She scanned back up to the beginning of Marty’s application form—age seventeen years, seven months. Under gender—nonbinary. Pronouns: they/them/their. Connected to the depression? Certainly possible, but not a given. Lily squeezed the bridge of her nose. Double damn it. From the driver’s license photo, an average-looking kid, sandy brown hair cut in casual layers, dark brown eyes, height and weight average also.

She made her last note: get to know Marty Riley.

By six forty she’d made it through all the files and felt much more comfortable, having at least begun to think of the campers as her new patient practice. She’d never considered anything other than emergency medicine, family practice seeming too tame, too ordinary. Right now tame and ordinary was very appealing.

The door opened and a boy came in wearing a camp T-shirt, loose sweats, and high-top sneakers. She recognized his face but not his name from the files.

“Morning,” Lily said as she rose and came around the desk to greet him.

“Um, I came to see the doctor.”

“That would be me,” Lily said with a smile and held out her hand. “Lily Davenport. And you are…?”

He looked surprised and a little chagrined. “Uh. Manuel. Manuel Lopez.”

“So,” she said indicating the hallway behind her, “do you want to come on back here and tell me what’s going on?”

“Oh,” he said, shuffling his feet, “it’s kind of personal.”

“We’ll talk in private, how’s that?”

He hesitated for just a second, then said, “Yes, okay.”

Once in the treatment room, she gestured for him to climb up on the treatment table while she sat at the small shelf provided as a desk and opened her iPad to the medical records she’d downloaded from the clinic computer. “So what’s going on?”

He said, “Nothing really.”

“Okay. Did you just want to talk?”

He grimaced. “Um, yeah, so, I have…I think…a rash?”

He said it as if it was a question.

“How long have you had it?”

“Just since last night. But”—he grimaced—“it really itches, and I think it’s spreading!”

“Maybe I should take a look at it.”

He flushed, and then said, “Yeah, okay, it’s”—he gestured to his thigh—“down there.”

“Right. Were you out in the woods, maybe wearing shorts?”

He nodded. “Yes, gym shorts. Some of us new guys, we went with Jeremy—he’s been here before—on this shortcut to the lake. To, um, swim.”

Translation—a bunch of boys found some spot to go skinny-dipping, and Manuel either sat in, on, or otherwise tangled with some allergenic plant resin. “Let’s have a look.”

He jumped down and pushed his sweatpants down to his knees. A string of angry-looking red bumps trailed over his thigh and disappeared under the edge of the navy underwear. Lily did a very deep dive into her long-ago derm rotation. One did not see much contact dermatitis from foliage in Manhattan. Fleas, lice, bedbugs—yes. Leaves and stems? Not so much.

“How high do they go?” she asked, googling derm images.

He winced and indicated his groin.