Camp Canoa // Luke Hemmings

The One Where They Go Home

[Day +7]

There is one week left, and things start shutting up for fall. Already the on-site snack van has folded up its shutters and rattled away up the long hill to Alben, and day by day the high silhouette of the pier's Ferris wheel disappears from above the tree-line as it is unpacked and folded away. 

Some of the kids go home early, needing to be shipped off far away for school; Emma takes to loudly counting down the days until she goes to Berkeley for her new college life to begin. I realise, on the other hand, that I was supposed to read A Farewell To Arms over the summer, ready to be discussed when I get back to school, but the thought of hanging out alone in my room to read strikes dull and heavy against my heart so that I don't even want to think about it.

According to Nora, the official term for what I am doing is 'moping'. Danni prefers the term 'pining', but Calum disagrees. This isn't to say that they're not doing their best to help me – they watch Indiana Jones and Star Wars with me and they don't make fun of my sunburn, but the special treatment just serves to remind me constantly of what is wrong.

[Day +6]

I let my phone charge die down, and by the time I get around to powering it back up, I have so many missed calls and incoming messages that my phone flashes and squawks at me to clear out my inbox to make enough space. The first three texts that I can see are from my mum in varying degrees of motherly concern. With a pervading sense of my own weariness, I scroll through every text I have received in the last three months – all the stupid jokes and arrangements to meet and the 'where are you?' from one side of the camp site to the other – and I delete them all.

The instant that the inbox is cleared, there is a flurry of new messages coming in, my phone vibrating wildly in my hand for a moment before it settles, and I click tiredly through. Mum, Mum, Mum, Dad, Mum, Nora, Mum, Dad – and so on. There is nothing from Luke – not that I was honestly expecting anything from him anyway. There is also, it turns out at I scroll further down, a message from Sam.

I toss the phone away.

[Day +4]

Gordon is a dick. That much is definite. As it turns out, however, he's not a monster, and he stands in front of me with guilt tinged with only slight reluctance as he apologises.

By comparison, the text from Sam is not so easily resolved.

It reads:

Hey you never got back to me about that pizza night I'm having the first weekend back after school starts – you up for it?

I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the text for quite some time, the phone held in two hands, while Danni and Nora move about in the kitchen in front of me in search of some way to mend the broken sole of Nora's trainer. I glance up at them. For a couple of moments I watch as they bicker over the counter about whether she could get away with just tearing the sole clean off and hobble around for the next six days, and even though they are barely ten feet away from me, I feel cut out from their argument and excluded.

I text back: Yeah, sure thing. I'll be there.

[Day +4]

There is no real excitement in kayaking, despite the games that I make up for them, and most of the kids take to jumping out at regular intervals and dragging their friends for a swim rather than stick to the boring rules that I set. I have lost all control over them.

Kayaking is uninteresting, and volleyball similarly loses most of its appeal when the kids are no longer battling against their enemies from another age group. Dancercise is an absolute disaster; no matter what I try, the kids just don't get it.