Chapter Text
David was incredibly excited to go back to Camp Campbell for his second year as a counselor. And this time, since the counselor he worked with last year had, well, an unfortunate, incident with a bear halfway through the year and vowed never to return, leaving him, still inexperienced, and Mr. Campbell, who would only pop in from time to time to give him vague advice about not trusting the government, as the only ones running the camp for the second half of that summer, it was his job to look for a new counselor. And he knew exactly who would be the perfect candidate!
“I fucking hate kids, David. Why did you think I’d be interested in your summer job? Look, as much as I’d enjoy spending the summer fucking around with you instead of flipping burgers somewhere, there’s no way I’d even get hired. I have no experience with children, I’m an only child for fuck’s sake, and I don’t know the first thing about trying to manage anything. Plus, I don’t know first-aid so no camp is going to hire me.”
“But Gwen, I haven’t even gotten to the good parts yet! You’d be staying in a cabin with me all summer, the pay is over minimum wage, and the only requirement is that you’re over eighteen! And there’s a guarantee that you’ll get the job if you apply, you know why?”
“Okay, disregarding the fact that I would go insane if I stayed in a cabin in the middle of the woods with no access to the rest of humanity all summer, why would I get the job? Because you believe in me?”
“No! Well, I do, but that’s not the reason why! It’s because I’m in charge of hiring a new camp counselor! Also, you’re not completely cut off from humanity, there’s cell service there, and a TV in the counselors’ cabin, so you can watch all of your trashy reality TV shows!”
“Ugh, you know what? Fuck it. I’m in. Chilling in a cabin watching reality TV and occasionally rounding up children so they don’t find creative ways to kill themselves for over minimum wage sounds less hellish than getting burned by fry grease every day at Burger King.”
“That’s great! I’m so happy, this summer is gonna be super hella awesome! Let me just call Mr. Campbell and tell him that I’ve found someone to fill the position!”
Gwen smirked and muttered something along the lines of “God, you’re even more wired than usual, have you stayed up all night, had three cups of coffee today, or both?” David didn’t answer because he figured that she probably already knew the answer was both, as he had decided to stay up all night last night going over this year’s campers’ activity sheets and Wiki-ing a few of the activities that he didn’t know very much about, knowing that he would be pretty much in charge of everything if he got Gwen in on the job. He was excited that Charles was coming back, the nine-year-old been so much fun in wilderness survival camp last year, and was slightly concerned about one of the new campers, an eight-year-old named Meredith who had chosen extreme sports as her activity. He’d need to talk to Mr. Campbell about just how to build a skateboarding ramp or something of that nature for her. Plus there was one activity sheet that looked like it had been filled in by the camper themselves, as it was written in crayon and the only thing on it was their first name. No last name, no emergency number, no activity, not even an age. Just the name “Max.” He could assume this Max was a boy, but seeing as the name could also stand for Maxine, he really didn’t know anything. It had made him exasperated, and a little nervous in case something went wrong and he wasn't able to contact the kid's parents The sheet said in big letters on the top of the page that it was for parents to fill in, how could anyone miss it? There was nothing he could even do about it, because he had no way of getting into contact with the child or their parents, as the envelope the camp papers from them came in didn’t even have a return address on it. But he had decided to involve a lot more activities that weren't a part of any of the campers' specified camps, because not only would it help them branch out and find other things they might love, but also to find this child an activity they could call their own for the summer.
“David… David… David! You’re spacing out again!”
David jolted back to reality. A side effect from getting three hours of sleep or having too much coffee, he wasn’t sure, but he’d been zoning out at any given moment all day.
“You haven’t been paying attention to this lecture at all, have you? You’ve been staring straight at the professor for at least ten minutes straight and class is ending soon.”
Well, it wasn’t his fault they were going over the late colonial era and he found it probably one of the most boring eras in all of history. History was one of the few classes he had with Gwen, because of their different majors. David's being biology, and hers being psychology and liberal arts. Even though in high school she was a grade above him, she’d taken a gap year, so they were in the same level for all of their required non-major related classes and had most of them together. Gwen was absolutely amazing with history, so the two of them would sit in the back of the room and chill out half the time, and then she’d help him whenever he had no idea what was going on.
“When did he start lecturing? The last time I was paying attention, before we started talking about summer jobs, he was playing a video on the Salem witch trials or something.”
“Jesus Christ, David, that video ended half an hour ago. Did you fall asleep or something? Absolutely none of what he’s fucking saying right now matters, as he’s gone off on a tangent about architecture throughout this era for the past fifteen minutes, so you didn't miss much. But I’ll give you what notes I’ve bothered to take after class if you come hang out in my dorm with me and get this camp job sorted out. Plus we can look over our final essays for this class together.”
“Gwen, I love you so much. Without you, I would have failed or dropped this class a long time ago. And of course I’m coming to your dorm after class, no way in hell am I risking going back to my dorm on a Friday night. My roommate’s probably doing drugs or having sex there right now. I’ve told him a hundred times, 'I don’t care if you want to do it, just send me a text or something when your girlfriend's coming over,' but I’ve walked in on them twice this week, and I sure as hell don’t want to do it again. Even the conceited Instagram model you share a dorm with is better than the guy who keeps the drugs he sells on the weekends in the bathroom cabinet next to my hair dryer. I bet the coke or meth or whatever he does is what gives him four times the sex drive of a human being. And I don't really care how he lives his life, but like, really, in our dorm room?”
“Yeah like you would know the sex drive of a normal person, you twenty-year-old virgin.”
“It’s not like you’ve been having much luck in that department either, you motherfucker!”
“Ooh, David used the fuck word, I must have really riled him up. At least I’m not actively looking for someone to bone and still failing.”
“I’m not- did you pull that assumption out of your ass? I’m not looking for hook-ups right now!”
“Hmm, the Tinder and Grindr apps on your phone beg to differ.”
“Okay, one, fuck you for looking through my phone. And two, can I not use dating apps for their intended fucking purpose, looking for someone to date, and not just one night stands?”
She sighed, rolling her eyes. “Getting defensive, caffeine crashing, or general mania?”
Damn she really had him pegged there. Well, she was a psych major for a reason, as well as having known him and the intricacies of his bipolar disorder for years. It wasn't like they were getting anywhere with their bickering, anyways. David sighed and looked at the clock. Five minutes until the class was finally over for good. Thank god it was the last day of the semester.
“All of the above. I’m also running on three hours of sleep. How did you know I had coffee?”
“You’ve been constantly going from super wired to about to pass out every few minutes all day. Your typical manic episodes aren’t that short, and you never go from high to low this many times in a day on a normal amount of sleep. The last time you were this bad was last week, when you had three finals in a day, and you drank a shit ton of coffee and stayed up all night the night before to study. So what got you getting so little sleep? We’ve both taken all of our other finals except for turning in our history essays. And I know you already wrote that because you called me like four times last Monday to ask me questions about it. Shit, am I looking forward to never taking another school-required class for the rest of my life. From next fall onwards, it's all gonna be cool shit.”
“Camp stuff. You’re going to have to help me figure out how to put together an extreme sports camp in the week we have in between turning in the final and packing our shit up tomorrow, and all of the kids getting to the camp next Saturday.”
“This job starts next Saturday? And you only told me today?”
“To be fair, I thought my boss was going to handle finding a new counselor after our last one left. But then he called me today after hearing nothing from him in a month and told me to find someone for the job.”
“Wow, sounds like an asshole.”
“Nah, he’s great. Just always busy. He has all of these other little projects going on as well as running the camp, so sometimes you’re just not going to see him for two weeks, and then he’ll return for a little while and disappear again.”
“So who’s actually in charge of this place if he’s gone all the time?”
“Well, that’s going to be you and me! And the Quartermaster, but his only duties are doing general maintenance work, serving vaguely edible food, and generally being slightly creepy and popping in at random times to scare campers. We also occasionally use him as a punishment, like if campers are being little shits, we’ll make them stay behind and clean the mess hall with him.”
“Is it too late to reconsider taking this job?”
“You bet it is, I have no idea who else I'd hire, and I am sure as hell not rounding up a dozen rowdy children and trying to get them to do things they don’t want to do every day, for two months, by myself.”
“Why do I accept things without learning enough about the consequences?”
“Because you trust me too much.”
“Yeah because you’re not usually this much of a little shit.”
Before David could respond, he heard the sound of forty other college students start getting up out of their desks. Thank god, class was over. The two of them headed back to Gwen's dorm together, talking about how much their final essays sucked. Once they got inside, David called Mr. Campbell, and the only questions he asked were whether she was over eighteen, (she’s twenty-one) and if she was good at yelling at people. (He told him that she excelled at it, which was true, as she'd yelled at him for impulsive decisions many times.)
“Congratulations, you have a job herding children and preteens! I’ll give you some kind of very basic first aid training sometime this week, which will consist of what I remember from the week-long course I took three years ago because I thought it would be required for this job. It’s really not. But it’s probably still good to know.”
“Yay," She said in an entirely uninterested tone. "Now tell me about this camp that every time I hear more about, becomes sketchier and sketchier.”
He told her all about how it used to be a nature camp that he went to as a kid, but after attendance dropped, Mr. Campbell made it into a camp where you could do any activity. So every year, they would build camps based on what the year’s crop of campers were interested in. Campers generally ranged from eight to twelve, though they'd occasionally see one or two thirteen-year-olds. They'd never had a camper younger than eight, half because the informational papers said it was for eight to twelve-year-olds, and half because parents generally didn’t want to send their kids away for two months when they were that young. After that, the two of them looked over each other’s final essays, and Gwen pointed out at least three historical inaccuracies in David's. Her’s all looked correct to him, but she was the one who was good at the subject, so he may not have been of much help. David knew history could be fascinating, but since they only covered from the middle ages to colonial times, he didn't really give much of a shit about any of it.
David ended up spending the night at her dorm, as they realized it was three am way too quickly, plus once he got there he found that her roommate had already left for the summer, so the other bed was bare. Gwen gave him a couple of blankets because she had a mountain of them on her bed, and a sweatshirt to use as a pillow. It wasn’t comfortable, but his dorm was halfway across campus, and he really did not have the energy to go all the way back there. The next day, they turned in our final essays and, to celebrate that they'd gotten through the last class of the semester, went out to get ice cream for breakfast because they were totally responsible adults that do not have poor decision-making skills and not enough impulse control.