Page 38 of Kiss and Tell
“Girls suck at sports,” he’d inform everyone, calmly and coolly, like he was stating a fact. We’d lose every match with them.
“Girls are too emotional,” he’d say if they expressed any reaction at all to anything. So they’d dial it back around Max.
“Boys are better at wilderness stuff,” he’d say, right before their group out-hiked us or beat us at tying knots.
Sawyer tried. But Max got into Sawyer’s head as much as everyone else’s.
The last straw came when Sawyer’s cabin—under Max’s “leadership”—or mind control, depending on your opinion of Max’s motives—pranked our cabin, and we ended up having to do an all-camp intervention to deal with the fallout.
Generally, counselors were in on the pranks cabins pulled on each other. To the kids, it always made us cooler, but in reality, we were there to keep things from going too far off the rails. But Max the Hijacker decided to pull a prank without Sawyer’s knowledge and conducted an underwear raid on our cabin while we were on the lake.
Even at eleven, Max was diabolical. They’d done it so sneakily, our cabin didn’t even know things were missing until the next morning when a few of the girls were embarrassed they couldn’t find their training bras.
It wasn’t until the third girl mentioned hers being missing that I had begun to suspect we had a problem. And it wasn’t until I herded the girls to the dining hall that we all figured out the problem at once: their bras and underwear were flying from the flagpole.
Oh, ha ha ha, one might think. What a classic summer camp joke.
And one might be right if it weren’t for two things. First, this was a much bigger deal in the fifth-grade cabin than it would have been in the eighth-grade cabin. Eighth-grade girls would squeal in fake outrage and secretly be glad they’d been singled out. Eighth-grade girls in their own way were as dumb as Max’s band of idiots.
But for eleven-year-old girls who were having to grapple with the existence of boobs for the first time? They largely resented the existence of them. Boobs were unwelcome intruders, and every girl knew it was a life sentence.
At that age, bras were an annoyance, and half of them tried to hide the fact they even needed to wear one. This was usually their most modest year, where half of them were hitting puberty and half were not, and all of them hated it, no matter which side of the process they were on.
Just having the bras up there was bad enough, but Max—diabolical Max—had taken it so many steps further. Every bunk had a trunk at the end, labeled with the camper’s name.
They’d made a point of remembering which pair of underwear belonged to each girl, then, in marker smuggled out of multiple craft sessions, wrote the owner’s name and the “girliest” thing they disliked about her on the butt of the panties.
“Sarah A runs like a girl.” “Lucy F cries like a little girl.” “Hailey W hits like—”
Well. You get it.
D.i.a.b.o.l.i.c.a.l.
My girls were devastated, and it was entirely possible I would have taken apart Sawyer bone by bone if I hadn’t seen his face when his cabin walked up. My campers were either crying, clamoring in outrage, or standing in wrecked silence as other cabins joined us.
His boys elbowed each other and smirked, waiting for the accolades from the other cabins for pulling an epic prank.
Sawyer’s face went from curiosity to confusion to fury as he processed what he was seeing and rounded on his boys. “You’re going back to the cabin this second. Right. Freaking. Now.”
A few of them lost their smiles at that point, but not smirky Max. Sawyer pointed his boys in the direction of their cabin but jogged over to us before he followed after them. “Sisters, I’m sorry my boys did that to you. I hope you trust us counselors to set them right. We’ll fix this. You deserve better. Please trust me.”
Then he took off after his boys in an angry walk.
Their humbling was a thing of beauty I doubted those boys would ever forget. I knew my girls never would. Because they hadn’t just poked a hornet’s nest of upset fifth-grade girls; they’d stirred up every girl younger and older, and nearly every single boy too.
The oldest cabin of boys went straight to work getting the underwear down from the flagpole, and for the first time, I liked the eighth graders.
The rest of the dining hall was buzzing—did I mention angry hornets?—with indignation on our cabin's behalf, and all the other girl cabins stopped by our table to commiserate with our girls. But it was the visit from the eighth-grade girls that cheered my girls the most.
“Girls,” their ringleader, a future CEO named Brooklyn, said, “We got you. We’re going to set them right. Don’t even worry about it.”
And had any of Sawyer’s boys seen the look in her eye, they’d have all called home and begged for extraction.
Everyone’s afternoon activities were canceled, Max’s cabin as a consequence, everyone else’s by choice.
Director Warren always told us counselors that discipline wasn’t about punishment; it was about changing behavior, and boy, didthatlesson ever sink in. That afternoon, instead of sand volleyball and ceramics, Boys Cabin 11 was marched into the dining hall and met with a presentation on feminism—from the eighth-grade boys.
I heard about it afterward, and I would have givenanythingto be there. Director Warren had given the counselors free rein with computer resources, and apparently, the burliest boy in the eighth-grade bunch, a bruiser named Nico who’d been playing tackle football for three years already, lectured them on menstruation, period stigma, and why the least they could do was not be jerks.
