BROOKLYN, 1985
The summer after sixth grade, all my friends at the prep school I attended went to sleepaway tennis camp. One night they called me and told me that one of them had a boyfriend and his name was Trevor, from somewhere in the Midwest, and would I like to talk to him, and Trevor got on the phone with me and I was happy they were including me—I didn’t go to any camp that summer—and excited to enter an age where the boys we liked could become our boyfriends.
Later, during the school year, I was eating ice cream on the steps in front of the tennis courts and I heard Trevor’s voice; I’d remembered his voice because it was so deep and grown-up, and it had made me feel grown-up, too. But he wasn’t Trevor, and he wasn’t from the Midwest. He was John something from our dumb school. He had been helping my friends in some prank wherein I am somehow tricked into thinking one of them has a boyfriend. As far as pranks go, it was not the most clever; I still don’t quite know what the goal of it was—how tricking me into thinking my friend had a boyfriend was supposed to somehow humiliate me or be hilarious. Whatever the desired effect of it was, whatever its goal, I thought only of how they must have laughed over my excitement and my gullibility. I confronted my friends that day, and they said that you’d have to have been there, you’d have to have been at tennis camp in order to understand why it was so funny.