the summer I didn't turn pretty

middle school malaise, theater camp, and what it takes to be a cool girl in 2006

The year is 2006, the setting a lauded performing arts camp, and our hero is an 11-year-old Julianna; terminally about to turn twelve and spending the summer trying (and failing) to be a cool girl. Rumor has it she is still trying to this day.

The summer before 7th grade is an exceptionally cruel one, and it can only be made worse when you (prone to bullying, chubby, emotionally earnest) go to sleepaway camp.

It would be my second year at the seminal performing arts camp of Upstate New York, and I was eager to return to the woods with all the trappings of a successful middle schooler.

I failed this task immediately of course, as this was the year that I somehow thought bringing my home friends to my beloved camp was a good idea. Why, oh why would one ever combine those worlds? Camp is a mystical retreat away from your everyday life, it is a time of reinvention and renewal, it is not something to be shared with classmates.

I loved my friends, but I had the feeling that they were outpacing me already, that even though we had barely begun to embark on the true terror of tweenhood, they were much more successful at it. They were emotionally complex in ways that hormones had yet to activate in me. Their parents let them watch The Simple Life.

I was young for my grade at 11 years old, and completely confident in the fact that I would be a child forever. It would be at least three more years before I stopped playing with dolls completely, and five before I had any kind of meaningful kiss with tongue. I had a terrible time striking balance as a child, perhaps I still do. I was either painfully quiet and out of the way or demanding all the attention in the room. There’s only one place in the world where this personality swing is rewarded: the theater.

I wasn’t serious about many things, but I was serious about the theater. I took music lessons, dance class, performed plays, basically anything that would pluck me from obscurity and thrust me into starlight. At a well-known performing arts camp with well-known former campers¹ the threat of prodigal fame was looming around every corner. Like most girls my age who loved to sing and grew up watching The Disney Channel, I was positive that my purpose in life was to become a superstar, and this camp was the place to enact that transformation.

The other girls in my bunk shared this belief, and through our delusion we formed the tenuous bonds of sisterhood. Our bunk was down the hill from the dining hall, with pine walls and showers that never seemed to drain properly. The bunk felt safe enough, a combination of new faces and my two trusted home friends, but as they were wont to do our pre-pubescent eyes began scanning one another for similarities and differences.

Most of the girls seemed exactly the type I’d like to be friends with. You never know however, until it’s entirely too late, if they would like to be friends with you. I took an immediate dislike to a girl named Laura, who was hellbent on pointing out to me that my olive skin and the dark hair on my arms made me look like a monkey. You can’t let a name like that spread. I had decided at the beginning of the summer that I was going to get a nickname at camp, and that nickname was going to be Poptart. Monkey was nowhere on the list of names I had imagined beading onto friendship bracelets.

At this stage in the game there were plenty of other friendships I could form. I arrived with a certain social cache, two girls from home who read as much cooler than me yet vouched for my existence. It was maybe the most valuable stock in the room. It wasn’t special enough that we were all the same age and we all liked singing. You needed an ace in the hole, and I was already out of the zeitgeist as half the bunk arrived with a copy of New Moon, the just-released sequel to Twilight, and I was still a little too scared to read vampire fiction.

The summer was drawing a line in the sand between girls who were lame and girls who were interesting. Interesting girls packed low rise jeans and wore nail polish. Lame girls were still figuring out how to tweak what they saw in the mirror.

The most interesting girls though were of course the counselors. I don’t know if this is just where I grew up, but somehow every extracurricular activity I attended as a child had a consistent stream of attractive 22-year-old South Africans, or Australians, or other English speaking imports. Our head counselor was a 19-year-old Scottish girl named something I can’t remember. Ainsley or something like that. She had this delicious combination of teendom and non-American intrigue that made her all the more appealing to me. I remember her as strong, possibly a student athlete, with a wispy braid running down her back. I trusted her with my life.

The junior counselor on the other hand was a 14-year-old who, since her age was in spitting distance of ours, felt obligated to remind us how much experience came with those extra few years. One night, cross-legged on her bed, she informed us that you had to pop your cherry before a boy could do it for you. Bleeding was too embarrassing, and she suggested using a piece of fruit (I would have to imagine a banana?) to get the job done yourself. This was even scarier than the vampire book.

I do want to be clear that even though I was eleven, I was no stranger to at least the concept of sexuality. I had a boyfriend in the 6th grade that took me to the fall dance and everything. He made me a mixtape with hits like Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young and Daydream Believer by The Monkees, possibly the most romantic gesture I’ve received to this day. We shared a few meaningful hugs, zero kisses, but he let me win at tic tac toe and I loved his eyes. He was nice, right up until he broke up with me unceremoniously on Valentine’s Day.

Camp however, and the notion of sleeping somewhere with boys and without your parents, accelerated certain feelings. My friends from home had versions of boyfriends faster than I could keep up with. Now remember this is a performing arts camp, so the types of boys that went there were of an incredibly specific niche. The most popular kid at camp² had just been cast in Billy Elliot, or was going to be in Billy Elliot, or at least was rumored to have auditioned for Billy Elliot, I can’t be sure. Either way, they were sensitive and arty.