Oozing Sores

“Bye, Colin.” A quick hug and my mother turns away from me, not even looking back as she leaves me on my own in a state I’d never been in, with people I’d never met, about to take a twelve hour bus ride and spend three weeks in a Canadian State Park with these strangers.
“Hi!” someone exclaims to my right as I catch the last glimpse of my mother’s severely silver head. “I’m Luis! Where are you from, I’m from Texas!”
Oh Jesus, I thought… Texans. I abandoned the conversation to change into the wilderness garb that had been accrued by my parents for me, based on a list sent by the school. Nylon, mid-thigh length, brown shorts, SmartWool socks, black Tiva’s, green windbreaker, blue bandana, Aviator sunglasses, I looked like the most expensive homeless person ever.
I felt even more out of place when I returned from the bathroom and realized I was the only person decked out like a fool at this juncture. My eyes welled as the Velcro ankle straps of my dorky shoes stripped a couple of layers of skin from my Achilles. This was going to be terrible.
I wasn’t an away-from home kid. I attended camp once, and by that I mean my mom dropped me off only to get a phone call from her wailing seven-year-old a mere three hours later begging her to come get me. Luckily the camp wasn’t but ten minutes from my house, and it wasn’t even an overnight affair. I just didn’t like severe, long-term change, or what I perceived to be so.
With this knowledge of myself, I gritted my teeth, called myself a pussy and entered the Recital Hall in the FAB to be debriefed along with my normally dressed cohorts. I took a seat near the back, and started eavesdropping.
I heard a lot of names of towns I assumed were in Michigan: Troy, Dexter, Detroit… Well the Detroit Area, Ann Arbor, Grosse Pointe, Ann Arbor, and then a throaty voice said, “I’m from Avon, Connecticut.”
Holy crap!
“Dude I’m from Granby!” I blurted. “Oh wow, how are all your cows?” asked Ryan Douglass, my fellow Connecticutian and future friend who would later transfer after freshman year.
“I just have chickens thank you,” I replied, “How’s all your money?”
“Just wonderful.”
Well he’s kind of a dick, I thought, but at least he’s relatable. As my comfort zone expanded as slowly and painfully as my oozing Achilles wound, I found myself caring less and less that the people around me were either snarky dicks or complete douche bags.
“I’m Sam, I like Cake!” shouted the four foot, patchy faced kid in the seat in front of me at the beginning of the day long bus ride. “Do you play any sports?” Asked a deep voice to my right. Lunatics and jocks, it was just like high school.
All I could do at this point was ignore the fact that I had more in common with the Cake-loving, (he meant the band but it took a while to figure this out) Lord of the Rings fanatic with serious opinions about the state of the economy than the relatively sane jock in the seat next to me. Eventually I fell asleep.
I woke up in a small puddle of drool on the muscular shoulder of my athletic seat companion. Apologizing awkwardly, the old feelings of dread and discomfort flooded back when I saw out the windows, about eighteen twenty-somethings, dressed entirely in fleece, circumnavigating the bus at top speed, shouting and jumping like coked-out second graders encircling an ice-cream truck. I quickly discovered that these asylum escapees would be leading us through the Canadian wilderness. My heart sank.
Lining up for group selection, I realized that there was only one attractive female leader. All right, I thought, if I get into the hot leader’s group, maybe I can use that as evidence that things won’t be so bad. I’ll just use this girl as a chauvinistic omen. Slowly, names were called out, a drool stained shoulder appeared when a Joe Malone was called to join the hot leader’s group, then a gangly kid with a stupid last name, a curly haired girl with a mean mug, a really loud half-Korean, half-Italian girl, a tiny gymnast girl, and then…
“Colin King.” A sign from the god of sexism, everything would be all right. And despite the girl with the train whistle for a voice, and the Kentuckian hippie who cried whenever possible, everything was all right.
After embarrassing myself in introductions where we had to pair our first name with the name of an animal starting with the same letter, (I thought alternate names for roosters were funny, I did have pet chickens for Christ’s sake) and discussing Amelie a little too passionately, I became great friends with these people. I’ve since had a few classes and adventures with the angry girl with the curly hair, I live with the gangly kid, and Joe Malone turned out to be one of my best friends of freshman year. And I didn’t even have to call my mom once.