Summertime is usually a well-needed respite for teenagers.  Those three golden months are used for sleeping in, calling up some friends, biking out to the local pool for a swim, grabbing an ice cream cone on the way home and then lounging around inside an air-conditioned basement watching old horror films until the wee hours of the morning.  Rinse and repeat as necessary.  At the end of my junior year I knew that although this was the summer most of my friends would be having, I was relieved I wouldn’t be.  A few days of nothing are fine, but I know myself; I get bored easily.  I need something to keep me busy, which is just what my summer job does.  No job keeps you as busy as being a counselor at a day camp.

            Some might call me crazy for wanting to work at a camp, asking, “Why would you want to chase after a bunch of crazy kids you’re responsible for and then spend two one hour-long bus rides with them before you can crash at home?”  But, you see, the appeal is all in the wording.  The negative spin on the job that some put on it isn’t right.  A more obvious answer follows a better question like this one: “Why would you want to get to know a group of great, enthusiastic kids and spend all day with them?”  The correct answer here, of course, is, “Why wouldn’t you?”  As a camp counselor you get to think up fun activities to do for approximately seven hours a day, five days a week; basically, you plan your own fun.  This coupled with the fantastic staff and children running about the campus all summer makes it easy enough for me to fill in the returning staff application I receive each winter.

            This past summer, I thought I’d have an experience similar to the two previous summers that I’d worked at Camp Shalom, a day camp with Jewish themes located on a sprawling, wooded, open, gorgeous campus.  I would get three groups of great kids, three sets of amazing co-counselors, and have an awesome nine weeks out at the campus.  This did happen; I had an unbelievable summer.  But what helped to set it apart from the other two was one of my kids, a third grader we’ll call Josh.  This child was beautiful: He was small for his eight years with unruly black hair, freckles splattered across the bridge of his nose, bright hazel eyes and an even brighter smile that he wore constantly.  From the outside he seemed just like any of the other kids we work with.  However, when we found out from his forms that he had Asperger's, I was nervous.  I’d played with some of the other kids who come to camp with disabilities, but had never had one in my group.  My co-counselors and I, an older friend I knew from my dance troupe, Havah, and a newcomer my age, Evan, were reassured by our Individual Needs Director that Josh was a wonderful child and just needed some extra supervision.  The Unit Head of Bet, the guy in charge of the second and third grade groups, heard us talking about him and piped in.  “You’re going to love him,” he said.  “He’s a little chatterbox with a robot voice, cutest, sweetest kid ever.”

            The first day of camp came around, and the three of us met our group of eleven eight-year-olds.  It’s always a little intimidating when we form groups.  You see, the first day starts out with everyone gathering by the Rally Tree to sing songs, we hear a few words from our administrative staff, and then are called up by counselor group to read off the names of our kids.  Because I have a loud camp voice which you wouldn’t guess if you only knew me during the off season, I was elected to read the list during the five seconds of trotting with my co-counselors down to the Tree.  We stood in front of the whole of the camp, smiling foolishly, and I yelled out the names, knowing that I’ve butchered more than one.  When your name is called, you head up front, and so soon we had all of our kids surrounding us; we were lodged in the center of a sea of eager faces looking up at us, wondering what was next.  That was it: We were responsible for keeping these eleven happy and safe.  We gathered our wits, got out of the way of the next group and introduced ourselves while heading up to our table, which happened to be the one farthest from everywhere.  Evan, Havah and I exchanged knowing looks when Josh said his name.  This is the one to keep an extra special eye on, we thought, but not just that.  What our Unit Head had said was true: Josh had a robot voice.  He spoke elegantly with much more sophisticated language than you would expect from a small child in his little robot voice.  Our Unit Head had put it into the best words to describe the sound, the annunciation, the surprising lack of inflections.  The volume would change but the tone would stay almost exactly the same unless he got extremely excited or agitated.

It was adorable.

            We got to our table, explained the schedule, and began the day with some get-to-know-you games.  We progressed through the day’s activities without incident until swimming time was up.  After you’d gotten changed you were supposed to go out and sit on the step your group was assigned, smallest number on the bottom, largest on top.  I got out of the changing room and counted the campers lining my step; there were only seven.  No problem, I knew, because they’d all get out, there was still time.  A few more kids trickled out onto the steps, my co’s joined me up front, and soon we had ten.  Groups who had all of their kids began to leave, but our group stayed on the step, twiddling our thumbs for our missing camper.  Josh.  After all of the other groups had left our Unit Head told us to go; he’d check the boy’s locker room for Josh, and if he wasn’t there he’d search the campus for him.  The three of us just had to get the ten campers left to the next activity.  Our stomachs filled with lead at the thoughts that Josh wouldn’t be in the locker room, that he’d run away and gotten lost, that the Unit Head wouldn’t find him and we’d have to call in the police, but we put smiles on and gathered our kids.  We had to stop at our table to put our swimming things away before we could go to Teva, Hebrew for “nature,” and so we went to the Bet area and headed up the slope to our table.  As we neared it, the other counselors and I still thinking about Josh, a small figure seated on the table came slowly into focus.

            Josh was sitting under the navy blue umbrella, swinging his legs off the side of the table, his bag of swimming things beside him.  Evan ran off to tell the Unit Head not to worry anymore and I hurried up to the table.  As I opened my mouth to gently remind him to stay at the steps tomorrow he called out, “This is probably going to happen tomorrow, just so you know.  I will be here waiting for you all to come back.”  The other kids giggled, but he only nodded solemnly.  He continued on, saying that it had been Nina, a girl from another group, who had come up with the plan and that she had gone as well (her counselors had seen her leave at the start).  Dumbstruck – I’d never been with a kid who would tell you that he’s going to continue to run off – I softened my reprimand and asked him to wait for one of the counselors to come out of the locker rooms tomorrow; he could come up with him or her then.  I needn’t have bothered, however.  The next day the three of us hurried to change and ended up coming out to see him sitting serenely on the step, not wanting to go in the least.  We turned to each other, took in our appearances, and laughed.  In our haste we hadn’t taken the care to dry off well or the time to put shoes on; we were barefoot on the hot concrete and dripping with pool water.  Things started looking up after that.