A Camp Vignette

Andrew*, age 8

            He’s the boy still wedged into the far end of a pew after the pastor tells the volunteers to pair up with the campers and get to know them. I slide down the varnished wooden seat to the point where it’s cracked down the middle. He sits three feet further down, where the edge droops toward the floor. He bounces on that board, widening the crack.

            “Tell me five cool facts about yourself,” I prompt, just like the pastor suggested.

            “I’m bad,” he says. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

            “You’re bad!” I try to laugh that off, reaching an instinctive hand to calm his jumpiness. “That can’t be true.”

            Twisting left and right in his seat, just avoiding eye contact, he continues his recitation. “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad. I don’t do well in school. I can’t sit in my seat. I get in trouble.”

             “I know a cool fact about you that you haven’t told me,” I say.

            “Like what?” He still looks at the ceiling, the other campers, the wall, the window. Anything but me as I crouch down and match his restless weaving on the pew. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

            “Your name. What’s your name?”

            “Andrew.” He examines the knuckles on his right hand, which grips the next pew over.

            “What do you like to do? Do you have a favorite sport?”

            “I don’t like sports,” he says. “I’m bad.”

            “That’s silly,” I say. “You’re not bad. How about you sit on the other half of the pew so you don’t fall and hurt yourself.”

            He moves, for a second anyway. He is a perpetual motion machine. His toes tap and his elbows wave. He behaves like a cornered animal, which I suppose might be how I’m treating him, but I keep going.

            “What do you like to do instead? Swim? Riding your bike?”

            “No. No.”

            “Video games?”

            He names one I don’t know and clarifies, “It’s a shooting game!” Bounce, bounce, bounce.

            “Okay, then! Do you have siblings?”

            Andrew’s head rolls sideways so it’s resting on the pew. The brown eyes with a film, a shield, more like, of disdain, flick to the door. “Yesss.”

            I don’t let up. “Scoot onto the other half of the pew. Older or younger?”

            He doesn’t scoot. He sees me eyeing the broken half of the seat and bounces on it intentionally. “Both.”

            “So you’re the middle. Is it an older brother or sister?”

            “Brother.”

            “Do you guys fight or get along?”

            “He be fighting me and I be fighting him.”

            “Why do you fight him back? I bet you could try not to.”

            Bounce, bounce, bounce. The pew is making a creaking noise now. “Cause I’m bad.”

            “How about your younger sibling?”

            “Sister,” he says, but now he’s looking under the next pew where a scrappy boy of six with a reproachful glint in his eye and a pout to his lower lip is hiding, swatting at Andrew’s feet.

            “I’mma beat you!” Andrew threatens, leaping forward and taking a swing at the other boy.

            “Hey, no! None of that,” I say, scooting between them and giving the other boy a glare. “A sister?”

            Andrew weaves around me now, waiting for the other boy to scoot under the pew again, which he does. “He be hitting me! I’mma beat him up!”

            Another swing; I catch his fist and he twists out of my grip with a squeal of frustration.

            “It doesn’t help to hit!” I reach for his arm as he pulls it back for another go. “If you don’t hit there’s no fight.”

            But he is not listening to me anymore. If he ever was. I make another grab for his fist, which he dodges, and in the next half second I’m on my knees between the pews, pulling the two of them off each other.

*names changed to protect privacy