Kids Across America

                    My eyes reluctantly open at the discomfort surrounding me. The stractchy, fuzzy comforters are equal to the affect of a thousand mosquito bites. The mattress is covered in a plastic layer that sticks to my skin at every attempt to pull away from it. It is very difficult to find sleep in these conditions yet I am awakening to a challenge of this theory. All of my cabin mates are sound asleep except for the homesick kid who spends most of his nights writing apology letters soaked in tears. He believes his parents sent him here on punishment but the brochures wouldn't advertise such a purpose.

                    I lay staring at the wooden ceiling. Seconds turn to minutes and minutes to hours. I drift off once more into a dream of a much more inviting place. This place is called home, where you wake up to the smell of blueberry pancakes and fresh sizzling bacon. A place where you wake up in a bed you can roll over in three times without worrying about falling off the top bunk. How in the world did I end up here?

                    This dream is interrupted by the commotion of my cabin mates. Its shower time. Showers where you are greeted by used towels hanging over the rod and the occasional centipede that looks at you as an invader of its home. The only protection from spectators is a silky, translucent curtain about as useful as air itself. The cabin leaders sacrifice a kid to "the shower" one by one, so my only option is to pretend I'm sleep for the rest of the week. I fail almost immediately when I hear hysterical sounds of laughter in every direction. I slowly rise in curiosity still trying to play off the boy-half-sleep role.

                     "Did you see it?" Jalen just catches enough breath to get the words out. I give him a confused look and he waves me out of the bed. I hop out of the bed and follow him across the rugged, wooden floors risking foot splinters along the way. He goes straight for the bathroom, a place I've seized to even look at in the five days I've been here. Fear outweighs any natural human needs. We're finally there when he points directly at the toilet. I extend my neck just enough to get the visual of the foot long turd floating in the water. I look at Jalen who is laughing so hard you can see the veins rising from each side of his neck. All I can think is these kids are crazy. Everyone else is sitting on their bunks laughing. Consider that my shower.

                        After showers we head out for our daily activity and I'm happy to leave the cabin which is completely made of wood. The windows are about 6 feet off the ground but are wide open which invites anything that can either climb of fly. My group walks out to join the rest of the boy's camp, and I quickly find that today it would've been much better to stay inside because the temperature has clearly risen above a hundred degrees. The sun's rays are piercing. I'm almost certain that I've gained such a tan in this moment alone that if this place actually had mirrors I'd be unrecognizable. The atmosphere is so energetically draining that every step feels likes fifty. I was almost surprised when I actually saw kids running around and playing with the poisonous spiders that are so commonly found amongst the gravel and sand. When a kid asked a cabin leader if the spiders were really poisonous he answered yes but its teeth are too big to bite you. This was the verbal interaction that began a genocide. These kids obviously share different backgrounds than me. This place may seem like a paradise to them when in my comparison it isn't even a shadow of the luxury I receive at home.

                        Our activity of the day was swimming. I'd imagined myself at the safer end of the pool all alone because I was the only person in my cabin that couldn't swim. We have to walk to the pool which is on the farside of the camp. Fatigue began to set in after the first few centimeters of the hike. Now we have been walking for about thirty minutes. We weren't even close to the pool when I began to realize that I clearly don't belong here. I was thinking of writing an apology letter of my own when I saw a beautiful group of girls walking about twenty yards in front of me. They were all wearing bikinis, and they were all heading for the pool. I knew then at that moment that this was the place for me.