Jennifer Yu - Four Weeks, Five People

Needless to say, I’m pretty relieved when we finally finish introductions. “Does everyone remember each other’s names, or do we need to go over them again?” Jessie asks, and I have to resist the roll of my eyes and get myself yelled at again. Clarisa is the one who stammers through most of her introduction and has to be asked to speak up five times, Andrew is so skeletal that it’s not exactly a mystery what his issue is, Mason has the most punchable facial expressions I’ve ever seen in my life, and Ben looks so zoned out it’s like he’s on a permanent acid trip. There’s five of us. It’s not exactly rocket science.

After Jessie is done extorting deadpan yeses from all of us, she and Josh walk us all to The Hull, which is what everyone calls the residential building. “The Hull” sounds like a really, really stupid nickname for a building, I know—but once you see it, everything makes sense. For starters, it’s literally shaped like a ship’s hull: only five floors tall, but seems to extend on and on forever from one side to the other. Second, the entire thing got painted over in a really tacky wood stain when they started Ugunduzi so that it would fit in with the whole “camp” theme, but whoever was in charge of painting the building over didn’t do a very good job: the paint is completely uneven, and there are patches where it’s peeling off completely to reveal the gray, occasionally mossy, occasionally moldy blocks of concrete behind it. Needless to say, the building is fucking hideous.

Each floor of The Hull is designated a number and divided into a left wing and a right wing. Our group name, 1L, means that we’re housed on the first floor, on the left side. Like I said: the Ugunduzi founders may have been kindhearted and well-meaning and all that bullshit, but they sure as hell weren’t very creative.

Jessie and Josh lead us into our common lounge—where there’s a pool table, a bunch of sofas, and a kitchen area—and tell us that we can hang out until dinner and “bond.” I, of course, would rather impale myself on the pool stick they’ve left unwisely unattended, but my plan to spend the time sitting by myself and making a comprehensive list of all the ways I might be able to escape is ruined when Andrew plops down on the couch next to me.

“Hey,” he says, as if we’re two old friends hanging out in someone’s living room and catching up. It takes me a minute to realize that I am not, in fact, hallucinating.

“Hi,” I say flatly.

“So...” Andrew says. He bites his lip nervously. I’m starting to get the idea that Andrew is coming to me with the hopes of getting some sort of wisdom or advice, which is sort of a bummer for him, because I have no wisdom, I have no advice, and I have no inclination to share anything of the sort with random strangers I’ve just met, anyway.

“So...” I say back, hoping he’ll leave.

“So what’s it like here?”

No dice.

“Hmm,” I say. “Exhausting. Aggravating.”

I give it a few more seconds of thought.

“And soul-suckingly oppressive,” I add.

“No, seriously,” Andrew says.

“No, seriously,” I reply.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as Mason walks over to Ben and badgers him into playing a game of pool.

“But it’s so nice!”

“Nice? Are you fucking with me right now?”

“No! All I’m saying is just—Look out the window! It’s like having one of those travel brochures right outside, except it’s not a travel brochure, it’s actually what’s outside—do you know what I mean?”

“We’re never allowed to be together unsupervised, just in case we accidentally end up murdering each other. The counselors do bed checks every two hours after lights-out. And every day of every week is planned with some dumb therapeutic activity that’s supposed to make us confuse exhaustion with actually feeling better. I’m going to go with no. No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“But don’t you feel kind of hopeful about it all?” Andrew says.

“Being hopeful didn’t work out so well for me last year. So I’ve abandoned it for a better strategy.”

“What’s the better strategy?”

“Unadulterated apathy.”

“Oh,” Andrew says. He looks down at his hands. “I guess that works...”

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s the fact that Andrew genuinely looks like all of his hopes and dreams have just been dashed. Maybe it’s the way he starts looking out the window again, all wistful and earnest and full of feelings. Maybe it’s that the kid just came up to me and started telling me his life story, for fuck’s sake, as if we’re best friends as opposed to strangers tossed into the middle of New York for a month. Whatever it is, before I can stop myself, the words come tumbling out of my mouth.

“But hey—don’t be too upset. It won’t be miserable, like, a hundred percent of the time. I’ll get us drunk. And there’s always The Ridge, even though no one—”

“You brought alcohol?” Andrew whispers, awestruck. His faith in humanity restored.

“Were you expecting to get through this experience sober?”

“Isn’t that kind of against the rules?”

I sigh. If this kid has spent his entire life trying to avoid going against the rules, it’s no wonder he wound up at Ugunduzi.

“Yeah, it is, so stop yelling about it. Look, are you in or not?”

“Like, now?”

“Yes, right now. Right now, right here, in front of Jessie and Josh standing across the room, both of whom will promptly see us and expel us from this lovely camp that our parents have pinned all their hopes and dreams on. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

Andrew looks taken aback.

“No, not now. Later, after lights-out.”

I pause. Is this really something I want to do? I was planning on waiting until the end of the first week of camp to break out the alcohol, when everyone is especially miserable with the realization that they still have three more weeks of camp. But right now we all have four whole weeks of camp left, and isn’t that even more miserable?

“Yeah, let’s do later tonight,” I say. “Look, you guys just have to sneak into our room. It’s really easy. We literally never got caught last year.”

“I don’t really—” Andrew starts.

“All you have to do,” I continue, cutting him off, “is wait until right after they finish the first bed check and then walk across the right wall of the common room to our side of the hall. Then as long as you’re back before two hours, it’s all fine.”

“That’s not what I was saying. What I was saying was—”

“Look,” I say, exasperated. “All you have to do is come over. It’ll be fun. And could you please stop looking like someone murdered your family pet? It’s making me uncomfortable.”

“All right,” Andrew says. “What’s the plan?”

Once I explain the camera blind spot and how foolproof the entire process is, Andrew is actually pretty down with the plan. He gets super into explaining all of the times he and his band mates snuck into various parks, or museums, or stores, which is impressive, I guess, considering it took three solid minutes to convince him to come over and drink. No, Andrew is all right. It’s Clarisa who ends up being the bigger problem.

“So,” I say to her when we’re alone in our room after dinner. “You ready for the initiation?”

Clarisa looks up at me, alarmed. “Initiation?” she echoes.

I take the last pile of clothes out of my suitcase and open up the compartment at the top. There, I’ve hidden eight water bottles full of vodka, obtained from one of my older brother’s friends through a potent combination of charm and cleavage (that is to say, ten percent charm, ninety percent cleavage), and six shot glasses.