There I was, with my big red glasses and hopes that I'd get to be the big-city girl. It was only after I settled in to my bunk and played the Let's Get Acquainted Games with the other campers that I realized that what's cool at camp has nothing to do with what's cool at home. This is why, I would realize even more fully weeks later, plastic woven ankle bracelets and tattered, chlorine-faded embroidery floss necklaces and camp songs and full-body cheers are fantastically appropriate with other members of the Sequoia cabin or around the closing campfire but are decidedly dorky to your friends from school.
I fully and quickly embraced camp cool that summer, letting one feather-haired cabin queen carefully make me over with lavender eyeliner and pink eyeshadow applied with one of those inadequate little sponges. I wore my own Tretorns like badges of hip honor and I took matching my socks to my preppy plaid shorts to a whole new level. I was twelve and even though I was nowhere near the coolest girl in my sixth grade class, I knew I could do pretty well at camp if I paid attention and soaked up some of what the Indiana girls radiated in their triangle bikinis (bikinis! at twelve!) and White Rained bangs (bangs! who wore bangs?!).
I went back home from camp that summer and life was different. I grew a few inches, gained some much needed pre-teen weight, started sprouting tiny boobs. I cut my long, straight hair into a bob that became wavy and was streaked white blond by all the time I'd spent at the pool and in the sun with the bikini babes. My mom had a seamstress friend make five new skirts for me for the school year, and I designed them with a new confidence, a refined sense of style that I thought would project my whole summer, my new(ish) me into the seventh grade.
Of course, it wasn't just the skirts and the hair and the boobs that made me ready for school to start. It was the confidence in myself, something pretty hard to come by when you cross over into teendom. Watching those girls, acting like those girls, absorbing some of who those girls were, somehow helped me feel more like myself. It wasn't that I had to be Indiana cool at home (although I am sure at some point I said something like, "Oh yeah, you might not understand these bracelets...it's a camp thing" with a little flip of my hair), it's that I now had a visual for what cool looked like, how confidence walked with shoulders back and bangs blowing in the breeze. Even if it was Indiana and not Chicago, it worked for me.
My seventh grade year wasn't an easy one. Even with my new-found confidence and sense of coolness and style, I got dis-invited to boy-girl parties, nightly hang-ups and had many of those "it's horrible to be this age" sob fests that most of my friends also remember having. But even after surviving all of that, I finished the year, packed my new sneakers (leather Tretorns this time, fully adorned with friendship pins on the laces) into my suitcase and headed back to camp.
I will never forget what I found that year when I walked in to the now-familiar territory.
"There she is," one girl I remembered said loudly, "That girl from Chicago!"
My aqua eye-shadowed eyes shined and my bob bounced and I was ready -- the sort of clumsy, funny, smart cookie, good girl from the big city -- to unpack some of my cool confidence for a few weeks away at camp.
Remember those bug juice, crazy cheers and God's Eye days? What kind of kid were you at camp?
