The bus gets rowdy quickly. I try to read The New Yorker but it’s hard to focus and I worry about looking pretentious. Some guy wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off proceeds somberly down the aisle with a bottle of tequila. “Shot?” he asks me. I accept, and some of it spills onto my hands as we go over a bump.
I’m wiping tequila onto my jeans when I recognize the guy four seats up and across the aisle. I went on a date with him. He has a generic white boy name, like Paul or Tom or Brian. We got drinks and then he followed me to a birthday party I didn’t want him to come to—I kept dropping a lot of hints about how I was walking to a different train and he kept saying, “I’ll come with you,” and I didn’t know how to tell him to just leave. Afterwards, when I didn’t want to hang out again, he sent me all these texts about how I hadn’t given him enough of a chance.
I duck farther behind my seat, so that my eye is level with the pentagram. That guy who followed me to the birthday party is here, I text Nina.
That’s good! Nina responds. That means there are people at the camp you’d consider dating.
I don’t want to date that guy, I write. I don’t really want to date anyone who would come to a dating camp.
YOU’RE at the dating camp! says Nina.
Yeah, but I don’t want to be.
I feel a tap on my shoulder and I panic, thinking maybe it’s the birthday party guy, but it’s just the guy who was handing out tequila shots. “You should try to disconnect,” he says.
“I’m already pretty disconnected,” I say, which is supposed to be a joke.
“No, I mean stop looking at your phone so much. Live in the present. I have an app that locks my phone down for four hours every day.”
“What if there’s an emergency?”
“It overrides for emergencies.”
“No, I mean what if someone is calling you in an emergency and you don’t know?”
He sighs and shakes his head. “Sometimes you just gotta let go, you know? For most of human history, no one had a cell phone.”
He taps Sarah on the shoulder. She pauses her podcast. “What?”
“Wanna switch places?” asks Tequila.
“No, thank you,” says Sarah.
“But you’re not even present, and I’d like to get to know this person.” He points at me vaguely.
Sarah looks at me. “No,” she says, and presses play again.
“God, what a bitch,” mutters Tequila, and walks to the back of the bus.
“Thanks,” I say to Sarah, but she doesn’t hear me. If he had sat down, I wouldn’t have known how to tell him to leave. I would have listened to him talk about disconnecting for hours.
I look out the window at the highway. Or, I think, maybe that guy was actually my soulmate, and I just blew it.
It’s when we arrive and everyone piles off the buses that I see Declan. He’s far away, but it’s him. Sometimes, when you know someone well, you can recognize them from blocks away, just by the way they carry themselves. Declan carries himself in a careful way.
It feels ludicrous that he would be here. It feels like I’m in a music video where different guys I’ve dated keep popping up while I sing about heartbreak to a catchy beat. Some girl gets off the bus and puts her arm around Declan. He must have just met her on the ride up, because why would you come to this with someone you’re already dating?
But maybe they are already dating—Declan’s not the kind of person who would get close to someone on a bus. Maybe they’re already in love and they just came here to make fun of people.
“Please make your way to the mess hall!” a woman shouts at us. She’s wearing all pink so we’ll know she’s an app employee. She has a heart-shaped whistle around her neck. Her hair is up in pigtails.
In the mess hall, we’re all seated on hard wooden benches and asked to take a colored wristband from a bin so that people will know if we’re interested in men, women, or both. I look around for Declan, but I’ve lost him. Instead, I end up right across the table from Paul or Tom or Brian. I pretend I just noticed something about my wristband that I need to look at.
“Lee?” he asks.
I pretend not to hear him.
“Hey, Lee!”
I pretend not to hear him again, but then this girl to my left nudges me and points at him. I hate her.
“Oh my god, hi,” I say. “I didn’t even see you there.”
“Mark,” he reminds me.
“Of course,” I say. “I remember.”
He says something I can’t hear over the crowd.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He says it again, but a guy two tables down is expressing some strong opinions about New York whiskey bars and I still can’t hear him.
“Sorry, it’s loud in here,” I say.
“How are you?” he says again.
“Oh, I’m good. How are you?”
“Good,” he says.
Then, blessedly, “I Want to Know What Love Is” starts playing and another pigtailed woman dressed in pink shimmies her way to the front of the room. Everyone cheers, as though we know
who this person is.
“Welcome,” she shouts, “to Camp CONNECTION!”
Nina texts me. Will you Facetime me and Jens so we can see what’s happening? Is it like a real camp?
I am miserable, I write back. And I don’t know because I’ve never been to a real camp.
She tries to Facetime me. I deny the call.
Pleeeease? she writes. I turn my phone off.
“All 200 of us are going to spend three amazing nights and two incredible days singing camp songs, swimming in the lake, enjoying an open bar, and, hopefully, finding your ultimate favorite! So, Lisa is coming around with sheets for everyone with five blanks. Obviously, you can talk to as many people as you’d like while you’re here, we won’t limit you to just five!” Everyone laughs uproariously. “But we’d like everyone to make a goal to fill out that sheet with your five favorites by the end of the weekend. And if any of your favorites also listed you, we’ll let you both know!”
Lisa hands me a sheet. She’s smiling like I’ve just won a prize.
“Doesn’t it seem weird,” I ask the girl next to me, “that they’re keeping the constraints of the app like this? Everyone is just gonna lose these, right?”
“Chill,” she says. “They’re just trying to make everyone more comfortable.”
Across the table, I think I see Mark writing “Lee” in his first spot.
“This is the first year we’ve done Camp Connection,” says the woman up front, “and we are honored to have all of you here to share it with us. So mix, mingle, and have fun!”
More cheering and then, inexplicably, she leads us in a rendition of “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which no one really knows all the words to. It must be a camp song.