Free Eating My Feelings by Mark Rosenberg

mother and tell her what’s going on. She’ll come and get me.”
    “Assuming she gets your letters.”
    “Tampering with other people’s mail is a federal offense,” I replied. It is. I saw Erica try to steal Brooke’s mail earlier that year on
All My Children
, so it must have been true.
    “GET OUT!” he yelled. “I don’t want to see you for the rest of the summer!”
    I stormed out of the cottage and it began to rain. Instead of getting out of camp, I had unleashed a hell that was going to terrorize me for the rest of the summer. My only ally, Leslie, was sure to never speak to me again, as I had outed her secret. To top it all off, I was rooming with four of the five original members of Menudo. I ran back to my bunk, picked up my pen and Winnie-the-Pooh stationery, and began writing my epitaph. Earlier that day I’d realized that my idiotic father and stepmother had given me the wrong address for people to send me mail. First they sent me to this awful place, and now they apparently did not want me to have any contact with the outside world. The following is a real letter that I wrote to my mother. Nothing has been altered from its original format; this is really how crazy (and kind of racist) I was at the age of twelve.
    “HELP!” I wrote in big bubble letters on the first page of the letter.
    “Mommy—look at this face.” I then drew a sad face with a really bad haircut and an arrow pointing to my hair. “My stupid bushy hair which the dumb Hair Cuttery woman gave me.”
    Not only do I hate camp, I have like 3 or 4 Eye-talians sleeping in my bunk and they curse each other all thetime. And besides that, they smell [I wrote the word
smell
with stink lines coming out of it. I was so creative.] They don’t have a pool, they have a crib. It’s a closed-out part of the lake, which you have to swim in. And as if that’s not enough, stupid Dad gave me the wrong address so I’ll never get mail. Help! Please! Call me at camp. I want to hear from you. I have 6,000 mosquito bites and I have only been here for three days and I have like 7,000 mosquito bites [apparently the number went up as I was writing the letter]. We don’t have a bathroom in our bunk. We have to walk to the bathroom. Last night when I had to piss, I tripped over a branch on my way to the bathroom and felt like an old man. I should have screamed, “Help. I have fallen and I can’t get up.” There aren’t any personal showers so we have to take showers together. (If I come back home smelling bad, you’ll know why.) Going to meals is hell too. Dad stayed here for twenty minutes then left—and expected me to hug him. So did Stacey. I hope they both ROT IN HELL. Oh well, but get me out of here. Today the nurse was helping me plot my escape, but now I don’t think it’s going to work [I couldn’t possibly tell my mother that I had tried in vain to blackmail the camp owner]. It would have never worked anyway. Oh well. I love you. Write back. Come and Get Me. Call. Either one—you choose. I love you, Mark.
    I was such a scamp. I waited for a night messenger from the U.S. Postal Service to arrive on horseback to take my mail, but when he didn’t show, I dropped the letter into the mailbox, in hopes no one would steal it. I went to bed that night and had the most amazing dream that Lorenzo Lamas had spirited meout of camp and back home. When I woke up the next morning to Jeremy’s face smiling and telling me to wake up, I knew it couldn’t have been true.
    “Wake up!” Jeremy said.
    “No! Go to hell,” I said.
    “That’s no way to talk to your best camp buddy. Come on, let’s shower.”
    “No. I am not showering with you.”
    “You’ll start to stink,” Jeremy said.
    “Well, the Italians don’t seem to mind, so what do I care? They really aren’t frequenting the showers from what I gather either.”
    “Come on, Mark, you need to take a shower,” Jeremy said.
    “Like hell I do,” I said as I got up, put on my shoes, and