For five summers, I got up every morning and put on a deep blue t-shirt, “STAFF” emblazoned on the back in white. During my morning commute, I would inevitably glance down, checking that I was still wearing my work “uniform.” The first time I drove into the parking lot of my high school as a summer employee rather than a student, I almost threw up.

There was nearly no way I wasn’t going to apply to work at the summer day camp housed in my high school. Nearly all of the counselors were alumni or current school staff, so when my brother graduated in 2014 and put in his application, my mom suggested I do the same—no matter that I was a rising senior whose only job experience included a few weeks of selling cookies in Faneuil Hall. I was hired and placed in the Gazelle group—I’d be taking care of kindergarten and first graders for the next eight weeks.

Like most seventeen-year-olds, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I got lucky; being a camp counselor fit me like a glove.

Other staff figured this out before I did. During Carnival, the infamous day during the last week of camp—when everyone was strung out and ready to float in a pool and never yell again—a traveling company set up five knock-off amusement rides, and the counselors made sure the kids weren’t throwing up (too much) or dying of heat stroke. As I was closely watching to make sure the kiddos weren’t running from the one spinny ride to the other, the tennis instructor came up to me.

“You’re really good with the kids,” he said and squinted at me. “They really care about you.” This, paired with a comment from the head counselor of the Bucks, the middle school boys group, during a staff meeting—“She’s the one you should thank. I don’t know her name, but she takes care of the trash at lunch on her own.”—made me never want to work a different summer job.

Being a camp that drew most of its staff from an already tightly knit school community did have some drawbacks. I rarely ate lunch in the staff lounge most years, choosing instead to spend my lunch break reading in the hallway or serving lunch to the younger kiddos. Interactions with coworkers were more fraught when you had years of history—sometimes you had to put aside the fact that this dude basically broke apart your friend group in ninth grade and work with him to calm down a raging fourth grader. I loved camp regardless.

Summer bled into summers: in 2015, a lot of my friends got hired and couldn’t understand why I looked forward to work; in 2016, I put my first triple circle stitch on my water bottle, where it still lives today; in 2017, I decided I didn’t need more than fifteen identical camp shirts, cemented my place as the ruler of the after camp craft room with my gimp and friendship bracelet skills, and finally learned how to play solitaire; in 2018, we got a new director and nearly half the staff quit; in 2019, the old director came back, and I saw some of my first campers, who were six years old then, now going into middle school.

Summer after summer, I’d see familiar faces—former campers who aged into other groups but would still hang on my limbs any chance they got, siblings who I had seen glimpses of at drop-off finally got their chance to come to camp, counselors who came back to spend another year rubbing on sunscreen, getting too combative during gaga, and stealing tater tots.

After missing 2020 and intentionally sitting out of 2021, I now imagine all these gaps in the legacy I built—the campers whose names will fade further from my memory, the staff who won’t know to take out the bins during lunch, the campers who will continue to grow up and forget me—a brief adult in their life, a flicker of care and love. I, after all, can’t recall even a face of the many counselors of my elementary school summers.

My sister is working at camp this year. After the first week, I’m bursting at the seams. Is anyone asking about me? I want to scream. Do they remember the hours I spent teaching them friendship bracelet stitches? The card games we played? Do they miss me?

She came home in a light blue shirt—camp name off to the side; “STAFF” emblazoned in dark blue.

“They got new shirts!” I yelled. She grinned and showed it off.

“Yeah, aren’t they nice?” she said. They were, objectively better than the twenty shirts still folded in my closet. “Some people asked where you were,” she said off-handedly.

I want more than being missed, though; I want my summers as a Gazelle counselor back. But now, those summers are like the blue t-shirts I can’t get rid of—relics of the past, fading further, fading faster.

Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.