Chapter Text
When Arthur gets home from playing tennis at the club Tuesday afternoon there's an envelope from Camp Evergreen waiting for him on the kitchen table.
His stomach does a little clench-then-flip action, which seems to happen every time he thinks about spending the whole summer working with a bunch of strangers, some of whom were already in college, and will probably treat the junior counselors like a bunch of babies. Not to mention the panicked feeling he gets at the thought of being responsible for a bunch of younger--probably totally spoiled bratty--kids.
It's best not to even think too closely about the promise he's already made to himself about what needs to happen before end of his increasingly terrifying summer adventure.
He grabs a Gatorade out of the fridge and heads upstairs, clutching the cream-colored paper so hard that it crinkles and softens in the heat of his hands. Gently closing the door behind him, Arthur crosses the room and perches on the edge of his bed, drawing one leg up under his body.
Deep breath.
He doesn't even know what's in here. It could be anything. But judging from the heft of the envelope, he can guess it probably includes cabin assignments and likely information about the other counselors, too.
He thinks: "The information in here is going to determine whether I have my best summer ever, or--more likely--the most awkward and miserable three months of my young life."
He's so nervous that he tears the paper right open, without even using the scrimshaw-handled letter opener sitting a few feet away on his desk. (Yes, he's a teenage boy who owns a letter opener. Get over it.)
Inside is a letter from the camp director, Mr. Saito, officially welcoming him to the Camp Evergreen family.
"The satisfaction gained from your role in molding the young minds and bodies of your charges will give you a sense of pride that will never be diminished. But we all know the fun of a summer at Evergreen isn't just for the campers. The friendships you'll make as you swim in the crystalline waters of our lake, run through the grass of our emerald playing fields and toast marshmallows around one of our glowing bonfires, will stay with you for the rest of your days. Camp Evergreen is proud to boast a large and active counseling staff alumni network with annual reunions around the country--not to mention our pride in introducing at least 20 people to their future life partners."
Gulp. Arthur can't help dwelling over that last little bit for a minute.
First of all, Mr. Saito using a gender neutral term like life partners is probably a good sign, right? Arthur's probably not going to get kicked out or fired if he actually manages to accomplish his goal for the summer. Secondly, it's not like he's looking for a summer romance to last forever. But the very idea that he could meet someone who would set his cold little world on fire, even for a few months, has Arthur's heartbeat picking up in anticipation.
The thing is, Arthur has decided that this summer, he is going to kiss another boy.
It's a bit of an experiment, really, and he's not even fully sure what he hopes to accomplish. But he knows that it's something he needs to try at least once. And doing it far away from home, where no word can get back to anyone from school or the tennis team or the student newspaper staff, seems to Arthur like the best course of action.
Arthur flips to the next page of the packet, which informs him that he's assigned as junior counselor in the Douglas Fir cabin--all of the cabins are apparently named after different evergreen trees--working with senior counselor Yusuf Shankar.
The third page lists the names and hometowns of all the senior and junior counselors. There are kids coming from all over the country. At least a third of them have little asterisks by their names, indicating that they started out as Evergreen campers before transition to the counseling side. Arthur is surprised to see four kids from England, including his own senior counselor, and one from France. He knew retired-business-mogul-turned-camp-founder Mr. Saito had a great reputation, but he had no idea Camp Evergreen would have such an international draw.
He leafs through the remaining pages--schedules, maps, rules--and turns back to the staff list. If he goes through with is plan, in all likelihood it's going to be one of these boys that Arthur will kiss before August is over.
Deep breath.
He scans the names, trying to picture what each guy might look like, which he knows is completely silly, but can't stop himself from doing anyway. Hmmm ... Tristan Eames. That's definitely the kind of name that makes you wonder about the person attached to it. With a name like that, he has to be at least kind of interesting. Same goes for Dominic Cobb. Arthur pictures a cherubic face, white blonde hair and big blue eyes. Lots of cool-factor potential there, too. He can't really say much of anything about Robert Fischer. With a name like that, he could be as boring as vanilla ice cream. Not like Arthur Miller is much better. If any of the other counselors-to-be out there around the world are playing this same game, they probably wouldn't linger over Arthur's name as a potential flirtation, kiss or hook-up for longer than a couple of seconds.
It's not like Arthur's never kissed anyone. He's sort-of made out with three different girls. It's not a stellar record. But it's not totally shameful either, for someone just 16 years old, especially considering that he has a reputation for being a bit stiff, a tad too serious and not at all carefree.
And if he's being completely honest with himself, the reputation is definitely at least kind of earned.
That's basically why he decided to apply for the junior counselor position back in February. He feels like he's too stuck in his long-term school personality, so that even when he wants to break free, everyone--other kids, coaches, teachers, parents--just sort of pushes him back into being good, old, responsible Arthur Miller, who can always be counted on to do everything the right way and never step a toe out of line.
And if he's being even more honest with himself, this reputation is probably the underlying reason for his summer experiment in the first place.
See those three girls he's kissed, not one of them had lit his world on fire. None of them had even started enough of a flame to toast one of Camp Director Saito's marshmallows.
OK it's true that he didn't exactly have feelings for any of them before the kissing started, so that could have had something to do with the lack of a chemical reaction.
The first, Bonnie Summerton, was during a game of seven-minutes-in-heaven freshman year. At the time, he was mostly relieved to have finally checked the first-kiss item off his mental checklist. It didn't even occur to him that it might be weird that he didn't really want to kiss her again. After all, he hardly knew her. They'd probably exchanged 20 sentences in their entire lives, at least eight of them in the closet during the game.
The second, Lisa Avery, had sort of drunkenly mauled his mouth when he agreed to be her sober ride home from an end-of-summer party for the club tennis team, right before the start of sophomore year. She had been sloppy, leaving saliva all over his chin, and tasted terrible. He'd kissed her back for about five minutes, just out of some misguided sense of courtesy, before pushing away and walking her to the front door of her parent's house. He's about 85 percent certain that she called him Sheldon when she said goodnight--as in Arthur's rival for the top spot in regional finals, Sheldon Greene--so he didn't exactly feel bad for wiping his mouth as soon as she turned her back.
The third, and final, kiss had been with Lux Hamilton, on the night of the Spring dance his sophomore year, almost exactly a year ago. He, Lux and a bunch of kids from the school newspaper had gone to the dance as a big group of friends--no dates. It was sort of a tradition for underclassman newspaper staffers, and Arthur was just glad to feel included without actually having to ask anyone, buy a corsage, or participate in any of that nonsense.
They danced in a big circle and later made fun of the preppy kids who were puking out back on the middle school's lawn. Somewhere in the midst of laughing at the jibes thrown by his sharpest-tongued colleagues, Lux had slipped her fingers into his. It was nice and friendly. He felt a tiny tremor of excitement at the idea that maybe he'd get to kiss her and this time--finally--it would he feel the way the kids did in those silly teen movies he sometimes secretly watched on weekends, all glowing and giddy with arousal.
The thing was: It didn't feel like that. It was, like the hand holding, nice. No fireworks. No butterflies. No free-falling elevator. Just nice. And it never happened again.
He was a bit disappointed, but didn't get too worked up about yet another kissing-related failure. He figured he just had to find the right girl and the right moment. No biggie.
But then a few months ago--after he had already applied for and been accepted to the Camp Evergreen junior counseling job--Arthur had gone to an all-ages concert at the college a little over an hour from his parent's house with a bunch of the newspaper kids, plus his summer mixed doubles partner, to see one of his favorite bands.
At the show, Lux--thank goodness they weren't awkward with each other after the kissing attempt last year--nudged her now-boyfriend, Ziggy, and pointed out these two slightly older-looking guys who were completely making out during a slow song. No one was mean about it, or said anything nasty about them. They were just sort of fascinated. Two men kissing in public wasn't exactly something that happened, oh ever in their small town. Lux and Ziggy seemed to think it was cosmopolitan--evidence that the sooner they could get out of their backwater town and be exposed to the excitement of college life, the better. Everyone else kind of had a giggle and then ignored it.
Except for Arthur. At first glance, he felt as if his stomach had dropped 10 feet, like he'd just crested the hill of a roller coaster. There was just something so compelling about the way these two college-aged boys--one tall and wiry with reddish hair, the other shorter with wild black curls and glasses--were so clearly and overwhelmingly lusting for each other. It was like seeing one of those romantic movies play out before his very eyes.
He couldn't stop sneaking looks. He had trouble focusing on the music. Luckily his classmates didn't notice. Unfortunately the redhead did, lifting his gaze to wink at Arthur while on a brief break from sharing air. Then he tilted his head toward the curly haired one and grinned. Somehow Arthur just knew he was saying: "Aren't I lucky? Maybe someday you can be this lucky, too."
That night, after seeing everyone safely home, Arthur came up with the plan for his summer experiment.
He was kind of freaked out by how watching those two guys kiss had made him feel. And he didn't really know what it meant. If he were gay, wouldn't he have realized it by now? That's the kind of thing you probably realize before you're 16, right?
Maybe he just had never seen people make out up-close before, and it grabbed his attention, he'd thought. OK that definitely was not true, because Weirdo Brenden and his string-bean, greasy haired girlfriend were always making out in the halls at school. Correction: Maybe he'd never seen attractive people make out up-close before.
On the other hand, maybe the reason none of his three kissing buddies, as he'd come to think of them, had turned his knees to jelly was that he was going about this game entirely wrong. Here he'd been thinking that he didn't have any chemistry with the girls he kissed because he was so uptight and reserved all the time. But maybe he should have been kissing an all-together different set of people, as in a different gender.
He just didn't know. And he was too scared to find out in a place like his hometown. He just hoped one of the counselors at Camp Evergreen was at least sort of interested in kissing other guys, too.