When we were kids we went to summer camp. It was this sleepaway situation in the woods in New York, everyone had these accents that made no sense but everyone said the things we were used to and everyone’s parents were fighting and everyone’s sister was hot and everyone chewed gum too loud and everyone was trailed by some friend of a neighbor or a cousin’s cousin and it always ended up being some grimy little kid with no shoes on, a little Gollum shadow that lived off the extra doritos they stole.
The camp was run by an old man named Devon who wore this strange crop top and tube sock outfit out of an 80’s slasher or 80’s porn or 80’s slasher porn. He ran the camp and was in charge of the counselors who really just ran themselves and they were mostly older high school kids that either used to go to the camp and didn’t know what to do with their summers anymore or they were pervs. Those were the two options, though there was some overlap.
We haven’t gotten to the main point of this yet but the last bit of background you need on this camp, Camp Aramak if we haven’t named it yet, is that every year something happens. There’s always one big event that that year is remembered for. The counselors, the kids, Devon, everyone knows and respects this. It’s never the same thing twice, its not always bad (though usually it is) and it is usually agreed that, while we can all reference the year by this event, we don’t share the event outside of the camp. What happens in Vegas etc etc. These rules aren’t firm of course; depending on the event, sometimes things get out. Some examples include 2003: the owl year; this was the year an owl took out a few campers. Different people tell the stories differently and they are always passed down by siblings and neighbors and the legend grows and shrinks but today that year lives on as the killer owl taking out Scotty’s older brother, Gretchen’s friend Katie, and Perry the Cabin 12 counselor, all in one week. 2010 was the year of Greg’s Chili. One of the cooks wasn’t paying attention and accidentally poisoned the chili. Exactly how and with what (and whether or not it was an accident) will differ depending on who is telling that story, but everyone at camp, every single counselor camper, was on the toilet, in the shower, and in the woods, pooping their brains out all night. The cook was never actually blamed for this, that fell on Greg, a first-year who dropped the “spirit stick” during color wars, cursing the camp. There are many more examples but we only tell you all this to explain the event that happened the last year we went to camp, the last year Cabin 6, as we knew it, was still a unit.
There was a boy named Ben or Brad or Breck or something with a B. He was at camp for his first year, though he was just a year younger than us. His family must’ve found out about the camp late or his parents sold their normal vacation home or who knows what. It wasn’t common for someone his age to be a greeny but he was and it caught everyone’s eye. It sort of did actually. The real thing that caught people’s attention was his looks. He was perfect. His face looked like no one had ever given him bad news. He looked so good it made us immediately want to trust him. It was like someone had cooked up someone in a lab who was designed to make Cabin 6 girls blush and fight and yell and cry. It was impossible to believe he would ever get old. We nicknamed him Dorian, just among us, and we called him D in public and that nickname stuck with everyone and we don’t know if he ever found out how he got it but he never seemed to mind. That was another thing, or maybe it was the same thing, just another level of it, it’s hard to know, but we say we don’t think he minded because he never spoke. He was dead quiet. Not in a creepy slasher way or a burn-bugs-with-a-magnifying-glass way or even a dumb way. When smart people made jokes he’d laugh before the other kids caught the joke, we knew he was in there, but because we couldn’t figure out a way to really read him, he became an obsession. And we say that as Cabin 6 but also the camp in general: obsessed. His counselor even would say things like “D, do you want to call your parents at all?” (not allowed), “D, is everything alright at home buddy?” (not really your business is it Kendall?), “D, you’re mad funny today.” (how so?).
That year though, wasn’t just the year of Quiet Dorian, it was more complicated than that.
A typical camp season is 10 weeks. All of the typical kids summer games, color wars and capture the flag and crafts and football and water sports and tie dye. Despite the distracting Greek god we all orbited around that summer, it went off pretty much without a hitch for the first chunk of weeks. In fact it went off really really well. Counselor Paul and Counselor Katherine had sex, which a lot of us had been waiting for for a few summers, he was so sad about it and she was clearly stringing him along for the fun of it. Also Sebastian passed the swim test, which shouldn’t be anything but we’d watched him fail the swim test, and then cry, and then try to call his mom, and then cry about not calling his mom, for the past few summers. When he got out of the lake and threw off his life jacket he cried again too, but this time was a happy cry and we threw woodchips at him and called him a wiener but he smiled through it and we did too, for him. Anyway that’s all to say, the summer didn’t have a real event. D, despite being a distraction, didn’t merit his own year, and nothing of note really happened good or bad, other than the few small things we’ve mentioned. All of this made us, and the counselors, and Devon, a little on edge. If we were boys we may equate this to something like a no-hitter. It isn’t the perfect analogy but basically it was a feeling around the camp that none of us wanted to name or look right at because then it might turn into something, we might talk a bad thing into existence. We aren’t boys though, we are Cabin 6 so maybe we’d just say it’s a spider or something, that you know is in the room, but you don’t know where, and if you go looking for it then you just may find it and you don’t want to see that so you just make sure to shake your shoes out in the morning and fluff your pillow a little extra before bed and try not to look too hard in the corners.
Well then we get all the way to week 9 weekend. That is usually talent show weekend. It’s the last weekend we have before the parents and the buses come and the autumn comes behind them and the schoolwork and you have to hug your friends and you have to tell them we’ll never forget that summer and we’ll write every week we promise. But what would we write about? What would we remember from this summer? There hadn’t been “the thing”. The spider and the strikeout, where were they? We couldn’t call it the year Seb finally swam could we? These were the thoughts going into the talent show.
One more very quick thematic word before getting back into the action. We know we know, why not just fold these thoughts in more organically? Why can’t we just write things nicely instead of giving us whiplash with the back-and-forth? Shut up. We just want to say, as a Cabin, maybe just remind you really, that when someone who looks like Dorian, or someone who looks the way you think god looks, and if they are quiet, even just a little quiet but especially someone functionally mute, when these things are combined, you have no option but to project. We did, as a cabin, as a camp, we put all of our hope and dreams and fears and insecurities in him as we needed, each of us different. Before the talent show, if you had split all of the camp up and interviewed us separately about what we believe Dorian is like, you would’ve had a hundred answers. Jordan from Cabin 2, the one with the recently and messily split parents would’ve said he's the type of guy who would never ever leave you, the type of guy who didn’t even know what a secretary was or how to get her pregnant with twins. Counselor Janine, with the gauges, would’ve called him “punk rock” or something and said he probably “skewed anarchist” or whatever. Blake, the boy from Cabin 8 would’ve said he was the best friend a guy could have, who could always keep a secret, maybe because we all kindof knew Blakes deal. The point is, we see what we want to see in people like D, and that’s their curse though we don’t think they ever know that. And we definitely didn’t think this then but now, today, having grown up in our own lives and with families and jobs and kids and all that, we know that people like that would usually disappoint. They’d have to. Unless they turned out to be the thing you impossibly thought they had to be. Because with those eye lashes and that hair and that laugh, why wouldn’t they be, they had to be.
Anyway the talent show, we were in the back right, we sat as a cabin even when we didn’t have to. Cabin 6 was always close. Counselor Max was the emcee for the talent show because he was the counselor of Lorelai, who signed up originally and then got so nervous she threw up and so Counselor Max took over, who was actually great so far, and she had the clipboard and she was introducing the next act which was cabin 12 and they were a second-year girls cabin who would be doing a dance to a song we all hated and everyone rolled their eyes but that’s okay because everyone loved the talent show and besides this was the nameless year up to this point and Counselor Max introduced them and then looked at her clipboard and she said on-deck was “Ben D” or maybe she said Brad D or Brent D or something but she looked up confused and a little hand in the front went up and it was Dorian who had written his real first name on the clipboard for people who wanted to do a talent and then he had written D next to his name because he knew that’s what people knew him as, bless his heart and because he was compassionate and empathetic and caring and beautiful and he would never leave us or wrong us or ever cut his hair.
It took most of Cabin twelve’s dance routine for the collective understanding to set into the room, that the previously mute Dorian would be on stage in just a few minutes, regaling us with a talent that any of us could only guess, could only dream. Even the Cabin Twelve dancers looked to be grappling with this reality as they gyrated and jumped and eventually they just called it early and hustled off as the music was cut. Max was on stage in a flash and introduced D with his real name and cued us to clap and forgot to mention who was on deck and just like that, Dorian, the boy wonder, was on stage, just him and his camp, his pupils and disciples, ready to grovel for any morsel of personality he was willing to share.
This year, the one we are telling you about now, would be referred to with many names. All of the different names would be related to what D decided to give us during the talent show, though the actual name would differ depending on who was talking, though it was never ever unclear as to which year was being mentioned. We won’t bore you with the play by play, we aren’t good enough writers evidently. Here’s the point, and we apologize for kicking the legs out from under the table here, but hot people disappoint. And generally, the hotter and the quieter, the bigger the let down. The Mona Lisa had to be small. Life has to pee in your locker to remind you how hard it can be sometimes. Sometimes D has to get on stage and throw everything you had ever wanted away.
We look back on that year as one of growth, and we know the fights and blushing and the yelling and hair pulling; we know all of that was useless, is useless. We know we’ll do it again too, but even when we do we’ll at least know even then again, that it will be for naught. Cabin 6 will stay together as long as it needs, as long as the glue holds and as long as life will create a reason. New cabin sixes will come after and they’ll yell and cry and blush too. They’ll find hot quiet things to project. But maybe life will throw them a life jacket and their counselor will be someone from the old cabin six or someone who was there the year D stomped on our collective hearts and they’ll tell the new cabin six that there’s no use in all that, that pretty things don’t stay pretty and that your life can’t be measured that way. Do we make sense to you? We are withholding but life is too. Do you hear us? Does our story teach you something? Should we have said a tornado ripped through the camp and taught us about the fragility of life? Or a bear snuck into cabin 3 and ate up a dozen third-years? We don’t know what you want from us. We know that we can’t give you everything though. ■