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us. The muscly guy—presumably one of those weird lifetime summer campers—caught her by her skinny waist. She looked like she was going to puke.
    â€œWho’s next?” The zip-line master shook the empty harness. Annelise pressed her small hands against my shoulder blades.
    Incidentally, it’s very embarrassing to have a grown man guide your legs through a harness, which resembled one of those swings for infants. For a moment he held me, suspended at the edge. “Ready?” He blew hot breath into my ear.
    I made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a dying gasp. The girls snickered. He pushed.
    The speed kept me from dwelling on the troubling distance between my butt and the ground. Everything was a blur of green and a blast of dry summer air. On the other side, strange hands pushed back before I could catch my breath. Despite the circumstances, I tried to relish my final seconds of soaring in solitude.
    I would not be alone again for a very long time.

    My responsibilities began every morning at six: I had to drag the girls from their bunk beds and herd them into the showers. Each girl was allotted two minutes beneath a trickle of lake water. At orientation I had been instructed to preach the practicality of the “triangle wash,” a method that ignored some fairly important body parts. The first time I tried to advise my campers on which regions to scrub, they looked at me with such intense disdain that I never, ever mentioned the triangle wash again.
    Surprisingly, the Shining Stars Summer Camp for Performing Arts was not very heavy on the performing arts aspect. In the mornings we attended a rotation of random activities. Either hiking, swimming, the care and keeping of horses, nature identification, or zip-lining.
    Once I had proved that zip-lining didn’t necessarily lead to death, my campers never wanted to do anything else. When forced to spend the morning identifying poison oak or brushing the knots out of horses’ tails, they spoke longingly of zip-lining. On a hike, Annelise declared, “Next summer, I’m not going to acting camp. I’m going to zip-lining camp.”
    Courtney, Margaret, and Peyton agreed.
    Before dinner, everyone assembled beneath a large canvas tent and that’s when we ostensibly rehearsed for our production of Seussical the Musical. Really it was absolute chaos: hundreds of kids crowded together, reading from their scripts, shouting to be heard over the din. Periodically I would spot Charlie across the tent, and I had a tendency to forget all about my campers and stand frozen, watching him.
    His chorus of eight-year-olds couldn’t memorize the songs. When the verse lagged, Charlie belted out the lyrics, looking partly like a little boy himself and partly like somebody’s dad. It was endearing, but it also made me nervous. At home Charlie was all about volunteer hours and extra-credit assignments and controlled, ironic smiles. Here, he was inexhaustibly peppy. By the end of the first week he had been named official camp troubadour. He conducted a fireside sing-along, balancing atop a log to strum an acoustic guitar.
    Charlie’s performance of “This Land Is Your Land” for some reason involved singing the second verse in a drunken Irish accent. Halfway through the song he toppled theatrically from the log and continued to play from the dirt, pretending to be wounded. I felt kind of embarrassed on his behalf. Apparently Camp Charlie had no shame.
    When the flames died down, senior staff members escorted the campers to bed. Since it was Friday, the counselors were allotted a few hours of freedom. I made the mistake of following Charlie down to the lake. I had this insane idea that he might miss me, like I missed him.
    I found him with his gang of brawny boys, lowering a faded red canoe into the water.
    â€œHey.” I stood in the sand with my thumbs in my pockets. “What are you doing?”
    Charlie barely glanced