Other counselors are just as bad. A perky girl counselor has set herself on the lap of a CP guy. Moving with the music, she teases at his face with her breasts, coming as close as she can come without actual touching. She must know that the slightest spasm would have him all over her—she must know it takes all his will to maintain that tiny distance between them—but she keeps up the torturous dance. He manages to hold back.

“Sara, why do the coun-se-lors act like that?”

“I wish I knew.” She almost yells over the music. “I try to figure it out, and I keep changing my mind. It’s obvious that something funny is going on. These counselors are mostly kids with pretty conservative morals, and you notice they don’t have public foreplay with one another. Just with us. I don’t get it.” A male counselor is slow-dancing with the blind girl. He hoists her up by her buttocks and wraps her legs around his hips.

The music gets softer, and Sara lowers her voice. “At times I think they don’t know what they’re doing. They think we’re children, or puppies, or sexless beings from outer space. They don’t realize that, whatever else is wrong with us, we all—even the quads and paras and the Butner people who’ve been sterilized—all of us are capable of being aroused. At other times, I think, They have to know! They have to know what they’re doing. It’s so obvious.

“So, then, maybe they do it for the same reason they do almost everything. They think we need it. It’s therapy. Just another facet of the whole Camp Courage mission to provide freaks with ‘normal experiences.’ Now, I’m no judge of Normal, I know, but this don’t look like Normal to me.” She laughs a laugh that leaves me cold.

“So, then, there’s a third possibility. Maybe—they like it. Maybe these Norm kids get their kicks from rubbing up against cripples, epileptics, MRs, aussies, and every kind of freak. They know they’re in control; each contact reinforces their dominance, their perfect able-bodied superiority. It’s the special thrill of laying hands on lepers. It’s how they know they’re divine. Teasing freaks might just be a turn-on they don’t get anywhere else.”

I can’t make up my mind either. That MR guy is standing like a folded-up ironing board with that girl counselor all over him. He is being so good, so passive, that she wraps her arms around his neck and presses her breasts against his chest. She pushes her hips, hard, against his groin. My experience is very limited, but I can tell the MR man is getting pretty hot. I’m not sure about the girl counselor.

Some of the campers, the ones with their heads screwed on right, pull back. It kills me. They’re trying to be polite. Some counselors take a hint; others don’t. I see campers cringe beneath kisses they’re powerless to resist. A few counselors act right. That surfer guy, for one, seems to know how to have fun without going over the line. But no one, not even the surfer guy, seems to disapprove of those who go too far. It is clearly acceptable at Camp Courage to tease Freaks.