Strawberry Legs

When I was twelve years old, my parents sent me to summer camp for the last time. It was called Mount Rain, and for the most part it lived up to the name. When it wasn’t raining it was sticky and humid and the air was so thick that we might as well have been living in a big rain cloud anyway. The property was beautiful in a way that I didn’t fully appreciate then. It was bordered by a winding river and cabins were interspersed with patches of woods. Beautiful tall trees everywhere. Grassy hills full of gnats and well-tended pathways connecting it all like a nervous system. The cabins didn’t have air conditioning and at night the rain would echo in a hollow way on the corrugated iron roof above the bunks. At the time I thought I was roughing it, living out in the wild. Now I recognize that place for the oasis it was, only accessible by me and a handful of others with rich parents, who complained about the bugs and having to wear flip-flops in the outdoor showers. The complaining was a badge of pride really. They all enjoyed it as much as I did, the feeling of being on one’s own.
In truth, it was paradise. A lot of those other kids would continue to go back in the following summers, eventually becoming junior counselors and counselors. Those hills were evergreen for them. But even before the events of that summer, I knew that wouldn’t be the case for me. There was something off about me. Everyone seemed to know it. I could walk with people to places, or sit at their table in the mess hall, or paddle a canoe with them, but I knew they never saw me as a friend. The camp was all girls, and girls have a way of letting people know they don’t belong without saying anything out loud. It was all in the things they didn’t say. The conversations that would peter out as I approached. The polaroids that were taken without me present. The stories and the inside jokes that were never explained to me when they were brought up. Something about me was other, that was for certain, but I had no way of knowing what it was. I knew that if I brought it up I would probably ruin their tolerance of me. So I went through the motions, watching the girls form unbreakable bonds and untarnishable memories as I looked on from the outside.
This was routine for me. This was how my life always was. Until Remy. She was the counselor for cabin six and she led archery. Achievements in archery were measured by wristbands, which were awarded each time a camper hit a certain number of bullseyes at a certain distance. Remy could hit a bullseye from 250 feet away. She had every color of wristband and she wore them all on her right wrist. They covered nearly half her forearm. She wore oversized t-shirts over short athletic shorts. She wore her long dark hair in a braid down her back. She had a cartilage piercing, which I thought was kind of edgy at the time. She was short, sun tanned, and muscular. Apparently she had played soccer in high school. She went to college in-state and was studying psychology. I thought she was the most perfect person I had ever met.
During rest hour, some girls would lie out in a patch of sun on the main lawn, or sit out on the covered porch if it was raining. That was when the problem began, during rest hour one day. Some girls were sitting out on the porch and I was sitting with them. We were quiet. Some of them read or journaled. I watched one of the carpenter bees. It was on its back, its little legs flailing in the air. The carpenter bees had been dying like this all summer on our porch. No one knew why. Maybe it was just their time. Maybe there was an insidious fungus somewhere. I found a stick on the ground and held it outstretched towards the insect. It grasped onto the stick like a liferaft but seemed unable to hold itself aloft. Still, I kept trying. I wanted the little guy to be okay, to crawl away and dry its wings.
“So this is where the cool kids hang out?” It was Eliza who had spoken. She was one of the counselors who had been at this camp every summer since who knew when. Remy was with her. Her hair was frizzy from the humidity. She was carrying an open bottle of cherry soda, which was technically contraband, but because she was a counselor she was exempt from the rules. I abandoned my stick. It didn’t exist for me anymore in fact. Eliza and Remy sat among me and the girls to form a circle. Remy sat next to me. It was kind of her, I thought, to choose to sit next to me. Charitable even. Usually it was the last seat left over.
“Up for a game of cards?” Eliza asked, pulling out a deck.
We decided to play Egyptian Rat Screw. I was never very good at it, but it was fast paced and semi-violent, so most of the girls at camp would go for it. We started placing our cards down. I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to lose with Remy next to me. She took a sip from her soda bottle, holding the cards in one hand, relaxed. I kept my hand hovering at the ready, prepared to slam it down on top of the pile and claim the cards as my own. A second seven went down. My hand darted out. Remy’s did as well. Her hand landed on top of mine.
“Too fast for me,” she conceded, smiling. I fumbled to add the cards to my pile. It occurred to me how close we were. I had never been this close to her. Our knees could almost touch. That’s when I noticed it, when I had the thought about our knees. I noticed her legs for the first time. They were muscular, I had always known that, but up close I could see them in detail, see the texture of her skin. It was clear she shaved, but the hair was still visible in the recesses of her pores. Those tiny pinpricks, the absence of hair, covered her legs, her quads and calves, which were so close to mine. They looked like strawberry seeds. She was like a strawberry.
I lost the game. I couldn’t keep my concentration, even once I tore my eyes away. I was too aware of her there, sitting with her knees propped in front of her, sipping slowly from her soda bottle. It was strange to notice someone so suddenly. To realize that I could touch them, they were that close. Not that I ever would touch her. I didn’t even touch the girls I considered my friends. Maybe that’s why the girls at this camp found me off putting. They were always touching each other. They would braid each other’s hair and give each other back massages and lightly caress each other’s arms to see if they could elicit shivers. None of that came naturally to me. I was always confused as to how it was initiated. If I learned, would Remy let me initiate it? Would Remy let me braid her long dark hair, which was frizzy from the humidity?
Definitely not. I tried to put all of those thoughts out of my mind. It was a blip, I thought, that thought about her legs. And so camp went on. I canoed and swam in the river and sat around campfires and played sports and read books and made friendship bracelets that were for no one. I admired Remy’s skill as she demonstrated shots in archery and focused on my arrows when it was my turn. I earned my red wristband and made sure not to touch Remy’s hand when she gave it to me. But still, no matter how hard I tried not to, I couldn't stop thinking about her legs.
It was a humid night in my little cabin. There was a light drizzle hanging thick in the air. I lay in my top bunk, covered by a sheet. Anything else was too hot. I was staring at the wall, a crack in the wood. The only light came from a buzzing floodlight outside. Everyone else in the cabin whispered to each other, as they often did before going to bed.
“Is she asleep?”
“I think so, she hasn’t moved”
“She never talks to us”
“We never talk to her”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“....No”
They giggled. I closed my eyes.
I was sitting with Remy in the grass at the shooting range. The grass was tall, meadow grass. She was leaning back, propped up on her elbow.
“Come here,” she said to me. I did. I leaned down over her legs and looked at the pores, those pores that haunted my waking moments. I leaned down until my nose nearly touched her skin. I looked and saw that there really were seeds there, little black seeds wedged deep into the follicles. My breath hitched. It was almost painful in my chest. As I watched, the seeds opened. They split open and out of them sprang tiny bits of green that grew and grew, curling into unruly blades. Her legs became the meadow. Her torso emerged from the thicket like that of a mermaid as she watched me watching the transformation. She nodded, giving permission. I reached my hand toward the strange green hairs and let my fingers sink through. The grass was soft. I grasped the writhing vines in my fist.
I woke up gripped by panic. It was still the middle of the night. My cabin mates were asleep now. I was covered in sweat and goosebumps and filled with a certainty. I needed this obsession to end. I climbed down the bunk and reached carefully under my bunk mate’s bed, where she kept her toiletries. I fumbled around until I found one of her little pink plastic razors and a can of shaving cream. No one our age had enough hair to shave yet, but most of the girls did it anyway. It was one of the bonding rituals I was always on the outside of, passing by as they stood around the water pump and shaved the cream off of their already smooth white legs. Now I approached the water pump myself, saw it sticking like a crooked bone out of the ground under the beam of my flashlight. Maybe if I made myself look like Remy then this feeling would stop. That’s what it all meant, I told myself. I wanted to be like her. To fit in. To stand with the girls at the water pump and laugh at a joke I understood.
I set the flashlight on a tree stump and examined my legs. I saw the soft, downy baby hairs on my calves. I remembered when I had first noticed them there. They had felt like mine. They weren’t mine now. They were someone else’s, and these were someone else’s legs. It made it easier to think of them that way as I lathered them with cream. I pulled the lever on the pump to wet the blades of the razor. I lowered the razor to meet the disembodied leg. It was small and pale and dead looking, like the belly of a fish. The bugs were screaming.
The first stroke was smooth. The blades glided over the skin without interruption. For the second stroke, I increased my pressure. I increased my speed. My hand moved up and down, up and down the length of one leg and then the other. I rinsed the blades before returning to the task. It was a simple rhythm. My hand felt like it was floating through the motions or maybe like it wasn’t there at all. Suddenly I realized it was done. All of the cream was gone. The phantom hand was holding the razor under the water and had been holding it there for a while for all I knew. I could see a few tiny hairs trapped between the blades, flowing like algae on rocks. And what of the legs? I wondered now. Had they become speckled with strawberry seeds? Had I sown the beginnings of a harvest?
I looked down and saw red.
If only it had been the red of ripe fruit. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. It was the red of absence. Of something leaving me. The red of the chunk of skin I had unknowingly cut away from myself when my legs weren’t mine. It flowed and flowed. I was barren. I was hollowed out, and I couldn’t help but feel that somehow she was the one who had done it. That she had possessed me, like a ghost, and now here I was back in my corporeal form and forced to deal with the consequences. I ran the cut under the water. It was a lot of blood. I watched it wash away and prayed that I would be purged of something through the loss.
The next day the cut hadn’t scabbed over. No one commented on it. No one commented on my leaving the cabin in the middle of the night, if they had even noticed. I continued to be ignored. It was nice in a way, that I could rely on that. In archery I took my shots then sat in the meadow grass as I waited my turn. It wasn’t as soft in real life. I looked at the oozing cut below my knee. I had the urge to pick at it. 
“Do you need a bandaid?” Remy was looking down at me.
“No, that’s–”
“I have a first aid kit, one second.” She jogged over to her drawstring bag and returned with a white plastic box. She sat next to me. I tried not to look at her. I looked at the grass. I picked at it. When I glanced back she had produced a band-aid from the box. Before I could object, she opened it and placed it over the cut. She smoothed it onto my knee, her hands cool against the hot day. Somehow in that moment I felt like crying. I miss you, I thought, even as I was acutely aware that she was right next to me. I miss you.
I convinced my parents to not make me go back to camp after that. I left without saying goodbye and never saw Remy or most of those girls again. It was less painful that way.