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Ray’s departure sent ripples through the cafeteria. The eccentric emo-surfer misfit, who once won over campers with his charismatic personality, now left as a defiant revolutionary. The looks on a group of counselors’ faces and the hushed, concerned discussions at their table told me he never belonged here after all. I looked up to Ray, and felt embarrassed over all the chatter.

“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Kena said.

“There’s nothin’ to it. We’ll wait for you behind the clothesline,” Buck said.

“Did he say why he left? Your counselor?” Marguerite asked.

“He didn’t like it here.”

Marguerite smirked. “Is that all it takes to get out? I don’t like it here either. Can I go home too?”

“We’d all be better off,” Buck said.

“Nobody asked you.”

“Yes, you did.”

We cleared our plates and headed out for the next round of group activities. When free time rolled around, I made my way to the Big House.

“He’s in a meeting, but I’m sure he’d be glad to talk to you when he’s done. Please take a seat. I’ll let him know he has a visitor.”

After a few minutes, a group of older men walked out of Billingsley’s office. Billingsley followed them out and sent them off. He looked tired. He faced the secretary, who motioned over in my direction. A smile appeared on his face, and he walked over.

“Hello TJ, isn’t it your free hours?” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You told me I could come and talk to you if I ever had questions.”

“Of course.” He motioned me inside.

I entered the office and sat opposite Billingsley, who sat behind his large wooden desk. As I sat, I completely forgot how I had been planning on beginning the conversation.

“Reverend Billingsley, how long have you been here? At the camp, I mean?”

“Let’s see. I’ve been a part of this community since long before this camp was ever here. Did you know there used to be another camp here a long time ago, one that I went to when I was your age? We used to go on long camping trips in these mountains for days, sometimes weeks at a time. I know this place well.”

I recalled the paths and stonewalls winding through the woods.

“What’s on your mind? I take it you didn’t come here to talk about how long I’ve been at the camp?”

“I wanted to ask you about Ray.”

“Of course. I’m sure his departure has come as a surprise.”

“I keep hearing ‌different things from people, and I don’t know what to think. I want to know why he left.”

I could not hide the quiver in my voice from him. Wheels turned behind Billingsley’s eyes.

“I know how difficult it must be to have to say goodbye to someone you were so close to.”

Billingsley removed his glasses and leaned forward.

“Mr. Chamberlain was in a unique situation that did not have an easy resolution.” He spoke as if the words were difficult to say. “I believe Ray has a unique connection to his faith, one that he and many at the seminary had certain disagreements about. Ray recognized these differences and, after discussions with the board members, mutually agreed to depart and not to attend in the fall.”

Hearing this from Billingsley did not provide me what I sought. Ray was gone. I didn’t understand why a disagreement about God would cause him to want to leave. Wasn’t God, God? Ray, who seemed to glow with God’s presence, was at odds with the ones at his seminary school, the place where people went to learn about God, to become missionaries, ministers, and priests. Billingsley asked if there were any other questions I had. I lied to the Reverend and left his office.

Buck’s incessant shaking awoke me. I’d been riding a charger wearing full armor and flying the banner of a red and gold lion. I held my gleaming sword high above me, the light from the sun warming my back. I rode into a poor village, where ragged-looking villagers welcomed me. They tossed flowers beneath me as I rode. I arrived at an old abbey, and standing in front of the large ornate door was who I took to be Galileo. He had a large telescope and beckoned me to look at the stars he’d discovered.

I slipped into my shoes and quietly shut the back screen door of the cabin. The stars above were bright, no clouds to veil the light of the moon. I rushed down the path that led into the woods behind our cabin and met up with Buck.

“Ready?” he whispered.

I tried not to stare too long at the girls’ bathing suits hanging on the clothesline. There was a stick propping open a window. I got on my hands and knees, and Buck climbed up to pull away the stick, tapping the sleeper on the top bunk before quietly shutting the window. We hid ourselves between the hanging blankets and towels until we heard the squeaking of the back screen door, and the girls followed us back across the basketball court and down the path into the woods behind our cabin.

We stopped when we were well out of earshot of the nearest buildings. Buck turned on his flashlight, and we continued down thin trails until we found ourselves at a clearing that overlooked the river. The moon shone in its fullness, illuminating the night. Buck went down to skip rocks. I stayed at the top of the bank and sat. Kena casually announced that she, too, was going to skip rocks. Marguerite said she’d stay.

“What’s wrong, TJ?” Marguerite asked.

She was wearing my hoodie sweatshirt, her wet eyes reflecting the moonlight.

“You can talk to me. What’s going on?”

Her fingers slipped into mine.

“I don’t know. I just feel different. Uncertain.”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“About me?”

“You’re probably the only thing I do feel certain about.”

At that, it was the moon that reflected the light of her smile. She leaned her head on my shoulder.

“What do you think about heaven?”

“You believe all that stuff?”

“You don’t?”

“My step-dad says God is dead, and that he might not have ever been there to begin with. He thinks we came from monkeys.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not sure. I think so. I’ve prayed for things before. Never got an answer.”

“It’s like he isn’t even there anymore.”

Marguerite leaned closer. “Isn’t God supposed to be everywhere?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, how far away can he be?”

Cicadas sounded off all around us. Moonlight shimmered on the water, disturbed by the skipping stones, the glass rippling off into unseeable darkness. The river lulled us, moving slow and deep. Dragonflies flew past, joining the stones that touched the water, planets expanding on the surface.

I turned and was met by two small, soft lips. I held my breath, the warmth of Marguerite’s scent lingering. My eyes shut, but with my own lips sensed the subtle movements of her face, her cold nose, her gentle breaths. I dared not think of her body, but there it was, warm and near to me.

As quickly as it began, the moment passed, and Marguerite’s head again lay on my shoulder. Neither of us spoke until Kena and Buck appeared, me trying not to lose my composure, and Marguerite content and calm, resting in a reality my dull senses could not perceive.

As we walked back through the overgrowth, voices echoed from the darkness ahead of us. We crouched low. Marguerite’s hand clung tightly to mine, but I soon recognized the voices. I flashed my light in their direction.

“Who’s there?” a voice called.

My flashlight fell on a group of senior campers coming up the path. They held brown glass bottles and were carelessly loud in the darkness. Alec Robinson and his posse approached us with shining flashlights of their own.

“Tiger, you dog. What are you doing out here so late? Is that Pork Rind? And a couple of ladies? Don’t you two know any better than to be sneaking out with these two no-goods?”

Neither of the girls responded.

“We were just heading back to our cabins,” Buck said, voice shaking.

I could not guess where they’d come from, and for a moment I feared the worst, but they said so long and passed us by. We reached the path that led back to our cabin and retraced our way back to the clothesline behind Beech. Marguerite turned and grabbed my face, once again laying her lips on mine, saying goodnight without using words, being sure not to let the others see. Buck and I snuck back into our bunks. Hodge was asleep above me, and I was thankful he’d made the right decision not to join Alec and the others. I wish I could have said the same the next time the opportunity arose—for both of us.

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I sat facing the center of the room. Hodge came down from his bunk and sat next to me.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure.”

We looked to Ray for assurance.

“It’s alright guys. I wanted us to talk to them about the other night. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity just like this. It shouldn’t take too long.”

The men filed in and sat in the chairs that had been stacked in the corner of the front room. It was not just these men who entered, but a handful of counselors from other cabins had also joined them as they came in. Their faces were stern and suspecting. Half of the boys were unaware of their arrival and continued to play cards, run outside, or take naps. Billingsley was the first to speak.

“I would like to begin this meeting by thanking you all for being here, and for Mr. Chamberlain, who has openly and honestly shared with me many things that I am curious to understand more of. Ray, thank you for being willing to meet with us today. We are eager to learn more of what you have begun to share with me.”

Ray rose from his bunk. He leaned against it as he recounted the events of the awakened dream experience we had shared a few nights earlier. To me, as I have said, it was like a dream. I did not have an idea that it would be the main reason we gathered here this afternoon. Ray came alive as he shared, raising his hands and voice at times, continuing with an excited look in his eyes. He repeatedly used terms I had never heard before, terms like “baptism”, “laying on of hands” and “interceding”. When Ray finished, the rest of the room looked to Billingsley for a response. He had been sitting with his hand to his chin, and rose from his seat. He gently turned to Hodge and I.

“Would either of you like to add anything to what Ray has shared?”

Hodge and I shared a glance. Despite my nerves, I was the first to share.

“When we were praying, I saw a picture of my mom and dad in my mind. Right after I did, Ray told me I was praying for my parents.”

Ray gave me an affirming nod. Hodge had a similar account, referencing the peace he’d felt after sharing many things that he didn’t like to share with anyone. Our testimonies had an effect on the room. It was silent. Most of the men looked contemplative or in distant thought. It was Billingsley who broke the silence, speaking to everyone, and to no one at the same time.

“There are some things about God that we cannot fully understand.”

He came to himself and glanced around the room at all the faces who looked to him in the moment.

“Thank you for sharing, boys.” He addressed the room. “To know whether a thing is of God, we must look at the fruit. These two have shared their accounts, both of which seem to be sincere, authentic, and impactful.” He paused. “We can only conclude that this must be from God.”

As the men and the others filed out of the room, I could not help expressing my confusion to Ray about what had just transpired, and why the meeting was even necessary at all.

“This is one of the main things they get all hung up on. But not anymore.” He looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. “Now things are going to start changing around here.”

I was not keen to think more about it. My thoughts were of Marguerite, and I immediately set off to search the camp for her. I was out for most of the afternoon. When I had finally come back, a group was gathered on the front porch. Ray was in the middle of them. He was praying for another counselor. I stood on my tiptoes but couldn’t see anything. I worked through them until one camper moved aside and let me near the front door. Through the screen, I saw Ray praying. His eyes were closed, head lifted, hands firmly pressed down on another counselor’s shoulder. The counselor looked slightly uncomfortable but remained engaged in prayer. They finished and everyone stepped back. Ray asked the counselor to stretch out his shoulder to test its mobility. The counselor said that everything was mostly still the same. They prayed again, but the result was the same. It occurred to me afterwards that Ray wasn’t just praying for him, but was praying for this counselor’s healing. He believed through the laying on of hands that the sick or injured could be healed. He prayed twice even, but nothing happened. I asked him why he kept trying to pray for him to be healed, even if after the first time it didn’t work.

“Well, I’d rather try and not have it work than never try and nobody ever get healed. Jesus said we’d be able to do it. Sometimes it’s about stepping out and trusting.”

“But why keep trying if it didn’t work the first time?”

“Prayer is powerful. Sometimes we just need to keep praying for things.”

The following afternoon, Buck and I met up with the girls at the snack shack. Buck had to stand in line and get us all drinks after losing in straight sets to Marguerite on the ping-pong table. Kena took the cherry off the top of her chocolate milkshake and handed it to Marguerite. She put it in her mouth and, in a couple of moments, took out just the stem. It was neatly tied in a small knot.

“How’d you do that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

The two girls chuckled as Marguerite’s face turned bright pink.

“Tiger,” Buck clasped me on the shoulder, “I really don’t know how you made it this far in life.”

“If you can tie a cherry stem in your mouth,” Kena said, “then you’re a good kisser. Here.”

She grabbed the cherry off the top of my milkshake, ate it, and handed me the stem.

I put the stem in my mouth. I almost came close to quitting out of how ridiculous I felt, but they were all watching with anticipation to see what I’d do. My tongue got the stem to twist, but it gave out and shot into the back of my throat, instantly thrusting me into a coughing fit, and I spat out the stem onto the ground. To say that they were Rolling On The Floor Laughing would have been an understatement.

“It’s okay, Tiger,” Marguerite said, “I’ll show you sometime.”

Kena put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, wow.”

Buck laughed, “Hold on, say that again.”

They laughed more, and the rest of the conversation went on, but it didn’t occur to me what she really implied until Buck pointed it out on the way back to the cabin that afternoon.

“You haven’t got the sense God gave a goose.”

We were a little late getting back to the cabin. Most of the boys were ready to go to dinner and then straight from there to the night service. When we finished, our group filed into the chapel. I couldn’t slip away to find Marguerite, and so I settled in with the guys. Tonight was a special night. Many of the camp counselors and other staff who worked for the seminary led us in chants, told jokes, and put on skits. It was mania and was always one of the most golden moments of the week. I remember leaving and feeling breathless, all the boys in our cabin uncontrollably laughing all the way out of the chapel and into the starry night until curfew.

I walked Marguerite to her cabin, said goodnight, and meandered through camp to the cabin. The boys were sitting up in their bunks when I entered. Ray was standing in the middle of the room. He turned when I walked in.

“Hey Tiger,” he said, “I was just getting ready to talk to the fellas.”

I walked to my bunk where Hodge gave me the same confused look I gave him. Ray stood under the ceiling fan light with his head bowed.

“I don’t know an easy way to say this.”

We watched Ray let out a sigh, and with it, a faint sob.

“I’m not going to be your counselor anymore.”

A tear trailed down his cheek.

“I’ll be gone early tomorrow. Your new counselor will be taking over for me in the morning.”

His eyes moved over each of us. I could only keep listening.

“It’s been a great summer. I’m gonna miss you all.”

“Are you moving to a new cabin?”

“No,” he said, “I wanted to stay with this group. That’s why I came back this week,” he paused, holding back a sob. “I’m leaving camp. I’m going home.”

“Why?”

Ray’s eyes fell on the voice that came from the bunk above mine.

“Well, I let my family know and the school know that I don’t want to attend anymore. My dad isn’t too happy about it, but it really just isn’t the place for me. It’s a part of God’s plan that I wasn’t expecting, but I think it’ll be okay.”

“Not for us,” Hodge said.

“We’re gonna miss you,” another voice said. “Best counselor ever.”

The boys got out of their bunks and wrapped themselves around him, and eventually the entire cabin was piled on top of Ray, who could not breathe from the weight of us.

The rest of the night carried on. We all stayed up and hung out into the late hours of the evening, far past curfew and lights out, my cabin mates carrying on mostly normally.

Before bed, I found Ray while he was brushing his teeth in the small front room of the cabin.

“Hey Tiger—”

I ran to him, tears in my eyes, trying not to let the others hear me cry.

“Hey, you’re gonna be alright, Tiger.”

I stood back and wiped my eyes. I told him I didn’t want him to go.

“I know this is hard. And maybe it doesn’t make sense. A lot of it doesn’t make sense to me if I’m telling you the truth. But man, Tiger, I’ve loved getting to know you. Hold on, I’ve got something for you. Wait here.”

He slipped out of the front room and quietly returned as the rest of the cabin had settled into bed.

“Here. I want you to have this.”

He handed me his blue leather Bible.

“But, this is yours,” I said, giving it back.

“I’ve got others. Everything we’ve talked about is here. God has started something good in you, Tiger.”

His words were of little comfort. Ray squeezed my shoulder as I walked back into the room and set the Bible on my trunk. The tears returned. Sorrow took me, and I fell asleep.

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Nobody was as excited to be on the river again as Buck. The sun was still low, gray fog floating on the surface of the water. We rose early to get as much time on our canoeing trip as possible. Our cabin paired up and took seven canoes, eight if you include our guide. It being a new week, Buck’s previous suspension had been uplifted. He and I surged ahead of the rest with the light breeze at our backs.

“Do you know the name of this river?” I asked from the front of the canoe.

“I don’t know,” Buck said, turning to see if the guide was nearby.

“Hey,” he called out into the fog, “what’s the name of this river anyhow?”

“Whiskey River,” a voice carried down the water.

“Why’s that?”

The voice, nearer now, came from our guide, who was a heavy-set mangy looking man with a beard and a ponytail. He wore a colorful t-shirt with skeletons and dancing teddy bears on it.

“Locals gave it that name during the Prohibition. People used to use routes throughout these mountains for smuggling.”

The nose of his canoe rose out of the water, his weight in the back bobbing on the waterline.

“Its original name, however,” he continued, “is the Pagitnigamek. Comes from the Abenaki, though there aren’t many left around here.”

“Hey Jerry,” Ray called, “what’s that up there?”

Above the fog, the wooded banks grew sparse as a jagged cliff rose up fifty or sixty feet. Below it, the water was shallow and rocky.

“That’s Demonhead Bluff,” our guide said. “From further down the river, it looks like the side profile of a face with horns.”

At the top, large rock formations stood among the scattered trees. Buck was looking at the same thing.

“It’s a tough climb, but you can see pretty far from the top,” Jerry said.

It was nearly pitch black outside when I was last at the top of what I now know as Demonhead Bluff. I recalled Alec Robinson, the older kids smoking, and the eerie feeling that came over me when the wind whistled through the trees towards us, all just before Hodge and I got caught on the trail after curfew.

We pulled off to a calm section of the river to fix our lines. The sun had yet to rise over the treeline. Our window of opportunity for good fishing would not soon close. We sat back and cast out. It was quiet for most of the morning. The sounds of the canoes gently disturbing the water were the closest of sounds, followed by the early morning chirping of birds in the trees above, as well as squirrels and the rustling sounds of the light breeze moving on the banks. Further off, the trees swayed, and the demon’s head lay chin down in the river like a sleeping giant. I imagined the giant waking, the stone head’s eyes opening and looking around. Would it see me? It rose and stood over the river like a guardian, blocking our way and not allowing us back to camp. The thought, silly as it was, made me uneasy, so I returned to my fishing. I asked Buck to turn us around so we could face upriver towards the lily pads and the rest of the group.

“Hey Jerry,” I called, “that name, Pagit-whatever. What’s it mean?”

The nose of Jerry’s canoe dipped as he turned to face the group.

“The Abenaki had a ritual in which they would return the bones of fish, beavers, and other animals to the water to lie to rest,” he said. “Pagitnigamek. It means ‘offering’, or ‘sacrifice.’”

Back at the cafeteria, breakfast was hash browns, rubbery eggs and salty brown breakfast sausages. I scanned the crowd and spotted a few empty seats near Marguerite and Kena. Buck and I walked over and placed our trays down next to them.

“Where were you this morning?” Kena asked.

“Fishin’,” Buck said.

I ate. Marguerite was quiet.

“Still asleep, Marguerite?” Buck said.

She rolled her eyes, stood up, and stormed off and out of the cafeteria.

“Who crapped in her cornflakes?” Buck asked.

Kena just raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

Buck glared back. “You know something.”

“What?” she said.

“Yes, you do, don’t give me that. Come on, now, what’s her deal?”

“I don’t know.” She looked down at her breakfast.

“What is it?”

Kena leaned in. “It’s Tiger.”

“Me?” I said, “What did I do?”

“Nothing. That’s exactly it.”

“What? I’m just sitting here eating my breakfast.”

“Do you know anything?” She rolled her eyes.

“You’re gonna have to help me out.”

Kena leaned in and whispered, “She likes you, dude.”

It wasn’t exactly news, but hearing it aloud made it suddenly real and terrifying. I felt embarrassed, and my stomach ached.

“You gonna ask her out?” Buck said.

“What?”

“You gotta ask her out now, man.”

“You can’t tell her I told you,” Kena said.

“You didn’t have to tell us. I saw it a mile away.” Buck chugged down the rest of his chocolate milk. “C’mon Tiger, you gotta do somethin’. Go talk to her.”

Wings fluttered in my belly.

“She’s probably just waiting outside for Kena. Why don’t you just go out there and talk to her.”

“He’s right,” Kena said. “She’s probably just sitting out there.”

Despite every bone in my body telling me not to, going to see about Marguerite was exactly what I found myself doing that very next moment. She was sitting at an outdoor picnic table, kicking her dangling legs against the air while she waited.

“Do you—”

I stopped myself. She hadn’t yet spotted me. Her eyes were closed. She was breathing deeply, finding the morning sun. Its warmth covered her. I stood by and watched her drink it in.

Gathering myself, I quietly walked over and sat on the other end of the table. I said nothing. I just sat, careful not to disturb the moment.

“What are you doing?” she said, her eyes closed and her back to me.

“Just waiting.”

Whatever tension buzzed between us, she did not let on much. She faced the sun.

She sighed, “Me too.”

A moment was manifesting, as if a stage and a spotlight were shining, waiting for me to take my place. I watched myself lightly tap her on her shoulder. She turned to face me. To my surprise, there were not eyes of indignation looking back at me, but of hope.

“I don’t really know how to say this…” I cut myself off. She stared at me as I spoke, but she followed suit and cut me off before a clear thought could cross my mind.

“Yes,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t even—”

“I will be your girlfriend.”

She inched herself closer towards me and I watched her slip her fingers into mine.

“Whoa,” Kena said.

Buck laughed. “You owe me a coke.”

Marguerite squeezed my hand as our friends approached us.

“I don’t know what to make of you, Tiger,” Buck said.

At the moment, I didn’t either. The following afternoon flew by. The girls, Buck and I all stuck together for the rest of the day’s activities. I don’t remember a single word from chapel that evening, only how Marguerite and I sat a few rows away from the group, holding hands and lost in a world of our own. We walked out together and sat with each other in every group that lingered outside the chapel, and down at the basketball court. At the bleachers, I gave her my sweatshirt, and she huddled close to me. It did not matter what everyone around us had said. We were entranced, and we didn’t care. That night could have been two hours or two minutes. I walked her to her cabin and hugged her goodnight, and returned to my cabin in ecstasy.

It had not worn off. I awoke quickly. My hair was combed, tie neatly fastened over my collar’s top button, breath minty fresh ahead of the morning’s Sunday service. I got there before our group and waited for Marguerite by the large oak doors of the chapel.

“Good morning, TJ.”

Reverend Billingsley nodded as he passed through the threshold. “You’re an early bird, aren’t you?”

“Excited to be here.”

He smiled as he passed. Other campers soon entered in groups led by their counselors. I waited for what seemed like hours as the chapel filled, worrying if we’d be able to find a spot together.

“Hey!”

Though she stood in the doorway, Marguerite’s voice came from a girl I did not recognize. Her hair was down, not in the typical pigtail braids she wore every other day. She wore a yellow sundress with flowers and a black pair of Chuck Taylors.

“Did you find us seats?”

“Not yet.”

My hands, feet, brain—none of them worked. She quickly took me by the hand and led me to a pew on the left side of the chapel where we squeezed through just in time to stand for worship. I held the hymnal in my sweaty palms, my necktie choking me.

The sound of the man with the golden voice distracted me for a moment. He was his same old self, though I had not seen him in a while. Above me, his voice rang down from heaven, and beside me, one of heaven’s angels sang sweetly and softly. The sermon was shorter than others I’d heard from Billingsley, but my concept for time was still skewed. It all ran together, melting away, like a single scoop in the summer heat. I closed my eyes and looked towards the words inside me. I found God there and asked if my life would always be this good. To my complete and total surprise, I received a response.

I will always be with you.

It was a thought, and not quite what I might have expected. But it was also not a thought. It was within me, one of the living words that swirled inside of me. It was me, but it was not from me. I do not know how else to explain it. One might say it was just me, or a voice inside my head. To that, I would say that my voice is not worth listening to, it rarely desires to tell the truth. These were words that could not have come from me or my head because I did not put them there. Yet, there they were, resounding throughout my entire being.

We rose from our seats and walked to lunch. Afterwards, I rushed to our cabin to change out of my nice clothes, ready to take on the free hours with Marguerite. Ray and the rest of the guys had just gotten back when I rushed out the door. As I darted out, I bumped into a man wearing slacks, a white dress shirt, and a tie. I looked up.

“Hello, TJ,” Reverend Billingsley said. “Do you have a moment?”

I stepped back. Behind him stood Mr. Robinson, other camp staff and a few older men still dressed in their nice Sunday clothes.

“Do you remember what we discussed? About Mr. Chamberlain? He wanted us all to have a chat. We’d like to discuss it more with you. Please, come in. It should only be a moment.”

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A brief interruption to the regular fiction schedule here at Shade Tree Creative — we’ll pick up as usual next week.

I have fallen asleep,
my soul stirs in the deep 
waters beneath the weight 
of all the slaughter that
has spilt the Holy blood
and called this ground accursed,
where waters wash weathervanes
neither east nor west
but low as tides,
the rains release
and still no washing of these
sins removes their blot from
garden soil

What can grow from such a soil?
But hatred, envy, darkness, toil?
It cries from brother's wrath upon
that gentle hair, those smothered
eyes, the smeared brow

How? How fair the favored one of flesh, 
in wretched death, the darling of two lovers' dream,
their long lost hope to live again
in western gardens green, 
slain by his own,
his blood cried from the earth, 
and cast the other son away to wandering

And now what dream is yet to be?
When sons of Cain took it from me?
Was it a promise or a lie,
or something worse that comes to haunt
the grounds at night and terrify 
the sons and daughters we now bear to
keep alive the flame we fan on
altars in remembrance of our bondage to 
this blood we spilt?

Do not forget our pleading cries 
You heard for generations while
in patience You remained aware 
of stains we wear 
but cannot hide 
with hide of goat and ox
and lamb

Or shall when summer sun is high
the first fruits of our harvest time 
remind us of the sons who died and cast aside,
marked forever wanderers and yet again
attempt to mend the brokenness we sent
ahead to all our children and their kin,
to wait for You to turn Your gaze away
from all our ways, we pray You take
Your time but do not take 
all of ours,
for we have nothing else upon which
to wait

Thanks for reading. I write fiction, poetry, and other words. I also paint houses, make Italian food, and can get down at a wedding.

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My dreams have always been quite obscure. It was only the habit of jotting them down when I woke up each morning that has allowed me to recall the ones I have shared thus far. Most of them, at least the ones that never made much sense to me, I have not and will not share. The ones you’ve heard are somewhat sensible, and so far have aided me in the telling of this story. There are even fewer dreams, however, that have profoundly marked my life in such a way that I am still trying to grasp the fullness of them and their meaning. The first time I had a dream like this was the night after Ray returned as my counselor.

I have to say, first, that there were multiple events leading up to this dream that played a significant role in my recollection of it. There was a campfire that went into the late hours of the evening. Groups of counselors and campers my age sat beside the warm fire as we listened to many from the camp share their testimonies. God was a central part of this camp, and many of the people here had stories about how God changed their lives, how he’d marked them in a special way, or how he made himself real to them. Their stories were raw, unfiltered, and unashamedly emotional as they recounted them. Many were filled with pain. Others with miraculous happenings, and the conviction with which they shared them left no room for doubt. How could anyone share something so personal, tears and snot and all, and not be telling the truth? It made me feel like I had to be quiet, not just while sitting with my buddies, but on the inside.

I thought about heaven. I thought about how every one of those who’d shared got from one point to another; from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from death to life. None of those journeys must have been easy. To me, God coming to be a part of these people’s lives was heaven, just like Ray had said. I saw how there was more to life than waiting to get there when I died. I saw heaven in every one of their stories. They were living there right now.

We were up late. Buck, Hodge, and all the rest of the boys and I were doing more laughing than actually telling jokes, overtired, over-sugared, as any summer night should be. Ray sat in his bunk, welcoming all the fun and ridiculousness. Pretty soon, sleep claimed each boy one by one, until the laughter and jokes subsided into the kind of quiet, honest conversations that are only had once everyone else is asleep.

Hodge was sitting with me in my bunk. He had also been moved by the stories he’d heard that night. He was being open with me, but he wasn’t as certain of everything as I was. I didn’t press him. I just listened.

“I don’t go to a normal school,” he said. “I stay at my school for most of the year.”

He whispered, the darkness of the cabin ensuring his secrets would be kept safe.

“I only get to go home for holiday breaks, if my parents are home. They visit me on my birthday.”

In the middle of the conversation, Ray came over to tell us to go to sleep, but the way Hodge was looking or talking must have stopped him. He sat on my bed and listened to Hodge as he continued to open up. As Hodge spoke, his hardened features soon lacked their edge and the lines on his brow softened. What was coming out of his mouth was not sarcastic or cynical. It came from a boy, a kid who had a lot of questions. A kid who was all alone. A kid like me.

The conversation ebbed and flowed. There were long pauses, and other times when neither of the three of us could stop our deep trains of thought. And then, at some point, I was in a dream. At least, that is the best way I can describe it. It was also not a dream, however, not like any other I’d ever known before. I was awake. We all were. It was real, and took place in real life, there on my bunk, but it was not like normal life either.

I felt something that I can only describe as like being in heaven. Not glimmering and happy, euphoric or sensational, but like a great light was shining, and we three became drawn to it, like we were made for it. It was as if the tension between all the goodness and all the darkness that I had known my entire life was for a time suspended, and beyond it, only this great light remained.

I had only ever felt anything similar to this in my dreams, which is why I refer to it as such. But it was not a dream. I was not asleep. I was in reality, probably more so than I have ever been at any other time in my life.

What happened next was beyond my human comprehension. I was aware of reality, yet more so aware of whatever I had been drawn into, when suddenly, something came upon me. It was not something that was forced upon me, nor was it a construct of my will and emotion. It was peaceful, yet powerful, mine, but not my own. My mouth opened, and from it, shapes formed sounds that whispered into the air. Now lying on the bed, pictures moved in my mind as my mouth tried to express what my spirit was experiencing. I saw pictures of my friends, both here at camp and at home. I saw my house, my street, and the ocean. Before I could identify what I saw next, I heard Ray’s voice ring out as if from a distance, perfectly describing the picture that was already there.

“Your parents. God, I thank you for TJ’s parents. I pray they might know you more.”

Tears came from my eyes, but I was not sad. I wept deeply, as if pressure had been building over the weeks, and in that moment it released. I longed for my parents, but not in the way I had been. This longing was for them to know me, and to know this feeling, to share in this revelation. I saw these things, felt these things, describing them in words I did not understand, and the shifting continued.

I was not alone in this. Something similar was happening simultaneously with Hodge. He lay next to me, tears streaming down his face, murmuring whispers into the darkness. Ray was there too, his hand on my shoulder. We continued until, at some point, it all stopped. The ending of that night is a blur in my memory. I don’t even recall saying goodnight. All three of us ended up back in our own beds and awoke the next morning without recollecting much of what had transpired. It wasn’t until Buck brought it up that I even thought about it.

“You guys were up late, huh?” he said.

Memories came flooding back to me.

“I got up to go to the bathroom around one or two. You guys were still up. Sounded like you guys were gettin’ in the Holy Ghost.”

“Huh?” I said, taken aback by the remark.

“The Holy Ghost. You know.”

“No, I don’t,” I said, confused.

“C’mon, you know. The Holy Ghost. People go crazy. Speakin’ in tongues, all the hootin’ n hollerin’, it happens at church all the time.”

“Not in any church I’ve ever been to.”

“Well,” he said, “back home, preachers and old folks and even little kids get all sweaty up there in the front of the church, like they’re having some kind of dance party or something. I usually sit in the back with my older sister and watch,” he sat up in his bunk. “I thought that’s what it sounded like you guys were doing last night, especially the prayin’ in tongues part, so I didn’t want to interrupt anything. I just got back in my bunk and went to sleep. I don’t even think you guys noticed.”

Looking back, as profound as that late night experience with Hodge and Ray was, I was blissfully unaware of anything remotely odd or out of place about it. This strange, powerful experience had occurred, and we all somehow carried on as if nothing was different, and for a little while longer, there was peace.

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The sunlight was different in the mountains. Days started cool, the air cloaked in gray and blue. Greens were dark and dormant. Dirt held water captive, begging daylight to come and release it. The gradient above stretched from blue to a fading darkness where stars still clung to the sky. There was a power here, I thought, a force at work in these mornings. What does it take to begin a day, to turn this sleeping world into a breathing, active habitation for life? It was as if I could see the great cogs, and the foreman who gave the command to fire them up. This power, this force, reveals itself no clearer than at this time, and hides itself again once the day begins. I had wandered up towards the Big House and the gardens there while I waited for the cafeteria to open, watching bumble bees float from flower to flower, joining the butterflies perched on their petals, flapping as if to flaunt their intricate wings. While I wandered the gardens, I happened upon an older man sitting on a bench reading.

“Hello, TJ,” Reverend Billingsley said.

“Can I sit?” I asked.

“Please.” He slid over and I sat down on the bench next to him.

“What are you reading?”

“The gospel of Mark,” he smiled. “Isn’t it too early for you to be out here on your own? Most of the camp is still asleep.”

“I just thought it’d be nice to go for a walk.”

“Something on your mind?”

I shifted in my shoes.

“I think God is trying to speak to me.”

“Is that so?” He closed the Bible on his lap. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“Well, I’ve been worried about everything lately. Just being here. It’s been hard. But, the other day, at chapel, I felt like God spoke to me and told me He’s with me, and I haven’t felt as afraid since then.”

“That’s good, TJ. I’m very glad to hear that.”

I felt a sense of relief as the words settled into the air. Billingsley might have noticed it, too. He sat quietly, and we watched the morning light come up through the trees.

“Reverend Billingsley, do you know anything about speaking in tongues?”

The question surprised him. At least, his expression suggested as much.

“I know some things about it,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

I told him what Ray had told us and how he even demonstrated it for us. Billingsley nodded along as I recounted everything I’d heard.

“I see.” He stood. “These are interesting questions, TJ. I must admit they are not the ones I might’ve expected from you.” He smiled. “It’s getting late. You should head down to breakfast shortly.”

He clasped me on the shoulder as I stood. “You are a fine young man, TJ. Thank you for sharing this with me. Let’s discuss it again in the future. I’d like to hear more about it.”

The end of that week loomed over me for the last remaining days. Our cabin had grown close. I didn’t want to say goodbye to any of my cabin mates.

“Football starts next week,” Strawberry said.

“Don’t leave me!” Buck cried and ran across the room, pulling Strawberry down halfway to the floor. We laughed at the ridiculousness of it, but I’m sure the same cry echoed inside of each of us. Strawberry had become our captain. He was reckless, fearless, and everybody respected him, even most of the older campers. He got us closer to trouble, but we probably got away with more than we ever could have, too.

The last goodbye of this week, and the one that was certainly bound to be the worst, still remained. I sat on the front porch watching Buck and the few remaining kids playing on the blacktop. Inside, Ray was packing up the last of his luggage while he listened to music through the stereo. I wasn’t as lonely with Ray as my counselor, I didn’t miss home around him. Everyone’s admiration of him was like a light I could only dream of carrying one day. I didn’t want him to leave.

He walked out onto the porch and handed me a crumpled up piece of blue paper.

“I found this on the floor under your bed,” he said.

After the first week, I had determined that I would no longer take part in the end of the week activity of deciding how certain I was I’d go to heaven. The shame of all the things that I knew would keep me out was not worth discussing.

“I talked to almost everyone, and I thought, ‘I’m missing someone’. I realized it was you, and lo-and-behold, here you are, Tiger.”

“I just didn’t want to talk about it,” I said, shifting.

He sat down next to me. “You want to know the cool thing about heaven?”

I looked up.

“We’re already in it.”

That struck me as obviously untrue. “How are we already in it? I don’t see any angels or streets paved with gold around here.”

“See, that’s the problem, man. Everybody thinks heaven is just this magical place where everything’s perfect and we’re waiting around our whole lives to get there, just make it to the end and hope they let us in.”

He turned and sat facing me.

“Everywhere he went, Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That means it’s all around us, and that we, you and I, get to live in his kingdom, Jesus being the king, right now.” He paused. “That’s the whole point. It’s not that we get to go to heaven when we die, it’s that we get to live with God on earth today, right now!” He laughed, “What’s so special about the idea of being in heaven anyway, is there anything more important there than God himself? We could spend our whole lives waiting on something that was here the whole time.”

What he said made sense, but it didn’t account for the things I’d done and felt that I was ashamed of.

“That’s easy. Do you remember what Billingsley talked about, how Jesus came and died for our sins?”

I nodded.

“Well, it’s as simple as repenting for your sins against God, realizing that Jesus came to dispel all the darkness in you and your life, and believing that he rose from the dead and is God.”

“Repenting?”

“It’s like when you realize you’re running one direction and you meant to be running in the other. It’s turning around and saying that I’m going the wrong way and I want to go the right way.”

I remembered the feeling I had on the previous Sunday in church, how close God felt; that no matter how dark things had been, he was a light and he would always be close to me. I knew I wanted to know that feeling forever.

“I want to run in the right direction.”

“Then repeat after me…”

The next morning came quickly, rays of sunshine waking me before my bedside alarm sounded. Everyone still slept in their bunks. I stepped outside into the cool air and sat in the chair on the front porch. I’d begun to like these mornings. Despite the sadness of saying goodbye to my friends, there were probably worse ways to start a day.

The boys and I went to breakfast and would return to our cabins and our new counselor once we finished. The lines were short, and only a scant amount of campers lingered, still in their pajamas as if the rest of the world was still fast asleep.

“These taken?”

I looked up from my bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch to find Marguerite standing over me.

“Nope. They’re all yours.”

She sat down. “You seem sad.”

I’d been thinking about the prayer I prayed since Ray left. I felt lonely, afraid, and I wondered not only what to do next, but where God was in the midst of it all. He didn’t feel as close.

“I’m just tired.”

She ate while we waited for our friends to return. As I ate, I appreciated having her company without the stress of constant conversation. Marguerite saw through me, and never in awkwardness or futility did she ever strive.

Love.

It wasn’t until I was staring at her that the thought arrived with resounding alarm, and I nearly choked on my cereal.

“Why are you staring at me?” she asked.

“Sorry, I was just thinking.”

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah. Totally.”

I returned to my eating, but in no way did I halt in my awkward observing. I had to know if she truly fit into this new theory that was building inside me. It differed from anything I’d ever previously felt towards a girl. Not necessarily an attraction, but it wanted to be near. It wasn’t a crush, but it wanted to know if she felt as comfortable around me as I did around her. These were vague, nameless things swimming around inside me that looked and felt like what I imagined love might be. I simply sat in them and let them have free rein, causing me to gawk in a way that would make any girl her age cringe.

After putting up with far too long of it, Marguerite looked away and without speaking stood up and left the table. My inability to hide my internal processing was undoubtedly what made her uncomfortable, but I was oblivious to this and sat there pondering what it was I might have said or not said that drove her away. It was just as quickly out of my mind, and Buck soon returned to his seat, as if nothing had transpired at all.

The day had gotten into full swing by the time we left the cafeteria. Lines of campers and adults crowded the pathways that ran through the camp. Buck and I walked along, invisible to them all. It was strange to see so many adults after being in summer camp for nearly a month, like I had forgotten what the real world was like. I searched the crowd for my parent’s faces but they weren’t there. I was alone here, as alone as many of these kids were on the outside of these grounds, and tried to imagine what it’d be like if I did not have my parents. It was not something I wanted to ponder for very long.

We walked on towards our fate. Seeing the line outside our cabin, we thought it better to hangout on the basketball court for a while until the crowd dissipated. Buck took the phrase “the backboard is your friend” a little too seriously. His shots often bounced right off of it back to him, often missing the rim entirely, which was a surprise to me considering how good at ping-pong he was. The crowd soon dwindled, and we determined it was as good a time as any. We walked up the steps and opened the door.

“Hey Tiger.”

I had to do a double take.

Buck walked through the doorway.

“What the…”

Ray addressed the rest of the boys and introduced us to the cabin himself. The roar of applause was a warm surprise only Ray could orchestrate. I remember being in their position just a few weeks ago, likely bearing the same look of excited wonder when Hodge arrived on that first day.

Hodge was there too, leaning back in the bunk above mine. I’ll never forget the smug, knowing smile he wore that day I reentered the room. It’s the way I often remember him. It was the way he should have always been.

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That night, I was haunted by my third dream since arriving at Camp Magnolia. Nightmarish men with swirling faces lurking in the woods outside our cabin kept me awake for most of the night, every sound outside the cabin setting me off. The only respite I could hope for was daylight, which wouldn’t appear for a few more hours. I thought of the water—the Long Island Sound—and how long it had been since I’d seen it, or smelt it on the wind, and nearly came to tears thinking about my parents. These were the hardest times, when all I wanted was the one thing I couldn’t have—for one of them to come lie down beside me and hold me like they always did when I was afraid.

Reverend Billingsley stood stoutly in the pulpit that Sunday morning. The dark wood beams above him looked warm and aged in the sunlight. Dust floated in the air above him, illuminated by the sunlight from the large glass window at the front of the chapel.

“If you would please, find the Bibles in the backs of the pews and open them up to the book of Psalms, chapter one-hundred and thirty-nine.” The congregation followed along as he read. He began in verse seven. It reads:

Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

and the light become night around me,”

even the darkness will not be dark to you;

the night will shine like the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

The room was silent. Billingsley had read the words slowly and clearly, and something happened in the silent moment afterwards that I will never forget. Something inside me cracked, like ice after a long winter. I read the book in front of me, tears in my eyes as I read them, again and again, as if the answer to my prayers was right in front of me. The feeling was that despite everything I’d faced so far this summer—the conversations I’d had with counselors and those I’d never wanted to have, the things I’d heard throughout the weeks of sermons from Billingsley in the pulpit, or anything else anyone had ever told me about God at any time in my life—that right here in this moment, God was real.

And he wasn’t just real. No matter what darkness overcame me, no matter what fears I’d faced, God was a light, a light that knows no darkness, and he was with me.

Some people say when they first believed in God that it came about from a blinding light moment of existential crisis, like a near death experience or a holy visitation that sounds like a story straight out of the scriptures. Others are born believing in God from an early age and can’t remember a moment when they didn’t believe. It was not that way for me at all. For me, it was as simple as a boy who was afraid at night and needed someone to be with him, to be close to him, to sleep on the other side of him. I felt God hold me close on that summer morning in that old camp chapel, and I knew with all my heart that he’d never let me go.

We walked out of the chapel in a large mass exodus, heading for the cafeteria. I carried something new with me, shifting and adjusting to it with every step.

“What’s the matter, Tiger?” Buck asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think God is trying to speak to me.”

“What’s he saying?”

“That He’s with me.”

Buck nodded his head. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

We got to lunch, and I had little to say this time around. I finished my food and made my way to the cabin for free time, and on my way, I heard footsteps running to catch up with me.

“Tiger!”

Ray caught up and walked with me towards the cabin.

“You can’t go back to the cabin without a counselor,” he said. “Something wrong?”

“I just wanted to be alone for a while,” I said.

Ray didn’t pry. He stayed on the porch and played his guitar while I went inside and sat on my bed. No thought or reasoning could explain what I’d been experiencing. This, I thought, was a spiritual matter. I sat in my bed reflecting, poking and prodding the new nameless thing inside of me.

After little progress, I went out to the front porch and asked Ray if he had a Bible, which he was happy to loan me. I sat on my bed, rereading the passage from earlier in the morning and others when the door opened. Hodge walked into the room and climbed up onto the bunk above me.

“Whatcha reading?” he asked.

“Bible,” I said.

“Anything good?”

I didn’t immediately respond.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

He didn’t immediately respond.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Do you think God speaks to people?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

The words I read moved inside me as if they were alive, and in them, God himself lived.

Ray came into the room to grab something from his bunk.

“Ray,” Hodge said, “does God speak to people?”

“Sure he does,” he said, like nothing could ever have been more true. “Haven’t you ever prayed before?”

I recalled the times at church when we prayed the Rosary, or the Lord’s Prayer, or the times before bed when I prayed and thanked God for all of my friends and family.

“Prayer,” he said, “is a dialogue, not a monologue.”

Neither of us understood what those words meant.

“Prayer is talking to God, and him talking back. It’s a conversation.”

“But, I thought God doesn’t speak that way anymore, like he does in the stories in the Bible,” I said.

Ray sat down.

“God is our father, right?”

Hodge and I nodded from our bunks.

“Well, what kind of father would he be if he never talked to you? Think about your real life. What would it look like if your fathers never talked with you? Would you have much of a relationship at all?” he asked.

“Sure wouldn’t,” Hodge said.

“That’s what’s so great about God. No matter how terrible or imperfect our earthly fathers are, he is a perfect father. He knows everything about us and knows everything we could ever need. He even tells us in the Bible when we’re alone to draw near to him, and that he’ll draw near to us. I could show you if you want.”

Hodge came down from his bunk and Ray showed us scriptures from various places in the Bible. I started making connections, not just things I’d heard from other people, that went in one ear and out the other, but my own thoughts and feelings. They connected to the words that lived inside ‌me.

A bunch of the guys came back to the cabin, ending our little powwow for the time being. They asked us where we’d been.

“We’ve been here. Ray’s been blowing our minds with the Bible,” Hodge said.

The rest came over to see, but Ray said he could show them all another time. I spent the remaining free time in our cabin with the group, falling victim to their contagion of tomfoolery for the rest of the afternoon.

When we left the cabin, Buck decided he’d show me a thing or two about ping-pong. We were on the patio of the snack shack, and I was getting schooled. For as heavy-set as he was, he was incredibly nimble and dextrous, playing with far more touch and finesse than me. He was a fine teacher, too, often helping me practice for hours at a time.

“What’s the score?”

Marguerite and Kena appeared at the side of our table.

“10-4, Ghostrider,” Buck said.

She frowned at me, clearly disappointed.

“I call next,” she said.

Buck laughed. “It won’t be too long now.”

With our new spectators looking on, Buck went from being a helpful coach to a relentless adversary. He made quick work of me, so I forfeited my paddle to Marguerite.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. He’s gonna need it.”

“You’ve got a mouth on you, huh?” Buck said, “Let’s get it going.”

They counted out P-I-N-G, and not but two swats after that Marguerite had sent her shot with so much topspin the ball flew by Buck and rolled to the other side of the snack shack.

“Well would you look at that.”

“I’ve got a table at home,” Marguerite said. “My step-dad doesn’t go easy on me.”

“I won’t either,” Buck said. “Your serve.”

I sat next to Kena and looked on as Buck and Marguerite battled on the tabletop. The contest was well matched, both volleying long and short in sequences that ran on forever and ended faster than a blink. Pretty soon, the entire snack shack stopped to gather and watch the two of them play.

“She’s tough,” Buck said to me after losing the first game twenty-one to nineteen.

“Switch sides buddy-boy,” she laughed.

Buck wiped his brow. I had never seen him so focused. They rallied back and forth for a second game until Buck snuck away with the victory.

The third match was one for the ages. Kena and I screamed at the end of every point, she for Marguerite and myself for Buck. This split divided the crowd, which grew with every serve.

“Win by two,” Buck said as the game tallied twenty-twenty.

They rallied longer than any previous point, and at the end, Buck reached with a stretch to his left but was just short on the return. It was Marguerite’s serve. She was up by one.

“Scared?” she said.

Buck shouted. “Come on, now!”

With one more trick up her sleeve, Marguerite held her paddle upside down and served. The ball floated up, drifted over the net, and by some kind of sorcery barely nicked the far white line—then shot straight to the ground for the point. The crowd erupted and rushed the scene. Buck stood with his jaw on the floor and demanded a rematch, Marguerite laughing as Kena ran and lifted her into the air. She turned in her paddle and set it for the next players, abdicating her claim to stay on the table. The buzz in the snack shack didn’t settle until minutes later when the four of us walked out together.

“It was a good game,” Marguerite said, still attempting to shake hands with Buck.

“It was not,” he said. “I’m playing you again tomorrow, whether you like it or not.”

We could only laugh, to which Buck kept saying, “It ain’t funny,” and that only seemed to add to our amusement.

The four of us strolled through camp until we reached an open area overlooking the river where we sat in a sunny, grassy spot. The afternoon flew by as we watched the water.

“So, do you two have boyfriends or what?” Buck asked.

“Boyfriends?” Kena said, laughing. “Why do you ask?”

“A little forward, don’t you think?” Marguerite said.

“I thought it was a fair question.”

“Are you wanting to be one of our boyfriends?” Marguerite said.

Buck squirmed. “That’s not what I meant…”

“Yeah, which one of us would you pick?” Kena said, smiling as she leaned into Marguerite.

Buck, clearly embarrassed, did what any good wingman would do.

“I was just asking for Tiger. Come on, Tiger. Take your pick.”

The girl’s attention was now drawn to me.

“Well, Tiger?” Marguerite said.

The suddenness of this situation left me too embarrassed to say anything, and unlike Buck I didn’t have the quick wit to get me out of it. I just stood there with an awkward expression on my face.

“See, he won’t answer because he’s actually nice!” Marguerite said.

“Oh, I’m not nice now?”

“No, you’re not!” Kena said.

“I’ve been nothing but nice to you all afternoon.”

“Asking us if we have boyfriends isn’t what I’d say nice boys would ask,” Kena said.

“I wanted to know.”

“You don’t see us asking you guys if you have any girlfriends, do you?”

“Tiger’s got a girlfriend.”

The girls’ eyes shot towards me.

“You have a girlfriend?”

“He sure does. What’s her name? Natasha?”

It had been a while since I last thought of Naomi. She was certainly not my girlfriend, but I had liked her, even though she hadn’t been at camp for a few weeks, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to see her next.

“Wow, Tiger. I thought you were better than that,” Marguerite said.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said. “I met her on the first week, but I haven’t seen her since.”

Marguerite concealed her initial expression.

“It’s stupid,” she said. “Camp boyfriends and girlfriends. They only last, what, a few weeks and then you go home and forget it ever even happened. No thanks.”

“You’re looking for true love, huh?” Buck said.

Marguerite laughed. “There’s no such thing. Trust me.”

I didn’t want to believe that, but she was probably right.

“Okay, Tiger,” Marguerite said. “You can still be nice, for now. But I’ve got my eye on you.”

“Watch out Tiger,” Buck laughed. “She’s watchin’ you.”

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They smelt the smoke. Typically, campers who wandered their way onto the biking trails after curfew were only given a warning, but this was a more complicated situation than I could have ever imagined. We spent the better part of the next morning sitting in the foyer of what the campers called the Big House.

No, it was not the camp jail, nor the football stadium where Brady played his college ball. It was literally a big house. The Big House was an old restored farmhouse where all the camp offices were located, as well as a large dining gallery for special events, extra space for storage, medical supplies, and fully furnished rooms to accommodate guests who might not prefer to stay inside a musty cabin. White columns supported the two-story wrap-around porch, Hydrangeas, Zinnias, and mountain flowers adorning the front flower beds. It was in an isolated part of the camp, not a typical place where campers have many interactions, unless they’re terribly sick, or, as in our case, in trouble.

Hodge and I sat in leather cushioned chairs outside the camp offices with the camp secretary. She was an older woman in her fifties or sixties, and looked the same as every secretary lady I have ever known in my life. We faced a door with a window marked Director. Next to that, another door marked with Camp Chaplain. We sat, uncertain which might open first.

“Have you ever been here before?” I whispered.

Hodge nodded, and the silence continued.

I sat with my hands across my lap.

“What you asked me about last night, before we got caught…” he whispered. “When I was little, my grandpa used to take me hunting. He showed me lots of things. Tracking, stalking, waiting. I don’t remember everything. Mostly what he called ‘the old ways.’”

I recalled how he hid his sounds in the forest as we moved.

“I don’t remember everything, but that’s one thing I haven’t forgotten.”

“That’s why I was looking for you,” I said, “What I wanted to ask you about. Your family.”

He sat back in his chair and leaned his head against the wall.

“I thought some rich Hollywood people started the camp?” I said.

He sighed. “That’s them.”

I tried my best not to ask all of my questions at once.

“Did you spend a lot of time with him, your grandpa?”

“Used to. He got sick, and they had to find someone else to take care of me.” He stared forward with a blank expression.

“Who takes care of you now?”

He gave me a look that told me he was tired of my pestering.

“In the summers, I’m here. That’s always been the same, since I was a little kid.” He paused. “The rest of the time…” his voice trailed off.

The door at the far end of the room opened. Out of the chaplain’s office stepped the camp director Jim Robinson and Reverend Billingsley. Mr. Robinson approached us.

“Timothy?” he asked.

“You can call me TJ.”

“Reverend Billingsley would like to speak with you, Timothy,” he said, motioning me towards the office. “I am going to have a word with mister Rivers.”

With that, he directed Hodge to stand up and led him into the other room. Reverend Billingsley stood with his arms folded and smiling as he leaned against the doorpost.

“Come in, TJ,” he said.

His office smelt of old books, which lined the shelves behind his desk. Billingsley sat once he said a word to the secretary and left the office door cracked.

“Good Morning TJ. Did you get much sleep last night?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Wonderful. Well, as you know, one of our patrolling staff members found mister Rivers and yourself quite a ways down on one of the bike paths last night. I want to hear your side of the story about how you both ended up there.”

The bold and ‌emotional preacher in the pulpit on Sundays was not the same man that spoke with me now. This Billingsley was attentive, direct, and spoke with a warmth I did not expect to find in his office.

“I went out looking for Hodge. When I found him we got lost. We were just trying to find our way back to the cabin,” I said, trying to keep my nervousness hidden somewhere in the back of my throat.

He paused and considered his next question.

“Was there anything else that happened before you got lost on the trails? Were there any others with you at any other time while you both were on your way back to your cabin?”

“No sir, it was just us.”

The weight of his gaze pressed on me.

“Are you sure? There were no others with you at all, at any time?”

Lying in this situation was difficult enough, but my conscience was not yet capable of lying to a reverend.

“Yes, sir, there were others.” I said.

“That is good, son,” he said, taking off his glasses. “Thank you for telling me the truth.”

“Yes, sir.”

He sat back in his chair.

“I am aware of a situation, not last week but the week before, where you and another boy had an altercation with an older boy, the son of Mr. Robinson, Alec. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“Have there been any similar interactions either you or the other boy have had with him since the previous one?” he asked.

“Well, no sir, not like that.”

He scratched his chin.

“We have had discussions with Alec and have informed him not to have any further interactions with junior campers. If either of you have any encounters with him in the future, or anything else happens that might be of any concern to you, please come straight to my office and let me know.”

I nodded.

“I understand you will attend here for the entire summer. Tell me, have you enjoyed your time?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been good.”

“And your counselors, how’ve you liked them?”

“They’ve been alright. I like the one I have now.”

“Who is that?”

“Ray. Chamberlain.”

“Ah, mister Chamberlain is your counselor. He is a special young man.”

He leaned forward. “As you may have already known, I am to issue you your first strike. Remember, after a second strike, we make a phone call home. Three strikes, and we send campers home for the summer.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I will not ask you any more information about last night. You’ve been truthful as far as I can see to this point. I thank you for your time this morning, TJ.”

“Thank you, sir.” I stood to leave, but stopped halfway through the doorway.

“Reverend Billingsley,” I caught his attention, “I enjoy listening to your sermons.”

He looked surprised. “Do you really?”

“I like the way you talk about the Bible. It makes it feel more alive, or something,” I paused, “But sometimes I can get confused about what you say.”

“Well, thank you TJ. That means a great deal to me,” he smiled. “How about this? Any time that you have a question about any of my sermons, you can come directly to my office and we’ll have a chat about it.”

My confidence returned as I agreed to his terms. He smiled as he said goodbye and sent me on my way. I looked forward to talking again. As I waited outside the camp director’s office, the door opened and a less optimistic looking Hodge sauntered out of the office.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“Same as usual.”

The many campers we passed on our way back through camp celebrated us as they saw us returning with our written reflections in our hands. Unfortunately, we’d miss our cabin’s scheduled time at the snack shack, having to turn in our reflections to Ray. He was playing guitar on the front porch of our cabin when we arrived.

“I used to be a troublemaker. Sneaking out, partying, you name it,” he said. “Then I got saved.”

We sat and listened as he told us a condensed version of his life story.

“Then, I got invited to this summer camp. It was like this one but a little different. Actually it was really different. People prayed in tongues and miracles were happening all over the place; healings, demons being cast out, it was amazing. I didn’t know what the heck was going on but it was so cool. That’s when they prayed for me, and they laid hands on me. I was free. Do you guys pray in tongues?”

We were both completely clueless about what he was asking us.

“You know, praying in tongues,” he demonstrated it for us.

It sounded peculiar, like he was trying to speak in a language that wasn’t actually real, though better than anything I could have come up with.

“It’s a gift of the Holy Spirit,” he said.

I remembered a heated conversation my parents had with my aunt from New Jersey. She and her boys were Catholic too, only they went to a different kind of Catholic church.

“I think my aunt prays in tongues.”

“How do you do that?” Hodge said.

Ray just smiled. “It’s a heavenly language. A prayer language.”

“So that’s the language they speak in heaven?” Hodge asked.

“I don’t know,” Ray laughed. “Maybe.”

Before dinner that evening, junior campers surrounded the asphalt basketball court and piled into the bleachers as camp staff taught us various songs and dances. They were without a doubt among the most ridiculous and fun aspects of the summer, most of them I cannot recall whatsoever, but at the time the horde of eleven and twelve-year-olds feasted on the hilarity of them, my own among the largest of appetites. Whether we were burning off energy, swept up in the collective mania, or just thirsty for chaos, it didn’t matter; we sang and danced those songs the whole summer, in groups, on walks, every opportunity we had to connect with another person. I believe this is the only time and age where you can run up to someone new, break out a dance move, and instantly make a friendship connection that was nonexistent just moments before.

Ray was in front of the crowd, playing his guitar, dancing, jumping higher and crazier than any other. If his looks and charisma hadn’t already won over the crowd, undoubtedly these did. It was a known fact that he was the coolest counselor among the junior cabins. He’d put up a good case for being the coolest counselor in the whole camp. He was my counselor, and he gave me the name Tiger. Just by being associated with his massive tidal wave of coolness, I became a recipient of the overflow.

“Is he your older brother?” a group of pretty girls asked me in the lunch line.

“No, but we are both from Connecticut.”

“He is so cute,” one of them said.

My close association with Ray allowed me to feel I had the liberty to take the compliment partially for myself. Soon, they started talking to themselves and I was back to being a normal kid who knew nothing about talking to girls. I had hardly hit puberty, and at this age, most girls were already one or two years in. I didn’t stand a chance.

“Hey Tiger, I see you spittin’ game,” Strawberry said as I sat at the table.

“The girls like you, man. Honestly,” Buck said. “You got them pretty looks.”

I said nothing. I wanted it to be true, but I lacked the confidence and experience it took to do anything about it.

“You should go ask one of them out,” Strawberry said.

I took a bite of my cheeseburger.

“What are you, scared? Come on, I’ll go with you.” Strawberry’s eyes locked on the same girls, who now sat two tables over. He was serious. Not only this, but all the boys were egging me on.

I sucked in a breath and followed Strawberry to the table as the rest of the guys from my cabin looked on. Strawberry immediately sat down and started chatting it up with the girls at the table. I sat next to him and listened, but there was nothing special I could detect going on in the conversation. They asked about his tank top, which he called a “wife beater.” He kept talking, and I noticed not so much the girl’s responses but how they looked at him. They eyed his arms and shoulders, his olive tan skin and patches of short black stubble on his face. Something was being communicated beyond the words, and I didn’t understand it. He started eating sugar packets, shooting them down like they were candy, much to the girls’ entertainment and slight disgust. He was the center of their attention, and the object of their affection. I could only look on and laugh from the background.

“Is he eating sugar packets?” the girl on the other side of me at the end of the table asked.

I turned to answer. “Pretty gross, huh?”

She looked across the table to the other girl she was sitting with. “This is why I don’t like to sit near the cool kids’ table.” Her hair was pulled back in two braids and she wore a tie-dyed t-shirt.

“I’m Marguerite. This is Kena.” Kena smiled and waved across the table. She had braces and covered her mouth while she was eating. “Sorry, Hi,” she said.

“You’re the kid who got in a fight but actually didn’t get in a fight with Alec Robinson,” Marguerite said.

I blanked. “How do you know about that?”

“I was there. You almost kicked me in the head when you flipped onto the ground. It wasn’t much of a fight at all, that’s for sure.”

My pride was hurt, but she was right, and I conceded the truth to them both.

“You’re nice,” Marguerite said. “I thought you’d be like the other boys in your cabin, like Sugar Packets over there.”

“What cabin are you in?” I asked.

“We’re in Beech. Right across the basketball court from you,” Marguerite said. Her counselor stopped at our table as she was rounding up her campers. “Well, it was nice talking to you.”

“You too,” I said.

Marguerite smiled. “See ya later, Tiger.”

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The second week of camp flew by, but little had changed by the beginning of week three. My closest pals, Buck and Strawberry, stayed in the same bunks of our cabin, and Hodge too, who had been warming up to us more since his duel in the sandpits with Strawberry. We had a new counselor that week. He wore a hemp necklace, had long brown hair, and he played a guitar. He too was from Connecticut, and his name was Ray Chamberlain.

“It’s what my last name means in English,” Strawberry said.

“Let me get this straight,” Ray said. “Joey goes by Strawberry and Ignatius goes by Buck—anybody else I should know about?”

Ray’s eyes came to me.

“What about you, Timothy? Do you have a nickname too?”

“Well, I go by TJ.”

“TJ? That doesn’t sound enough like a nickname to me.”

After a moment, he called the room to attention. The boys came close.

“Everybody, from now on, TJ is gonna be called Tiger.”

Tiger. That had a nice ring to it. Something lit up inside me when he gave me that name. I bore it proudly, and it stuck.

Ray was from out east, a place near Rhode Island called Mystic, which all I knew of was a historic seaport and a pizza place from a movie with Julia Roberts, one of my earliest Hollywood crushes. It was the film Mystic Pizza that put her on the map. Hook was where I’d first seen her, opposite Robin Williams in the scene where she grows from fairy to full size wearing a dress fit for a princess. Needless to say, the first time I laid eyes on her, I was hooked.

Ray wasn’t like the rest of the counselors. He wore tie-dye and tight black jeans, an edgy and perhaps mystical look that clashed with the other counselors. When counselors usually went off with their friends during free hours, Ray would often stay back with us, play cards or just simply hang around, as if he didn’t want to be with other counselors, and instead saw us as equals, not campers he was tasked with taking care of.

“We got lost,” Buck said, a group of us walking to the snack shack. “Lost like a ball in tall weeds.”

Ray laughed. “What did you do?”

“What any country boy in his right mind would do. We just kept on fishin’”

Ray was trying to keep it together.

“I’m impressed you stayed out there as long as you did. Totally worth the strike in my eyes,” he said.

“It won’t happen again,” Buck said.

“Well, yeah, numb-nuts,” Strawberry said. “They aren’t gonna take you guys out on the river anymore.”

Any disorderly conduct or larger behavioral issues warranted what Camp Magnolia called a “strike”. Three strikes at camp and you were out. Buck earned his first when he and his canoeing partner took a detour into a “holler”, or in other words, an offshoot of the river that ran along the property of the camp. Their hour-long canoe trip turned into a half day of dropping lines and reeling in largemouth hogs. Ray wasn’t angry or upset. He actually thought it was funny.

“I think you’re one of my favorite kids in this camp, Buck,” he said.

Buck’s teeth showed through his smirk. “Why, thank you.”

I felt a tinge of jealousy at the remark.

“Do you go to college here? With all the other counselors?” I interrupted.

“I’ll start in the fall,” Ray said. “Helping with camp is one of the summer pre-reqs for incoming students.”

“The other counselors are boring,” Strawberry said. “You’re not like them. You’re way cooler.”

Ray just smiled and kept on walking, sunshine following where he stepped.

“What’s got you down, Tiger?” Ray asked.

“He probably misses his mommy and daddy,” one boy in the group called out.

“Hey,” Buck said, “I’ve met Tiger’s folks. They’re nice people. You shut up ‘bout that.”

Ray fell back into stride with me. “What do your parents do?”

I was still embarrassed, and anyone finding out that my dad was a wealthy doctor would not make things any easier. “My mom is a teacher,” I said, looking down.

“My dad’s a teacher too, well, sort of. He’s a pastor,” Ray said. “He’s also a board member of the seminary. Which means I have to go. Even if I don’t exactly want to. Did I tell you guys I lived in Bangladesh?”

“Bang a what?” Strawberry blurted.

“Bangladesh. It’s a country near India. I lived there for the first eight years of my life. We were missionaries.”

“What was that like?” Strawberry asked.

“It was great. I loved living there. I miss it a lot,” he said. “There were elephants.”

“Did you have a pet elephant?” Buck asked.

“I wish. They’re a protected species, sacred in the Hindu religion.”

“A sacred elephant,” Buck said. “Now that’s something I’d love to see.”

It had been almost three weeks since I’d last seen my mother. I awoke from a dream where she was dropping me off at the new middle school in our town on the first day. I lay in bed for half of that morning. Later, Buck approached me in private and asked me how I was doing.

“I haven’t seen my mom in a few years. That’s partly ‘cause she’s a drunk. But they say she’s been in rehab for a while, and that I might get to see her for Halloween. They said we might go trick or treating, but I don’t think these folks know her too well.”

“I used to miss her a lot. I still do sometimes. But she needs help, and if I get to thinking about needing to see her…well, I just figure if I can take care of myself for a while then she can have the time she needs to get better, and then I can see her again.”

“You know,” he continued, “you’re not the only one of us who’s got nice folks, I mean real nice, good folks.”

I lifted my eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Buck pointed up to the empty bunk space above me.

“He’s got some of the nicest folks there is. At least they’re the reason we’re all here, anyhow.”

“Hodge?”

“It’s not something he likes other people knowing, but I’ve been around a while. I’ve heard some things, seen some things. This stays between you and me, Tiger.”

I looked around for Hodge but couldn’t find him anywhere. It was late. There were about forty-five minutes until curfew. Following my hunch, I slipped out the backdoor of the cabin and moseyed my way through camp. I passed by hordes of kids on my way to where I thought I might find him. The games at the volleyball courts, groups of girls flocking from one huddled spot on the bleachers to another, trying to keep warm, flashlights shooting across my vision as a big group played tag in the twilight. I used these and more as my cover until I found my way to a path in the woods, which I darted into when at first I noticed there were no suspecting onlookers.

Camp staff patrolled the trails most nights. This didn’t keep most kids out. Movement behind bushes just off the trail startled me multiple times—couples in the dark who were likely more startled by my presence than I was of theirs.

There were a few spots Buck had shown me on our night adventures I thought to check. I followed a thin game trail that stemmed off the main path that was almost impossible to see at night, running in the darkness and jumping over the long stonewalls that stood waist high. These boundaries of old property lines spread throughout the woods, just like home. I followed one of them until they led up a hill where pine trees densely covered the surrounding area. The lights and sounds of the camp, now far off, had faded away into the sounds of the night. I knew I was in the right place.

At the top of the hill, there was a large rock formation. One enormous boulder sat surrounded by various other moss-covered rocks. Murmured voices came from above the rock formations. I put my hand on one of the smaller rocks and dragged it along until I felt a jagged break. Above that was the ledge I’d use to lift my foot up into the break and begin the ascent. Higher up, smooth steps scaled up the side of the largest boulder. I leaned my chest against it and let the steps take me up.

The voices grew quiet, as if startled. I paused, and before I began my slow retreat, I heard shuffling leaves at the base of the boulder where I had come up.

An older camper stood at the base of the boulder, staring up at me.

“Yo!” he called.

Two more came from the other side of the hill, coming to a halt and gawking.

“Could you guys help me down?”

They approached and lifted me off the rock. “What’s your name, kid?” one of them asked.

“TJ,” I said.

“Aren’t you the kid that jumped Alec?” another asked.

“I wouldn’t say I jumped him, but—”

“Sure you did. Don’t they call you Tiger?”

“He’s friends with that one kid, you know. Kid with the teeth.” The first one sprawled his hands out in front of his mouth as if he were impersonating a beaver.

I did not expect to make it this far without much trouble. We started back up the boulders together, one ahead and one behind, the third staying on the hillside to stand watch. As we climbed higher through the shadows of the canopy, it appeared these rocks were organized, as if they might have been a part of an actual structure from a long time ago. We broke through the canopy, where stars spread out overhead. The boy ahead of me pulled my hand and lifted me over the final foothold. At the top, the stone floor was smooth. In one direction, trees covered the hills in the distance, the wind howling after the shrouded moon. In the other, a shallow cave descending below the floor, carved out of the boulder that rose higher still above the trees. Standing in and around the cave were more boys. As we approached, a faint orange glow burned in the mouths of black silhouettes.

“Look who we found creeping around on the other side of the hill,” one of them said.

The glare of Alec Robinson peered out from behind his black hoodie sweatshirt. He had what appeared to be a cigarette in his mouth. At the sight of me, his face hardened, and he marched towards me, clinging to my shirt and pulling me with him towards the edge of the boulder.

“How’d you find out about this place?”

His hands latched onto my shirt, my back nearing a steep drop.

“He was already climbing up when we found him,” one of them said.

Alec’s angry eyes returned to me. “That little puke friend of yours?” He jolted me.

“Tiger?” another voice called from the cave.

“Tiger? That’s your name?” Alec said, grip tightening.

“He’s with me.” Hodge stepped forward, the moonlight illuminating his hooded face. “He’s cool, man. I’ve brought him here before.”

Alec’s eyes carved into me.

“If you tell anyone about this place, you’re dead,” his grip again tightened.

“I won’t,” I said, barely getting the words out.

“Swear it.”

“I swear I won’t!”

Alec glanced at the assuring Hodge, and relented. He calmed almost unnaturally and walked back to the cave. With the same glance, Hodge assured me that his lie about how I found this place would stay between us.

We returned to the mouth of the cave. Alec struck a match, orange light flashing.

“You smoke?” he asked.

Still no reply, only terror.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, kid. Relax. C’mon, try it.”

He held out a smoking, rolled white-paper cigarette.

“Suit yourself.”

“What are you doing out here?” Hodge asked.

“I was looking for you. I wanted to ask you about something.”

Alec’s eyes appeared glassy in the moonlight as he pulled from the joint and held it in.

“You’ve got some balls coming out here.”

One boy interjected, “Hey, he jumped you, didn’t he?”

Alec chuckled. “Yeah, he did.”

He took another pull.

“What are you even doing here, anyway?” Alec asked. “At camp, I mean. You don’t belong here.”

I didn’t disagree with Alec.

“My parents just signed me up to stay here for the summer.”

“I hope they didn’t.” Alec shook his head. “You’ve got nice parents alright,” he laughed. “Maybe you do belong here after all.”

I did not intend to sound like I was throwing my parents under the bus, but incidentally, I had.

“They’re pretty good,” I said.

“I hate my parents. Can’t stand them,” Alec said. “I can’t wait to get out of this place.”

I thought of the camp runners, the Robinsons, and what they might think if they saw Alec at this moment. I tried to imagine Alec as a young boy wandering around the camp and what he might have been like then.

“See any ghosts on your way out here?” one boy asked. “Better watch your back. There are ghosts in these woods for sure.”

I recalled the time I got caught out here with Buck when I heard the story of Randy Flowers—whose name I dared not even think in Alec’s presence—and could have sworn someone was following us in the woods. Right then, a cold wind blew across the treetops towards us. Alec’s eyes flickered in the dim glow of the moonlight, thin clouds and smoke veiling its light.

“What time is it?” I asked.

Alec laughed. “Look at him, he’s gonna piss his pants.”

Nobody responded to my question, and I feared not only the prospect of ghosts in the woods, but of getting caught out here with older kids who were doing things I knew were bound to get me into loads of trouble.

“Our counselor doesn’t care if we’re in by curfew,” one of them said.

The air grew colder.

“I’ll take him in,” Hodge said. “We gotta check in for curfew. I’ll be back.”

“Gotta get back to Skinny Jeans, huh?” Alec said. “That guy is a wack.”

He flicked away the last of the joint. “See you around, Tiger. Tell Pork Rind to watch his back.”

We turned to leave.

“And remember,”

I looked back.

“You never came here.”

We climbed down the rock formations and headed back down the hill and into the underbrush. As we walked on, I couldn’t help but notice that as he moved through the brush and dead leaves, Hodge made hardly any sound at all.

“How are you doing that?” I asked.

His steps rolled over leaves and branches, nearly silent, no different from the sound of the wind lightly rustling the leaves.

“Come on,” he said, keeping his voice low.

We walked along the stone walls, each piled by hand and stretching on into darkness. To me, these walls had been here in the woods for thousands of years, the boundaries of a land from long ago. We hopped over the last wall and followed the thin game trail back to the main path.

A light flashed up ahead and was coming towards us fast. We darted off the path, finding a hiding spot behind a felled tree a few feet in.

Hodge peered over the log.

“It’s clear now, but we’ll stay here for a little longer, just to be sure.”

“We could just tell them we got lost,” I said.

Hodge waited a few breaths more.

“Let’s go. Keep up.”

Hodge cautioned me out onto the path where we ran, but we were not cautious enough. Whoever rode by us on the bike the first time did not fail to spot us. As soon as we stepped out onto the path, we heard a voice call out and a light with the power of a thousand candles flashed behind us. We were caught.

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At the start of week two, the same girls stood on their porches screaming for their incoming cabin mates. Adults left sheepish-looking newcomers alone. Not much was different here in Pine—a new counselor and mostly new kids in the cabin, many of whom I’d met already, having been in different cabins the week before. I was bombing around with Buck and a few of the others when the whistle sounded for us to report to our cabins. We all sat on our bunks for roll call.

The first call was for a camper I did not recognize. Not only this, but anyone would have a hard time recognizing him as a camper at all.

“Joey Afragola,” he said, “I go by Strawberry.”

His voice was as deep as the counselor’s and he spoke with a New York City accent. He smiled like a sewer croc.

“An interesting fact about me? I’m thirteen and wear a size thirteen.”

We asked him to take off his shoes and show us, gathering around him and passing around the shoe like an ancient artifact. He and Buck started rambling, each speaking what sounded like their own foreign languages, one a country bumpkin twang made up of unfathomable comparisons, the other a dirty street slang in a cadence that rose up and down like the hills of Tuscany, and yet, they were understanding one another like they were brothers. It occurred to me that these boys all spoke a common language I was still learning and might never fully understand.

I told Joey my mother’s side is Italian, to which he responded, “You speak it?” I said I did not.

He then attempted to teach me various words I struggled to pronounce. When I asked him their meanings, he flashed his teeth and said their translations out loud, immediately prompting our counselor to call him out to the front of the cabin to have a speaking with. He wore his crooked smile the whole time until he came back inside, where the rest of the boys venerated him, and now could not stop trying to become fluent in Italian curse words.

I noticed Hodge was missing from the group.

“He’s too cool for us,” one of them said.

His things were still on the bunk above mine, and I remember him being here just ‌half an hour ago.

“I’m right here,” a voice said from the small front room.

Hodge had been standing there quietly while roll call finished up. He walked out into the main room.

“Strawberry, huh? That’s cute.”

Everyone looked at the towering giant.

“Oh yeah? You look pretty cute too. What are you, four-foot tall or something?”

The room was divided.

“Yeah, I’m short,” Hodge said, eyeing him up and down. “But, you know what they say, ‘the bigger they are…’”

He lifted his pointer finger up high and whistled as he moved it downwards towards the floor, getting a rise out of the rest of the boys in the cabin.

Our counselor reminded us we were all friends, and instructed us to sit down while he read through the information for the week. Strawberry stood defiantly with his arms crossed and chin pointed up, but no intimidation could disrupt Hodge’s confident smile. A tense moment of silence passed before the two went back to their bunks, the rest of us following suit.

I’d never seen so many stars. My dad blamed light pollution, which made it hard to see them back home. There were hardly any people in Discovery, tucked away in the mountains of New Hampshire, leaving the starry host above as clear and bright as I had ever seen. Thousands of floating golden specks danced in the sky, glistening like when the sun hits just right on a salty shallow tide.

“There’s the Milky Way,” Buck said.

The river of stars above ran down the center of the sky. I lay back off of the log, the fire now warming the bottoms of my shoes. Buck named at least ten constellations, each I’d never seen or heard of before.

“You’ve gotta get outside more, man,” he said. “Just look at it. Nature’s beautiful. Nowhere else I’d rather be.”

The night was cloudless, our galaxy shining overhead. I thought it would have been entirely appropriate to ask about sleeping outside, that if anyone were to see this sky, there’d be no legitimate reason to keep anyone from doing so. I nearly fell asleep right then and there, half on the ground and half up on the log, when some boys from the cabin came over to where Buck and I sat.

“What are you guys doing?” one of them asked.

“You’re lookin’ at it,” Buck said. “What about you?”

“Bunch of kids gathering in Birch. I think the groundsmen are coming.”

“Like ghost stories, TJ?” Buck asked me.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“We’re in.”

We arrived to find counselors on the front porch, and at least thirty campers crammed inside the small cabin. Boys piled on each other’s bunks, three or four to a bed, more in chairs. There was a hushed buzz as we waited for the chair in the middle of the cabin to be taken. Soon, voices mingled with shuffling feet on the front porch, and as the screen door opened, ten to fifteen older campers and their counselors poured in to find standing room only in the cabin. To my relief, Alec Robinson was not among them. The screen door opened again, and in walked one of the camp staff leading an older man into the cabin. I correctly guessed the old man was Benny, the one ‌we’d all been waiting for. He wore a sleeveless shirt beneath one of the most worn-out pairs of overalls I’d ever seen. His hat read “Vietnam War Veteran,” and he donned a thin, gray handlebar mustache. He took his time walking to the chair in the center of the room and took the same amount of time sitting down and settling into it. As soon as he did, the entire room grew silent.

Benny just started talking. He didn’t wait for anyone. No questions, no introductions. He rambled about his life, going from one thing he’d learned in his many days to the next with no clear sense of direction. There would be brief pauses in his rambling when a camper would ask a question like, “Can you tell us about the war?” or “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen at camp?”, many of which he eventually answered in a strange roundabout way, never being direct, but also never fully wandering off his train of thought.

I used to think that men like Benny had lost their minds, but now, I think he was just trying to tell us things he wished he knew, and that he didn’t want to waste any of the remaining breaths he still had on words that were unnecessary or untrue. As a fire flickers, I watched his words cast light and shadow on the boys’ faces in the dimly lit room, boys who listened to his stories of war and blood, of life and death, of darkness and light. His stories spoke to the men within us we had yet to become and pushed us inches towards them. I had gained the confidence to ask a question that had been on my mind since Benny walked into the room.

“Did you know Randy Flowers?”

The room was silent. Benny turned to look towards where he heard the voice, a cluster of boys on a top bunk in the back of the room. His piercing blue eyes looked right at me, though they did not find their target. For the first time all night, Benny was still and didn’t make a sound. I feared the rest of the cabin might think me a fool for asking such a stupid thing, or that the ghost of Randy Flowers would soon come to take my life, but Benny rambled on about the founding of the camp, how his family had been working this land long before there was any camp to speak of, and his relationship with the Flowers. I slowly relaxed as Benny’s response vindicated me of my trespass, awkward as it was.

He finished with his spookier stories, one of him waking from a dream in which an abominable beast tore through his cabin in the snowy north, only to awake and find that his cabin had indeed been completely and inexplicably ravaged while he slept. Others he told of hearing whispers of voices long forgotten while alone in the wilderness of Vietnam, as well as the tales of his encounters with other specters in the mountains surrounding camp that I dare not recount, those which he described as so evil not even the word “fear” could begin to describe the nature of their visitations. I will conclude by saying that I was not interested in going to the bathroom at night for the next few evenings.

We did not linger in Birch for long. As the cabin emptied, a fire blazed by the volleyball courts. Like the summer bugs we were drawn to its light. A crowd of boys formed in a circle around the sand volleyball pits. The fire blazed behind them, their darkened silhouettes gleaming with sweat. It was a ritual, or trial, I thought. Voices shouted out, and two shirtless older campers walked into the center of the circle. They shook hands and stepped back. One of the camp counselors shouted, and the two took crouching poses, swatting at each other’s hands, circling, eyeing, measuring, until one of them pounced, and the start of the grapple raised a shout from the crowd of boys. The two barreled in the sand until one came up victorious to many cheers. Soon, there were two more titans clashing. I too was enraged, crying wildly at the combat, my spirit awakening as the chanting continued. A younger camper entered the ring, awaiting an opponent. Before I knew it, my feet led me forward, and I took off my shirt as cheers erupted for the skinny kid who jumped Alec Robinson. Unknown to the reputation that preceded me, the match began. I knew nothing of the tactics of wrestling, but in the heat of ‌battle, a warrior rises. I unleashed that hidden fury of strength and anger. My length helped me stabilize myself against my opponent, but I could not withstand his experience and technique. He locked me in, unable to prevent the count to three. I arose from the pit, marred and beaten, but more victorious in their eyes than I knew.

Shortly after my bout, Hodge’s short frame entered the ring, making quick work of not one but two challengers. He stood and waited until, to the masses’ satisfaction, he pointed his finger at his next opponent, calling him out. The silhouette of a giant stepped forward into the firelight. Strawberry took off his shirt, revealing a collection of scars around his midsection and his long, lean, muscled arms. His heavy brow shadowed his loathsome eyes. It was his moment to prove himself, and he showed no fear. The two engaged and never had I seen such a performance. The crowd raved as the two rolled in the sand, caught in a dance, each movement coming inches away from either victory or defeat. Strawberry imposed domination with his size and strength, but Hodge outmaneuvered him every time the match neared its end. It was clear where the advantage lay, and soon Hodge proved it true by locking in a rear-naked choke. The giant tapped, and the crowd swarmed the two. They rose together and embraced, leaving their rivalry there in the sandpits.

I seldom dream, but when I do, I’ve made a habit of writing them down. My grandmother always told me that dreams had meaning, that they point us towards our destiny, and that oftentimes they require a second look. With her help, I’d developed this habit, which is why I am able to relay the dreams I have thus far, as well as the one I had later that week. I was walking along a path in the woods at Camp Magnolia when I happened upon a lost sheep. The sheep ran from me, and I followed it until I reached a man dressed in white. It occurred to me that this must be Jesus. I’d never seen Jesus before, and did not know what he looked like, but it was a dream and I knew it was him. He smiled at me and held out his hands. In one hand he held a pile of rocks, and in the other, bread. Then I awoke.

I went to church that Sunday morning with my mind fixed on the dream, intending to listen carefully for some kind of meaning or explanation for it, if that was even possible. Closing my eyes, I sang through the worship songs. As we sang, I heard the sound above and behind me, the sound of the man with the golden voice, finding momentary comfort in it. The singing stopped, and we sat as Reverend Billingsley took to the pulpit.

Who was he anyway? He stood up there, a pastor, a preacher, swinging words around like a sword. My mind wandered onto the legend of Randy Flowers, unable to ignore the intrusive thoughts of his death, and Buck’s silly claim he was murdered. But as I settled into the sermon, the air lightened and the anxious thoughts fled.

“Today,” Billingsley read, “if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked me…”. He continued to tell a story about the Israelites, how when they left Egypt after the parting of the Red Sea, all they did was whine and moan, and did not listen to God’s voice when they heard it. They hardened their hearts.

“How is God speaking to you?” he asked the room. “What is he saying? Are we listening to his words or do we have hard hearts, like the Israelites, that tune him out and follow our own ways?” I couldn’t tell if God was trying to speak to me, I wasn’t sure God still spoke to people, at least, not in the same ways he did in the Bible, with dreams or visitations, but what Billingsley preached resonated with me. It was hard to know exactly what a pile of rocks and a handful of bread meant, but I knew that if God was trying to speak to me, I didn’t want to have a hard heart and block him out. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

“Does God speak to you?” I asked my counselor.

“Sure,” he said, “God speaks through his Word. He speaks every time we read the Bible.”

That made sense. God wrote the Bible. His words have been speaking out throughout history for thousands of years. But that wasn’t exactly what I meant.

“Yeah, but does he speak to you like, on a more personal level?”

His brow narrowed.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like if God wanted to tell you something, or talk to you.”

“You mean, like how God speaks to people in Bible stories? No, he’s already said everything he needs to say. God doesn’t speak to people that way anymore.”

The finality of his tone told me there would be no more questions of that nature. Until that point, I had never had a reason to doubt my counselor. My upbringing only affirmed this claim. For me, it had been simple; go to church, listen to the sermon, go home. Don’t ask too many questions, and everything will be alright. If inspiration came upon me to sit down and read the Bible for myself, which was hardly ever, I’d read through a story or two, or maybe a psalm, and feel good for a while. There was right and there was wrong, and if I did what was right, like read my Bible, I’d be closer to God, and if I did what was wrong, I’d be all the ‌‌further away. This is how it was until later that summer. It was like the lights turned on. It turns out my counselor was wrong. Nothing ever came so clearly to me as it was when I heard the voice of God.

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Long grass swayed in the soft shore breeze. A path wound down from there, at the edge of the tall grass, down a muddy trail. Long strands of thornbushes grew off vines and lay along the tree-covered path. It led through the trees to a clearing at the top of a seaside cliff, continuing all the way down the cliff-side. Along the sand path, the cliff-side grew taller as it descended to the beach. On the beach where the tide had pulled off, the sand was dark and wet. It rippled up towards the dry white sand, trails of green and brown seaweed left behind. The departure of the tide left the remaining water flat and still. Its shallows stretch on and on, water only a few inches deep, and the channel becomes a wide platform of waterless ocean floor. Black shells of snails, oysters, and horseshoe crabs stretch across the channel, hushes of swaying cattails and carcasses of crabs eaten by gulls floating adrift, blown by the wind.

We stood in the middle of the channel during low tide, when skiffs and schooners cannot pass, and the night song sings its softest—songs learned from women who stood out over their watches, waiting for the sea to return their husbands to them, or the husbands, whose own songs carried over the waters in response as they rowed heavy oars in groups of two and three, their crates and nets returning from the deep empty or filled with burnt orange and brown lobsters.

Naomi and I stood beneath the stars, unmatched in brilliance and luster like diadems. The sharp shells pressed down into the soft sand beneath our bare feet. Our eyes met, reflecting the light of the moon and the night, illuminating her face, smooth skin, soft lips. The taste of salt on the wind, her warm breath, the cold water moving up and down my ankles, and the closeness of our bodies entranced me. Only us, under the stars in the sky, in the paths of the sea, melding together, our lips slow, souls alive, hearts eclipsing.

The inside of the cabin was black, night sounding off outside the cabin. I felt disgruntled and adjusted my sleeping position. As I awoke, a familiar yet strange sensation overcame me. It had been a couple of years since I last wet the bed, yet I felt as though I needed to tell my parents to come upstairs and change my sheets. I had not, I concluded, and tried to understand the mystery of this sensation. I felt pain, the kind that comes along with waking up in the mornings and needing to go to the bathroom, and so I got up and went out back to the stalls. It was there that I realized what had happened.

Immediately, I was aware of something previously nonexistent in my nearly twelve years. All I knew of these kinds of things was what I’d heard from other kids, which wasn’t much. What I did know was how dirty I felt, a similar feeling to how it was whenever they joked around, teasing, myself not being sure of what was so funny, nodding along and smiling like I did. Now, it hit me like a linebacker on the blindside of a quarterback, and there was nothing funny about it.

After changing, I went back to bed, ashamed and unable to sleep. The dream was so real. In it, I felt things I’m not certain I’ve ever felt before in real life. I thought of Naomi, horrified of what it would be like to see her again, or if I’d even be able to talk to her if I did. Eventually, I drifted off. By the next day, I had mostly forgotten about the whole thing, and carried on with the rest of the week normally. It wasn’t until the end of the week that the memories of it flooded in. We were all gathered in the cabin after another one of Billingsley’s sermons. Jamey sat in his chair in the middle of the room as he shared with us.

He was talking about his darkness.

Most boys our age knew about pornography. Sex was among the most commonly joked about topics around camp. But when an adult openly discusses these things, the laughing stops. As Jamey confessed his personal struggles to all of us, the cabin grew quiet and attentive. It wasn’t often these things got talked about seriously among boys, let alone men, as I’ve now come to find. I was likely more in the dark than the rest on the subject, but I put two and two together. I recalled a recent time when my older cousins from New Jersey showed me pictures of nude women in magazines, and all the other thoughts about girls I didn’t have vocabulary for. He continued.

This darkness of his was something he called sexual immorality.

My dream flashed through my mind’s eye. As I heard this new term for the first time, I identified its presence in myself. I knew I possessed the same kind of immorality. Somehow I knew these thoughts, these feelings, were wrong, and I had been careless with them. But nobody had ever spoken about them to me before. I’m not certain I would have ever known they were anything but normal if I hadn’t been told otherwise. I don’t know how he talked about it so honestly, and I’m sure I was not alone in how uncomfortable I felt.

After confessing his sins to us, Jamey reexplained how Jesus came to take away sin, his included, and that he’d take away ours too. I knew this, of course; we all do, but I had never been confronted with my own darkness like this before. Sure, all kids lie, cheat, steal, disobey their parents. Everybody knows that’s all wrong. It’s pretty black and white. I was mostly confident God would forgive me for those. But this was more shameful. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. Not even Jesus.

Jamey came around with a piece of paper and a pencil. He said he would keep our answers private. I looked around and saw the others starting to read and write on the paper. It posed the question: On a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that if you died today, you would go to heaven? I was a good kid, I thought, and fairly confident I’d be let in, but all this talk of sex and other things left me confused and uncertain. I wasn’t sure of how honest I should be, and I definitely didn’t want to put anything lower than anyone else. I circled the nine and folded the paper up before I gave it to Jamey.

It wasn’t until the very end of that week that I heard anything about that paper. It was Thursday. The boys and I were coming back to the cabin after a long afternoon game of two-hand touch football when Jamey stopped us and asked if he could speak with me. We sat on the front porch of the cabin.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I have your paper here. It’s great that you put a nine, but I have to ask, what made you put nine and not ten?”

This caught me off guard. I thought nine would have been good enough. I couldn’t even remember why I put it. My dream came to mind again, the shame, and how embarrassed I’d feel to talk about those things openly with Jamey like he did a few nights ago.

“Do you have any questions about heaven?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve thought about it, and I actually changed my mind. I know where I’m going. I meant to put ten.”

I could tell Jamey was thinking about how to respond.

“Okay,” he said. “Are you sure?”

I gave him my best smile and nodded in a reassuring gesture. I don’t know how I came up with the lie like I’d said it a thousand times. Though I was not so confident in it, Jamey relented and opened the front door to the cabin. I walked inside, surprised I had gotten off too easily. The truth was that my Sunday school answers didn’t explain how this darkness made me feel. Jamey could not know what was going on. No one could. To me, there was no other option than to escape. I knew better than to put nine ever again. When I came back in, I joined the next game of cards with Buck and the rest of the fellas.

On Friday morning, the kids from the surrounding cabins circled around the blacktop to say goodbye. There was one counselor in the center of the blacktop with a guitar, leading us in songs and hymns we’d sung throughout the week. Campers cried, one arm around a pillow and another around a best friend they probably wouldn’t see ever again. As we prayed, I looked down at my shoes, thinking to myself how much worse things could have been in one week. I was thankful and thought the remaining weeks wouldn’t be so bad. Kids pulled Sharpies out of thin air and started signing each other’s t-shirts, writing long messages to their closest friends or things like “Buck wuz here”. I searched the crowd and ran over to where I spotted Naomi standing with a group of girls from her cabin.

“Hey,” I held out my marker.

She looked at me and covered her mouth, holding back laughter, her friends doing the same.

I stood there unsure until she grabbed the marker and told me to turn around. I remained calm as I felt her hand on my shoulder, feeling the letters she wrote. In return, I signed hers in the same spot.

The basketball court cleared out as campers hauled off their bedding, storage bins and baggage until there were just a few of us left shooting a basketball on the chain-link net. I went back to my bunk on that quiet afternoon and took off my shirt, reading everything people had written, seeing the signature on the top that was dotted with a heart. I lay back and let out a sigh. We’d have a new counselor in the morning. Buck was sleeping in his newly claimed bunk right next to mine, wiped out from who knows how many games of knockout he never came close to winning. The rays of sunlight were warm on my skin, and soon I too shut my eyes, letting myself drift off into a wonderfully unexpected afternoon snooze.

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Sant’Antimo Abbey stands in a valley outside the medieval Italian village of Castelnuovo dell’Abate, enfolded into the hills of the Tuscan countryside with the cypress and olive groves. We walked down from the village on a sunny but quiet weekday morning. The old stone belltower blocks out the sun, the shadows leading us to the entrance of the abbey, large doors cracked open to the daylight.

Inside, four nuns kneel at the front of the chapel. There is silence, the kind that’s been kept here for nearly ten centuries, and we are transported to another time. The silence washes over us, inviting us to wonder at what else has been kept there, and is found there now by these four living stones. I do not know, I think to myself, but I am enraptured by the sense of wonder, of awe, the mystery of this place. I long to know what they see, what they have seen, that has led them to their knees on this sunny but quiet weekday morning.

My background in various expressions of mainstream American Christianity has, if anything, led me to have more questions and concerns regarding Catholicism than anything else.

But as time has gone on, I’ve been drawn to something when I recall the four nuns in the chapel in Italy. It is not unlike that which draws me in my own tradition of prayer, that of writing in my journal and speaking mysteries into the silence of my secret place, beholding an inner beauty, not one made by the hands of a craftsman.

And the more I think about it, the closer these two moments seem to resemble one another.

It is not in the seen things our hearts are stirred, but the light of the unseen. But how much of what I have seen has revealed to me that which is unseen, and taught me the difference? It is in both memory and in stained glass where what we have seen draws us to that which is unseen.

There are an estimated 2.3 billion Christians in the world today. And yet, we seem to categorize one another into a handful of Christian subcategories. We create caricatures of one another, each slightly different depending on who you ask. We caricature ourselves too, only the lines are drawn in flawless gold, and the colors of memory and familiarity remind us of the moments where the unseen became seen.

Caricatures are seen, but only seen. They become the idol, drawing attention to themselves, staying there on their pedestals, rather than directing our gaze towards the beauty of the unseen. When we encounter someone new, we put them in their category and draw their caricature in our mind. We dismiss them, and return to the image we created of ourselves. What we don’t realize is that these graven images point us back to us, and it is in the dark chambers of our own hearts they receive their worship.

On our trip to Italy, I tramped from region to region in pursuit of a favorite fine wine, and through the Roman trattorias to settle once and for all which makes the best Cacio e Pepe. We hopped trains from the pastel coastal villages of Cinque Terre to the cobbled streetcorners of Rome, where the stories of myth and faith collide in a cacophony of marble-carved heroes and fresco-filled sanctuaries, flitting prego off the tip of my tongue at every turn.

I wanted what I found in Italy to become a part of me. I wanted it in my bones.

What I found was not left to memory, but found a place deep in my heart. I became someone new after leaving. I saw something that transformed me, not only as an Italian-American, but as a human being.

To make a caricature of my experience, or the people and places I encountered, would be to blaspheme the inherent goodness of what I found there—a degrading reduction no different from the disparaging attitude and imagery that breeds the hateful, tribalistic bigotry that rears its ugly head throughout human kind.

We must ask ourselves what it is we see when we look at other denominations.

It is easy to create the caricature, to behold the golden calf—and just as easy to ignore its existence altogether. When viewed from the lens of caricature, denominations become institutions flaunting their articles for division. But what if we were to see through them, to the unseen glory they are trying to reveal? What if their perspectives, culture, history, and expressions that are unique to them — their flavor, function, not unlike the unique expression of the Italians amidst other nations — are actually pointing us towards something bigger than all of us?

Seen this way, these caricatures of division become expressions of diversity. We see that really, all denominations are like nations, or even individual people — each uniquely shaped by their experience, tradition, location, culture, and history. If you really think about it, none of us fully toes the line of our own denomination. We are each, in our own way, a denomination of our denomination.

We are all denominations.

What if, like nations, different denominations had truths and expressions you could only find there? We all have a country we call home, but we get to reap the benefits of each culture when we are humble enough to engage with and learn from them. How much more ought this to be true of us as citizens of an invisible kingdom — one that knows no allegiances to a country or government, passing through this world together toward a life that has yet to fully begin?

The nuns of Sant’Antimo pray, and before them, the eucharist sits on the altar. Being the central focus of many sacramental gatherings, it allows little spectacle. It is quiet. Holy, and though I don’t know how far down the rabbit hole of transubstantiation I want to go, Christ was clear in saying that, This is My body and this is My blood. Paul writes about how taking the elements can bring not only physical healing, but judgment if taken without first truly examining the heart. In many traditions, it is valued to such a degree that they do not hand it out lightly to newcomers, if at all. In my own tradition, we’ve been quick to hand it out to newcomers without a second thought, and can fall into the trap of viewing the communion elements as just a transition into the next part of the service.

This is one small example, but I wonder what truths, practices, and perspectives can we glean from the rich, diverse, multinational expression of the Christian experience throughout this heavenly kingdom?

Without them, we miss the opportunity to be transformed — both as individuals and as a Body at large — from glory to glory.

Paul’s letters were written not to different denominations, but to different churches in different nations. When he wrote to the church in Corinth, desiring there to be no divisions among them, he was speaking to a specific church that was quarrelling over whose teachings they follow of all the other leaders, apostles, and Christ Himself. His response is plainly, “Is Christ divided?”

We take Paul’s writings and apply them within our own churches, but what if the same imagery he uses applies to denominations on a larger scale?

“The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” In the same way that Christ is not divided, neither should His spiritual heavenly bride be. She cannot pertain to a single teacher, denomination, or human expression of the Christian experience, but to all of them.

I want to weep with the prophets over the broken state of our denominations and nations. I want to partake of body and blood for my spiritual and physical redemption. I want to pray in the tongues of saints and angels. I want to walk in the love that is deathless.

Our Lord is returning for a bride who is blameless, spotless. One who is undivided, unified, consisting of the tribes, nations, and cultures of the earth, yet who’ve forsaken the worldly caricatures and sought that unseen heavenly kingdom. A people who transcend the limitations of a fallen humanity, reborn of spirit. Those who wander the earth chasing the wind — not knowing where it goes, but that it comes from that unseen place — whose love for one another sets them apart in a world at war, yearning for something real.

We are all denominations. It is our oneness and unity by which we become a new heavenly Body on earth. We are each members, Christ our head. May we bless her Hands with gentle affections. May the mountains be covered with her lovely Footfalls. May her Eyes see all that is unseen, and may her undivided Heart beat unendingly for the One whom her soul truly loves.

Thanks for reading. I’m a zillennial writer, pastor, and former teacher. I also paint houses, make Italian food, and can get down at a wedding.

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The opening drum roll and the power chord of Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption blasted throughout the cabin. I shot up, my eyes crusted shut, head pounding. Our counselor was standing in the doorway dressed in a plaid shirt and tie with slacks and loafers. He was standing next to his stereo, smiling, as it played the epic guitar solo cranked at full blast.

“Good morning, boys,” he yelled over the music. “It’s Sunday. Time to get up.”

Not two hours had passed since I found my way back into bed after last night’s festivities. Buck was sound asleep, mouth open, making a gurgling sound in the back of his throat. I put my bare feet down onto the cool concrete. Hodge was sitting up in his bunk, hair wet, dressed in a white button-down t-shirt, jeans, and boots.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“I’m always up,” he said, fingers crossed over ‌his chest.

“You don’t sleep?”

“Sometimes.”

Eddie Van Halen’s finger tapping caught my attention, and I shared a glance with Jamey, who was nodding with approval. I liked it and nodded back in agreement. Soon, I stepped out into the foggy morning and passed our clothesline, remembering what Buck and I had done before we met up with the others, hoping we would not soon cross paths with Alec and the rest of the senior cabin. I checked under the door and exhaled before stepping into the stall and taking a steaming shower.

No one is born with a desire to wake up in the morning and go to church. It’s a desire that is sown, often in children by adults who hope the seed takes root. At this point in my life, the seeds in me were newly tossed. Not enough time had passed for anything conclusive to have grown. Going to church was simply a thing I did, a place I went. I didn’t fully understand why, but I did not detest it either. There was a beauty in the high ceilings, the echo, the sunshine. I often found myself distracted by the pictures in the stained glass windows, the way the light played on the colors, and the way the colors shone down onto the floors and the people. One thing I came to enjoy on Sundays at camp was the hymns. We had hymnals at St. John’s, very similar to the ones in the back of the pews in the chapel at Camp Magnolia. Many songs were the same, but ‌when we sang them there, they sounded different. Maybe it was the voices, the hundreds of kids who sang the old traditional songs in one collective voice. Maybe it was because there was no organ or cantor, just our voices against the backdrop of an acoustic guitar that inspired me to hold the book myself and sing along. Or maybe it was the one voice, the one that rang out above all the rest. He sounded like an angel. I called him the man with the golden voice.

Almost every old church has one. He likes to stand close to the front or, as he did that day, high in the balcony where all the locals preside above the campers in the back of the chapel on Sunday mornings. He’s middle-aged, and sings as loud and unashamedly as if he himself were the one leading the congregation. Many of the others looked back to see the man. They’d find him standing tall, proud, hearing his booming voice, wondering what to make of him. They’d snicker, looking to each other for confirmation of this man’s foolishness. But they’d recognize that neither anyone else in the room nor any of his contemporaries seemed to mind, or even notice the man’s worship. Soon, all who might have questioned the stature of this man too pay him no mind, and, perhaps without realizing it, sing all the more attentively themselves.

The man with the golden voice was such a man. He was scruffy and gray, but his voice rolled down from the balcony like a river of liquid velvet, warming all under its sound. There was something old in his voice, so old that it became young again, and beautiful, like time itself had begun anew. I wondered what might be required of a man to shine as he did.

We sat as the singing ended. Reverend Billingsley walked up the steps to the pulpit and opened a big brown leather Bible. I was still getting used to his style of preaching. Back home, Father Carmen often told stories about real life in his messages, making it easier to follow along. Billingsley wasn’t like that at all. He switched between reading straight from the scriptures to elaborating on them, breaking down each passage verse by verse, translating from the original languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic.

He was talking about Jesus. Who was Jesus? Who is Jesus? Well, Jesus is God, isn’t he? God’s son. That much I knew. There was a lot more that he said that went over my head, but what I caught was this—Jesus came to rid the world of darkness.

There was still a lot of darkness in the world. I thought back to the Sunday school lessons where our teacher told us that Jesus died for our sins. What exactly is sin? Well, it’s all the bad things we do; it’s our darkness. Billingsley said we’ve all got darkness in us. How did Jesus make our darkness go away? Billingsley kept going on from one thing to the next, and by the end, I was more confused than I was at the beginning. I resisted my temptation to look around the room and bowed my head as he prayed to close us out for lunch.

I walked alongside my cabin mates as we made our way toward the cafeteria. I expected everyone to be in their Sunday best. For many, not much was different. Some kids weren’t dressed up at all. A few wore the same shirt and pants they wore every other day of the week. I wore a blue button-down shirt with a navy tie, khakis and boat shoes, and as I looked around, I realized I stuck out like a sore thumb. What I didn’t realize about my outfit was that not only did it make me stand out, but it made me an easy target.

We were following the crowd, the others having a conversation about what toppings were appropriate to put on a hotdog.

“There’s nothin’ less American than putting ketchup on a hotdog,” Buck protested. “You can put it on a cheeseburger all you like, but put it on a hotdog and you ain’t no American. You’ve lost all respect from me.”

He was continuing with his rant when he ran into someone who was walking towards us opposite the crowd. I looked up to see Alec Robinson there wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and his backwards flat-bill cap, looking down on Buck with a smolder bound to burst into flame.

“You probably think you’re real smart, don’t you?” Alec said.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Buck said. “Me and my friends are just walking—”

“I know it was you,” Alec interrupted.

“What was me?”

“You’re the only one dumb enough to think you can sneak around at night and not have anyone notice. I own this place. But I’m not here to play games,” Alec said.

“I’m here to call a truce. No more of this. Let’s just call it quits.”

He reached out his hand to shake. I could tell Buck wasn’t sure either.

“How do I know you ain’t lying?” Buck said.

Alec smiled. “Do I look like I’m lying?”

Admittedly, he didn’t. He sounded as if maybe someone had talked sense into him, someone older or in charge. Maybe he was changing his ways. There was a pause before Buck extended his hand to shake, and it was a moment too late when Alec’s smile grew horns and a barbed tail when he snatched Buck’s hand. Buck locked up, his body went tight, and he dropped to his knees. He was trying to yell but couldn’t make any words. I looked closer. There was a metal ring on Alec’s finger. Buck closed his eyes, looking as if he were about to pass out. When I saw Buck like that, anger and heat worked up inside me, and the next thing I knew, I pounced on Alec’s arm. I flipped over it and landed beneath them as his grip finally broke off of Buck and we toppled to the ground. Alec stood and scowled down at me. Counselors soon stepped in and broke up the skirmish, helping Buck and I to our feet. Alec raised his arms, not claiming to have done anything. As he did, he had his hand partway closed, concealing whatever it was that hurt Buck. He started yelling about how he was trying to apologize for what had happened the other day.

“Did you take a shower this morning?” Buck called out from the dust.

Alec hadn’t caught what he said.

“Take off your hat,” Buck called a second time.

At first, Alec paid Buck no mind until he kept egging on the older camper. He removed his cap and found that his curly blonde locks had been butchered off, leaving a large bald patch on top of his head, making him look like a monk from the Middle Ages. What Buck had taken out of his pocket and thrown into the river the night before had apparently been a sizable chunk of Alec’s hair.

Buck yelled over the noise of the crowd, “If you own the place, I’d fire whoever’s runnin’ security.”

The counselors soon took on the task of restraining a berserking Alec Robinson, who now looked like an imbecile in more ways than one.

Buck stood there with his smug, buck-toothed grin, knowing he’d pulled off the most unbelievable counter I had ever seen. The surrounding kids mocked Alec’s haircut as the counselors detained and vacated him from the area.

“I thought you were gonna pass out,” I said.

“He had one of them little buzzer rings, the kind you get in a gumball machine, or whatever it is,” he said. “Only this one wasn’t like those. He must’ve made one stronger than normal, my arm is still numb from it.”

He looked at me. “Looks like he got you, too.”

I put my hand to my brow, touching warm blood on the tips of my fingers.

“I don’t know what happened.”

“That’s a good one,” he said. “Makes you look tough.”

Buck patted me on the shoulder, and the boys came around. With their help, I left from there wearing a new mantle, and together we walked to the cafeteria where, in defiance, we loaded up our lunches with ketchup, to Buck’s dismay.

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Our cabin sat towards the back of the chapel as Reverend Billingsley closed his sermon. All the campers bowed their heads and closed their eyes while he prayed. I looked up. I was not the only curious camper in the gathering. A handful of others sat up, nervous eyes glancing around, hoping to avoid detection. There were a few eyes that were not curious but uninterested in anything Reverend Billingsley had to say. Others looked as if they’d never heard a man pray before in their lives.

We waited outside as hundreds of kids wandered all over the hillside. It was dark, and the moon hung above the trees. I stood by a wooden fence when two girls approached me.

“Hi, what’s your name?” one of them said.

“TJ,” I answered.

“Are your eyes blue?” the second girl said.

“What?”

“Your eyes—are they blue?” she asked again.

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.

They leaned in to see. “My name’s Naomi,” the second girl said.

She gave me a strange look. Her eyes widened, and she smiled.

“What?” I asked, confused.

The first girl put her hand on her hip.

“She thinks you’re sexy,” she said.

Naomi gasped and covered her mouth. The two of them cackled as they ran off into the night.

“Who was that?” Buck asked.

I turned around.

“Naomi.”

Buck looked out and shrugged.

“We’re gonna go out tonight. You gonna be able to stay awake?”

“How late?”

“Two-thirty. Three.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll wake you up.”

Jamey read through a devotional in a chair at the center of the room. All the boys had showered and were lying in their beds, listening. My mind was elsewhere. I was thinking of Naomi, her light brown skin that was warm in the moonlight, her dark eyes that left me wordless when she smiled, and the words her friend said to me. I wondered if I’d see her again soon.

Jamey soon finished. We bowed our heads and prayed before our last remaining forty-five minutes until lights out. We discussed the plan, and it seemed simple enough. Buck would stay up and wake up anyone who fell asleep. There were four of us. The other boys I did not know too well, but were friends of Buck’s.

I lay in my bed in the darkness, listening to the quiet sounds of the evening, and found that one of my front teeth was loose. I reached up and tried to move it, when suddenly it popped into my hand. It was painless and bloodless. I felt the tooth next to it and by putting hardly any pressure on it, it too came free from my mouth without discomfort. One by one, I plucked out my teeth until my mouth was a numb, mushy blob of gums. When I closed my mouth, I found I had no lips, just a solid flat face bone. My new bones didn’t work like my old ones. I was trapped and couldn’t breathe. I tried to scream, but no words—

“TJ,” a voice whispered.

My eyes opened. It was pitch black inside the cabin. Buck’s hand was around my mouth as I awoke. He crouched and gently shut the screen door behind him on his way out of the back of the cabin. I loosened my sticky tongue from the roof of my mouth. Each tooth was intact and in place, wet and smooth like polished stones. I put on my shoes and crept out the back door into the darkness.

“Buck,” I looked around, but found no one.

Psssttt.

A light flashed down the path into the woods. I followed it into the shadows.

“Ready?” Buck said.

“For what?”

“Come on.”

He led me down the path and then off into the underbrush until we reached a string of clotheslines behind a group of cabins.

“What are we doing here?”

Buck silenced me as we neared the senior camper’s cabins. This was where I saw Alec on the first day coming in. My hands trembled and my mouth dried up.

“We can’t go out there. They’ll kill us if they find out.”

Buck shrugged. “They won’t find out.”

He crouched and walked out into the open.

“Buck!” I whispered.

“You just go grab what you can from the clothesline. I’ll be right back.”

From the treeline, I watched as Buck snuck past the clothesline and into the back of the cabin. I held my breath, motionless. Seconds were eternities. Before long, Buck reappeared out of the back of the cabin and nearly tripped, catching his balance as he snuck back to the treeline.

“What did you—”

“Grab the rest of their stuff.”

Buck gave the command and within a few moments, we were running through the woods, our arms full of bathing suits, towels and other items. Buck moved quickly for a boy his size. He maneuvered over roots and under branches like Mowgli from The Jungle Book. I kept up pace until we reached a clearing. I looked down.

“Throw them in the river,” Buck said.

My eyes widened.

“Throw them in!”

I wasted no time. I hurled them into the river and watched them disappear into the darkness. Buck reached into his pockets and tossed a handful of something light and fluffy, but I couldn’t tell what. We stood there above the bank and caught our breath.

“What next?” I asked, exhilarated.

Buck smiled.

“Follow me.”

It is a shame no such thrills survive into adulthood quite like sneaking out late in the middle of the night, when the legal parameters set in place are bypassed, in the tense space between safety and the threat of being captured. As we ran, I exposed the ghouls in my mind that hid behind every tree or long cast shadow, holding them at gunpoint, imposing their surrender upon them. We ran wild, free from all constraints, obligations, rules, or authority. We were immortal.

I followed Buck until we came to a clearing at the end of another wooded path, a smothered campfire surrounded by wooden benches. We sat on the benches where two of my cabin mates were waiting for us.

“Never thought you guys would show,” one boy said.

“Sour Patch?” the other asked.

I grabbed a handful and tossed them into my mouth, the sour crystals exhausting my salivary glands of their supply. We walked atop the benches as Buck detailed the success of our operation, laughing as we recounted our exploits.

“Tell me about Randy.”

The three of them looked at each other.

“You wanna tell it?” Buck asked.

“No, you go ahead. You’re better at telling it, anyway.”

“Alright. Sit down.”

“Now, before I start I gotta say this was well before my time, but I’ve been around long enough to know what’s what, and that what I’m about to tell you ain’t nothin’ but the truth, so help me God. This was almost ten years ago now, maybe more, maybe less. Started out in the summer, a normal summer, kinda like this one. Alec Robinson was just a kid, running around the place much like he still does today. Camp was newer back then, they hadn’t been running as tight a ship as they do now. Everything was peach n’ easy, and it was right about then that the Flowers moved into town. Old man Flowers bought a farm not far from camp, and his family worked the land. Nothin’ too big, fifteen, maybe twenty acres. They got to being friendly with their new neighbors, the Robinsons, and their oldest boy, Randy, took Alec Robinson under his wing like a big brother of sorts.

Shh, now quit it, I’ll get to that part. I’m the one tellin’ the story, ain’t I? Where was I… right, Randy Flowers and Alec Robinson; the two were thick as thieves. Everywhere they went, they were together, couldn’t separate those two, not in a million years. Randy was ‘bout fifteen or sixteen, hardly a kid by his looks, tall, strong, real handsome they say. A man in his own right. Alec was just a runt compared to ‘im.

Now, Billingsley wasn’t as old back then as he is now, had more hair and he could move around better too. They say he was out riding his bicycle one night patrolling the camp when, sure enough, he spotted Randy and some other campers lighting up in the woods. He chased after ‘em but he didn’t catch ‘em, and he wasn’t fully sure who it was he was chasing, ‌but Billingsley ain’t no fool, he stayed out most nights after that until he found ‘em again, which of course he did. He brought the boys to the camp director. They all got in loads of trouble, and Randy didn’t have it so easy, especially since little ole Alec was with them when they got caught. Old Man Flowers found out about the trouble Randy got in and, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t ever want no folks like the Flowers, all high and mighty religious folk, strict about everything. Randy wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t like being told what to do, he and his dad didn’t get along too well after that. I don’t really know if they ever did.

Not too much later, Randy went missing. Everybody thought he took off with his older friends, thought they’d just turn up soon and have hell to pay. Turns out, no one else was missing. A week or two went by still there wasn’t any sign of him. The Flowers went to the sheriff and reported him missing. They held prayer meetings in the chapel and folks came from all over to support their family. Local boy goes missing. He was young, good lookin’. It was all the talk in every hole ‘n holler across these mountains. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that they found his body.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“All I know is they found a gun and that it wasn’t too far from camp. He’d been dead for a long while by the time they got there.”

There was a long pause before anyone spoke.

“I think we should go back,” I said to the group.

“You wanna know my theory?” Buck said. “I think it was murder.”

“Murder,” one boy said, “that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way he was murdered.”

“You ever known anybody who was murdered?” Buck asked. “It don’t ever make sense.”

“He wasn’t murdered. Everybody knows what happened,” the boy said.

Buck shrugged. “Well, I ain’t convinced.”

“People say they’ve seen a ghost out here in these woods,” the boy said. “They say it’s Randy looking for his body.”

“And his hideout,” the other boy said, “you forgot to mention it. No one’s ever found his hideout.” He turned to me. “He’s looking for his old hideout so he can finally rest.”

“That’s why you can’t say his name,” the first boy said. “Superstition is if you call on his name, you’ll end up dead. Look what happened to Buck. He said it out loud, and sure enough, Alec almost killed him.”

“You believe in ghosts, TJ?” Buck said.

Where once I’d arrested the shadowy figments in my mind, now they stood just beyond the moonlight, mocking me, and I, after hearing all of this talk of death and ghosts at the camp, could do nothing to apprehend them.

“I’m ready to go back.”

“He’s spooked,” Buck laughed. “You wanted me to tell you the story.”

“I feel like we’re being watched.”

“Sure you do,” Buck said.

“No, guys, look!”

A branch broke in the brush just ten feet behind us in the treeline. We snapped our heads around and looked to where I pointed. By now my heart was racing, every shadow stood tall and crept towards me. I was certain there was something in the woods just beyond our line of sight.

“Run,” Buck whispered.

In a moment, we shot out of the clearing, down the path and through the woods. We ran back towards our cabin on different trails than we came in on, hoping to lose whoever—or whatever—might’ve been chasing us. We came to a halt, and Buck killed the light, and we sat behind a felled tree off the path and waited.

Minutes passed, and there was no sign of anything coming up the path. All was silent again. We caught our breath, and for good measure, waited out another twenty minutes.

“Sun’ll be up soon. Come on.”

Buck led us down a thin trail without a light until we arrived at our cabin. I slipped in the back door and found my way to my bunk. I took off all my clothes and lay on top of my blankets, exhausted, but too wired, scared, and sweaty to fall asleep right away. The last thing I remember was the faintest glow of light coming in from the back door and thinking I heard the slapping of feet climbing up into the bunk above me.

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My mother spoke on the microphone at the front of the church, my father beside her, me leaning up against her. She was telling the congregation how proud she was of me to attend Camp Magnolia. I thought it was a mission trip by the way she made it sound. She described my heart for the broken and the fatherless, that I felt the call to fulfill the great commission, and this was the way I wanted to do my part.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I just smiled and went along with the plans they’d made for me. They didn’t ask me. They only told me I’d be spending my summer away at camp and that I’d have a great time. I didn’t know it was a summer camp for foster kids.

I learned that was the ‌accepted term among my cabin mates. Apparently, nobody had legitimately used the term “orphans” since Oliver Twist. They used their own terms too, given to them by various authorities, words like “juvenile”‌ or “hoodlum”, and others that were much less pleasant. I also learned that not all foster kids were homeless, or even parentless. Most of them had parents. They just couldn’t live with them or had only one parent. Some had their own families they lived with, they just weren’t biological.

Camp Magnolia is on a large farm, where throughout the year locals who work for the camp live and homestead on the land. The full-time staff runs the camp with help from students at a local seminary school, many of whom fill in needs around the camp and serve as counselors.

This entire operation was founded and funded by some bigwig Hollywood folks. They bought the farm and let the family who worked the land, the Robinsons, stay there and facilitate everything involving the camp. Their entire family devoted themselves to running their family farm and overseeing all camp operations. Alec, their oldest son, was barely still young enough to be a camper. He’d help with tasks around camp while they were busy. I’d already seen him once, and I wish I’d only ever just seen him. I regret the day I ever met Alec Robinson.

Buck and I were heading towards the snack shack to find out if a frozen Butterfinger was better than a normal-temperature Butterfinger. We stood in line behind a group of boys our age who recognized Buck and waved us over.

“Why would anyone ever want to freeze a perfectly good Butterfinger?” a boy asked.

“Don’t knock it ‘till you try it,” Buck said. He whispered to me, “You’ll see. It’ll change your life.”

After a brief debate over chocolate bars, the group was satisfied with our selection of snacks and sodas. Buck was right. I couldn’t quite pin what it was, but that frozen Butterfinger did in fact change my life.

Over the noise of our banter, the whine of an engine hummed from a distance and drew closer. I looked and spotted a golf cart barreling down the road at an alarming rate, swerving past bystanders and racing towards the snack shack. The driver stepped off the cart and walked over to the snack shack with the two others he rode with. They went straight to the front of the line, disregarding all the campers waiting, none of whom seemed interested in commenting on their intrusion.

“I’ve seen him before,” I said, “the one with the tattoo.”

“You’re best to keep your distance. He’s not too nice, especially to new campers,” Buck said, “and never mention Randy. If you ever hear anybody talkin’ about Randy, you just tuck your tail and get outta there, especially if Alec and the others are around.”

“Who’s Randy?” I asked.

“I already told you don’t talk about him.”

“You wanna end up like Randy?” one boy said.

“What happened to Randy?” I asked.

“Shhh.”

I looked up and saw Alec and the bluish-black outline of the lightning bolt on his arm. He wore a ripped sleeveless shirt and black skate shoes, the ones with the thick and oversized tongue. His curly white-blonde hair puffed out from beneath his black flat-bill cap with a logo of a fox. He was teasing the group of girls who had previously been first in line.

I soon noticed that we were cornered in the space near the front of the snack shack, and our only exit was to go past the front of the line where Alec and the older boys lingered. We conceded we were just fine remaining there for the time being, so long as we didn’t have to report back to the cabins soon.

“What time is it?” I asked.

Buck checked his watch. “Four-twenty.”

We were ten minutes from needing to report to the cabin for dinner prep. People were clearing out, but more older boys showed up and were trying to flirt with the girls behind the snack bar. Soon it was just us left in our corner and all of them, twenty feet away. It was four twenty-four. We needed to move. Before I could speak up, Buck was halfway across the snack bar, and the other boys were right behind him.

“Excuse us,” Buck said.

Brooding, mature faces looked down on us. They reeked of skunk and smoke, a scent I could not place but knew meant nothing good.

“What’s your name, kid?” one of them asked.

“Buck.”

“What’s up with his voice?” another laughed.

“There’s nothin’ wrong with my voice,” Buck said. “Maybe there’s somethin’ wrong with your voice.”

“What was that?” Alec laughed, stepping forward. “Let me see this kid.”

I was certain Buck was going to die, but he doubled down.

“I said maybe somethin’s wrong with his voice. Maybe somethin’s wrong with your ears too,” he said, without a flinch.

This got a rise out of the rest of the group.

“I don’t know if I should laugh or…”

“Or what?” Buck said sharply.

Alec laughed. “Who is this kid?”

Alec looked away, and it was a good feint. With his head still turned, he struck with both hands and latched onto Buck’s shirt, lifting him in the air.

“Nobody ever taught you any respect, did they?”

Buck yelped as he crashed down onto a plastic table and chairs. The rest of the group laughed, and we watched with terror. Alec wore a raging smile. I could not believe what I heard next. His cheeks red and streaming with tears, Buck called out from the pile of broken plastic.

“I’m glad Randy’s dead.”

The group froze.

Alec’s face contorted in such a way that I thought the devil himself might speak through him.

“You’re dead,” Alec made a line for Buck, who was still crying as he tried to get up from the pile of broken plastic.

Alec reached into his pocket and flipped out a short-bladed pocketknife.

“You’re so dead,” he said, walking like a man possessed.

A short, muscular boy with dark hair jumped out from the group of older campers and started pushing Alec away.

“Leave him alone, man. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

It was Hodge.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Alec fumed.

“Just let him go,” Hodge said, pushing against him. “It’s not worth it.”

A few of the others started towards Alec to calm him down. He came to himself and put away the knife.

“If I see you again, you’re dead,” he turned. “Any of you.”

I looked away as he and the others left the snack shack. Hodge stayed behind.

“Stay away from him, alright?” Hodge said.

“Who’s Randy?” I whispered.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just stay away.”

Hodge turned to catch ‌up with the others. The boys and I were still in shock, but we came to enough to see Buck still hysterical by the table and chairs his crash had destroyed. We helped him to his feet and started back towards our cabin. It was four forty-five.

I’d gone to a small private school, the kind that’s holed up in a church and class sizes are smaller than families who attended. Here, there were hundreds of kids running, screaming, playing, and not one of them was familiar. Buck was company enough, but not exactly what I was used to. There was a lot I didn’t know, and a lot of time left to be spent with a few hundred middle and high schoolers, most of whom had no parents and had certainly not been as sheltered as I had. I sat at the wooden picnic table with a tray full of Swedish meatballs, noodles, and a side of Jell-O and sulked, too nervous to eat, too hungry for what I knew I couldn’t have—to go home.

“Cheer up, TJ,” Buck said. “Nothing’s gonna happen. He’s all talk anyhow.”

“He just tossed you like a rag-doll,” I said.

“I’ve had worse,” Buck said.

“He said if he ever sees any of us again, he’d kill us.”

“Nobody’s gonna kill anybody. You’re gonna be just fine.”

I took a bite of my meatball. Buck was squishing his green Jell-O square and slurping it up with a straw.

“Buck,” I said, “who’s Randy?”

I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, but I knew he wanted me to know.

“Can you keep it a secret?”

I leaned in.

“You can’t say I told you.”

“I won’t.”

He looked around.

“Not now. Later. After the meeting tonight. We’ll go out.”

Buck went back to slurping his Jell-O, and I took that to mean that our plans had been settled. I brought my tray to the kitchen drop-off and on my way noticed a table of girls from one of the nearby cabins. On my way back, I walked as tall as I could past their table and thought I saw a couple of them whisper to each other out of the corner of my eye. I concluded they had, and I carried on that evening towards the meeting with the blissful overconfidence of a boy who understands nothing of the elusive complexities of the opposite sex.

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The dirt path my parents and I walked kicked up dust, covering us and all my luggage. We passed by cabins designated for boys, all a few years older than I. One older camper had a tattoo, which startled me, forcing my eyes elsewhere. Further down the path were the girls’ cabins. They sat waiting on their porches, screaming excitedly whenever a newcomer arrived.

We continued until we reached a ring of cabins circling an asphalt basketball court. The campers here were my age. Near the wooden bleachers, a camp counselor stood with a clipboard. When it was my turn, the counselor asked for my name.

“TJ.”

“I’ve got a lot of names here. Can I have your full name?”

“Timothy James Becker.”

The counselor scanned ‌the clipboard. “TJ, we’ve got you right here in Pine. You can take your things up to the front steps. Some boys will be there to help take your things to your bunk.” My parents thanked him, and he sent us on our way. “Welcome to Camp Magnolia.”

We approached the sign designating Pine, just past Birch and Hemlock. I kept my head low and hid my eyes beneath the visor of my Yankees cap as I rolled my luggage to the front steps, my mother and father walking close behind. The cabin wasn’t much. There was a covered porch with wooden benches on either side. On the right was a small room with nothing but a sink and a water drain in the center of the room. To the left, a bunk was laid out in a more sophisticated manner than I would have assumed of a twelve-year-old.

“That’s Jamey’s bunk. He’s the counselor,” a voice said.

I looked up to find a red-headed, freckle-faced boy about my age with bucked teeth and a southern drawl. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you to your bunk.”

He led us to a gray mattress on a painted metal frame.

“Nobody’s in this one. You can take top or bottom,” he said.

I placed my things on the bottom bunk. My parents asked if I needed anything else. I said that I didn’t. Soon my father gave me a hug and my mother kissed me on the cheek. I watched them walk out the door and down the front steps of the cabin. I wouldn’t see them again until the end of the summer. I sat on my bunk and fought the urge to cry.

“You got nice folks,” the redheaded boy said, “I’m Buck.” He held out his hand to shake.

I shook timidly. “TJ.”

“You wanna go see the creek?” he asked.

It was either go with him, or stay here with nothing but my loneliness.

“Sure.”

Ignatius Buckland Williams spoke with a twang my northern ears were not accustomed to, using strange words and expressions, things like crick, holler, or how he was always fixin’ to do something. Add in his lisp and his big bucked teeth, and he came across as quite the character. I wondered how a boy from Mississippi ended up at a summer camp in New Hampshire.

“Well,” he said, “I move around a lot. I guess it’s easier for me to just stay in one place for a while. Least that’s what my older sister told me. She’s the one who looks out for me, mostly. What about you?”

He nodded along as I retold the story.

“Well, I don’t know why your folks would sign you up to come here, but I’m sure glad they did,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go back to the cabin and catch up with the rest of the fellas.”

That remark struck me, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t always easy to understand the things Buck said.

There were more boys in the cabin now, nearly every bed accounted for. I sucked in a deep breath as the counselor called us to our bunks for roll call.

“When I call your name, tell us if you have a nickname and one interesting fact about yourself. First call, Becker, Timothy.”

I didn’t have an interesting fact. I raised my hand.

“You can call me TJ.”

“Is that a Yankees hat?” a boy yelled.

“Boo Yankees!” another added.

I had no rebuttal. My family were Yankees fans. Though I preferred football over baseball.

“Yeah, but I like the Patriots,” I said, hoping to win back what approval I’d lost.

“You’re a Yankees fan and a Patriots fan? That’s even worse than just being a Yankees fan,” a boy across the cabin shouted.

“Alright, boys, that’s enough,” Jamey said. “TJ, we’re glad you’re here.”

Where I lived in Connecticut, people split evenly between the New York and Boston professional sports teams. It was an insult that I had picked teams from both cities, and this sin has damned me from either of their acceptance, even to this day. I stood there regretting I had ever liked sports at all.

“Up next…”

Just then, the front door swung open. The boys turned their heads in unison and soon abandoned their posts to swarm the incoming camper who stood in the doorway, patting him on the back and welcoming him to the cabin with a cheer. His short frame hardly filled half the doorway, but he stood there as if he were the tallest one in the room. He glanced around the room and spotted the last remaining bunk, which was the one right above mine. He met my eyes and started towards me. All he carried was a backpack and a pillow. He threw them up on the top bunk.

“You can have the bottom if you like. I don’t mind switching,” I said.

“I like sleeping up high,” he said. “I’m Hodge. What’s your name, kid?”

“TJ,” I answered.

“You from New York? Me too,” he said, pointing to my cap.

“No, Connecticut.”

“Rich boy, huh?”

“My dad’s from New York. You like baseball?”

“Yeah. The Mets.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere, and before I made things worse, I figured it’d be better if I stopped talking.

“Hey Hodge, got any interesting facts about yourself?” one boy asked.

“Nope,” Hodge said to the room. “I’m the least interesting one here.”

The boys laughed, and glances shot across the room. I, not knowing what was funny, could sense the happy mutiny that rises in all boys who know when a comrade is up to no good.

Our counselor read through a long document that detailed various aspects of our routine for the week. I listened as well as any boy my age, and like most, would be caught off guard when the actual events played out in real time. He soon finished, and the cabin returned to a disorderly calm.

“I never cared too much for sports,” Buck said. “Don’t let ‘em get the best of you. You’re alright.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I’d made a friend in Buck, and played cards with him as the boys in the cabin settled in. From our game I observed Hodge in his bed. He sat upright, quiet, watching the rest of the group, and yet, I got the sense that he was looking at something I couldn’t see. I didn’t want to stare too long lest he spot me, so I kept my cards close and tried not to let my eyes give me away.

After a few hours, our group followed a mass of campers up a hill to a building I did not expect to see at a summer camp.

“What’s with the church?”

“It’s where we have our meetings,” a boy said.

“Meetings?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

The place was overrun with campers of all ages. There was a rush about the air, a tension, like the rising moon had ignited something in us all that made us wild and expectant. As I recall it, that may have been one of my earliest memories of feeling the inherent magic of a summer night.

We reached the white chapel that stood at the top of the hill. It might have been a peaceful place if not for the hordes of over-hyped teenagers flooding the area. We filed in and found our seats on a polished wooden pew.

The chatter in the place was near a roar. I sat on the edge of my seat, neck stretched out, looking in front and behind me at the droves of campers all around. There were so many faces, all glowing with the youthful light that is forever etched in my mind.

The lights went out, and pandemonium ensued. The chapel resounded with a cheer so loud that I had to cover my ears. I looked over at Buck, who had a smile as wide as the Mississippi itself. The meeting began with dramatic intro music over a loudspeaker. Camp staff walked onto the platform at the front of the chapel, introducing themselves. After that, counselors told jokes, and we sang camp songs, the words being projected ‌onto the front of the chapel above the pulpit.

We sat down, and the lights came back on. I noticed three older people sitting in the front row who had yet to be introduced. Sure enough, they were next up as the speaker called out their names.

“Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, our camp directors,” the speaker said, “and our camp chaplain, Reverend Michael J. Billingsley.”

The Reverend waved to the crowd as they cheered his name. He was an older man, heavyset and balding. Reverend Billingsley took the microphone and stood at the pulpit. The crowd of campers hushed all around.

He was a soft-spoken man. Occasionally, his voice rose in intensity, which I did not expect, nor had heard or seen before at St. John’s back home. Father Carmen always spoke somberly and monotone. I distinguished between what I observed was a preacher and the other, a priest. Most of his sermon was lost in the moment’s excitement, but there was one part of his sermon that stuck with me that evening:

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”

Soon, the whole place was silent except for the sounds of scattered sniffling. It was strange. Mass was never emotional, at least not like this. We usually just sat there, listened, and went home. I’d never heard a sermon like this before.

Stars twinkled above us as we walked back towards our cabin.

“What did you think he was talking about?” I asked.

“I got pretty bored ‘bout halfway through,” Buck said, “Preachers back home are much more exciting. They get to dancin’ and hollerin’ out loud like wild men. It’s a lot of fun.”

I tried to imagine Father Carmen dancing in front of the congregation at St. John’s.

“He says it every week.”

I turned around. Hodge stalked up behind us.

“Every week, every year. Same opening message.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Look around, kid,” Hodge said.

It never occurred to me before, but I soon noticed details of all my fellow campers that I’d previously missed. There was a wildness, a kind of excitement that scared me, a meanness and a strength, a resilience. I thought about what Reverend Billingsley said, and then it hit me. It’s what I couldn’t see before, and what Hodge had been looking at the whole time.

“Are you guys orphans?”

With that, Buck let out a loud belly laugh.

“Welcome to Camp Magnolia.”

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Epigraph

“Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—”

1 Corinthians 15:51

I never wanted to leave the shoreline of Connecticut. The Long Island Sound stays warm throughout the winter, and just about the time winter has cooled it, spring has arrived, and the chilly sea breeze cools the summer months by ten degrees. Tourists doubled our population in the summer, their white yachts and sailboats lining the town marinas along the shore. From Memorial Day to New Year’s, there wasn’t a better place to call home.

Now, when I speak of the shoreline of Connecticut, I am speaking of the land east of Fairfield and New Haven, beyond where most of the New York City folk commute and might be called Nutmeggers, but they’re just New Yorkers. The place where I come from is where real Connecticut Yankees live, in the small shoreline towns between New Haven and New London, northwards into the green wilderness and farmlands from Durham to East Haddam and the Connecticut River, and the quaint New England villages of Essex, Ivoryton, and Chester—the heartland of Middlesex county. We are not commuters, nor tourists who own the beach homes that line the Sound. We are here when they depart, and long after that, when the winters are dead and cold.

Most young people from here often complain about how there is nothing to do, especially in the winter, how the small towns will kill you and never let you leave. Though I never entirely agreed with the former sentiment, I have regretfully found the latter to be partially true. I’m saddened to say that an unusually high number of my classmates died young, given our small population. The reasons vary, but there’s a part of me that believes there was more at play than meets the eye—that they’d somehow been influenced by the small towns and their changing seasons, or the dark and lonesome woods, or the endless sea, or maybe, it was the cold itself, that barrages against the coast for half the year, and freezes deep into the soul of our society.

By all means, I should not have left the shoreline of Connecticut, as many of my acquaintances might have preferred. It’s been years, and yet, in many ways they remain my closest companions. Once you’ve waded through death’s frozen darkness, and the cold of it sets in like frostbite until everything blackens and slips away—real friends can be hard to come by in the land of the living.

The death this coldness wrought, and the strange sequence of events that preceded it, finds me somewhere else, far away. It’s the story of how I came to be the stranger I am where I reside, and in the many strange places that I’ve lived since. It was the summer of my twelfth birthday, and for the entire summer, my parents sent me away.

I do not blame them for doing so. I was an only child, and over a decade passed since they last had a summer without me. My father, being a doctor, took off time as he pleased, and my mother, a schoolteacher, always had the summers off. Two months on the Connecticut shoreline without me was as good a deal as they could get. I’m sure they had the time of their lives.

They’d seen a pamphlet on the bulletin board at St. John’s one Sunday. The big red letters and the prospect of a summer without me had all but made their decision. A quick phone call to the people running the program and I was booked. They were connected to a religious organization, providing kids with food, lodging, and a summer camp experience. After the church took an offering and collected funds for me to go one Sunday, my fate was sealed. My parents said there was no way we could return the money, no matter how much I begged. The money had been given to us by the church, and like the good church folk we were, we were going to follow through with our commitment.

I sat on the beach, looking out. The blue haze above the horizon line marked Long Island, some ten or eleven miles away. If I looked east, and if I looked hard enough, I might see England, or Ireland, or whatever was on the other side of the Atlantic. The sun was going down; pink and orange and red all danced atop the water, the silver clouds above glowing amber and brilliant. The boats in the harbor were along the docks. They’d said goodnight and settled in as the crimson sun set behind the far western coastline. I would soon say goodnight as well, and tomorrow, I’d be off somewhere else, far from these waters, wondering when I’d get to see them again. Hoping soon.

The bumps of highway construction woke me up. My father behind the wheel, my mother in the front seat, driving up I91N past Hartford, somewhere between there and Springfield, Massachusetts. An hour earlier, we passed through the quiet forests of Killingworth and the quaint farms of Higganum, just north of where we lived on the shore. The back roads wound through the woods as if they’d been there for hundreds of years. Some of them had.

I asked if we were almost there, and I was assured that we were not. Discovery, New Hampshire, was our destination, a small town north along the border of Vermont, beneath the long shadow of the White Mountains. My parents had taken me to the area before. We’d spend weekends skiing at resorts in Killington or Ludlow, or one of the many mountain towns that drew in outdoor adventure seekers.

We soon pulled off the highway. Time was suddenly short. It was now time to decide whether I would be a good boy and go along with my parents’ plans, or if I would set in my heels and make one final stand. I felt it rise—the stirring, the quarrel within, the temptation to scream and rave and kick and cry out, my last begging plea to turn us around and bring me home. We turned onto a gravel road with a sign that read, Camp 2 miles, and the fright of it sent me over the edge, giving me such ammunition that I was confident I’d prevail against them. I began my assault. I struck hard. I gave them my best. We reached the long line of cars until there was a standstill on either side of us, and when I realized neither of my parents ever so much as spoke a word, I knew I had been defeated.

We approached a large wooden sign arching over the road at the top of the hill. Written with sticks across the arch read the words Camp Magnolia. I asked what that word meant and learned that magnolia trees were very common in the southern United States, in places like Georgia or South Carolina, places not in New England. We continued past the arch and approached the place of my sentencing.

Trees bent over us from both sides of the road, blocking out the sun, potholes forcing us to inch along, no end in sight. This was the threshold, I thought, the world between worlds. I imagined this was much like being sucked through a wormhole in the far reaches of outer space, not knowing what place might be there waiting on the other side, or what strange creatures might live there. I braced for impact as we neared the end of the vortex. And then, to my twelve-year-old, unsuspecting surprise, there was light.

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It is a shame no such thrills survive into adulthood quite like sneaking out late in the middle of the night, when the legal parameters set in place are bypassed, in the tense space between safety and the threat of being captured. As we ran, I exposed the ghouls in my mind that hid behind every tree or long cast shadow, holding them at gunpoint, imposing their surrender upon them. We ran wild, free from all constraints, obligations, rules, or authority. We were immortal.

I followed Buck until we came to a clearing at the end of another wooded path, a smothered campfire surrounded by wooden benches. We sat on the benches where two of my cabin mates were waiting for us.

“Never thought you guys would show,” one boy said.

“Sour Patch?” the other asked.

I grabbed a handful and tossed them into my mouth, the sour crystals exhausting my salivary glands of their supply. We walked atop the benches as Buck detailed the success of our operation, laughing as we recounted our exploits.

“Tell me about Randy.”

The three of them looked at each other.

“You wanna tell it?” Buck asked.

“No, you go ahead. You’re better at telling it, anyway.”

“Alright. Sit down.”

“Now, before I start I gotta say this was well before my time, but I’ve been around long enough to know what’s what, and that what I’m about to tell you ain’t nothin’ but the truth, so help me God. This was almost ten years ago now, maybe more, maybe less. Started out in the summer, a normal summer, kinda like this one. Alec Robinson was just a kid, running around the place much like he still does today. Camp was newer back then, they hadn’t been running as tight a ship as they do now. Everything was peach n’ easy, and it was right about then that the Flowers moved into town. Old man Flowers bought a farm not far from camp, and his family worked the land. Nothin’ too big, fifteen, maybe twenty acres. They got to being friendly with their new neighbors, the Robinsons, and their oldest boy, Randy, took Alec Robinson under his wing like a big brother of sorts.

Shh, now quit it, I’ll get to that part. I’m the one tellin’ the story, ain’t I? Where was I… right, Randy Flowers and Alec Robinson; the two were thick as thieves. Everywhere they went, they were together, couldn’t separate those two, not in a million years. Randy was ‘bout fifteen or sixteen, hardly a kid by his looks, tall, strong, real handsome they say. A man in his own right. Alec was just a runt compared to ‘im.

Now, Billingsley wasn’t as old back then as he is now, had more hair and he could move around better too. They say he was out riding his bicycle one night patrolling the camp when, sure enough, he spotted Randy and some other campers lighting up in the woods. He chased after ‘em but he didn’t catch ‘em, and he wasn’t fully sure who it was he was chasing, ‌but Billingsley ain’t no fool, he stayed out most nights after that until he found ‘em again, which of course he did. He brought the boys to the camp director. They all got in loads of trouble, and Randy didn’t have it so easy, especially since little ole Alec was with them when they got caught. Old Man Flowers found out about the trouble Randy got in and, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t ever want no folks like the Flowers, all high and mighty religious folk, strict about everything. Randy wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t like being told what to do, he and his dad didn’t get along too well after that. I don’t really know if they ever did.

Not too much later, Randy went missing. Everybody thought he took off with his older friends, thought they’d just turn up soon and have hell to pay. Turns out, no one else was missing. A week or two went by still there wasn’t any sign of him. The Flowers went to the sheriff and reported him missing. They held prayer meetings in the chapel and folks came from all over to support their family. Local boy goes missing. He was young, good lookin’. It was all the talk in every hole ‘n holler across these mountains. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that they found his body.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“All I know is they found a gun and that it wasn’t too far from camp. He’d been dead for a long while by the time they got there.”

There was a long pause before anyone spoke.

“I think we should go back,” I said to the group.

“You wanna know my theory?” Buck said. “I think it was murder.”

“Murder,” one boy said, “that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way he was murdered.”

“You ever known anybody who was murdered?” Buck asked. “It don’t ever make sense.”

“He wasn’t murdered. Everybody knows what happened,” the boy said.

Buck shrugged. “Well, I ain’t convinced.”

“People say they’ve seen a ghost out here in these woods,” the boy said. “They say it’s Randy looking for his body.”

“And his hideout,” the other boy said, “you forgot to mention it. No one’s ever found his hideout.” He turned to me. “He’s looking for his old hideout so he can finally rest.”

“That’s why you can’t say his name,” the first boy said. “Superstition is if you call on his name, you’ll end up dead. Look what happened to Buck. He said it out loud, and sure enough, Alec almost killed him.”

“You believe in ghosts, TJ?” Buck said.

Where once I’d arrested the shadowy figments in my mind, now they stood just beyond the moonlight, mocking me, and I, after hearing all of this talk of death and ghosts at the camp, could do nothing to apprehend them.

“I’m ready to go back.”

“He’s spooked,” Buck laughed. “You wanted me to tell you the story.”

“I feel like we’re being watched.”

“Sure you do,” Buck said.

“No, guys, look!”

A branch broke in the brush just ten feet behind us in the treeline. We snapped our heads around and looked to where I pointed. By now my heart was racing, every shadow stood tall and crept towards me. I was certain there was something in the woods just beyond our line of sight.

“Run,” Buck whispered.

In a moment, we shot out of the clearing, down the path and through the woods. We ran back towards our cabin on different trails than we came in on, hoping to lose whoever—or whatever—might’ve been chasing us. We came to a halt, and Buck killed the light, and we sat behind a felled tree off the path and waited.

Minutes passed, and there was no sign of anything coming up the path. All was silent again. We caught our breath, and for good measure, waited out another twenty minutes.

“Sun’ll be up soon. Come on.”

Buck led us down a thin trail without a light until we arrived at our cabin. I slipped in the back door and found my way to my bunk. I took off all my clothes and lay on top of my blankets, exhausted, but too wired, scared, and sweaty to fall asleep right away. The last thing I remember was the faintest glow of light coming in from the back door and thinking I heard the slapping of feet climbing up into the bunk above me.

To Sleep on the Other Side begins serializing May 25, exclusively on Substack

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Before I begin releasing chapters in just a few weeks, I wanted to take some time to answer a few questions you might have—about the novel, the release schedule, and what to expect from Shade Tree Creative in the months ahead.

What is this novel about?

At its heart, this is a novel about belief.

This novel asks the questions: what happens when we first believe in something?

And what happens when that belief is shattered?

What are we left with?

To Sleep on the Other Side leads readers back to these first moments of belief. It explores the grief, darkness, and loneliness of being young and unequipped for the disillusionment that accompanies the age of adolescence. It hopes to show that, despite uncertainty, there is something found in belief that answers alone cannot provide.

You must become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven.

This novel asks its readers to do the same, as they follow a young protagonist on his hero’s journey through the unforeseen and the inevitable. I want to take readers somewhere they’ve been before, but not as they ever have before.

We’re all going back to summer camp.

TJ Becker arrives at Camp Magnolia, a summer camp in the mountains of New Hampshire that houses an old chapel, hundreds of other foster children, and the lingering shadow of a boy who disappeared long ago.

Readers will follow his journey from sheltered, naive boy of privilege to wounded healer with wisdom beyond his years, aspiring after the lineage of literary narrators who’ve come before him—the likes of Reuben Land, Ponyboy Curtis, and Scout Finch.

This novel is a bildungsroman—a “coming-of-faith”—and the discovery of what real faith costs. When another camper disappears, TJ is led to the literal cliff’s edge of belief, love, and life itself. Only there will he discover the great cost that’s required to sleep on the other side.

When will this novel be released?

Readers will follow along with the rhythms of this novel as it follows the course of the summer. We will begin reading on Memorial Day—the unofficial start to summer—and will finish just on the cusp of winter, which also follows along with the flow of the narrative.

Starting on May 25, I will begin releasing chapters weekly for subscribers. These will be released on Mondays, giving you the entire week to read each chapter before a new one is released and a new week begins.

This style of reading I think perfectly suits my novel. Chapters are approximately between 1500-2000 words, or roughly, 10-15 minutes of reading per week. There are 24 chapters (which is such a satisfying number), so this will be a nearly 6 month endeavor, one in which I sincerely hope you'll follow along.

If you follow along every week, you’ll be able to add one more book to your reading list at the end of the year, just by simply reading your Substack inbox every week.

A few housekeeping things

I would like to eventually try to self-publish this work, either as an e-book or softcover, but as this is released serially, it will be totally free to read.

I’d like to share some notes about my creative process and behind-the-scenes writing tips and tools I’ve used. I’d also love to create a space for feedback from subscribers via the Substack chat.

Important: if you are not interested in receiving weekly novel chapters in your inbox, you can unsubscribe from the section on this publication, without fully unsubscribing from Shade Tree Creative. Chapters will be released under the “Novel” section of this publication. You can opt out in your account settings.

I still plan on releasing essays, poetry, and more throughout the year on Shade Tree Creative, so don’t touch that remote. You don’t want to miss out.

Lastly, be on the lookout for a first look at a chapter excerpt in the next couple weeks.

I’ve spent the last few years drawing from deep wells, of both craft and memory, to write this novel. I can’t wait to finally release this to you all.

I hope you stick around.

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One of my biggest hesitations has been that serialized novels can get lost on Substack—that the work I’ve put so much time and energy into won’t get the kind of attention you want a novel to get, and that holding on to it until my platform is large enough will be the best time to release it.

Over the past few months, this has started to change.

Shade Tree Creative began as a space where I wanted to share things I’ve cultivated in my walk with Jesus and in just being a creative person.

So that’s what I plan to do. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to share this novel with you all.

Here are the reasons why I’m serializing my novel on Substack.

For the sake of defiance

I’m defying the idea that I need to wait years building a platform before I share the art I’m most passionate about.

If I aim to be a published author, then yes, it is almost impossible to do without showing you can build a following in today’s literary age.

But that shouldn’t prevent you from sharing the stories you care about.

Releasing this novel is me saying yes to the long process of living within creative rhythms—the tension of the now and not yet. It is an act of faith to the craft (and to God).

For the people I love

There’s this tendency I have recognized in myself—I want my work to be recognized apart from people knowing who I am.

I’ve viewed this as a false sense of success—my friends and family only like my art because I made it, not because it’s actually good.

What I didn’t realize was how incredible it is that some people enjoy what I created because I created it.

We should strive to make excellent beautiful art, but I’ve been quick to cast aside the fact that many people who genuinely care about me may enjoy my art in a different way—a way that is life-giving and based on an authentic relational connection. Or in other words, through real community.

I was talking about this with a mentor of mine. We want people in our churches to share and lead because we know who they are and think highly of their character. We want what they have to offer because of our shared history, how we’ve loved them and been loved by them. This gets skewed when we promote people in churches based on their abilities, rather than proven trust built through authentic relationship.

We don’t often see it this way, but I think the same applies to art.

I want to share with the people who know and love me. And if they see things behind the creative veil that others who don’t know me wouldn’t be able to spot, that’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It allows for a kind of vulnerability we can’t reveal any other way.

For the sake of my readers

Lastly, this is for you all reading this.

I have pearls to cast. I want to share what I’ve been given with you.

This has always been the heart behind Shade Tree Creative. I wanted to create a space for readers to get out from under the sun—the grind and hustle of the substack-restack-maxxing-culture-machine—and simply find some art that might make them think or feel deeply.

I also want to show others that being an artist is a lifelong pursuit that isn’t actually measurable with numbers. It’s as measurable as the seasons are measured. Or how trees grow.

Being an artist (and a child of God) is a lot like being a tree. You just grow really slowly and faithfully.

You’re still a tree even if you’re just a small tree. You’re a beautiful tree and you’re growing. You’re doing it right.

So, this is for you all. It’s an open invite for you to sit in the shade and slip away from the hustle and the grind. And hopefully, you can learn to slow down too and grow at the pace you were created to.

And now…

I will say that serializing this novel on Substack is not what I’ve had in mind for the last 3+ years of me writing it.

But I want to show others that their work is valuable and successful simply because it’s been done. What we gain through the faithful obedience to the craft and the communion with our Creator God is worth more than any following, platform, or money can bring.

So I’m taking a leap and publishing my first novel, To Sleep on the Other Side, exclusively on Substack this summer.

I’ll be sharing more about the novel soon, including the new section on this stack I’ll be creating, schedule of release, and what it’s about.

Now that I’ve said all that,

I just wanted to say that I’m so so so excited

and that I hope you stick around

because this summer,

WE’RE ALL GOING BACK TO SUMMER CAMP

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