Brief content warning: description of past harassment and sexual assault, based on real-world events in an industry known for the same. It's not long and it's hopefully not gratuitous, and if you have a problem with how I've portrayed it please let me know. This will not be a recurring feature of the series.
This is the second part of What's Left of Me, a series I started after some thinking about what I valued in erotic fiction. Based on the eleven thousand words in part one, apparently what I value is not having sexytime. Oops. Unlike Chapter 1, this story includes a good bit of flirting and some chatter about sexual histories good and bad, though no boots are knocked during this chapter.
The rest of the week went by quickly and pleasantly enough. We'd start at eight and knock off for the day between three and four, with frequent breaks to rest and digest but without wasted time. Thom, Gwen, Kieran, Ryan and Hope took turns leading our little group. Thom ran us through everything twice, first from the perspective of a camp kid, then as a staff member. Gwen preferred to do everything once, sliding back and forth between perspectives, calling halts mid-activity to teach us what to expect. Kieran would have us do things, then lead a madcap Socratic debrief, asking us to analyze our own group behavior on the element. Ryan approached the training as a lecture, giving us a full breakdown of the activity, then quizzing us as we did it. Hope preferred to teach by example.
We'd started to develop our own routines and get a sense for how everyone interacted. Kieran and Ryan were opposites in most ways. Kieran was flighty and Ryan calm and steady. Kieran liked to joke around and play little tricks, and he and Thom treated Hope like a little sister. And he was incorrigibly flirty with all four of the ladies, and sometimes with Ryan. Hope played along, Gwen shot him down, Gabby blushed and stammered, and Emily flirted back so outrageously that Thom, laughing near to tears, threatened to call Kieran's wife to tell her her husband was humping legs again. Emily caught my eye at that, gave me an innocent little look and another of those devastating winks. Yet for all that, he was one of the stars of that week, more emotionally intelligent than I expected and more perceptive than I realized.
The other star was Gwen. On that first day she'd come across as an ice queen, resting bitchface brought to life. And she played into that, most of the time. She didn't talk much in the mornings, didn't waste a lot of words making small talk. But she knew her stuff backwards and forwards. If something needed to be done, she could do it as well as anyone, quickly, quietly, without drama. No one worked longer or harder. But behind her hard shell and ice-blue eyes, she had a goofy streak a mile wide and a way with a Dad joke at an unexpected time. It was nice seeing that side of her come out, when it did.
Those two carried our training group. They were in a tier by themselves. Ryan gave us the information we needed, and he answered our questions accurately and thoroughly. But he needed us to ask for help, and he fixed one thing at a time. Kieran would see something before it happened and correct it. Gwen would see the same thing, help fix it and thought about what else might need correcting. Ryan didn't have that kind of vision, or maybe he didn't want to get that invested. Hope, I thought, had enthusiasm in buckets, and energy to spare, and she knew everything she needed to do. She just hadn't figured out how to teach it yet, and when she trained us Gwen and Kieran quietly reinforced the 'why' while Hope gave us the 'what' and 'how'. Thom drifted in and out – I suppose as a director he had a lot of other demands on his time, even in the summer. He might have preferred to play his banjo and maintain some distance; that was an option too. Rank, after all, has its privileges.
**
In the afternoon of the second day, we were each asked to lead an activity as the instructor. Emily was great, taking to it like a duck to water, showing an activity where kids would step across platforms of different sizes and heights without falling and wrapping it in a silly story about mushrooms and plumbers and a kidnapped princess that edged right up to the line of inappropriate. Scott was pretty good too, though he had a sort of fussiness that seemed appropriate for a kindergarten teacher. Gabby's pick – a team balancing exercise on a cable – was a little ambitious, and both Kieran and Thom delighted in trying to break the rules she could remember without getting caught. Dave picked something simple and led it without much enthusiasm, the group behaved themselves and I wondered if Thom, Gwen and Kieran had already written him off as a dud.
I wondered if they'd written me off that way too, after my attempt.
I'd chosen the same cable-balance exercise Gabby did, and while I did a better job controlling the group, my presentation was mechanical and wooden and the whole thing felt stilted. I'd caught the three senior folks exchanging looks at various points, and I wasn't surprised when Gwen held me back as the group moved on.
"Try to remember," she said gently in her drawl, "this supposed to be fun. You did good rememberin the safety stuff. Don't need to give it to the kids all up front. They'll tune y' out. Listen and watch and jump in when you need to. Give 'em some freedom, they're here to have a good time. Loosen up a lil."
Not the worst feedback, I guess, but not praise either.
The next days, Wednesday and Thursday on the high course, were better. It clicked for me in a way that the low course hadn't. It was more physically and technically intense. It wasn't, lacking a better word, silly. Getting to go on the zipline would be the highlight of a kid's week at camp, and Thom assured us that little Janey missing out because we'd run out of time would be the quickest way to get little Janey's mother on the phone to complain (especially if counselors got a turn, which sometimes happened). The zipline, turns out, was serious business. Our salaries weren't much, but that's what paid them. And, turned out, I was pretty good at it.
Any kid going up in the air had to wear a climbing-rated harness and be connected to steel safety cables at all times. Whoever was in charge of the zip platform, where kids would get launched across a valley, slide over a cute little creek and get caught on the far end, would be twenty or thirty feet from places where the campers left the ground to make their way to the platform. That's where bottlenecks could occur. All the connections and equipment had to be checked, and getting the kids to hook it up themselves, then wait for a check done by yelling instructions back and forth, was hit-or-miss. Every day, two of us summer folks would spend six hours or so moving from station to station performing those checks and keeping the whole operation running smoothly.
I quickly developed a knack for getting up into the trees and anchoring myself just so, giving me both hands to work with. We had three buckles, two carabiners, a rope and a pulley to check, and a slow check could take a minute, or more if something was wrong. By the afternoon of our first day at the zipline, I was getting checks with an unscrewed carabiner and two loose straps complete in fifteen seconds or fewer. Kieran told me that, normally, they didn't train summer folks on the platform, but he'd talk to Thom about making an exception for me. It felt good, a salve against the imposter syndrome I'd started to feel.
The fourth day was more off-the-ground work. We learned to belay climbers attempting to scale the flimsiest, most awkward rope ladder I'd ever seen, a series of hanging logs held together with cables and massive staples for hand- and foot-holds, and an old, algae-stained climbing wall. We practiced strong stances and being mindful of anchoring points. Our belaying test involved catching someone leaping from a platform for a hanging trapeze; poor Emily, all maybe a hundred ten pounds of her, had to catch Ryan, who might have been a foot taller and double her weight. Emily stood too close to her anchor point, got yanked off her feet and nearly dropped the rope. She might have if Gwen hadn't been backing her up. She was sore physically and mentally the rest of the day; she'd been pretty much perfect to that point, and I'd been wondering if she'd ever make a mistake.
**
The best parts of those days were, surprisingly, the mornings. I never have been a morning person by nature, but a few minutes earlier in the morning made a big difference to my commuting time. Emily and I were the first people there, and we'd wait in the parking lot to walk down to the cabin together. When I was first, I'd close my eyes and listen to music and she'd rap on the window of my car; when she beat me there, I'd pull into the lot as she stretched and basked in the early morning sun. We'd sit on the porch until Thom pulled his big red F-150 into his reserved spot behind the cabin and unlocked the doors, or go down to the benches in front of the gym.
None of our conversations were deep, but they were comfortable, like we were rediscovering each other rather than meeting for the first time. We learned my commute took me right past her neighborhood. I recommended some bars and restaurants, and some touristy things for empty pockets; she told me about California. We compared dating histories, keeping to facts and figures, keeping the emotions hidden away for later. My two long relationships had burned out without a shared future to fuel them. 'Future' hadn't been a consideration for her; she'd only made it past a second date once, despite several attempts, with a girl who made it to date four before tonguing someone else's tonsils. Wouldn't have been a problem, Emily said lightly, if she'd asked first, but she hadn't, and anyway her choice of tonsils was problematic. We talked about our likes and dislikes on the most superficial level, and we talked about the job and the people we worked with.
David – Dave, we agreed to call him – was a bit crap. He wasn't a disaster, but he wasn't good at anything either. He was here to cruise through the summer, finish his degree and take a job earned by the sweat of honest nepotism. No one would give him any real responsibility, we thought, and that would protect him from his mistakes. That's not what we wanted, we didn't say to each other; we wanted to earn that trust. We wanted to show we had
it
, whatever it was. I thought she did, and I hoped she thought the same of me, but I didn't ask, and she didn't tell.
We weren't sure what to make of Scott. Nice guy, but after four days he felt like an outsider. Maybe it was because he had the career Emily had walked away from. Maybe it was because he'd already closed the door on working for the fall. He didn't seem to make much impression on my mind, somehow; just a sort of blandness and a sense that the real guy was hidden deep in there. I wasn't sure I wanted to meet him. Sitting one morning, leaning close enough that our shoulders brushed, Emily told me that she thought he had a petty, maybe vindictive, streak, and we amused ourselves for a brief moment by imagining the sorts of juvenile misdemeanors he might have gotten up to in his floppy sun hat and zip-off pants.
Gabby seemed okay, lively and energetic, quick to smile and laugh but often a step behind. Knowing her background as a lifeguard, we were looking forward to seeing how she performed on the pond. As we sat on the porch that Friday morning, Emily accused me, mock-seriously, of looking forward to seeing Gabby's tits in a bikini top. I told her, not fully or even mostly honestly, that it hadn't crossed my mind.
