*****

“Jed, you have 10 minutes before I expect you to be in bed.” No answer. “Josiah Bartlet, are you listening? In 10 minutes, you are going to sleep. And at 6 o’clock tomorrow morning we are pulling out of that driveway, and you will make do with whatever you’ve packed.”

A sulky 15-year-old clomped down the stairs. “Tell me one more time why I’m suffering this indignity.”

“Because it builds character. Are you anywhere close to being packed?”

“I think my character is fine already.” There were few things in life Jed had anticipated with less joy than this week at camp.

Sarah Bartlet sighed. She didn’t understand her eldest son; with his nose always buried in books and his head in the clouds, he didn’t *do* the things his brother did. She hoped a week at camp would toughen him up — if he survived.

“John, tell your brother camp is good for him."

“Oh yeah, it’s great.” John didn’t look up from his comic book. Sarah glared at him, but he didn’t notice (or pretended he didn’t).

“If it’s so great,” Jed countered, “why isn’t John going too?” Not that he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of a week free of his pesky and antagonistic brother.

“He has to attend summer school.” Sarah glared at her younger son, and Jed felt a momentary thrill that he would not suffer the constant pressure from their parents that John was sure to endure.

“So I’m being punished for being smarter than John? I mean, theoretically, if I had failed three classes and had to go to summer school too, I wouldn’t be going to camp.”

Sarah had no answer for that. She resorted regretfully to her “because I’m your mother, that’s why,” prerogative. “Jed, you now have 5 minutes. If you want to get to Camp Wampanoag with anything other than the clothes you’re wearing, I suggest you get to it.”

The next morning, Sarah risked a glance at Jed as they sped along the highway. He read the same US history book he’d been absorbed in since they left the house. “Jed,” she asked a bit plaintively, “are you going to read all the way there?”

He looked up at her. “What else would I do, Mother?” he asked. Her suspicion that he honestly couldn’t think of an alternative made her want to scream, but she didn’t know if she wanted to scream at him or at herself.

“We could talk, Josiah,” she said. “Some mothers and sons talk.”

“Oh. Sure.” Jed loved his mother, and they got along far better than he did with his father, but he appreciated more than she how little they had in common, which never failed to depress him but about which he was at a loss as to what to do. For a moment they sat in silence, unsure what to say. Then Jed brightened. “I’m reading some fascinating things about the lost colony at Roanoke—“

Sarah Bartlet sighed heavily. She thought of telling him to forget it, then realized this might be the best chance she’d get. “What about it, dear?”

******

Joe draped his legs down the concrete steps at the back of the Camp Wampanoag dining hall. “Last day of freedom, boys,” he told his fellow counselors. The next load of campers would arrive the next morning.

Dave, Hal, Pat, and Neil gathered around him. Hal checked to make sure nobody was watching, then distributed the expressly forbidden cigarettes that were the only thing that got them through the summers.

“This is the worst week, too,” Dave said grimly.

“Which week?” Joe lit his cigarette and watched the smoke drift into the muggy air.

“Big Babies.”

“Aw, shit!” Neil ran a hand over his cropped hair. Touted in camp brochures as “Experience Week,” this stifling session at the end of July was known among the staff as “Big Baby Week” because it consisted of children between 13 and 16 who had never been to camp before. Almost without exception these were clingy mama’s boys, nerdy intellectuals of both sexes, and gawky girls allergic to everything. “Who’s got it off?” He looked around to see which of his companions broke into the uncontrollable grin that meant they’d drawn a pass from this descent into hell.

“McGarry,” Dave answered promptly.

“Lucky bastard,” Pat muttered. “Think he’d swap with me?”

“No,” Hal said. “He’s gonna swap with me.”

“Yeah?” Neil said. “And how are you gonna do that, nimrod? You’ve already had your week off; what are you gonna offer him?” Hal shrugged.

“Forget it, men,” Joe said. “He probably won’t swap with anybody, but if he does, he’ll do it with me.” No one bothered to ask why. Things just happened that way. Joe was undeniably the leader of the male counselors, and whatever he wanted he usually got.

“Where is McGarry, anyway?” Neil looked around as though expecting the absent youth to materialize out of the air.

Joe grinned wolfishly. “Visiting his new girlfriend.”

“Uh-uh!” Pat exclaimed. “Who?”

Joe smiled and refused to answer. At 18 and a half he was the oldest counselor, and he felt somewhat fraternal toward Leo, who at nearly 16 was the youngest. “Shit, you guys realize some of the campers this week might be older than McGarry?”

The others pondered this, then laughed. “I had not thought of that,” Dave said. They were still laughing as the young man who had been the subject of their musings wandered across their line of vision from the general area of the women’s cabins.

“McGarry!” Joe called, waving him over.

Leo waved and jogged up to them. “Hey, guys.” He did not sit but put his foot on the second step and propped an elbow on his knee. It looked terribly uncomfortable to Pat but somehow seemed fitting for Leo.

“Hey,” Joe greeted him. “How’s Jenny?”

Leo blushed furiously, and the others hooted. “Jenny? Lovely Jenny O’Brian from Cabin 12? McGarry, you old dog!”

Hal offered Leo a cigarette, which he declined. Joe took it from Hal and regarded his young friend as he lit it. “So, McGarry, I hear you drew the pass this week.”

Leo hated the week off and wished he didn’t have to take one, but administration worried about counselor burnout, so everyone took the week. He usually stayed on grounds, swimming and reading a lot and hanging around with the camp physician. “Yeah.”

“The boys and me, we’re pretty jealous about that.” Leo understood that. The other boys had normal families, their homes were close, and most of them had girlfriends waiting in quaint hometowns nestled in picturesque foothills. At least, he had that image of what other people’s lives must be like. He, on the other hand, was packed up every summer by his mother and sent with his sisters from Chicago to their grandparents in Boston; grandparents who, in turn, shipped them here — or had, until Josey pitched an unholy fit last summer and Elizabeth fell into a nest of carpenter ants. Leo was the only McGarry not harboring deep resentments toward Camp Wampanoag. Joe went on, “And we wondered if we could interest you in a swap.”

“Sure.” He may have jumped on the offer a bit quickly, but anything was better than lurking around camp trying to make sure his grandparents didn’t know he had a week off. And now he had Jenny to stick around for.

“The only question is who you're gonna give the week to?”

Leo laughed nervously, fully comprehending the challenge. “Who wants it?”

“Who doesn’t?” Neil countered.

“I don’t,” Dave said. “My parents are in Switzerland for a month; I’m stuck here.”

“OK, well, rich-boy aside,” Joe said, “I know I want it, and I believe Hal, Neil, and Pat have expressed some interest in it. So, whaddya say, McGarry? Who gets the great big prize of having Big Baby Week off?”

He’d forgotten it was Big Baby week. He shuddered, but he had committed now. He could give it to Hal, who’d already taken his week, but administration would find some other way to make him take a week off. Neil wasn’t his best friend in the world, but as the counselor in the cabin next to Leo’s could make life painful if angered. Pat was the gentlest in the group and got picked on for being so sweet; doing something nice for him had its appeal. Still, he could really only bestow this favor on one person. “Joe.”

Neil and Hal groaned, and Joe leaned back against the steps like a king on his throne. “What did I tell you, boys?” He shaded his eyes with his hand and peered up at Leo. “I do appreciate it, McGarry,” he drawled as he rose from the stoop. “Come on. We’ll go tell the Mighty Ones we’re switching.”

*****

Dave pigeon-holed this one easily. Short, with thin glasses tucked into his shirt pocket and an enormous book tucked under his arm. Well, Dave thought, better bookworms than crybabies. “Welcome to Camp Wampanoag.”

“Thanks,” the kid said without enthusiasm.

“Name?” Dave prompted.

“Bartlet.” Jed was scanning the horizon for anything that looked like either something intetresting to occupy his time this week or a convenient escape route. Nothing promising presented itself.

A sullen one, Dave thought as he rifled through the registration forms. “Josiah?” Man, with a name like that no wonder the kid was a geek.

He heard sympathy in the counselor’s tone. “Jed.”

“OK.” He handed the kid his papers. “You’re gonna go to Cabin 4. Leo’s cabin. Give ‘im a wave, McGarry.”

Jed looked where the young man at the table pointed. An easy-going guy with sandy blond hair waved amiably at him. He gave a half-hearted wave back. He couldn’t get out of this, but at least his counselor looked all right. With a sigh, he turned back to Sarah. “OK. Let’s get my stuff to Cabin 4. The sooner I’m settled in, the sooner it’ll be over.”

She had to smile at her adolescent prophet of doom. “That’s the spirit.”

*****

He couldn’t say why, but Leo liked Jed Bartlet. It wasn’t that he was smart; a lot of the tome-toting campers were smart. And it wasn’t that he was funny; most of these outcasts had perfected sarcasm as a defense mechanism. Something about the way Jed let people in and kept them out at the same time drew people to him, perhaps looking for the way in. Leo tried time and again to get him to open up, but while he talked enough during meals and the obligatory camper-bonding times like bonfires and swims, he kept his conversation superficial: funny stories he’d heard second- and third-hand, tidbits of useless information about long-dead ancestors who helped found New Hampshire. He never went deeper or revealed anything personal. He went nowhere without that book, but Leo, in an effort to get him to expand his experiences, didn’t ask about it. Instead he’d try to start conversations like, “So, Jed, tell me about your family.”

The kid shrugged. “I have a brother, a mother, and a father. The usual.”

Leo shook his head. “Not totally usual. I have two sisters, a mother, and no father.”

At least he piqued Jed’s interest. “What happened to your father?”

Normally he didn’t share details of his personal life, but if he wanted Jed to open up to him, he’d better be equally honest. He looked Jed in the eye and said, “He was a drunk. Came home one night, fought with my mother, then went out to the garage and shot himself in the head. I found the body.”

“Jesus,” Jed whispered. That was a whiz-bang conversation stopper; there was no place to go after that sort of revelation.

Another time, Leo tried religion. “So, Jed, you believe in God?”

“Well, sure.”

“Catholic?”

“Of course.”

OK, so that wasn’t headed anywhere.

Sometimes one of the other counselors passed by Leo and Jed sitting on the steps of their cabin not quite connecting. Dave pointed and laughed; Neil and Hal shook their heads in bewilderment, and even Pat pulled him aside later and said, “Give up, McGarry. The kid’s totally inside his head. You’ll never get to him.”

Jenny understood, or she said she did. She amazed and befuddled him; this sweet, gentle girl with the beautiful smile who had, for unfathomable reasons, taken a liking to him. If he frustrated her with the amount of time he spent talking about this nerdy kid in his cabin, she didn’t say anything about it.

Finally it was early afternoon two days before the week ended, and Leo was walking from Jenny’s cabin to his own when he witnessed a site he wouldn’t have imagined possible. On a log at the edge of the lake, slapping mosquitos off his arms and legs, sat Jed Bartlet — without his book. “Jed!” Leo called out before he stopped to think he might run the kid off like a spooked rabbit.

But Jed stayed, even smiled as Leo came over. “Hi, Leo.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Activity now?”

“Please don’t harass me about that. I can only do so much swimming when they won’t let us past the 20-foot rope; I’ve been banned from archery because I keep almost shooting other campers, and I am so terrified of horses you couldn’t get me within 2 miles of the stables. So I’m just, you know...enjoying Nature.”

“Where’s your book?”

He shrugged. “I finished it.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Jed looked blank. “That thing was, like, 800 pages long.”

“748.”

“Well, if that’s all...” They sat silently a moment.

“Were you at Jenny’s?”

Leo blushed. “Yeah.”

“She’s nice,” Jed said. “I like her.”

“Me too.”

That started Jed laughing, and Leo found he had to join in. After they collected themselves, Jed offered, “Listen, Leo, I know what you’ve been trying to do this week. Amongst the forced character building my mother and brother were so keen on, you’ve tried to be a real friend, and I appreciate that. I just...I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out the lay of the land, so to speak, and where I fit in it.”

Leo leaned back to stare at Jed more fully. This was the longest speech he’d gotten out of the kid all week, and it packed quite a whallop. “Are you sure you’re only 15?”

Jed laughed. “Painfully sure.” He stared across the deceptively flat surface of the lake. He could almost believe he could step onto it and walk away from everything that was wrong with this life. From his father and brother, from the thoughts that never stopped racing around his brain, from the fact that he would never, no matter how hard he tried, fit in (which was why he didn’t try too hard). “There’s one other thing,” he said finally. “You’ve been great to us this week. I know it would’ve been easier to go along with the other couselors on the ‘Big Baby Week’ thing, but—“

“How’d you know about that?” Leo asked sharply. The other couselors had a serious talking to coming their way.

Jed shrugged as though it couldn’t matter less. “We listen. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for allowing us a little dignity.”

Leo was livid at the idea of anyone “allowing” someone else their dignity but decided to put that away for now and to address Jed’s unspoken question instead. “No problem. To tell you the truth, I do that because...because I’m probably the biggest geek of all.”

Jed’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really. In fact, there’s one question I’ve been dying to ask you all week.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell me about the book.”

Four and a half hours later Jenny had to come and collect them for dinner. The two young men sat on their log, now falling into early evening darkness, engrossed in a conversation she figured had been going on for hours. Jed talked, gesturing wildly, while Leo sat completely sideways on the log to face him, enraptured. The passionate fire of a man who knew how right he was lit Jed's eyes; a quieter flame that had given birth to a great idea lit Leo’s.

“Leo!” she called, chilled by a change that had come over Leo in the few hours since she saw him last. At the sound of her voice, Leo looked up, grinning and waving, and for a minute she could almost believe he was the same kid he’d been four and a half hours ago, that she’d imagined the whole thing. But when she saw the disappointment in both their faces when she yelled, “You’re late for dinner. Everyone’s waiting for you,” she knew she hadn’t been wrong.

Jed shrugged and headed for the dining hall. “I’ll see you there,” he said, pulling ahead to give the shy new couple their privacy.

“Jenny!” Leo laughed and spun her around. “Jenny,” he whispered, slipping his arm around her waist as they walked, “the kid is amazing. He and I talked for — my God! Four and a half hours. Jenny, the things he knows about American history and politics — he’s gonna do great things someday; I’d bet every cent I have on it.” He watched Jed Bartlet’s back. “And we’re gonna be there to see it all.”

Jenny watched Leo’s smile, and the way the reflections of ten thousand ideas flashed every second in his eyes, and she knew, with a sinking heart, that he was absolutely right.