Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

The real reason for going to sleepaway camp

It was searingly hot, even for the first days of August, and since camp was ending tomorrow anyway, most of the campers were down by the lake cooling off. Too embarrassed to wear a bathing suit in front of her mean cabinmates, Jenny was in the weaving room, threading a strand of raw purple silk through the stays in her weeping-willow-twig loom in a risky attempt to make something more colorful than her collection of lumpy barf-green napkins. She felt like the miller's daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, trying to weave straw into gold.

Suddenly someone came up behind her and put his hands over her eyes. It was Matt. At least she was pretty sure it was him, since she hadn't really made eye contact with any other boy the whole time she'd been at camp. "Hey," she giggled nervously. He'd only waved hello to her twice from afar since barging into her cabin more than two weeks ago. Now he was touching her?

"Okay, here's what I want you to do. You've got to stand up very carefully, and we're going to walk like this to my cabin." He kept his hands sealed over her eyes.

It wasn't Matt, Jenny realized, her body rigid. "But—"

"Don't be scared," the boy whispered in a lispy, spitty voice that made Jenny relax just a little. If things got weird she could probably kick Lispy's butt. "Nothing bad's gonna happen. Promise."

Wanting to trust him, she stood up and allowed him to lead her out of the art building. "Come on, it's going to be fun," he murmured spittily in her ear as he pulled her down the path to his cabin. Jenny was pretty sure Matt lived in cabin 12, the last of the boys' woods cabins. Was that where they were headed?

"What's going to be fun?" she demanded, stumbling forward. It was hard to keep her footing when she couldn't see where she was walking and her boobs were bouncing so much it hurt. Where's he taking me? she wondered, feeling scared and curious all at the same time.

"You'll see," the boy lisped, adjusting his grip over her eyes. His fingers smelled like bug repellent. Everything at camp smelled like bug repellent or pee or peanut butter.

"Okay, step up. Another step up," he directed, guiding her carefully up the wooden cabin steps. He opened the creaking screen door to the cabin and they stepped inside. Jenny's heart was pounding. Sweat beaded on her upper lip and trickled down the unventilated crevice between her boobs. "Now walk forward one, two, three steps—" He removed his hands from her eyes and gave her a little push between her shoulder blades. Jenny stumbled forward, right into Matt, who was standing in the middle of the cabin, his freckly face so red it was almost purple. He didn't smile at her or anything. He didn't even look at her.

"Whoa," she faltered, regaining her balance. She smiled cautiously up at Matt. "What's going on?" He swallowed nervously, the bump of his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. He looked terrified.

"Go on," Lispy urged. Jenny glanced behind her. He was a year or two older than she, tan and muscular in a sleeveless black Puma T-shirt, with dark hair shaved into a crew cut and a cocky smirk on his face. He actually looked a lot more threatening than he sounded.

"You know you want to," came another boy's voice. She looked up to find two more campers huddled on the top bunk of the bed on the far side of the room. The cabin was four times the size of the one she shared with Rachel and Jill and was decorated with boyish paraphernalia like posters of soccer players and the various archery awards they'd won over the summer. The mattress the two boys were huddled on was made up with black pirate sheets covered with white skulls and crossbones. The idea that one of the boys was so into pirates he had actual pirate sheets almost made Jenny smile.

"Honk, honk," one of the pirate boys croaked, holding up his hands and squeezing his fingers open and shut.

Blushing furiously, Jenny turned back to Matt. Whatever it was Lispy and these other boys were doing, she had a feeling Matt wasn't completely in on it. He took a deep breath, swallowed again, and then ducked down and pressed his dry, chapped lips against hers. Then he reached up and quickly patted her chest with his clumsy freckled fingers.

"Hey!" she cried, taking a step back. "Stop it." Her boobs were so new even to her, the idea of anyone besides the woman from the Village Bra Shop touching them was completely out of the question. 

"I'm sorry. I wanted to kiss you," Matt stammered, his freckly face a tie-dyed mixture of purples and pinks. "But they made me—"

"Lame," one of the pirates jeered.

"He saw your boobs on the Internet," Lispy joined in. "We all did.

Jenny whirled around to glare furiously at him through tear-filled brown eyes. She'd thought Matt might turn out to be nice. She'd thought he might be her first boyfriend. But he was just as big a jerk as Lispy and his pirate friends. Was it fun making her feel so bad? If this was their idea of fun, then she felt sorry for them. They were losers; they'd probably always be losers.

Well, at least she got a first kiss out of it. That's something.

"Have a good rest of the summer, guys," she told them breezily, blinking back the tears and refusing to reveal how angry and humiliated she was. She pushed open the screen door and hurried down the steps of the cabin, letting the door bang shut behind her. She raced down the path through the stinking, mosquito-infested woods. Maybe she would be the kind of girl who had more boy-friends than girl-friends, but those boys were so immature they hardly counted as boys.

Get used to it, sweetie—they're all like that. But they get hotter with age, and we learn to be more tolerant.