The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. Amy Schumer

seeming slutty, and charitable on top of it all. That kind of perfection didn’t yet make me furious. It just made me want to be exactly like her. Then there was Dave Mack, a gorgeous guy whom I would have immediately fallen in deep West Beverly High love with except for the fact that I could see he’d already set his sights on Carli. Man, maybe if I had gotten here first I’d have gotten him, I lied to myself. But he was smart and could see that Carli was a living angel with perfect olive skin and a sweet little tush.

      Our group leader, Joanne, was a pretty woman with frizzy blond hair, a pronounced Italian-looking nose, a fanny pack, and a great rack. She was the only one of us who got paid, though I can’t imagine it was a lot. She was a kind, strong woman who’d been around the block with these ladies. She was no-nonsense, but she’d still laugh with the rest of us when ridiculousness occurred. Which was often.

      Every day, I’d put so much mental energy into wanting to be appealing to Tyler – or wanting to be as flawless as Carli. But the Senior 10 chicks who I was now spending all my time with had much better strategies. They generally didn’t waste energy hiding who they were or faking who they weren’t. There was Mona, who was always wearing a baseball hat and a huge muscle T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it. She was strong and masculine, and her smile would light up a room. Mona had Down syndrome, as did her best friend, Lucy, who had a short, boyish haircut and knock-knock jokes for days. I almost never understood the punch lines, but she was so delighted by reciting them you couldn’t help but laugh right along with her.

      Another camper, Debbie, was openly flirtatious and boy crazy. She kept her hair braided perfectly so she felt pretty. Plump and youthful, she was like a Juliet looking for her Romeo. She had Down syndrome, too. Blanche had a long, thin, freckled face. She didn’t mind being mean and made it clear early on that she didn’t like me one bit. I respected that and stayed out of her way. No energy wasted between us faking it.

      Enid was schizophrenic and reminded me of Woody Allen in terms of her voice and her physical movements. She had short red hair with tight curls and was very neurotic. She’d often pace around and talk to herself. Once, I nudged her to tell her it was time for lunch, and she replied, “Don’t interrupt me, can’t you see I’m having a conversation?” Well, damn, she was right. I didn’t let it happen again. She couldn’t stomach small talk but was kind enough to engage in some good debates with me. She was so bright that I’d forget about her ailments. Much like a stoic big sister, Enid would sometimes refuse to have anything to do with me, but other days we were thick as thieves. By the end of the summer, I was closest with her.

      One sunny day it was my job to hang with a camper named Beatrice, a sweet sixty-year-old woman who spoke like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and had an even bigger crush on Dave than I did. Dave and Beatrice were sweet on each other. At all the dancing events it was understood that no one danced with Dave but Big B. She was only four feet tall but weighed about two hundred pounds, and though her words were, in general, indeterminable, listening to her speak was a treat. She’d mumble something that sounded like it would only make sense in the Shire, and laugh wildly to herself and slap her knee.

      On this particular day we had a huge game of Marco Polo planned for the campers in the pool. Nothing says summer like a game centered around a Venetian merchant sailor who may or may not have traveled through Asia in the 1200s to 1300s. I was fully prepared to win the game: I was younger and faster than my Senior 10s and I knew I could dominate that pool. I was extra motivated knowing that being in bathing suits always made the campers grabby with one another’s bodies. Especially mine. They thought it was funny to grab my breasts, and if one of them caught up to me, my boobs would be squeezed like lemons at a lemonade stand. Not that I don’t like affection, but they grabbed hard and I bruise like a peach. But before the game started, Joanne asked me to take Beatrice to the bathroom and wait for her while she put on her bathing suit.

      I brought her into the muggy bathroom and while she was in the stall changing, I looked at myself in the foggy mirror. I didn’t recognize myself. My body was in the adolescent state where I would get frequent growing pains in my legs. Exactly every other day I looked either long and lanky or chubby and potatolike. The only constant at the time was the difference in the size of my breasts. My right one was very much in the lead. The left wouldn’t catch up for years and never fully has. The mirror got foggier as I stood and stood and waited and waited.

      “Beatrice?!”

      She made a Nell-like grumble from within the stall. “Whloppppr.”

      “Bea, what’s goin’ on, sister? Let’s go, we’re gonna miss the game.”

      After several minutes the door was flung open and out came Beatrice ready for the chlorine in her bathing suit and Teva sandals. There was just one problem: her bathing suit was on backward. Her scoop-back one-piece was facing very much the wrong way, which meant that I was getting a full-frontal view of what used to be Beatrice’s breasts. They were long and old; at the time, I’d never seen anything hang on for dear life like this before. They looked like those fake snakes that pop out of trick cans of peanuts. Her cans were attached to her chest and those snakes were loose, skin-colored, and almost to the floor. She looked around the bathroom, anywhere but at me. I looked right at her. I was mesmerized: here I’d been afraid of one of the campers grabbing my breasts, and I was now faced with hers. I could tell that she had absolutely no clue about the wardrobe malfunction and she made a beeline for the door.

      “Whoa whoa whoa!” I yelled, trying to block her.

      She knew something was off, but she was fired up about the pool. “Poo poo,” she said, meaning “pool.” I think.

      “You need to turn your suit around. It’s on backward, honey.”

      She looked at me with anger in her always-red eyes. I could see that she was ready to go and wasn’t going to let me stop her. She was not interested in turning that suit around; it was game time.

      I body-blocked the exit, led her gently but forcibly back into the stall, and did what needed to be done. I took those bathing-suit straps in my hands and yanked them down. It was a struggle. The suit was so tight I had to drop down to my knees and use my body weight to get it off her. There we were, Beatrice nude, staring and blinking, and me trying to grip and pull at the spandex swimwear, my face inches away from her vagina and breasts, which at this point were very much in the same general area. Her soft, stretched-out nips rested on my sunburned shoulders while I twisted her suit around and told her to step back into it. She ignored me. She was probably daydreaming about her and Dave summering on Martha’s Vineyard next year. Undeterred, I picked up her white and soft-as-porcelain-looking foot and placed it in one leg hole, did the same with the other leg, and then, with all of my might, pulled that tiny suit over her pear-shaped body.

      I was dripping with sweat by the time we were finished, and the bathroom could have doubled as a steam room. We walked out hand in hand to the pool. Finally, someone at this camp wanted to hold my hand. I think she knew I needed it. Almost whistling, she led me to the pool, but I was too exhausted and freaked out to join the Marco Polo game. Instead, I sat on a deck chair, staring off into space without moving, as Beatrice splashed around with the other ladies. One of them probably grabbed my breast, but I felt nothing for the next forty-eight hours.