Where in the World Wednesday: Smart Camp at Northwestern, part 3

It's Classy in Philadelphia's Where in the World Wednesday!

The idea of WITWW is to post a picture of you in someplace in the world... it doesn't have to be somewhere foreign or tropical. Just a picture of you somewhere that you consider traveling. It might even be somewhere in your own hometown! Feel free to get creative and post where you WISH you could travel, old scanned pictures of vacations from years ago or even feel free to repeat a destination with different photos! Get creative.

The past two weeks, I've chronicled my first summer at smart camp at Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development.

This week I'll recount my third and final session of camp, in which I took literary analysis, had my first kiss, and fell in camp love with a boy whose heart I ended up breaking.

When I got back to camp in the summer of 1996, I discovered that three of my bestests from the previous summer were sharing a quadruple room right down the hall from mine. I pretty much spent every waking moment in their room and barely spoke two words to my own roommate.


Why yes, I am wearing my Taz baby tee from the previous summer. Note, however, that I grew out my frizzy bangs.

Minus bangs and expander, plus braces. Still plenty awkward.
There's not much to say about my class. I spent far more time worrying about boys and friends than I did about homework. Indeed, by the end of the first week I had kissed a boy for the first time in my life. One of my friends later overheard him telling another boy that he didn't really like me, but that if he could "get some" it would be worth it. I had never been so disgusted in my life--I was 13 and I wasn't planning on doling out any "some." No sir!

Do I look like that kind of girl? ---------->
(Picture from one of our dances.)

Despite getting burned, I was still looking for some sweet adolescent love. Soon enough, I found it--with a boy I knew and had made fun of the previous summer for wearing glasses so thick that they made his eyes look distorted. We called him Big Glasses, or BG for short. It turns out that in the year between camp sessions, BG had started wearing contacts and had gotten his braces taken off. In short, BG had transformed into a creature so beautiful that he took my breath away.


We were the camp version of "going steady." We even traded each other watches! He scratched up the glass on mine, but I didn't care. Who could be mad at that face?

We never progressed beyond holding hands (we didn't even kiss!), but we did have a "marriage announcement" in the all-camp magazine (four pieces of paper folded together) that my friends and I edited together and passed out at the end of the session:

[Heidi Renée] and [BG] got married while bungee jumping off the Mackinac Bridge on August 7. Luckily, the couple survived to go on a Caribbean cruise for their honeymoon.

I pretty much adored him. I didn't have e-mail at home yet, so we mailed flirty letters to each other throughout the new school year. I covered the remaining pages of my camp journal with "I love [BG] forever" and little hearts.

In January 1997, after five months apart and contact only via letters, he sent me a lovesick tome that "popped the question": would I be his girlfriend? I wish I had kept it, but it has long since been trashed. I responded, according to my journal, with a "rather harsh" letter pointing out all of the reasons why we couldn't be together. Namely, that he lived an hour away from me and I couldn't possibly maintain a long-distance relationship. (Said the girl who ended up marrying a sailor who can be gone for months at a time.)

My mom got an e-mail address soon after that, so we continued the debate electronically. He said that he understood, but he thought that I was being unfair. Really, I was just being a fickle 14-year-old who didn't know the first thing about having a boyfriend. A mutual friend told me that he constantly asked her if he had a chance with me throughout the spring months.

In July, when he was getting ready to head back to camp for a third summer (but I wasn't), he sent me this e-mail:

I will miss you still...I pretty much wrote to tell you that no matter how far away we are, or how long it has been since we wrote/saw each other...I will Always love you...I just thought that you would like to know that...

[...]

Heidi...I will always love you, no matter what happens, and that will never change in my heart...

Yours always

[BG]

Swoon. What was my glitch, right? The poor guy was totally in love with me for a year and I turned him down cold. Who knew I was such a heartbreaker?

Addendum: Facebook tells me that BG has gained weight (um, like me), balded significantly, and still wears those damn glasses sometimes. I still think that his wistful e-mail is one of the sweetest things a guy has ever written to me, though.

But not as sweet as this.