Breakfast was very subdued. My fellow waiters and waitresses - those who had indulged at least - moved slowly, talked quietly, sipped hot coffee gingerly. They winced and massaged their temples at the sound of a raised voice or the clatter of silverware. As with the drunken revelry of the previous night, there was camaraderie in this too. Comparing symptoms and regrets, sharing embarrassed smiles and disbelieving head shakes at the things that shouldn't have been said, but were.

This time, I wasn't a part of it.

Because unlike the rest of my heavy-lidded, suffering peers, I felt fantastic. Nowadays, if I indulge in a second tumbler of single malt on a Saturday night, I do so with the knowledge that I am pretty much writing off all of Sunday. But back then, when the first notes of Reveille sounded over the PA system, I sprang out of bed, fresh and invigorated and eager to bathe my face in the welcoming light of the rising sun.

Needless to say, everyone found my early morning élan tremendously irritating. And suddenly, I felt like the outsider again. The guy who didn't fit in. The contrarian. Abrams and Iceberg - everyone, it seemed - regarded me with resentful, bloodshot eyes. Only Booger offered any kind of friendliness. A small, tired wave.

It was progress.

Suddenly, I heard Emily's voice. "Hi, Aaron."

I startled. "Jesus!" I hadn't realized she was standing next to me.

"Can I talk to you for a second?" There was a tremor in her voice.

"Um... sure."

With a sense of foreboding, I followed her a few paces away to Igor, which is what we called the trash compacting machine. At the end of the meal, Igor would be full of cardboard cereal bowls, styrofoam cups and watery, uneaten eggs.

Emily took a moment, forcing herself to breathe normally as she gathered her thoughts. "I've been thinking about what happened last night." Oh, God. This was just what I needed. "And I want to apologize to you."

I stared at her, speechless, and she mistook my incomprehension for anger. 

"I don't blame you for being mad." She looked down at the floor, ashamed. "I made things very uncomfortable for you."

"No, Emily," I said reassuringly. "Believe me, you didn't do anything wrong."

She gave me a sad smile. "I did. And I'm so sorry." She searched my eyes for a sign of forgiveness.

I didn't know what to say. I had truly gone through the Looking Glass, into this surreal world where I was the victim of Emily's insensitivity. Where I had a right to be angry. Where she owed me an apology.

I wanted to grab her and shake her, to tell her that her affections were wasted on me, that I was an asshole, that I cared more about the approval of her bitchy bunkmates than anything she was feeling. But instead, I simply accepted her apology. 

She was very relieved.

Then suddenly, there was the screeching of an air horn. My hungover associates pressed their palms to their ears, grimacing. A stocky, hirsute counselor ran through the mess hall, holding the air horn aloft like it was the Olympic torch. His face was painted half blue, half white. His shirt was off, abdominal fat undulating with every step.

I could feel the electricity in the room. The campers were on their feet, looking at each other with the same questions written on their faces. Could this really be it? The start of Color War? Or was it just a fake out?

I was fairly confident it was the latter. In my experience, the break of Color War was always more elaborate, more theatrical. In the past there were men in medieval armor jousting on horseback and circus performers juggling while riding on giant unicycles and spitting fire. A solitary fat guy running around topless was far too low rent and banal. But still, a part of me could not help but wonder if maybe this was it.

It wasn't.

The counselor stopped running and looked around the mess hall as if he had just awakened from a dream. "What's everybody looking at?" he said with mock innocence. A collective groan went up.

And then everyone started chanting. "One, two, three, four, we want Color War! Five, six, seven, eight, when the hell's it gonna break?" They stomped their feet, shaking the floor.

My hungover comrades squeezed their eyes shut and rubbed their temples in earnest. I chuckled at them, unaffected. Booger caught my eye and flipped me off. Good-naturedly. I think.

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Two days later, Benny called the upper division together to have a serious... disquisition. We were sitting on the grass, talking, laughing and punching each other on the shoulder, until Benny placed a monogrammed whistle between his lips and let out a sharp blast, silencing us. 

The rest of the year, Benny was a gym teacher.

"Last night," he said gravely, hugging his clipboard to his chest, "there was a significant... contravention. This act of... malfeasance involved someone here."

His eyes scanned us suspiciously through amber aviator sunglasses, like a mystery novel detective investigating a murder in which everyone was a  suspect. But it was a charade. There was only one suspect, and he was more than happy to identify himself.

"Come on, Benny," Cheese said with a smirk. "They all know what happened."

We sure did.

Cheese and Booger had been caught having sex in the gymnastics pavilion. (You don't write sentences like that every day.) We never learned how they were discovered, or by whom, or at what point in The Act they were separated. It was never even clear how, in the darkness, anybody could tell that this grunting tangle of limbs was sixteen year old waiters and not eighteen year old counselors.

And now that I think about it, how did this interloper even handle such an awkward situation? Did he keep a discreet distance, politely waiting for them to finish before busting them? Or did he, enraged by their wanton immorality, violently pry Cheese off of her, heedless of decorum and the possibility of projectile fluids?

All of that remains a mystery. Everything else, however, Cheese told us in graphic detail within moments of returning to the bunk that night. 

"Hey, fellas," he said, leaning against the door frame, grinning smugly. Some of the bunkmates greeted him with a nod of the head, then went back to their card games and issues of MAD Magazine.

Disappointed by their indifference to his manly doorway tableau, Cheese baited them with, "Well, I had quite a night." And then: "Yup. Quite. A. Night."

An amused Kareem caught my eye. "I'll bite," he said, then turned to Cheese. "What's up, buddy?" But before he could complete complete the question, Cheese could contain himself no longer. "I nailed Booger!"

For the first time, Kareem's cool demeanor slipped and he responded with unabashed admiration. "No! Really?" Cheese grinned shit-eatingly and waggled his eyebrows. "My man!" Kareem rushed over to give Cheese a high five. 

Slap!

From that point forward, Cheese held court. My bunkmates who, like me, were still virgins, had a lot of questions and Cheese was more than happy to provide them with answers. What did a vagina feel like? Buttered silk. What did it taste like? Smells like tuna, tastes like steak. Was she impressed with the size of your cock? Who wouldn't be?  Did she orgasm? Like, a million times.

I looked over at Yogi, who was still reading his book, smiling and shaking his head at the foolishness all around him. 

Then Ira, who had somehow worked his way back into Cheese's good graces, offered up his impression of the encounter. First, in falsetto, "Oh, Cheese!" And then in an affected baritone, "Oh, Booger!" He repeated it over and over, building in intensity.

Occasionally, Cheese would look over at me to gauge my reaction. I kept the best poker face I could, but he could tell it was eating at me. It was baffling. Just forty-eight hours prior, Booger had indignantly complained to me that Cheese only wanted to fuck her. But she went ahead and let him fuck her anyway. It made no sense.

I wasn't jealous, exactly. I just bristled at the injustice of it all. I was under no illusions that I would ever land a girl as hot as Booger and even at sixteen, I had made my peace with that. But why him?

Ira's impression reached its screaming crescendo and everybody laughed and applauded. "Yeah," Cheese said. "That's pretty much how it went. Only for, you know, another half hour. So who wants to smell my fingers?"

God damn that guy.

The sense of injustice became even more acute now, as Benny... vituperated us in the summer heat. I understood why he was angry at Cheese. Parents were entrusting Big Hills with their child's well-being, and they didn't want to be in the position of getting a furious phone call, demanding to know why their daughter was pregnant. Especially since this was a Jewish camp and a lot of the parents were lawyers.

But it was difficult to see how, exactly, discussing Cheese's sexual conquest in front of dozens of envious teenage boys constituted a punishment for him. If anything, it was a punishment for the rest of us, who didn't nail anybody but still had to sit under the same unforgiving sun, suffering through the same raspy-voiced lecture.

There was one more thing before we were allowed to disperse. In typical bureaucratic overreaction, the Big Hills powers-that-be decided to postpone the next co-ed dance indefinitely. It didn't matter, apparently, that the coital infraction did not happen at a dance, nor would canceling the dance in any way prevent Cheese and Booger from going at it again.  They needed to demonstrate that they were doing something.

But there was a bright side, for me at least. I wouldn't have to worry about another god damned slow dance.