Crying

My shift was over; I’d spent the last three hours keeping a lookout on the female side of camp. I grabbed my toothbrush from my bunk, careful to avoid waking my campers, and went over to the bathhouse. My phone read 1 a.m.. I blinked groggily into the mirror, listening to the mayflies hum on the ceiling, and wet my toothbrush. And it was like that—with the end of a toothbrush sticking out of my mouth and paste frothing around my lips—that I first saw Sarah cry.

For years, Sarah had been my rock at camp: I went to her when I felt isolated by my straight peers, when my chronic back pain was at its worst, when I didn’t know what to do with my campers—it was my first year as a counselor. Now here she was, crying to me.

She told me about her friend Jo, who’d just left camp to start field hockey at college, and how she felt that all of her friends were leaving after their senior year. As her eyes welled, Sarah choked through her sobs, “I shouldn’t be crying to you. The only places you’re allowed to cry at camp are in your bunk after everyone else has fallen asleep, or alone in the shower stall.”

To me, Sarah always seemed in charge of every situation and confident in herself. If she cried, or ever showed that something was wrong, Cate was someone who always cried alone. Yet in that bathroom at one in the morning, Sarah was crying—and she was crying in front of me.

I’d never felt more frightened in my life.

And it was then that I realized there wasn’t that much of a difference between Sarah and me: just two years. Two years of being a counselor. Two years of learning confidence. Two years of taking charge. Two years of crying. I felt those two years begin to shrink as she cried to me, because growing up isn’t just having the courage to cry to someone instead of in your bed at night or alone in a shower stall; it’s about having the courage to be someone’s rock when they’re the one who needs to cry.