day 28

Not exposure therapy but exposure.  You have to expose yourself to yourself as your toughest judge.  You have to find out what you can't do and what you can do based on your own truthful judgment, and then keep raising the bar.  You have to pretend there's an audience watching you and they can tell whether you're bullshitting or not.  And you can't allow your bullshit to be enough.

  *end me yelling at myself in the mirror*

                  The bus veered down the narrow belt-line of oaktrees, the consistent sound of branches snapping like a giant twisting the branches off of a tree.  The bus driver was walking on eggshells, convinced each one of these noises was a new scrape or scratch on the bus, and he was bracing himself for this horror once he eventually was able to scrutinize the damage more closely.  Mr. Aaronson sat in the seat behind the driver, studiously filling in a sheet on a clipboard with an ordinary Office Depot pen he fancied as one of the quill variety.  His wife sat next to him, long since giving up the urge to make him communicate or socialize in any degree, and now sat placated with a mindless smile across her tightly stretched mummy lips. 

The little CB radio next to the steering wheel howled as it sat precariously close to falling into the wheel well.  The kids at the back of the bus wrestled over a pair of binochulars that originally belonged to someone that wouldn’t claim them.  Hank, the one who was above average sized for his age, was delegated control over them by his followers, twin brothers Arnold and Allen (who’s parents Amy and Art had a sense of humor).  Hank stared amused through the binochulars at the trees in increased detail before deciding to chuck the thing out of the sticky halfopened window.

Dave let the fact that his binochulars were lost in the woods slide.  He took a deep breath to steel himself and turned the volume of his tape player up, along with a ritual readjustment of his headphone chords.  He thought of what his mother had warned him, “The kids are going to be exactly like they were last time, they will not respect you, they’ll hate you more for coming back”, but he insisted he would be fine, and she sat clutching the dog on the porch as he road off. 

There was a tacit understanding amongst the other riders about Dave’s presence.  He was “the guy who freaked out and took off” the year before.  A park ranger had forcibly brought him back like a grown cat picks up its cub by the neck, and he walked broken and defeated back to the bottom bunk he called home, broken and defeated as he heard the sounds of ridiculing youth outside the windows.  He stayed in this catatonic state for the majority of the summer, seldom leaving his quarters, which was not usually permitted by counselors except in the case of a camper who may kill themselves. 

His love for another campers girl, Isabella, had been outted.  Mean Charlie Green (a nickname Charlie had bestowed upon himself), found a series of Dave’s love letters stashed away inside his pillow case.  Charlie was a meddlesome and hectoring kid, aided in his establishment of infamy by the reputation of his older brother, a 12^th grader who was kicked out and sent to military school for widely debated reasons.  He may have gotten a hand job from that young TA (one of the kids may have just seen Rushmore), he might have been cooking meth with the recently fired science teacher (Breaking Bad), some believed he was a werewolf (a completely unfounded theory which didn’t explain expulsion… Teen Wolf?), or maybe he had planted a bomb in the teachers lounge (completely original).  Either way, this was his kid brother, who was, by popular majority, hot shit.

Dave’s paranoia prevented him from fighting back.  You don’t fight the cool kid to become cool, it’d just turn all of the other cool kids against you.  When it was widely reported, as was learned from his notes, that Dave was carrying a hunting knife and enough prescription drugs for a small pharmacy, he gained his own infamy as the crazy, unpredictable outsider.

“Is that that Dave kid?”  He heard a girl with red hair, a green raincoat, and black Lisa Loeb glasses ask her friend, as she peered from the inside seat directly at Dave.  She was excited enough not to notice that the only person sitting alone on the bus must be the one who was shunned by the rest of the community.  Her excitement reached a boiling point and she called out, “DAVE!”, falling over her well mannered, plain looking friend.

Dave smiled to himself turned toward the window.  Atleast he had an identity this time.  He knew he shouldn’t rely on the superficial image too much.  The bus came roaring to a stop in the middle of this thought, the driver standing up before anyone had a chance to exit and clambering out with an ardent urgency.  He pulled at his hair and said “Fuck” to himself in a rapid drawl.

The living quarters had been switched to a room which previously was used as a pool hall.  The original quarterrs were being fumigated, and the ceilings had to be replaced.  Termites had destroyed the wood and were installing a skylight which was circular and proposed a sidelong view of the woods.

Dave was installed in the bunk with the exchange students, kids who lacked any defining characteristics or histories.  It gave him a great chance to build new relationships from the ground floor up. Most of these kids were shy of each other, unable to find solidarity in their alterity. He knew the drill well, so he appointed himself a guide.

Mr. Aaronson was in over his head.  He had no clue how to entertain these kids for an entire summer alone, and he refused to concede this fact to his wife who still had utmost faith in his abilities.  The year before, he had a few gym teachers with him who were cut due to budget problems, and at the time he didn’t appreciate Rex or Spike’s contagious enthusiasm for throwing footballs around.  The kids can tell if you’re faking it, he thought as he attempted to organize a flag football game.  His first mistake was allowing the kids to choose their own team, resulting in a team of the biggest most competitive camp goers, and a team of all of the female campers, the squeamish weak types, and Mr. Aaronson himself who was weary of the violent actions which he was subjecting himself to.