It’s dark and I don’t feel at all well and my mother will soon arrive to take me home and the overripe aroma of the hedges with the tiny white flowers is making me want to throw up but I’m not alone because a fellow counselor-in-training, my first friend who is a boy, has left the camp sleepover to wait with me, this smart boy with big hands and nose and a cracking adenoidal voice who doesn’t yet know that he will grow into something very close to handsomeness, who doesn’t yet know that his engineer father will break the family apart and leave him in pieces too sharp to glue back into a semblance of the boy he is right now, sitting out the promise of camp songs and sugar and maybe kissing to keep me company, and whenever a car approaches he guesses the make from the engine sounds and almost every time he gets it wrong and I ache for both of us and neither of us knows that one summer a decade hence, flush with young adulthood and our own wheels, we’ll have sex, a lot of it, in his mother’s condo with the vertical blinds and the wall-to-wall carpet and that then I will never hear from him again and though the smell of those tiny white flowers almost fifty years later fills me with longing for all we’ve lost I don’t need him back in my life, I just want to know if he’s OK.
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