the still-unopened water bottle in my hand. There’s a part of me that wants to squeeze it until the plastic crumples under my grip and water bursts everywhere. Instead, I turn around and look back out the window—back to the mile markers, back to the trees. Back to the numbers. I can practically hear the fight go out. //
Sixty-six miles later, my mom finally breaks the silence. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she says. She sounds exhausted. “Are you okay?” I tell her I’m glad she asked. I mean it, too. There is nothing comfortable about silence between two people who have too much to say to each other to speak. //
It’s not long until the first sign for the camp appears. Camp Ugunduzi, it says, Next exit. My mom’s breath and mine catch at the same time. I put my hand on her arm, partially to reassure her, and partially to stop myself from shaking. “You packed sunscreen, right?” she says. “And bug spray? And Band-Aids?” //
“It’s going to be fine, Mom,” I say. But that’s another one of those things that neither of us really knows how to believe. So instead of talking, we just sit and watch as the camp grounds come into view. First there’s the main housing building, directly ahead of the parking lot, painted a hideous shade of bright yellow that makes it impossible to miss. Behind it, a lake unfurls, water sparkling in the sunlight. There are picnic tables scattered across the grass in front of the building and a volleyball court in the distance. And then we’re parked, unmoving, and I should be getting out of the car, I should be grabbing my suitcase from the trunk, I should be doing something, for goodness’ sake, but all I can think of is my mother’s voice, her question echoing in my head over and over and over again. //
Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? And just like that, I can’t breathe. //
“Um, Mom,” I say. My voice comes out shrill and uneven, which of course makes me feel even worse. “Oh, honey,” my mom says. She looks so touched. “Don’t be nervous. Ashley has sent someone here every year since they started the program and never had a bad experience, and Dr. Manning says the Zoloft should be kicking in over the next two weeks, too, so there’s nothing to—” “That’s not it,” I say. //
I close my eyes. “I need you—” I start, before a wave of panic rises in my chest and crushes the sentence. “I need you to...to ask me again.” “What?” she says. Breathe, I tell myself. And then again. And again, and again, and again, and again, and again. //
“I just need you to ask me again,” I say through gritted teeth. “How I am. You asked six times, so I just—Could you please ask one more time?” I can feel the tears starting to well up in my eyes. Pathetic, I think. Camp hasn’t even started and I’m already breaking down. //
I look over at my mom, who has frozen with one hand on the door handle. An expression on her face I know all too well. “We’re here,” she says, voice brutally calm. “How are you feeling?” I open my eyes, finish the rest of my water bottle, open the car door, and step out. I do not bother replying. She knows the answer just as well as I do. //
MY PARENTS, IN typically self-absorbed fashion, think that this is their fault.
You should hear them talking to each other about it when they think I have music playing through my headphones, or am sleeping in my room, or have gotten so absorbed in my phone that I’ve lost cochlear function. “We shouldn’t have spoiled him so much as a kid,” they say. “We shouldn’t have raised him in this neighborhood, it’s too gentrified, there’s too much here—it’s made him entitled.” Then comes the long pause when my mother looks at my father with sad, guilty eyes, and my father looks back at her, crossing and uncrossing his arms over the dinner table and wishing he had an answer.
“There’s nothing we could have done, Amy,” he always says.
There’s nothing we could have done.
They’ve been relying on that phrase for a while. In the fourth grade, when Brian Whitaker tried to steal my lunch box and I took a pair of scissors from the art corner and quietly destroyed his in return. There’s nothing we could have done. In eighth grade, when I called Jenny Winters a slut in gym class and she had a conniption of epic proportions even though, let’s face it, I was just the only one brave enough to say out loud what everyone else was thinking. There’s nothing we could have done. In sophomore year, when Peter Chu called me a faggot and opened his locker the next morning to find his stuff covered with fifth-period AP Biology’s supply of dead frogs. There’s nothing we could have done. It took a four-hour meeting with half of the administration to sort that one out, and the only way our bumbling pushover of a principal would let me stay at the high school was if my parents agreed to send me to a therapist for a serious psychological evaluation.
It wasn’t long until we were sitting in some over-air-conditioned, underdecorated therapist’s office in downtown Bethesda, listening to some psychiatric hack spout an endless stream of nonsense. It took only three words for all of my parents’ worst fears to be confirmed.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
“Narcissistic personality disorder?” my mom repeated.
“That’s not even a real thing, Mom,” I said. But she was already starting to fall apart, and I knew she wasn’t listening to me. In fact, I knew exactly where her mind was as she looked over to my father, teary and frantic, for reassurance.
There’s nothing we could have done.
They’re trying, of course. In one of the least self-aware moves two remarkably not self-aware people have ever made, they are now trying to undo what they see as the negative externalities of wealth by sending me to a twenty-thousand-dollar summer camp.
So here we are, staring at each other in the room I’m about to be imprisoned in for a month. I watch as my mom takes her hand off my suitcase and then puts it back, unable to decide whether or not she’s ready to leave. “Mason,” she says, and takes a deep breath. This is my mother’s holding-back-tears voice, which means that it’s time to rearrange my face into a sympathetic, pained expression. “Mason, promise me you’ll take advantage of this opportunity.”
“I promise,” I say, looking into her eyes. I walk toward her, place a hand on her shoulder, then draw her in for a hug. By the time we pull apart, she is dabbing at her eyes. This is a good thing, I say to myself. I am doing a good thing. My mom will go home and convince herself that she’s found the perfect program for me and that when I come home in a month, I’ll be a totally different person. Then she’ll drink tea and actually be able to fall asleep without worrying about me for once. I won’t have to deal with a lecture that I’ve heard a thousand times already, and my father can feel manly and important, since he’s footing the bill for this stupid camp. Besides, what else am I supposed to say? “Mom, everyone else at this camp is going to be a dipshit and there is no reason for me to be here. But if you’re going to make me come, the least you can do is hurry up and leave me in peace.” She doesn’t deserve the anxiety and I don’t deserve the fallout.
So I hug her, and I smile in the way that I know reminds her of my father, and I take the suitcase. “I got this,” I say. I move it to the side of the room, where there’s a pile of bags starting to form, and then walk back and shake my father’s hand.
“Be good, son,” he says.
“Yes, sir,”
