Camp Nurse Read Online Free PDF Page B

room.
    “Hey, do you have anything for depression?” he called out, as nonchalantly as if he was asking for a cough drop. “But please don’t call my parents,” he begged me. “They’ll have a cow.”
    He wasn’t homesick, he said, he loved camp, but kept having these “bad thoughts.” Zack used the distraction to beat a hasty retreat, promising he’d come back again to follow up about his knee. By then, the girl who had been lying down had recovered and returned to her cabin with her counsellor, and the ceramicsinstructor who had only a “quick question” had gotten impatient and left, so Phillip and I had some privacy.
    “Phillip, I want to call your parents. This may be something serious, something you need help for.”
    “Ahh, do you have to? I wouldn’t have told you if I knew you’d rat on me. Don’t you have a pill I could take right now, to help me sleep?”
    “Come with me, let’s go out.” I’d learned the best way to get my own sons to talk was to get them moving. In motion, the words came. As we walked, Phillip agreed to let me contact his parents and restart his antidepressant meds if that’s what they decided he needed. He promised he’d come back to talk with me again.
    The next morning after breakfast, I went to the staff lounge, where the senior staff members held their morning meeting. They were lying on the filthy old couches, sinking into the deep indents made by many previous weary bodies. The guys were stretched out, their heads in the girls’ laps; girls lay back with their heads in other guys’ laps. Slumped into each other, the whole mess of them looked like rows of wayward dominoes. I pulled up a metal folding chair and launched into my list of concerns: waterfront safety, the importance of sunscreen, fluids to avoid dehydration, general hygiene, and foot care.
    Mike stifled a yawn.
    Wheels got up and walked out. “Catch ya later, Nurse Tilda!”
    Carly, the head of culture and education, who everyone called Gidget and was hooked up with Moon Doggie (I figured out that their nicknames were a reference to an old TV sitcom), had been paying attention at first, but soon I lost her too. I’d already had a run-in with her the day before when she asked me to check her and her campers, but I didn’t find the lice that she swore herentire cabin of little girls was infested with. She sat there, sullenly, fiddling nervously with her nose ring or else poking her fingers into her Afro, checking for lice when she thought no one was looking.
    One by one, as if felled by a sedative, they tuned me out or drifted off to sleep. There was only the sound of my voice droning on about sun hats and closed-toe shoes, especially on long hikes, but no one was listening. Mike was actually snoring softly.
    Let me out of here!
I thought, but there was no escape. Young people usually have to inhabit the adult world, accommodate to our tastes, timetables, and rules. Here, at camp I was stuck, having to put up with their preference for late-night parties, their predilection for mac and cheese, watery hot chocolate, and ramen noodles with msg broth, and being exposed to their unfamiliar music. I was held captive, trapped in the lonely chasm of the generation gap. Before I came here I’d thought of myself as young and hip, but now I felt like an old lady, nagging, scolding, and complaining. I was wearing jeans and a top from Old Navy but to them it was as if I was wearing polyester stretch pants, bifocals on a string around my neck, and hobbling along with a walker. I crumpled up my list and angrily lobbed it into a garbage can. Mike woke up with a start. “Hey, save a tree! Use the recycling bin,” he said. He was right but I wasn’t in the mood.
    After the meeting, Mike came over. “Nurse Tilda, you look like you need a hug.”
    I stepped back. “No one was paying attention, Mike,” I complained. “This is important stuff.”
    “Camp Na-Gee-La is all about process. We’re a community of shared