Family + Camp (working title)

Chapter 33 Part 2: Enjoy the Silence

This was the thing: back at Fields, she'd had friends who were also coworkers. And because she'd had Len, she didn't feel completely unmoored when the end of summer came around and all the other campers and staffers went back to their own hometowns, schools, and lives. She had a life that was camp as well as the outside world. Because, let's be honest: camp was a bubble. It was a magical mystery tour of joy and growth and laughter that she got to be a part of 365 days a year. Three hundred and sixty-six during Leap Years.

But this year would be different because...because she did not have a Len, a person who fit into camp but who also fit into the outside world beyond the bubble. And this was her last year of childhood before going off to whichever college would take her. So far, she'd met no locals who would be attending Sierra High School where she was enrolled for the fall.

She did not have Len.

Speaking of...Nell thought that things between them were in a pretty healthy place, all things considered. Sure, she had kissed him, but they had worked it out. He'd helped her pack. He'd written her The Catcher in the Rye note, which she had successfully not thought about until now. But never mind. They were fine. Or they would be because she'd sent him the letter. Truthfully, she had been too busy to dwell on him much lately. See: the aforementioned new friends...
Which brought her back to: What would happen when these new friends left? How would Nell do with that? 

And that brought her back to missing Len.

She wiggled her whole body on the bed, shaking off the Missing of Len, which was, all of a sudden, like a deep pit in several places—her stomach, her heart, her throat, her head. She could not have him. So she had to stop missing him.

With what felt like superhuman strength, she went back to the problem at hand: new friends.
Most of these people seemed to live hours away, like in San Francisco or suburbs and towns she had never heard of, but they all seemed to know (San Jose? Vallejo?). They would go back to their lives, and that was going to be a challenge for Nell, because while she was used to meeting new people every year at camp, she was not used to meeting new people every year at school. She was definitely not used to being the new girl.

Oh, my god, she thought, mind slightly panicked. What was that going to be like? To be the new kid on the block?And a senior at that? Her cohort would be a tight knit group. She would have to either try to infiltrate that or just ignore it. What if they wanted to kick her ass? Haze her? Or, perhaps worse, what if they completely ignored her?

Quite frankly, this was pissing her off. She'd had it too easy not caring about shit like this. She'd had her friends, her community, and she had not had to worry about any of this nonsense!

Nell thought back to the students who had transferred into Collins over the years. Sophomore year, there'd been a new kid from Idaho, Millie Wheeler. She was short, red-haired. Her hair had made her the talk of the small high school for a week, but hair was hair, and Millie was cool. She was also smart, which earned her bonus points in Nell's book. They had become friends. Not super close. But Millie held her own as a transfer student.

Okay. So, Millie Wheeler would be Nell's role model in the fall. Things to remember to do then:

Seek out the smart kids.
Seek out the kids who had nice smiles.
Seek out the kids who didn't seem to care too much about fashion yet still tried, especially when it came to hygiene.
Seek out the kids who talked to her first.
Do not write anyone off, even if other kids told her to. They were going to be seniors for fuck's sake. Popularity did not matter at this point. Not messing up her 3.98 GPA ,and possibly bringing it up to a 4.0 or better with AP classes, did.

Oh, damn! What if her new school didn't offer AP classes? This was something she had not given any consideration to before. Fuck!

Nell sat up on her bed. She needed to find a local high school student ASAP.