When I was ten years old I was given a penpal from one town over. The reason for this was simple. In the following year I would be attending the district middle school which was a cooperative of two towns. In order to ease this transition we were all given pen pals from the other town. Mine was mental. Like legitimately, why wasn’t she permanently locked in a psych ward, mental. Why this particular individual had been chosen for me, an anti-social bug-loving girl from the back woods, I will never know. I hope it was just a lottery… a bit like Shirley Jackson’s Lottery… but still.
I have video footage on VHS tape somewhere of me regaling my class with a particularly entertaining three and a half page letter she sent me after my teacher was daft enough to ask, “Well it looks like you got a nice long letter over there! What does it say?”
“UHM…… well…. it says she got into a fight with her family and she ended up on the roof until the cops came….”
“Is there anything in that letter I should see?!”
“……….No ma’am……”
Suffice to say I didn’t make a new friend. This wasn’t unusual. By the time I did make it to middle school the next year I found myself forced into an old tradition… begrudgingly making my way to Ferry Beach. You see a long time ago some of the staff thought it’d be a great idea to make the children from both towns bond with each other sort of like those horrible team building exercises office workers are sometimes forced to endure with coworkers. Does this ever end well??
My brother went seven years before I went and hated it. I was not looking forward to the venture. It felt like hours and hours and hours on the bus before we got there. We were almost immediately given a diary which we had to write our favorite part of the day in. I wrote the obvious, the only thing we did all day, “I enjoyed the bus ride here.” LIES. After this I set about writing my first letter home.
“Dear Mom,
I made it to Ferry Beach. I already hate it here. Please come pick me up.”
I was assigned a camp counselor and a group of kids. The group of kids consisted two who were so annoying I had to restrain myself from lobbing them off the seaside cliffs into the ocean. “It was an accident!” I’d claim. But alas, no murders happened. If they did I may have pointed my malcontent at my camp counselor who was way too enthusiastic and responded to everything by yelling, “Sweet!” I thought he must have the IQ of a potato.
That night I was forced into a dorm room with three other girls, the partner I was left with because no one else would chose to be with me, and two little bitches who would badmouth me when they thought I was sleeping. My partner ended up being a bed wetter which is probably why she didn’t last the week in the dorm.
On Wednesday I was treated to an ice cold thirty second shower as the teachers cheered us on for being good sports and “saving water” with our quick dips. Saving water?! I was saving whatever the female equivalent of shriveled balls was…
On Wednesday I wrote home. “Dear Mom, I know by the time you get this I will probably be on the bus going home. Thanks a lot. I still hate it here.”
The only joy I had was at dinner one evening. Seated at my table was the most gullible girl on the planet and a boy who had a cheerfully devious mind. He convinced her the red skins in our mashed potato were actually left over squid parts from our dissections earlier on in the day (which STILL made the cafeteria reek. Good God does the stench of raw squid guts cling to one’s clothes!) She believed every word and everyone was laughing.
On Thursday night I had a fever but none of the staff believed me. Instead of sending me to the nurse they forced me on stage to perform a play with my speshul group of kids, who by the way had all week to plan a play and didn’t. I wore a trash bag and pretended to be an amoeba before slogging off stage trying not to barf.
Friday I wrote in the diary. “My favorite part of today was the bus ride home” SWEET GLORIOUS FREEDOM!
At the end of this trip I made a total of 0 new friends, though I’d like to think I learned a lot about how sometimes life just sucks and you have to deal with it on your own. Perhaps not the lesson I was supposed to learn…
