Summer Camp II

“Heads up GeekMan, here comes Big Julie.”

Art, my best friend at camp, said this quite calmly as we sat on the bleachers by the baseball field pulling the legs off of daddy long leg spiders to pass the time between lunch and dinner. Usually such a pronouncement would have been met by my indifferent nonchalance, but earlier in the day I had been informed that Big Julie seemed to want to ‘talk’ to me and that caused me to raise my head in alarm and begin calculating the success probabilities of hiding vs. fleeing vs. suddenly developing psychic powers and destroying Big Julie in a ball of fire. Seeing how close she was to the bleachers, I quickly rejected the first two plans of action and desperately searched for a means of implementing the third.

Needless to say, I was unsuccessful.

Now, Big Julie was known as Big Julie not just due to her size, which was obviously very large, but also because of her tendency towards violence. For a fourteen year old girl, Julie was extremely wide and tall. She stood about 5’9” tall, weighed about 180lbs and had demonstrated her great physical prowess by squat-lifting one of the bunk beds in her groups’ cabin, with both of the girls who had upset her still asleep in it. She then dumped both of them, and their beds, onto the floor and proceeded to beat them both at the same time as they begged for mercy. Any girl, or boy, who insulted her, even if only in her own mind, would soon find themselves on their knees desperately stammering apologies through their blood soaked hands while trying to staunch the flow of blood coming from their busted noses.

And this massive creature of destruction was coming straight towards me.

I was just a small boy of twelve, standing a mere 5’4” tall and weighing a scale-breaking 100lbs. in soaking wet winter clothes. I knew I was dead, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why and that made my impending doom all the more ironic.

I mean, I was a prankster, but even I never crossed Big Julie.

Giving my surroundings another desperate look in the hopes of finding a miraculous means of escape, I realized that there was none. I also came to the sudden realization that no matter where I might run, the camp was too small for me to hide indefinitely; sooner or later Big Julie would find me. I could only hope my nose wouldn’t break when it was forcibly introduced to her knuckles. I also prayed that she didn’t know who was behind The Great Girls Underwear Wearing Frogs Fiasco, which was when everyone at camp discovered that Big Julie had a liking for wearing frilly, lacey, and some might dare say ‘sexy’, undergarments.

Shuddering at the thought, I turned to face Big Julie.

As I watched her approach, I couldn’t help but notice that something seemed amiss. Big Julie was not approaching with her usual sauntering walk of menace. In fact, if I didn’t know her any better, I would have sworn she seemed a little confused, or perhaps hesitant and awkward, during her approach. As she reached Art and I, she seemed to be out of breath and even a little red in the face, as if she were so angry she was barely holding herself back from breaking the nearest object no matter what, or who, said object was.

Gulping back my fear, I prepared to die.

“Art.”
“Yes, Bi… uh, Julie?”
“Go away.”
“Well, uh… that is…”
“Now.”
“OK.”

As Art turned to leave, breathing a sigh of relief in the knowledge that he would live at least a few moments longer, I met his eyes in the hopes of conveying to him what I wished done with my remains should Big Julie actually kill me now that we would be without witnesses. Meeting my eyes with a look of sympathy of his own, Art acknowledged my burial request by fleeing the bleachers as if the hounds of hell were on his tail. Silently cursing my friends’ lack of fortitude in the face of physical pain, not to mention his lamentable lack of psychic communication skills, I turned once again to face my executioner.

Only to find that she was shyly offering me a lanyard necklace.

A quick word about lanyards at summer camp. They were the standard method by which a girl would ask out a boy, and by ‘asking out’ I mean ‘go steady with’ and ‘date’. Now, truth be told I had received my fair share of lanyards at camp, especially since the Heidi Incident, but never in my wildest nightmares did I ever suspect someone like Big Julie could wish to date someone like me. In fact, I don’t recall ever thinking of Big Julie as someone who would even THINK of dating.

Punching, kicking and possibly even stabbing, but dating? Impossible!

“Uh, Julie?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s, uhm… a very nice lanyard you have there.”
“Thank you.”
“Is that the cobra stitch?”
“Nah, it’s the box stitch.”
“Ah.”
“…”
“Julie..?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you holding that lanyard?”
“It’s a gift. For you.”

Holy crap, I was a dead man.

To be continued…