FireSweet

Effugere

What if I told you that there was a camp, that once attended, would guarantee you a complete scholarship to the college of your dreams?  What if I told you that you could attend it for eleven months out of the year and never have to take high school classes again?  That means none of the high school nightmare: any of the calculus, fighting over scholarships, or stupid teachers that don’t even know their own subject.  Survive eleven months at a camp in Tuscarora, New York and suddenly everything becomes possible.  I’m talking Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Princeton, the world at your feet.  Eleven months without your parents to set curfews, fuss about your outfits, or make you go places you hate.  Welcome to what will soon be my world, welcome to Effugere.

            It sounds amazing doesn’t it?  It gets even better.  I’m not about to tell you that it costs two million dollars to go, or that you have to be a straight-A student with tons of extracurricular activities.  My brother went last year.  My druggie, drop-out, delinquent brother, Max went to Effugere and returned a changed man, or so it seemed.  In truth; parents praise the place, and it’s easy to see why, but Effugere is every sane teenager’s deepest fear.  It’s an etiquette camp, designed to brainwash and remake teenagers, designed to squelch out our individuality and creativity.  The troublemaking children return docile and polite, every parent’s dream, every teen’s nightmare.

            Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.  However, when Max returned from his stay at Effugere he acted… different.  You can’t exactly return from an etiquette camp and still manage to drop the f-bomb in every other sentence.  He didn’t, actually; around my mother, he was a perfect gentleman.  The extent that those people had affected his thinking was almost creepy.  He was bowing now, speaking in grammatically correct sentences, and dressing well every single day.  I thought that I had lost my rough-and-tumble older brother to the evil that is prim and proper.  I sulked when he was around, not trusting this new version of my brother one bit.  He looked so empty, but my mother ate it up.  All she talked about how wonderful he was; I kept silent.  Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the ability to sink into my chair so deep that she couldn’t see me.

            “Darling?” my mother said, trying to get my attention.  “Your dinner is getting cold, you should eat it.  We wouldn’t want all of Max’s new culinary skill to go to waste now would we?”

            I scowled at her, then at my plate, and back to her again.  She had called me Darling.  I hated being called Darling, as I had told her again and again.  Then again, she never listened.  I couldn’t even remember the last time she had called me by my proper name.  I was sick of it. 

            I violently shoved my plate away from me and glared at my mother, completely losing my cool.

            “Oh yea, because it would be such a tragedy for me to do a thing to waste Max’s amazing set of skills from that overly polite hole he crawled out of.  Don’t make me laugh; he’s like a teenage butler.   ‘Come here Max!  I seem to need reheating for the exquisite dinner you have prepared for your unworthy family!’” 

            I was rolling with laughter now, smiling for the first time in a while as my teenage defiance slipped out of my mouth.  It was hilarious how much my bitterness at this new robot of a brother could make my mother, who was bad enough on her own, even more irritating. 

            “Enough.”  My mother’s tone was cold, but that only made me laugh harder.  Part of me was aware that I sounded slightly crazy now, but there was no stopping me. 

            “That’s a good one Mother.”  I gasped out in between bouts of laughter.  “Stick up for your gentle son.  It’s rude to defend yourself against your snarky sibling, don’t you know?  That would be impolite of him.   It would defy his programming.”