably would have put it away. I would have sulked out of principle, but I wouldn't have been such a shit about it. However, considering that it was Harry Potter and it had just come out, I consider my actions perfectly understandable.
Upon our return to our wooden shack that evening, Bitchtaint rounded on me and angrily informed me that she had seen me reading after she had expressly forbade it. My response amounted to, "Yeah, shit happens," and on the spot Bitchtaint decided that she didn't like me reading Harry Potter period, because it promoted witchcraft. This declaration served only to amuse me.
I was less amused when Bitchtaint confiscated my book.
My book. She confiscated it.
One second my book was in my hand, and the next, it wasn't. She had it.
She took my book.
She took my book.
SHE TOOK MY BOOK.
If she had asked me to hand the book over, it would surely have come to physical combat. Bitchtaint clearly knew what the score was, because she just straight up snatched it out of my hands before I could do anything to stop her. And I was shocked, shocked. I stood there with my gob hanging open as she carried my book away and put it in her trunk at the foot of her cot.
I felt the earth tilt under my feet. My vision swam. I could smell colors. My entire world teetered on the brink. It was all so incomprehensible to me. I was so shocked that I could do nothing but stand there gaping like an idiot, and then slowly turn around and climb up into my bunk, defeated.
I lay there all night, staring at the metal ceiling and trying to comprehend what had just happened to me. I felt like a character in a Lovecraft story whom had just gazed into an abyss of cosmic horror and was left stripped of anything resembling sanity, grappling with a soul-raping despair at the terrible knowledge of the true bleak nature of being.
She took my book.
The next morning, I approached Bitchtaint and politely asked that she return my property. She refused. I restrained the urge to bite her. She informed me that these books promoted anti-Christian values and clearly had a negative influence on me. I wondered why I was restraining myself from biting her, since she was obviously asking for it. If such an incident occurred today, I would calmly explain to Bitchtaint that she was perfectly free to her beliefs, but my values were not for her to decide and it certainly was not within her rights to police my choice of reading material.
But this happened back when I was still a teenager, a very angry time for me, so I growled, "It's my book and my values are none of your damn business."
So I didn't get Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince back until the the last day of camp.
Day after day I was trapped in a singing, cheery hellscape surrounded by people relentlessly trying to coax me into taking part in some wholesome activity or another, and my one escape was entirely cut off. Perhaps I have no specific memory of my ordeal because I spent it shuttered within the confines of my mind, my last true refuge.
I engaged my hours in fevered contemplation of the yet-to-be-discovered fates of such beloved characters as populate the Harry Potter series. I had silent, mental interviews with them, trying to puzzle out their true allegiances. I concocted detailed fantasies of the Death Eaters' attack on Camp Disney Sequel, in which it would be up to me and my latent, just-suddenly-realized magical abilities to defend the other campers until Dumbledore's Army and The Order of the Phoenix respectively arrived to our rescue. Of course, there would be casualties. Bitchtaint in particular would suffer multiple applications of the Cruciatus curse only to be blown to messy smithereens by an errant flick of a wand. The camp director would be magically imprisoned within his own guitar and forced to listen to it play 'One Tin Soldier' endlessly into eternity. The seven other girls in my cabin would be rendered irreversibly mute and unable to ever annoy me again. My boyfriend Professor Snape, thrilled by my skill in the magical arts and bravery in battle, would approach me to deliver some barbed compliment in as derisive and snarky a manner as is his wont, and I would effortlessly match wits with him thereby earning his deepest respect and eternal Wuv.
It was this lurid vision that kept me from losing my grip as I dutifully marched alongside my cabin or sanded my pitifully-simple-to-construct wooden birdhouse. It was what kept me from surrendering to the void. It was what kept Bitchtaint alive and breathing rather than having her foul head mashed to a slimy pulp by aforementioned birdhouse.
Truly, J.K. Rowling has given me much.
To be continued...
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