May and June of 1991, Waterville, Maine

By Araminta Star Matthews

It was the seventh grade and I was a 12-year-old redhead, too skinny for my height and too pale for my signature black wardrobe. At 12, the all-consuming quest of every young girl is to find that group of like-minds who accepts her unconditionally, because school is a battlefield, and a girl’s gotta have allies if she’s gonna make it. This skinny, sun-less redhead? That’s all I could think about at 12. My own popularity. My need for acceptance. It never occurred to me that others might pay for my selfishness. Even if it had, I’m not sure it would have mattered.

Where I grew up, middle school housed grades six through eight with not more than 100 students in each. I had triumphed over my sixth grade initiation rights and was still fresh in the middle of middle school when the trial of all seventh graders descended upon us. The Seventh Grade Summer Camp Field Trip. This is the trip that would make or break my middle school name. A trip to a summer camp, complete with rustic cabins, a lake, corny arts and crafts projects, and no parents for an entire weekend.

The lunch table buzz was all, “Who is bunking with whom?” “And did you know the boys’ cabins are right next to the girls cabins?” No way. Ohmygod.

Of course, by the time I realized its full importance, it was too late. All my friends, or at least the people who sat at my lunch table, had assigned themselves to their respective cabins, and I was the odd duckling out. “Please, you’ve gotta let me in? Can’t we have seven in a cabin just this once?” I begged the teachers, the chaperones, my traitorous friends, but it was no good. They had banded together because they had to, just like me. It was for the popularity. May the most ruthless tween win.

When the time finally came to head off to camp I ended up in that cabin, with all the other odd ducklings or late bloomers. Lucy, the teacher’s pet; Emma, the athlete and the only Hispanic person in our entire school district; Jen, the Special Ed kid who wore diapers to school; myself, the girl in black; Mary, with a heart almost as big as her bottle-neck glasses and two front beaver teeth; and an empty bed where Kelsey the class bully would have slept if she hadn’t gotten suspended for torching the vice principal’s cat the week before we left.

This might not be so bad, I thought. Emma and Lucy are all right. Jen might make me look cooler than I really am. And Mary? Well, Mary’s nice enough.

Camp was a flurry of activity. Gone was the whimsy that this might be a co-ed vacation sans parents. Oh no. This was an all-structured camp extravaganza with every minute of our trip scheduled. We worked together, by cabin, to compete in various activities for camp prizes. Trivial Pursuit in the morning, who can tell the spookiest story for the night. It actually wasn’t until the second night that Lucy brought up the plan.

“Every camper has to pull a prank, right? It’s totally tradition,” she had said, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “And I have the perfect idea.” The plan was to get a Maxi Pad and, while all the other campers were wrist-deep in sock-puppet theater, replace Jen’s mattress with it. Of course, we’d have to rope Emma into the fray because she was on the bunk right below Jen’s and we’d need her to stash the mattress under her bed. It was absolutely fool-proof. Except….

“Where are we going get a pad?” I asked. Emma shook her head, “I’m not due for another two weeks, so I didn’t pack any.”

“Me neither, how about you?” asked Lucy.

I was too ashamed to tell them I hadn’t gotten mine yet, so I just shook my head, too.

“Wait! Mary! She got her first period like this week sometime,” Emma said, slapping a palm to her head. Everyone knew that Emma’s and Mary’s moms were friends, so they sometimes spent time together outside of school, though Emma never acknowledged Mary’s presence in school. That was somehow forbidden. We middle school girls all had our secrets.

“Good, good,” Lucy whispered as a cardigan-clad chaperone walked by, eyeing our huddle. “We can’t risk Mary knowing our plan. She’ll tell us it’s wrong, or whatever. So, you’ll have to be the one to get it. You’re the only one that can sneak into the cabin unnoticed.” Lucy nodded to my signature black sweater and skirt.

She was right. Dusk was already falling and I’d blend into the wilderness, but there was something tightening in my stomach I couldn’t explain. A warning. Lucy and Emma just looked at me expectantly, mouths gaped open and neither of them breathing. I swallowed hard and nodded my head. A girl’s gotta fit in, right?

“Excellent,” said Lucy, as she explained the plan. “Now, after you’re inside, Emma will say she left her puppet in the cabin and I’ll offer to go with her so she doesn’t have to walk in the dark alone. I think together the three of us can pull this off,” she said. I smiled. Maybe I’ll make a real friend out of this, I thought.

After the sun set and the campfires were lit in the amphitheater, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I ran full-speed to the cabin and rushed through the door. In the darkness, I felt my way to the foot of Mary’s bottom bunk until my fingers found the hard rectangle of her over-sized suitcase lying flat on the floor. After some probing, I found the button and pushed it upward. The clasp gave way and the suitcase popped open. My fingers waded through the textures of clothes there. Terry cloth, corduroy, cotton. But nowhere did I feel the plastic crinkle of a sanitary napkin.

Just as I was about to thrust my hand into the zippered pouch of the suitcase lid, the door creaked open and the cabin exploded into light. I froze. Oh God, I thought. Had that chaperone overheard us scheming?

“What the hell is taking you so long?” Lucy stood with her hands on her hips, her mouth an exaggerated circle. “It’s been like 10 minutes since you left. It doesn’t take 10 minutes to pee. People will notice.”

Emma popped up behind her. “Yeah, hurry up,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” I sighed. “I just haven’t found it yet.” I reached my arm into the pouch. My fingers immediately crinkled over a smooth plastic wrapper. “Bingo,” I said.

Lucy and Emma barreled toward me. “Awesome, let’s see,” they said as they leaned in so close to me I could smell the campfire in their hair. I pulled the pouch wide open, tipping the lid down enough, so we could all peer inside and confirm the contents. No sooner had I done so than Lucy reeled backward with her hand clamped over her nose and mouth.

“What in the world is that?” Emma asked, pointing into the pouch where my hand was. Slowly, I turned to look inside and there I saw them all. Mixed in with the dozen-or-so pink-plastic napkin casings were another two dozen or so used napkins all balled up and sticking to the sides of the suitcase.

“Oh my God, that’s disgusting,” Lucy said. I stared, wide-eyed, at the graveyard of bloodied napkins – none of them wrapped or covered. I closed my fingers around the unused pad and pulled my arm out of the pouch, eyeing the bloodied cotton pads like a mine-field.

“How could she do that?” Emma almost whispered. “Doesn’t she know how to throw them out?” Emma looked at me for answers, but having none, I just held out the unopened pad to her. She looked at it blankly.

“Hold on, guys,” Lucy said with a smiling voice. “I have a new idea.” I dropped the lid of Mary’s suitcase and turned to face her.

“Our prank has already been done for us,” Lucy said. “We just have to let it be known.” Emma looked at me warily, but we both knew what we were in for. Maybe the shock of all the blood had gone to our heads. Maybe it was that hormone coursing through our own blood, the one that spoke to us with every heartbeat. The hunger to fit in. We knew what we would do.

By the time we got back to the campfire, the sock puppet theater had given way to free time. Everyone was crowded in their cliques near the fires, gabbing about nothing. Mary was sitting with the cardigan-chaperone, her knees to her chest. She laughed and her mouth, which never seemed to close around her big, buck teeth anyway, grew large enough to swallow me whole. At that moment, I felt a twinge.

But it was too late.

It took minutes to destroy her. Lucy, Emma, and I split up, went to each separate clique, even to the loners who were throwing rocks off the top of the bleachers. “Ohmygod, did you hear about Mary?” We told everyone in our entire grade. Every single person she had in class, or saw in the hallways, or had to eat lunch in with.

At first, she couldn’t figure out why everyone was laughing at her. Somehow, one of the chaperones had gotten it out of one of the students. I saw the chaperone’s face, ghostlike, as she stood motionless looking over at Mary. I saw her straighten her back and walk slowly, her hands clutching the hems of her long-sleeved shirt. I watched as the chaperone leaned in and whispered in the cardigan-lady’s ear, who in turn frowned. Their eyes welled up as they turned to face Mary.

Mary stared dumbly at them, her mouth still open in a half-smile before it faded. For the first time since I’d known her, her mouth fully closed over her large Beaver-teeth as she frowned deeply. She began to sob into the lady’s cardigan. The other chaperone placed a hand on her shoulder and Mary seemed to collapse under its weight as her body shook with crying.

Lucy slapped a hard palm on my back. “Dude, we totally pulled it off,” she said, laughing.

“Yeah,” Emma smiled, her eyes scanning the fire-lit ground.

Lucy sat next to me on the bleachers. “You know, girl, some of us were a little upset when we found out we had to bunk with you. I mean, no offense, but you are a little weird.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, I guess.”

“But tonight,” she went on, “tonight you proved something. We pulled off the awesomest prank in the history of summer camp pranks and we didn’t even have to try.” Lucy pulled me in for a sideward hug. Emma’s eyes still scanned the ground, unable to look up at Mary just a few yards away.

“And absolutely everyone knows it was you who made the discovery,” Lucy said. All the muscles in my body clenched, my stomach tightening into tiny fists. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mary. She’d lifted her head from the cardigan-lady’s shoulder. In the firelight, I could see her glasses all steamed up and her face a pulpy red.

Scooting off the bleacher beside me, Lucy stood up in front of me, blocking my view of Mary. Her face was wild with the firelight glowing like a halo all around her head. “Seriously,” she said. “Word on the street is you are one badass chica, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded, unable to look into her eyes.

Lucy put her hand on my shoulder, her arm stretched long. “People will be talking about this through high school. You did it, girl. You are totally in.”

Araminta Star Matthews is a recent graduate of National University with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She currently divides her time between grassroots social justice projects and her life as a fed artist.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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