Girl Trouble. Kerry Cohen

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      We applied bug spray and readjusted barrettes and headbands in the mottled mirrors in the bathroom, and then tromped down the path to the fire pit. The air was heavy with humidity. The boys were already sitting around the pit on the wooden benches, and some of the girls pulled up their tank tops halfway, revealing their bellies. The boys, of course, looked. One girl, Gaby, asked me my name. She had been in the program since nursery school. She pointed out the girls she knew and told me a little about each.

      “That one,” she said, nodding toward a girl named Tiffany who would become my bully that year, the one who would haunt me for years, “is a bitch. And that one,” she referred to the girl next to her, “is a bitch in training. Just stay away from them and you’ll be okay.” The bitch she referred to had curly dishwater hair. She was one of the ones who had raised her tank top. She sat with the other girl, who I’d later learn was Courtney, hanging on her almost, looking to her constantly. We introduced ourselves, and when I said my name quietly, Tiffany smirked at Courtney. To this day I wonder what it was about me. I had had friends throughout elementary school. In most of my friendships, I’d been fun and happy and unafraid. But that day something shifted. For the first time I saw myself in the world, with others around me. My parents divorcing. My mother’s grief. My own sense of newness and change, of the world spinning out of control.

      The leaders handed out envelopes and small pads of paper to each of us and explained that we would each write our name on the envelope and hang it from the bulletin board near our bed. Each day of the week we were here we would use the pad to write notes of praise or encouragement to one another, which we would stick inside the person’s envelope. We had to write three per day, but we were welcome to write more.

      Back in the cabin we all hung our envelopes, and then we left for kitchen duty. We had various chores to complete each day—cleaning the cabin, making meals, and cleaning up after meals. We went out to a clearing in the woods and did blindfolded trust falls, had to get ourselves over a wall using teamwork, and prepared for a three-day hike. What I remember most, though, are those envelopes. At the end of each day, we checked them. The girls Gaby had pointed out to me had at least three per day. I tried to think of things to say to each girl, and some afternoons during our free time, when most of us wrote our notes, I spent the whole hour and a half crafting these notes of praise for my bunkmates. We all wrote things like, You were really helpful at cleanup today, or, You’re a nice girl. By evening, though, I always had only one, always from Gaby, and some days I had none at all.

      In the last part of the trip, we went on the three-day hike through the woods. We camped in tents, made our own fires, fished, and had to use compasses to find our way back to the camp. I have no memory of any of this. I don’t remember the smell of the thick oaks and maples, the sound of the creek, the shock of cold as I leaned down to touch the water that rushed by. I don’t remember lying on the cold ground in my sleeping bag or who slept next to me. I don’t remember turning on my flashlight in the night and walking into the warm night, the bulbous yellow light before me, so I could pee in the woods. I remember none of it. In truth, I can’t be sure it happened. Twenty-five years later, after I had published my first memoir and reconnected with various people from my past, Gaby contacted me. She wrote, “It’s so great to see you again! I have such good memories of you.” I didn’t know who she was. Her face, her name, the things she said—none of it called up any sort of familiarity in my mind. She’s the one who told me this story, who said she’s sure she had a photograph somewhere (although she never could find it) of our group from that trip. I can imagine that photo as though it were from my own memory, of the girls, our arms around one another, the smiles. This friend I’d forgotten is the one, in fact, who brought back into my memory this year that began with this trip into the woods, a year that I still call the worst year of my life, a year when my home life spun out of my control, when I was bullied extensively by a few kids, one girl in particular, when my understanding of girls and their power formed, and a year that I somehow pushed from my memory so that I could not fully recover it.