Okay, it wasn’t band camp. It was Peer Helper Camp.
FYI, Peer Helpers, while it was interesting to do, was a terrible, terrible idea. Letting kids think they could offer talk therapy to other kids was just a bad plan. The concept was fine, but they treated it too real.
Also, at the camp session of which I am speaking, someone in the “truth circle” said “I’m not racist or anything” then asked me something about being Native that was incredibly racist.
But the memory I want to share now is about a different young lady, two of my three best friends, and the strangest of nights.
So at this camp, we were spending the night in dorms at Taylor University. If you don’t know Taylor University, imagine any midwestern liberal arts college and there you go. We were divided up by our academic year– not by gender– at least in terms of halls/wings. There were two girls across the hall from me and two of my closest friends.
The evening got weird. We had this thing, which I just mentioned above, called “the trust circle.” It’s basically a version of truth or dare with no dares and lots of crying. It had gotten super emotional because one of the juniors told me all about his father abusing him, because that was the “one thing you never really share” that I shared, and I spent most of two hours holding him while he cried. I think it was really good for him, and I was super-proud of how that dude turned his academics around. I just realized, as I’m typing this, that I wish I hadn’t lost track of him. Last I saw him he was literally living his dream.
But the end of the trust circle is the encouragement that you go back to your room and continue the sharing with your roomies, to help you to learn how not only to unburden but how to handle dealing with people when they open up. I sensed the potential problem as we went into this whole thing. Allow me to give my friends and another student we went to school with code names so as to not embarrass these folks should any of them ever Google their names and find their way here. One of my friends, Lucas, was a big football star at our high school and was at the time dating Sarah, an incredibly smart and funny girl who also happened to be just about everyone’s crush (oddly not mine– I was never attracted to her that way, though I did really enjoy talking with her, and we spent a full year as on-duty Peer Helpers together). My other friend, Ted, had a little secret. He’d had an almost blinding, obsessive crush on Sarah since the sixth grade.
And Ted told Lucas about this crush in the circle of trust.
Things got super awkward, and… listen, I know what I’m about to write is going to look stupid and misogynistic, because it looked that way to me when I was 17 and nothing has changed that in the years since… but they decided they needed to sneak out of the dorm room and go into the woods to “resolve” this (basically they went to fight for her, to decide who got to pursue her).
Here’s where it gets super-ironic and crazy.
Sarah knocked on the door and asked if she could sneak into our room. I thought she was looking for Lucas. Turns out she was, but not for the reason I’d have thought (no “Dear Penthouse, I never thought this sort of stuff really happened at Peer Helper camp until it happened to my bro Lucas”). She’d come to break up with him, as she’d surfaced in her own circle of truth that she didn’t like feeling like she was with him just because he was popular and every guy who talked to her wanted to be her boyfriend.
Not me, I half-giggle. She asks me where Lucas and Ted are.
Now here’s the thing that makes this all so crazy. *I* had known of Ted’s pining for Sarah since it started. I was the person who called her on the phone and asked if she’d talk to him only for him to be too shy and hang up. For all I know she thought I was calling her on my own behalf all those years, since ol’ Ted never managed to squeeze out a single word to her on the phone.
I wasn’t about to betray the trust circle. I wasn’t going to out one of my closest friends.
So I told her they went out into the woods to talk about some stuff.
She asked, almost before I’d finished trying to explain, why they’d left me behind. I was the “glue” friend in this particular circle. Lucas and Ted weren’t super close, but with me as the spoke in the middle the three of us were a pretty rowdy lil wheel of nerdism.
I tried to explain how there’d be a context where they needed to talk without me. I was hinting that it might be about me.
Then I got the third shock of the night (the first being the junior’s weep session, the second being my two friends going caveman to fight over this girl, and then…). She knew about Ted’s crush. She’d known… since the sixth grade. The carefully preserved secret I’d placed in the Phill vault was common knowledge to the only person who it was actually a secret from.
And because she knew about the crush, she— remember, I mentioned she was smart– pieced together what was going on, more or less.
Then she asked the question I asked the two of them before they left. “Shouldn’t they have included me in this sort of talk?”
I nodded in silent agreement, and I asked if she’d like to sit for a while and listen to Live, which at the time was pretty much my answer to all confusion. I’d listen to Live and sketch. So we sat, her on Ted’s bed, me on the top bunk above where Lucas would sleep later in my own bed, and Sarah got to listen as I explained that while I knew it’d never be a radio single, TBD was the best track on Throwing Copper.
She left after a couple of hours.
Ted and Lucas returned several hours later to find me sound asleep facing the window. They woke me to inform me that Ted had decided to be a grown up and not stand in the way of Lucas and Sarah’s teenage love.
I pointed at Lucas’ bunk. There was a note. From Sarah. Dumping him.
He asked me what she said when she brought it, distraught then quickly angry at her.
I told him she didn’t say anything.
It was the only time I lied in the “circle of trust.” I didn’t really want to tell him that I agreed with her belief that he was being possessive and using her to stay “cool,” nor did I want to tell him that after she dumped him we listened to music and chatted about nothing that ever mattered to anyone for a few hours.
During the following semester, Lucas would start dating the woman he’d go on to marry. Sarah started dating the little brother of the man she’d marry years later as well. Ted, well, Ted kept trying to win Sarah’s heart until he went to college and met someone who made him forget about her.
And me?
I still think I grew up with some misogynistic idiots, that I realized how different I was from my “friends” that one night at Peer Helper camp. And I still think that TBD is the best track on Throwing Copper, though I also love Iris.
I would meet the woman I’d go on to marry in a different circle of trust, speaking off-the-cuff during my first semester at grad school as I drove someone I barely knew at the time to her car because it was dark and cold and you shouldn’t walk across the Michigan State campus by yourself. I wouldn’t tell her how I felt for months, because she was seeing someone at the time. I’m glad he turned out to be a piece of shit. I needed an opening, and unlike some people I knew, I wasn’t going to drag this other fellow into the woods to fight about it.
I mean I would have, if she’d asked me to.
Of course I would have.
I’m not an idiot.