*First contest submission! Really excited!
Please enjoy, I'm so glad that I saved this piece for the contest, even though sometimes it was like torture.
All characters are 18+*
*
I hadn't even wanted to go on the Senior camping trip. It all seemed so fake. But after the guys on the basketball team begged me, and after my parents badgered me that it was 'part of the experience' I finally agreed. I felt like I would have been fine if we stopped the high-school bullshit and just lined up for a diploma, but nope. Senior overnight it was.
Before I went, my father rambled about his Senior camping trip, and he told me about something he had never shared before.
"Oh Jason, it's awful! We were kids though, and we were just having fun, no one really got hurt. We'd stay up very late, and the football team would work in conjunction with the cheerleading squad and pick a boy and a girl from the tents. We'd take them out to this little island in the middle of the stream and lock them in this little shed. They were usually the shyer kids, and we wanted to help them along. The Goats."
I glanced up at him. I mostly took after my mother, thank god. There was still hope that I wouldn't suffer his shiny bald head that had started to thin at the ripe age of 23. I ran my fingers through my hair self-consciously while asking. "The Goats? You called these kids goats?"
He shrugged and laughed. He was trying not to laugh too hard, but failing. I loved my father, but I loved him a little less for how hard he laughed at those poor kids that he had locked up in that shed. The Goats.
I was starting to believe I would never be able to come out to him.
"Well, yeah. It was a tradition a long time before we came along. They probably put a stop to it a while ago, afraid of angry parents and whatnot. People need to stop being so darn concerned... We were just kids having fun."
I almost believed that he was making it up. I had never heard about this apparent tradition before, and it just seemed too cruel. Maybe the tradition had been alive when my dad was a kid, but not now. The jocks at my school weren't like jocks in a TV sitcom or coming-of-age drama. We weren't a bunch of stupid cows who pushed freshmen into lockers or pantsed smart kids. No way any of my friends would do something as cruel and petty as lock two unpopular kids in a shed. Surely we had evolved.
---
At noon as the school buses dropped off three hundred and twenty squawking teenagers, the debauchery began. People had brought alcohol, weed, pills, and condoms, and they were determined to use as many of them as they could before the buses came back to pick us up at twelve the next day.
The chaperones were outnumbered, outgunned, and exhausted already. They ended up sitting all together at a picnic table on the game field as we spread out. The industrial-grade tents were stacked in a massive pile by the treeline, to be erected and filled by four people each when the sun went down. The field was long and narrow. As wide as a football field but stretching the length of eight or nine. It stretched from the dirt road and the industrial-grade tents at one end and the stream at the other, surrounded on all sides by pine trees.
I walked over to the tallest hill on the field and looked around. A few industrious seniors were in the process of setting up their four-man tents. People were shucking shirts and shorts to get down to bathing suits and flip flops. Some rushed for the stream to wet their feet (it only came up waist-high) and others started games of soccer, frisbee, 500, and one manic group of hipsters with hacky-sacks. Some had brought radios, and around each radio the games congregated.
The needs of three hundred and twenty teenagers and ten harried adults were met by a veritable mountain of coolers (filled with saran-wrapped sandwiches) and a line of six green port-a-potties.
I grinned. This wasn't nearly as bad as I had thought. I stripped out of my t-shirt to feel the sun on my back. A girl walking by in tiny cutoff shorts and an orange bikini top did a double take and I grimaced inwardly. On the outside, I smiled and waved.
---
As the day went on, I got out of my cynical funk and started to just have fun. I played soccer with a group of guys from the basketball team for an hour or so. I had a dinner of two pre-wrapped roast beef sandwiches and a bottle of powerade. As the sun was hovering just above the treeline, I stripped into my swim trunks and kicked off my sneakers. I felt hot and sweaty and sticky, and there were a lot fewer people in the stream now that the chaperones were passing out dinner.
I wove my way around the maze of beach towels (some with half-naked sunbathers, some without) and stepped into a tiny sandy bank of the stream. When I glanced downstream, I was reminded of my father's story. I couldn't see a hut anywhere; maybe it had been taken down since my father's 'glory years'.
I waded into the stream. Our gym teacher, Mrs. Dresden waved at me. She was a chaperone and she stayed at the stream on the off chance that someone was stupid enough to try and drown in the shallow gentle current.
I was up to the deepest point in this section of the stream. My feet sank into soft cold muck and the weeds wound sinuously around my calves and knees. The water level came to about halfway between my navel and nipples. I dunked in the water, gasping at how good it felt.
I decided to go and set up my tent. I was tent-mates with two other guys from the basketball team and the quarterback of the football team. They would want to stay up all night, and if they did get tired, they would most likely be too drunk to fix up the tent. To my knowledge, Ben, Bjorn, and Tim had all brought booze.
I was watching the ground to avoid stepping on towels and girls when I ran headlong into Caleb Greene.
I was a lot bigger then him, and while I just stumbled a bit he fell down hard, right on top of a reclining girl in a purple bikini.
Caleb flushed bright red from the roots of his pale hair to the neckline of his baggy t-shirt. He struggled to get off, mumbling an apology and looking absolutely terrified as the girl woke up and started cussing at him.
I was astonished at her mouth. I couldn't remember her name, but whenever she talked to me she always acted really sweet and shy. I guess I knew now that it was an act.
I grabbed his shoulder to help him up, and to her I said. "It was an accident, calm the fuck down!"
She saw me and flushed. "Sorry, Jason!" She said meekly as Caleb and I walked away, my hand still on his shoulder.
I released him. His skin was still flushed with embarrassment. "S-Sorry." He whispered, playing with the hem of his shirt. He had oversized wire-rim glasses that were always falling down his thin nose. The shirt was long, almost to his knees, and he was wearing baggy cargo pants with the cuffs rolled up and sneakers with peeling soles. The left one was flapping, and the right one had duct tape looped around the tip of his shoe twice. He had worn that same pair of shoes for the last two years, even in winter when he had to tramp through several feet of snow. They hadn't even been new when he got them.
"Hey, no problem, I wasn't looking where I was going. Where have you been? I don't think I've seen you all day."
