The wind moved through the pine trees and ruffled the water on the surface of the lake. I shivered a little and pulled my hoodie tighter around my round body, looking out over the water.
It was the final night of the week-long church camp my parents had sent me on, and I was trying to figure out how I was feeling about it.
I had refused to go at first, arguing that I was eighteen and they couldn't make me, but the day I learned that Alex Fetterwain was going to go, I'd told my mom to sign me up, trying to give the impression that I was giving in entirely to please her and dad.
I'd had an enormous crush on Alex for years, and the thought of being near him in a romantic mountain forest, with so many excuses to get close and make him see that I wasn't just the nerdy fat girl from Spanish class, that I had spiritual and intellectual depths and that -- although I might be sexually inexperienced in physical terms -- I had read a lot of fic and was willing to do anything to please him.
And on that front the week had turned out to be a gigantic disappointment. Alex had given as little indication that he knew I existed here in this pine-woods retreat space, surrounded by some fifty or sixty campers and counselors, as he had ever done back in school, surrounded by fifteen hundred or so students and faculty.
But it hadn't been all a horrible, tragic waste of time. One of the counselors, a college senior named Melissa, had seemed to make it her particular mission to draw me out of my shell, asking me questions about the anime boys I was doodling in my notebook and, when she had eventually dug far enough to learn that I was interested in poetry, she had been so excited to hear me read it, and so genuinely complimentary once I did, that I could feel myself starting to develop a little bit of a crush on her as well.
And that, maybe, was ultimately why I was out here on the narrow, rickety dock looking over the lake while the dining hall-slash-auditorium up the hill behind me echoed with giddy laughter and shouts and the clang of folding chairs being either set up or put away or both -- I wasn't entirely sure what was next on the schedule, and didn't care: I had come out here to be alone, and try to make sense of my thoughts.
My crush on Alex had always been safely impractical in the sense that I never had really had to risk anything, since there was such a small chance that he would ever notice my adoration, much less return it. But as long as it had lasted, it meant that I didn't have to waste time thinking about any other romantic thoughts or feelings; my loyalty to Alex gave me permission to ignore anyone that I could conceive of as lesser, which had been anyone else in the high school.
But Melissa was not lesser. Not just in terms of age, either, although her friendly, open smile and easy sense of authority undoubtedly made him look like a sullen, self-absorbed, posturing teenager by comparison. She was also taller than he was by several inches -- it was with a little bit of a shock that I realized early on in the camp week that he was actually a little short for a senior, since in my dreamy-eyed gazing from a distance he had always seemed to loom so large -- and in the campers versus counselors basketball game on Wednesday, she and the other counselors had cleaned the clocks of the high school boys who had cockily refused to let any girls play. Alex had been a superstar in JV basketball when we were freshmen, but he had switched to football since then, and ended up looking clumsy and red-faced on the court. Melissa's smile, on the other hand, seemed to only glow more strongly as the sweat gathered in a sheen on her light brown skin.
Oh, that's right -- Melissa was also black. Our suburban high school had very few students of color, and none of them were on this church trip. My parents had never explicitly brought up race in the household, but I had an uneasy feeling that, as disapproving as they would undoubtedly be if I were to mention that I might be harboring a crush on another girl, they would be all the more bewildered, and wonder where they had gone wrong with me, when they saw what she looked like.
Not that Melissa was not stunningly beautiful. Her matte black natural hair was springy and curly, blossoming out from her head in a manner that resembled fireworks, although she usually wore a bandana tying it down in front so that it only puffed out the back, like a peacock's tail. Her brown eyes were kind, and quick to take in everything that was going on, and her body was strong and athletic, with supple curves that made me feel almost dirty when I looked at her walking from behind in shorts.
And however my parents might react, it wasn't that I was feeling particularly horrified about having feelings for a girl. I had always kind of expected to be a little bit bisexual, ever since I got involved in my first online fandoms as a pre-teen. But I had never actually experienced bisexual feelings before, and the social consequences were looming very urgently in my mind, far more so than any angsty questions about identity. This was, after all, a church camp.
The different speakers over the course of the week had all had slightly different attitudes, and none of them had actually said anything as direct as "gay people are going to hell," but one of them had used "woke" as a pejorative and another one had made a joke about God loving even liberals with blue hair. (One or two kids had glanced at me. There were still some purple highlights in my own hair from junior year, but they were hard to see against the fading black that I had dyed it since.) Melissa's own testimony, during the counselors' introductions in the first session, had been brief, referring to growing up in a church that loved like family and a family that loved like church. She was so friendly and open -- and she was a college senior! She wouldn't be scandalized by my being bisexual, I thought; although she might not appreciate being the object of a high school student's crush. In a way that I never had when I had mooned over the inaccessibly popular Alex, I felt embarrassed and shy about the difference in her and my social standing.
All of this was running through my head when I heard a creak on the dock behind me, and a slight wobble that meant someone else had stepped onto it. I turned around, squinting because the sun's orange glow, still shining over the lake, had already dropped into shadow behind me.
I could recognize the slim, taut body, poof of hair, and bright smile of Melissa, who gave a little wave. I smiled and waved back, but my gaze fell quickly. I felt a sudden pounding in my chest. She came up, the dock creaking under her.
"Hey Lydia," she said, and touched me on the shoulder, very gently, but I felt as though the very slight pressure I could feel through my hoodie would leave a mark like a scald. "We're getting ready for the last session. Everyone's putting in the songs they want to sing. Worship songs," she added, with another quick smile, and a kind of I-know-it's-silly-but-it's-church-camp-after-all shake of her head. "Did you want to join us?"
"Yeah," I said, hating how thick and stupid I found my voice in the moment. "Yeah, okay. I'll put in 'Awesome God,' if no one else has." I hesitated, and looked back at the lake, glowing pink in the reflection of the sunset above it. "I'll be up in a little bit."
She nodded, and stood for a little bit with her fingertips just grazing my shoulder, looking out over the pink lake with me.
"Beautiful," she said softly.
I almost said "No, you are," but I bit my lip and buried my chin in my chest instead. She gave my shoulder one last squeeze, and said,
"I'll hold a seat for you." The dock creaked as she moved away, and I balled my fists in my pockets and told myself how stupid I was, but without making it clear whether it was for not saying it out loud or for thinking it in the first place.
One the crunch of her tennis shoes in the gravel beyond the shore had faded into silence, I lay down on my back and looked up at the sky. The pink was already beginning to fade from the eastern sky, and I could already see the twinkle of stars in the desaturated gray-blue that wasn't quite black yet, because the sun hadn't quite gone down.
"God," I said out loud, not as a prayer but from a kind of impatience with my own overflowing emotions, "I just want to know."
What I meant by that was hard to articulate. I was feeling uncertain about so many different things, and maybe oddly the one that made me the most unhappy was a feeling of being disloyal to the years-long crush I had harbored on Alex. After all, he and I would both be going back to school, and he would be there to be mooned over again for the rest of the semester, and Melissa would be where? I only had the vaguest idea where the college she had mentioned in her introduction was. Out of sight, out of mind, surely; a camp crush, quickly inflamed, quickly extinguished. But I could still feel where her fingers had grazed my shoulder.
The dock shook again, but not behind me; from in front. Frowning, I raised up on my elbows to peer at the end of the dock, and saw Melissa climbing up the ladder that led down to the canoes. I stared at her in confusion: I had seen her and the other counselors pull all the canoes out of the water and put them in storage for the next campers. And there was no path, as far as I knew, down to the bottom of the dock. It was just water below us.
But it was definitely Melissa, smiling her brilliant smile, and approaching me. She knelt down in front of me and looked into my eyes.
