I know, five minutes ago I’d have been insulted if someone suggested I had something in common with Robert. Now I know better. He’s dropped his mask, a mask he’s worn for at least eight years. Maybe he’ll wait another eight years before dropping it again, if he ever does. But this one time has been enough. Enough to know: he’s like us.

I can’t get the words out to explain all this, but no need. Sara knows. She understands my telegram-short speech, just as we both understand volumes from Robert’s yell. Only the Norms don’t get it.

The excitement subsides. In a transformation that is almost physical, the event is becoming a Camp Memory. I have no doubt Willie and Sara will turn it into a Camp Story. Their version will be funny and probably slightly mean, but I think it should be a different kind of story, a beautiful story of a precious revelation, a marvel. The problem is, I’m no good at telling stories. And anyway, who would listen? The people back home would never understand. You have to be here.

*   *   *

Maybe it’s a mark of how few adventures I’ve had that getting here, to this little cottage, almost seemed like an adventure. It’s only a pocket of pine woods in eastern North Carolina, but I imagined I was deep in some foreign Black Forest as we wound through clouds of sand gnats and buzzing mosquitoes and the possibility of unseen snakes. A tangle of trees trapped the air and blocked the sun, and we kept going with no view of where we were headed. At last we turned a bend, seemingly no different from all those other bends that got us nowhere, and there it appeared, the little cottage, sun-bleached, squatting on an egg-shaped yard of swept white sand, a reverse oasis of light, sand, and open air, ringed entirely by dense green wilderness. That first encounter promised fairy-tale magic. But here, now, inside, there’s only Camp Courage reality. It’s time for arts and crafts.

We take our places with some boys at paint-spattered tables under three naked lightbulbs that hang from the ceiling. We have been given heavy cardboard, pencils, and Elmer’s glue. Silently I listen to the demonstration: how to make mosaics. The arts and crafts coordinator, Becky, is as cute and perky as the two little ponytails bouncing on either side of her head, but I tune her out. I also tune out the boys’ joking and teasing. I’m too busy studying all the things on the table: piles and piles of dried beans, buttons, beads, and macaroni. I could try all day and never pick up even one thing. In occupational therapy, I tried very hard to sort screws and bolts that were bigger than these things, but I just couldn’t get hold of them.