Camp for Sad Girls
The girls cry in their bunks every night. I hear them, a chorus of soft whimpers and sobs unstifled by cotton pillowcases. If you sit and listen long enough you can begin to differentiate one from the other: Margaret’s phlegmy hiccups, Stacey’s canine sniffling. After a while it’s just another sound you become used to, like the thrum of a summer rainstorm or a cicada’s trill.
You’ll be wondering why they cry, of course. But it’s true we treat them well. It’s just another sleepaway camp, after all—a scheduled disappearance that lasts a summer’s length. Everything you’re imagining: the girls in khaki shorts and soft blue T-shirts. Cannonballs into water so cold it shocks the body at first touch. Charred marshmallows perched on the ends of pointed sticks over a smoking fire.
Occasionally you’ll catch one in the middle of a scrawled postcard to the favorite parent, looking guilty. Like it’s a crime to think of home and miss it in the same breath. She’ll hedge her homesickness, blame it on the rain—but she’s a liar. I want to stay here forever, she’ll promise, fingers crossed beneath her father’s address. At least for this girl and those like her the sadness is somehow quantifiable. Can be attributed. Misery with a cause is somehow less unsettling than the tears that come for no reason.
No, I can’t explain it. On my own sleepless nights I walk to the edge of our small empire, find the oak tree I call my own. A thick trunk and ample leaves in the summer, offering a kind of solace. In the daytime I pretend my age gives me some advantage, that I have answers, can explain the way we feel. But inevitably a tear slips down my cheek once I’m settled in the oak tree’s branches, and suddenly I can’t remember how old I am at all.