Excerpt from "Wicked Normal"

chapter one - Birch Bog Day Camp

Yet, on the morning of the first day of camp, I could only think of all of the reasons why I love camp – the bus ride, singing songs, the flag ceremony each morning and afternoon, the arts and crafts, the pool – and my bubbling excitement suppressed all of my negative thoughts! With my trusty plaid backpack expertly stuffed by Mom with everything I could ever possibly need, I bolted from the car the moment I saw the yellow school bus arrive to take us to Birch Bog. Mom and I exchanged hugs, kisses, and loving farewells, and I boarded the bus.

As we pulled away, Mom waved goodbye, yelling, "Have fun!" and I waved back. The counselors-in-training, otherwise known as CITs, started our singing that would continue for the entire ride. I've always loved to sing so what better way is there to kick off each and every camp day but with a sing-along!? We sang the whole gamut of traditional camp songs. Oddly, I have no idea how long the ride to Birch Bog actually is because it goes by so fast when we're singing!

When we rounded into the camp's long driveway, we were emphatically getting into one of our favorite songs. It makes fun of the counselors, and we were all belting it out at full volume just as the bus came to a stop at Birch Bog Camp. Needless to say the counselors heard us coming, and they were visibly not happy about our song choice. We all reported to the Horseshoe Green for the flag ceremony to open camp for our session of summer 2009. The senior campers, who were high school students who stayed overnight for the entire summer, presented the flag. After the Pledge and announcements the counselors called each of our names to divvy us up into our groups.

My counselors looked like absolute grouches. The older one, named Traci, had blonde hair and looked maybe in her twenties. The younger one, with maple syrup colored curly hair, looked like a college kid and went by the camp name of "Gilly." How on earth grown-ups who work with kids could be so grumpy is beyond me! They looked as if we were seriously cramping their style. Surely they're paid to deal with us... so they needed to just deal!

They led us to our cabin, Cabin Six, and we sat in a big circle to think up a camp name for our group. Honestly, I can't stand when girls whine and pout and get all melodramatic to get their way. The girls in my cabin unfortunately epitomized this behavior. Ugh. Personally, I thought our cabin should be aptly named, the Obnoxious Twits, but I didn't figure that would be well received, so I didn't suggest it. Eventually we agreed to be "Glittering Trillium," even though in my opinion it's a ridiculous name. Trilliums are a perfectly fine kind of flower found in Vermont, but there's nothing glittering about them. At any rate, we made a big "Glittering Trillium" banner and decorated it to represent the girls of Cabin Six.

After that we ate snack and went for a hike. The counselors seemed to be in some huge rush. "Come on, you klutzy campers!" Traci yelled. I didn't understand why they were in such a hurry. They were stuck with us for the whole day, whether they liked it or not, and speeding through activities wouldn't actually make the constant element of time progress at a quicker pace.

"Get a move on, you lazy little girls!" Gilly encouraged. If we were supposed to be motivated by insults, it worked because their rudeness provoked me to protest their behaviors by intentionally stepping ever so slightly more slowly.

Although some people say that they feel like they are going in circles in life, we literally were. They had us hiking on some long, circling trail that led us back to exactly where we had started, just in time for lunch. As we ate, Traci, Gilly, and the other counselors actually stole parts of the campers' lunches, right off of the picnic tables! Luckily, my lunch was hidden in my backpack, and thankfully, they didn't grab my peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of my hands.

At the end of lunch, Glittering Trillium got very excited with anticipation of what would come as soon as we waited our mandatory twenty minutes after eating... swimming! There's no way our grouchy, thieving, insulting counselors could ruin swimming! The Birch Bog Lagoon, as the pool was called, had always been a centerpiece at camp. Sparkling blue and clear, no other experience at Birch Bog remotely compared to swim times at the lagoon. Sure, ever since the beginning of time, there has been the legend of Boggy, the swamp monster of the deep end, but because the pool was always so pristine, Boggy seemed like a preposterous scare tactic simply to ensure campers wouldn't go near his "hideout," located conveniently under the slide that was strictly off-limits.