Summer Camp

TRASHING AND BASHING

After lights-out each night Stacy and Abigail would gab. Dana never spoke. He felt it wasn't his place. But sometimes to Dana, it was magical hearing their sweet voices out of the pitch dark like that, almost like the whisper conversation of angels or mermaids. The hush of the wind through the White Pines, the gentle lap of the waves against the lakeshore and the harmony of the screech of crickets and hoots of owls added an ancient and wonderful chorus.

But not tonight. Tonight, the topic of conversation was the trashing and bashing boys.

When he couldn't stand it anymore, he interrupted from out of the darkness, "But we're not all like that."

"Yeah," Abigail sneered. "Right. And the Pope's Polish."

"Okay," said Stacy, ever the peacemaker. "I'll bite. What makes you so different?"

"Well, what I've always wanted in a girl was...well...a friend."

"A friend?"

"Yeah. A best friend."

"Listen," Stacy said, "I know that if I look in the Oxford Dictionary for the word, 'Computer-Geek', it's your picture I'll see beneath it. But surely, you must have had a friend at some time in your life."

"Sure. Guy friends. But it's not the same."

"Sure," Abigail cut in. "You can't have a guy friend with benefits."

Dana ignored Abigail and her dismissal of 7% of men. She was all bark and no bite. In truth he though she was kind of cute, in a Pit-Bull sort of way.

"I've always been afraid... Afraid that if I wasn't good. Wasn't the best. That my parents would take me back to wherever it was they got me from."

Dana waited in the darkness for some cutting remark that would tear his flimsy flag of truce to tatters. But he heard only silence–both girls lost in troublesome thoughts of their own.

"Saying you're afraid, needing to say you're afraid, putting it out there. That's not something you can do with another guy."

"Why is that?" Stacy whispered.

"You just can't. That's all."

"That's so sad."

"Anyway, a girl, my girl. She'd be my best friend and everything else besides. And I would never laugh or scold her when she was afraid. I would only hold her close till it went away."

"Cool," Stacy said.

"You guys are like that. I can talk to you like I could never talk to anyone else."

"Whatever," Abigail dismissed. But she sounded like she was trying to convince herself of something.

"Good night, Dana."

"Goodnight, Stacy. Goodnight, Abigail."

Then there was only the sound of the summer night.