Also, because of my self-imposed post-puberty social isolation, I wasn’t very good at meeting new people, or staying at a house other than my own, or sleeping in a bed that’s not my own, or making small talk with new people. I wasn’t good at existing outside a set of very narrow confines (the walls of my house, basically). I had spent three years turning myself into a socially incapable shut-in, and I didn’t know how to undo that.
On the other hand, I had wanted to go so badly it made my chest ache. I had actual heartburn from wanting it so much, and knowing I would probably let myself down. I wanted to go to this camp more than I had wanted to go anywhere in my life. I was chosen because I was an A+ English student and I won the school’s short story competition the year before (for an admittedly very melodramatic but honestly amazing story, if I do say so myself, called ‘Remember Me’ about a girl whose boyfriend is dying of a mysterious disease that causes him to forget his past a week at a time and he is cured just before he is about to die, but he’s lost his last memory of her), and possibly because I spent so much time in the library reading at lunchtime. But, looking back, a little part of me thinks I was chosen because of fate. I was destined to go on this camp and find the two people who would help me survive the rest of my teenage years—and the rest of my life, I hope.
Mum and Dad were overjoyed by the news I had been chosen. It was as though I’d been picked for the Olympics. I know they fretted about having an unbearably self-conscious hermit for a daughter, but if they broached the subject with me, it would usually end in a meltdown of tears and self-pity (mine, obviously, although Mum has a flair for the dramatic, which is where I get my best material), so my lack of social life and friends became the Topic Not To Be Discussed.
The camp invitation had opened the door to that topic again, and Mum wouldn’t let it be. We went around in circles: Mum telling me I had to go, and me telling her I would probably go, I would almost certainly go, I would try my best to go, but never quite agreeing that I would definitely go. It calmed me to know that there was still the option to not go. Because what if I woke up on the day of the camp with a huge, disfiguring pimple between my eyes? This was not a theoretical concern, but rather something that had happened to me already several times in my life. I have had a pimple so big that it looked like a third eye. I have had pimples so big they should be featured on those awful, voyeuristic, disgusting pimple-popping videos.
It’s hard to explain how bad skin makes me simply give up on things, but it does. I can go from being excited to feeling numb, empty and resigned in one minute flat. I don’t ever want anything badly enough that I’d still go with a giant disfiguring pimple on my face.
The heavy-duty acne medication should have given me confidence, but I didn’t trust it. My body could always, always betray me. That’s what I knew. And even if it was okay now, it would betray me in the future. Even my dermatologist said that—if the acne was caused by my unbalanced hormones and problematic ovaries (official name: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome), as we suspected it was, then it would probably come back. Maybe a year after I stop the medication, maybe sooner, maybe longer. My skin was a ticking time bomb, poised to explode in the most public way whenever I let down my guard. My GP said if I go off the pill in the future then, as well as a return of acne, I should watch for symptoms like a disappearing period, thinning head hair, increased facial hair, weight gain and general depression. That’s a fun checklist. Also, by the way, this was a condition that would continue for a lifetime.
It wasn’t just my skin and hormonal stuff though. Meeting new people was hard and I hated it.
But Mum didn’t let up. She was so scared of me missing this opportunity, the fear became palpable in our house. The signed parental consent forms were stuck to the front of our refrigerator for days, and I kept catching Dad looking at them with a worried expression. Mum surrounded them with Post-it notes, on which she drew arrows and wrote ‘Don’t forget!!’ and ‘The deadline is Friday!!’ and ‘Do it!!’
They were going to be so disappointed in me if I didn’t go.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I took the forms to school and handed them in. I was going. Definitely, definitely going. Mum danced me around the kitchen in delight.
I made several trips to the dermatologist to beg him to fix the shiny red patch on my face, to no avail. (‘Unfortunately, Natalie, this is just something you’ll have to endure while you’re on the medication,’ he had said, with a tone that implied he thought I had a limited capacity for enduring things.) I packed and repacked my bags. I chewed my fingernails. I had nightmares. I thought about changing my name. (Surely if I introduced myself as Roxy then I would magically have the confidence of a girl called Roxy.)
And I went to the camp.
Mum and Dad drove me there. It was a three-hour trip and Mum kept up a relentlessly cheerful commentary for practically every minute, as if a moment of silence would allow me to change my mind. She kept telling me I was going to have a great time, which made me want to have a terrible time just to spite her.
At the camp sign-in, I stood in line behind a boy. Mum nudged me, and I refused to look at her, because I knew she would do something unsubtle like wiggling her eyebrows suggestively. She’d done that once before when a bunch of boys were standing near us at the cinema, and I had to go into the bathroom and deep breathe in the cubicle to recover from my embarrassment.
The boy in the camp line (spoiler—it was Zach) turned around and smiled kind of goofily at me as he walked past. He was tall and skinny with messy dark curls and the friendliest face I have maybe ever seen on another human being. I quickly glanced away and didn’t smile back, which is my standard response whenever anyone looks at me, but in my mind I was smiling back, and it felt like a good sign.
I was desperate for Mum and Dad to leave, but the minute I saw their car pulling away, I was hit with a wave of nausea and had to stop myself from running after them screaming, ‘Come back, come back, come back.’ I was alone, and I had to cope without them for three days. I had to sleep in a single bed with itchy-looking blankets. I had to share a bathroom. I had to eat meals prepared by people who had no idea that chicken sometimes grossed me out and I didn’t like the texture of cooked mushrooms.
Lucy walked into the cabin then. She was assigned to the other bed in my room.
Lucy was the other student from my school picked for camp. We had been in several classes together, but we’d never spoken more than a few sentences to each other before this moment.
I knew about Lucy though. I spent a lot of time at school watching and observing, and I generally knew a lot more about my classmates than they knew about me. I knew Lucy liked poetry and YA fantasy novels, and that she always enthusiastically volunteered for things, from reading aloud a section of a book in class to creating posters for our school’s campaign for combatting climate change. She was on the debating team, she was in the school musical, she was vice-president of the social-justice club. She was a joiner and she was aggressively nice, two things I have a natural suspicion of, but with Lucy they weren’t fake or annoying. She acted like a good person because she really was a good person.
Lucy had one strike against her, though—she had perfect skin. Ever since the first pimple appeared on my face, skin is always the first thing I notice about someone else, the first judgment I make, even when I try to stop myself. Do they have good skin? Lucy was small (she was fifteen at the time, but she still looked twelve), with unmarked skin and the kind of big blue eyes that could get you off a murder charge with a couple of well-timed blinks.