♦◊♦

5.

After treating my injuries, the nurse scribbled some notes into my medical file and then called my father. She signed me out of the infirmary and reminded me not to fall asleep, to which I said that I would absolutely do my best to stay awake, but I couldn’t promise anything.

What can I do to make you promise not to fall asleep, she said.

Just don’t make me wear this eye patch, I said.

But you look like a pirate, she said pleasantly.

I wore the eye patch over the butterfly bandage, which the nurse had stuck across my eyebrow, and with this new cycloptic vision, I spotted the object of my affection walking across the rotunda toward where I had situated myself to wait for my father. I waved hi at her, and she came over.

Hi there, she said.

Oh my gosh, what happened to your face, she said.

I ran into a locker, I said.

Are you OK, she said.

I’m OK now, I said.

What’s the eye patch for, she said.

To protect my eye, I said. The nurse made me wear it.

I’m glad you’re OK, she said.

I am too, I said.

I stood up from the bench and pretended to look for my father’s sedan turning onto campus. I shook my head as though I had mistaken another vehicle for his and sat back down.

Are you coming tomorrow morning? she said. They’re announcing the retreat.

Where is the retreat, I said.

In the mountains, she said.

It fills up early, she said. So bring your deposit if you want to go.

Oh, should I go? I’ve never been, I said.

Do you want me to go, I said.

Of course I want you to go.

Then I’ll go, I said.

♦◊♦

6.

My father hesitated to fund my participating in the retreat that weekend until I told him how I had convinced her to pay me back for the calculator.

You know those things are expensive, he said.

It’s hard enough as it is for me to keep track of everything on my own, he said.

I know, I said.

So then what did she say, he said.

That she couldn’t afford it just yet, I said.

And, he said.

I still had money leftover from some random chores I had performed several weekends before, and so I opened my wallet to show him its folded contents. At a stoplight, he pinched the bill between his fingers and held it up to the light.

That’s only a five, he said.

She’s paying in installments, I said.

That seemed to satisfy him, for he tucked the bill into his front pocket before downshifting wordlessly as we rounded a turn.

OK, I’ll write you a check tonight, he said at the next stoplight.

He reached over and awkwardly rubbed my head, and I let him do so despite the pain.

Later, after we had arrived home, I realized that I needed to quadruple my income for the next few weeks if I wanted to avoid disappointing him. I had no idea how to get more money, though, short of selling drugs and pornographic magazines like some of the other boys at school. They had an entrepreneurial spirit I sorely lacked.

This new monetary crisis brought my headache back to full strength and made my eyebrow throb beneath the patch, so I went through the house in search of a pain reliever. When my father caught me rummaging through the pills in the kitchen, he sent me to bed to sleep it off. I was too tired to argue.

I got up sore and forgetful early the next morning and found a check for the deposit on the kitchen table. Next to it, spread out in neat little piles, lay the assorted contents of the backpack: calculus homework far beyond my capabilities, some honors English assignments, an odd paragraph or two written in a language I could not understand. And each one bore my father’s cramped handwriting, occasional thin spots from his erasing too much, a handful of sticky notes marking several problems that he wished for me to address. I wondered how long he had stayed awake to complete everything. I wondered why he hadn’t recognized the handwriting wasn’t mine.

♦◊♦

7.

The rest of the week passed without mishap. No one blamed me for stealing the other backpack when I traded it for my own, which had rested quietly in the hallway all the while. My history teacher allowed me to make up the work I had missed on account of my head injury. I managed to turn in the deposit and save a spot on the trip, though I had to forge my father’s signature on the check. I had trouble judging the nature of this omission. Had he purposefully withheld his signature as a kind of subtle disapproval of my new romantic interest? This from someone who seemed to invite a new woman into our lives every few months. Or had he become suddenly lax in his own financial affairs, despite how often he preached the opposite to me?

When Saturday morning arrived, I found myself sitting with my fellow students on an old school bus, which delivered us to a small, folksy looking camp in the mountains east of the city. Counselors herded us into a large outdoor auditorium, explained the schedule for the weekend, as well as the camp regulations of conduct, and then released us to our bunks so that we might unpack our duffel bags.

During free time before lunch, I searched out the girls’ cabins, though the rules insisted that I avoid doing so. I loitered on the gravel trail just before the neutral coed zone ended so that I might accidentally meet her on her way back to the common area. I found a stick and whittled at it with my pocketknife, which my father had insisted I bring, though I didn’t know why. After a few feeble attempts at making a cross out of two small branches, I heard voices, the shrill sounds of girls my own age, and then a group of them turned a corner in the path, led by none other than my crush. As they approached, I saw that she had on a bright orange shirt with the word COUNSELOR across her chest. I felt anxious to see her wearing clothes other than our school dress uniform; the shirt fit her closely, revealing the surprising curve of her breasts.

She smiled when she saw me. The other girls twittered nervously around us, some of whom I recognized from a few of my classes.

Hi, I said to her.

Still wearing the eye patch, she said.

Yeah, not sure if everything’s all healed, I said.

It makes you look older, she said.

I feel older, I said.

She laughed, and I looked intently at a bug crawling on my arm.

So you’re a counselor, I said.

They let a few of the upperclassmen do it every year, she said.

Which brings me to a question, she said. What are you doing up here?

Exploring, I said.

Why don’t we explore the other way, she said.

She edged past me and her entourage of girls followed. I gave them a little time before nonchalantly walking after them in order to maintain what I thought to be the bearing of someone intent on examining new territory. I looked at each tree, beneath every rock, at each tree again, and by the time I returned to the main camp ground, I had missed the first activity. I spent the next few minutes trying to locate my group, which had gathered on the small island out in the middle of the swimming pond. The counselor, an ostrich-looking sort of kid, led us in the next activity, one of those trust exercises in which you close your eyes and fall backwards into the waiting arms of the group. We assembled ourselves in two rows next to a tall tree stump, and our counselor chose the first faller. The kid stood above us, prepared himself as if to pray, but then turned around and said that he couldn’t possibly trust me enough to catch him. Apparently, I had missed quite the bonding session beforehand.

♦◊♦

8.

After lunch, the counselors explained the afternoon’s activities, which involved a ropes course high in the trees, a zip line down the mountain and over the pond, a climb up some man-made cliff face. These activities were meant to challenge our faith, they explained. They were supposed to make us stronger. Then they passed out carabiners and climbing harnesses, which we all strapped weirdly onto our lower halves.

I fell into a small group of students who needed help to figure out the complex system of loops and webbing. We lined up near the climbing wall to get checked out, while those who had correctly harnessed themselves horsed around by the picnic tables—an impromptu game of tug sprang up and soon the stronger of the boys were yanking the weaker ones around and dangling them in the air. I gave silent thanks for my inabilities, since they had saved me from possible humiliation, until I saw her walking down the row, kneeling in front of each student, checking buckles and clamps.

She approached me and smiled.

Having trouble, she said.

No, I think I got it, I said.

I tried backing away from her, but she grabbed my hips and dropped down on her knees in front of me.

You’ve reversed the webbing here, she said.

Through the buckle, I mean, she said.

She tugged at the buckle just beneath my belly button and re-threaded the webbing. I looked down at the top of her hair, which she had parted on the side and pulled back into a short ponytail. She had not managed to get the part exactly straight, and small tufts of loose hair sprouted at odd intervals.

And I shouldn’t be able to get more than two fingers down into your leg loops, she said.

Oh, I see, I said.

Leg loops, I said.

What, she said.

Nothing, I said.

This isn’t a joke, she said.

I didn’t mean that, I said.

She wiggled her fingers between the webbing and my thigh to show me how loose everything had become. She leaned back to check her work, and I could almost see down her shirt.

A fall could hurt pretty badly, she said as she cinched the leg loops.

If you’re too loose down there, she said. She squinted up at me.

Nerves, I guess, I said.

I’m afraid of heights too, she said.

She looked down at my pants.

Everyone shows it differently, she said.

You’ll be fine, she said.

She pulled everything good and tight so that the harness gathered the cloth around my crotch, bunching it into an embarrassing knot I could not undo. I felt ashamed. Had she felt me stir? Would she ever talk to me again? She avoided looking into my face as she moved on to the next person, and I tottered off to find my group, hoping that my condition might go down before we hiked to the ropes course.

♦◊♦

9.

Our group passed each challenge without a problem, though our counselor occasionally interrupted our progress to lead us in prayer. We prayed for strength and courage. We prayed for safety. We prayed for fun. I only mumbled along a half-hearted amen to keep up appearances. I did not want to be that guy, the guy who let everyone down, even though I felt more and more hopeless as the afternoon drew to a close. After all, I had failed. I had humiliated myself. I had ruined any chance of winning her over, all because of my body, this out-of-control thing, this clumsy baggage.

By the end of the day, after the hands of every member in the group lifted me to the top of a flat-faced wall so that I could ring a bell, I had withdrawn so completely into my head that I lost touch with everything around me. Back on solid ground, a boy pointed at a cut on my leg, and I rubbed it with my finger until the blood blended into my skin.

We finished the last of the exercises and went to dinner. I ate quickly so that I could retire to my bunk and curl up on my bed. My father had packed me a little battery-powered fan in case it got hot. I flicked this on and pointed it at my head. I planned to sleep through the evening’s activities, whatever they may have been.

♦◊♦

10.

I awoke to a voice in my ear, saying my name quietly, and when I opened my eyes, I saw her head above my face. She had climbed halfway up the ladder to my top bunk. She clicked off the fan.

Why aren’t you at the pond, she said. Be honest.

I feel numb, I said.

I don’t feel anything, I said.

I think it’s OK not to feel anything, she said.

She helped me sit up and curved her arm around my shoulders.

You’re too young for me, she said.

You know that, right, she said.

I nodded. I tried to think what my father would say about a woman like this one, a woman who never seemed to make a mistake. I wanted to say what he would say. I wanted to say the words to her face, to thank her, to ask for her forgiveness, to tell her that I would miss her. But before I could speak, she gently took off my eye patch, and then she leaned over. I suddenly felt very afraid that she might try to kiss me. Instead, she grasped my hand and raised my fingers to the rough scab above my eye. Through the window I could clearly see the pond in the distance and a man standing in the water, immersing one after another the students who waded out to meet him.

♦◊♦

11.

Upon my return home, I discovered that my father had once again welcomed a strange woman into our midst. She greeted me pleasantly from the front seat of the sedan, introducing herself as a friend, and then tapped a cigarette from a cellophane package.

You don’t mind, do you, she asked, the cigarette already lit off the glowing plug in the dash.

He doesn’t mind, my father said.

I don’t mind, I said.

But I rolled down the window in order to make some statement against my father’s interjection, to demonstrate my dismay at the greater drama playing out before me. The windows in the back seat only lowered halfway down, a function of their being childproof, and I again felt rudely thwarted in some way.

The pair of them peppered me with questions about the trip, what I had accomplished, how I had grown in my faith, if I planned to return next year, all the while holding hands across the center console. I tried to answer their questions as best I could without giving away myself, without fully committing myself to this inane conversation, but then the woman broached the subject of my romantic interests.

And your girlfriend, the woman said.

What girlfriend, I said.

Your father said you had a girlfriend, the woman said.

She broke your calculator, the woman said.

I don’t feel good, I said. I had begun to sweat heavily, and that bittersweet taste of saliva flooded my mouth.

Are you going to be sick, my father said.

I’m sorry, I said.

No, it’s my fault, the woman said. She flicked the cigarette out of the window.

My father pulled the car off the side of the road. I unbuckled myself and pushed open the door. I bent over in the grass. My father stood next to me, patting me comfortingly on the back. The woman stood downwind of us, smoking another cigarette, watching me curiously.

♦◊♦

—Photo thomasgood/Flickr