In Search Of - A Childish Gambino story

Chapter 7: Camp

This chapter is a throwback chapter giving you more background on Andrea and Donald and how they first met. Camp.

Summer - 17 Years Prior

Donald

Nervous didn’t even begin to describe how I felt right now. This whole scene was completely foreign to me. I honestly hadn’t seen like, real trees and shit, wilderness I guess, in so long. Besides outside through the windows on my way to school. But I usually chose to keep my nose close to a screen of some sort. But now, there wasn’t any sort of electronics around for at least a 10 mile radius. Maybe besides the walkman I’d managed to sneak in.

It helped some that my dad was the one to drop me off at what has to be the definition of Purgatory. Fucking summer camp. Camp Berry to be exact. I mean, I knew for sure that this was some sort of spiritual test when my dad told me it was run by a bunch of religious organizations. As if camp by itself wasn’t bad enough.

To make things worse, he’d dropped me off late. Everyone else had gotten moved in last night, enjoyed all the opening ceremony festivities and other bullshit. But nooo, everyone worked late last night so I had to get dropped off in the morning.

I walked awkwardly into the mess hall, trying to remain undetected by the backdoors. There were two long wooden tables parallel to each other and in turn perpendicular to a large stage in the front of the spacious room. Seating was self evident. All the girls to my left, all the boys to my right, a sea of tacky orange t-shirts.

“Well hello there!” A too peppy voice burst through my silent observations.

I looked up to see a tall, lanky white dude looming over me. Outfitted in the camp counselor gear I had only ever seen in movies and on TV before: khaki shorts that didn’t quite reach his knees, a brown tee that noted his counselor status, and the dumbest fucking handkerchief tied around his neck like he was wearing a cape.

“You must be our late check-in camper,” he continued, “Donald, right?”

I stared at him blankly in response.

“Well my name’s Ted! I’m the head counselor for the boy campers here. I’ll take your bags to the cabin for you, go make yourself comfortable and grab some breakfast!”

Before I could protest, Ted had all of my shit and was making his way quickly outside.

Great.

I sighed and decided to finally make my presence known to these dimwits I’d be spending the rest of my summer with. I was pretty sure if I just kept out of everyone’s way like normal I’d be okay.

Boy, was I wrong.

“Hey, you. Kid. I’m talking to you, Afro Punk.”

That got a lot of snickers. I hadn’t been sitting at the end of the table for an entire minute and I was already being harassed. A surly white kid was leaning over the table to get a better look at me. From what I could tell, he called the shots; the other boys eyes gleamed a little too hungrily as they watched him scowl at me.

“I’m Nick. I run shit around here.” Ah, corroborating my theories. “And if you want to survive here for the whole summer, you have to go by my rules.”

I sighed and put my utensils down. So much for eating.

“What do I have to do?”