Over the next couple of weeks I went see him every night until I was exhausted and confused. You're so pretty and I can’t even tell anyone. When his breath started to get ragged, he whispered in my ear, “Do you even know how I feel when I have to look at you running around in your shorts all day long. I closed my eyes and tried to memorize it, figuring that it was my first real kiss and I would want to remember it someday. A bright moon hung in the frame of the window behind him and he was only a silhouette when he cradled my face in his hands and leaned in to kiss me. When he opened his eyes, he didn’t seem surprised at all. What if he sent me away? What if he didn’t? Finally, I reached out and touched his bare shoulder. I found his bed and stood over him, trembling with adrenaline. I tread silently, aware that the stakes were very different than those of any of my previous transgressions. Nathan’s bunk smelled like feet and mold and was strewn with the detritus of the 8-year-old boys for whom he was a counselor. I was covered in a cold sweat when I arrived. It was a long walk across camp and the darkness outside my flashlight beam seemed alive and threatening. The night I snuck out to see him, I slept carefully on my hair, set my alarm clock under my pillow and stationed my white Keds at the ready by my bedside. But ultimately, I was asking to be loved, without grasping the possible manifestations that love might take. I was asking for it, to be sure, but what exactly was I asking for? I wanted to kiss him I thought about it constantly. This went on for weeks before I finally found the courage to seek him out alone. I gave myself asthma attacks and stomachaches with the anxiety of it all. I plotted and preened and placed myself in his eyeline at every possible moment. After that, my crush flowered into something more raw and persistent. I was flooded with the exquisite realization that I was not alone in my desire. My whole chest seemed to tighten around it. One morning in the chilly lake, Nathan swam up behind me to correct my stroke and an electrical charge passed between us that was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I imagined Nathan understood me in some fundamental way, he just didn’t know it yet. I, too, felt like an outsider, never able to summon the same gung-ho camp spirit as the other girls. He was bisexual he was friendly with Morrissey he was a model for the United Colors of Benetton. Nathan didn’t quite fit in and there were all kinds of rumors circulating about him. I spent countless hours imagining myself into a future in which I strolled through Washington Square Park with Nathan, preferably on a fall day in between college classes. Trumping all, he was from New York City, mecca of all things wild and wonderful. His dyed black hair spilled over one eye and he wore his shorts low on his hips.
Nathan was sarcastic and slouchy and unusually stylish for a camp full of spoiled East Coast Jewish kids.
I turned from real life to fantasy, and eschewed the hazardous boys my own age in favor of a secret crush on Nathan, the 20-year-old swimming counselor. I had my first boyfriend - a skinny, freckly arrogant kid a year my senior who took me for two paddle boat rides and then broke up with me, declaring me a prude and, I was sure, ruining my romantic life forever. I shaved my legs for the first time, dumped Sun-In in my hair and tanned with baby oil.
The summer I turned 12, I went to sleepaway camp. The real reason is because I believed I asked for it. Until now, I have been far too politicized to admit the chief reason I never called it sexual abuse in spite of the fact that it would be considered as much from both a criminal and a clinical perspective. The word "abuse" seems to imply victimization and has always made me uncomfortable in this instance. I never called it sexual abuse, because it felt like an overly dramatic Oprah-ization of what happened. Over the years, I have called it an "inappropriate relationship." I have called it "an incident with an older man." Most frequently, I have called it "the thing that happened that summer." As in - remember the thing that happened that summer? Names and identifying details have been changed.