When I was in the fourth grade, I went to basketball camp. It was in New Hampshire. Henniker, NH, if I remember correctly. It was about — what? — an hour or so away from where I lived. No matter, it was, at ten years of age, the longest time I think I was ever away from home. Not that I knew it then. I was 10 years old was what I knew, and I was off to spend a week playing basketball with a whole bunch of people I already knew. Basketball camp wasn’t away from home, but rather, because my friends would be there, an extension of home.

I would room with my best friend, Adam. You all know him. He’s the psycho that writes The Simplification of Adam. We’ve known each other since just about birth, which means we knew each other when we were ten. He went to a different school from me, but I got to know some of the people who went to his school too, through him, so even though no one from my school went to basketball camp, I knew most of the other kids anyway, through him.

There were a whole bunch of kids from my hometown there that year. The camp had kids from everywhere, but there was definitely a Swampscott contingent. It felt like we had our own wing of one of the dormitories. There were some other people on the floor, I think, but they blended in pretty quick so I don’t really remember who they were. As far as I knew, everyone on the floor was from Swampscott, even the kids who weren’t.

Adam and I had another roommate too. A kid named Greg. For the life of me, I can’t think of his last name. Doucette! Douce! DOUCE! Greg Doucette. A big kid. He was one of Adam’s close friends from the other school. I’d known him for a couple years, I think, and we got along all right. We laughed a lot. I remember his laugh. There are other things about Greg that stick out. Like the time he stood up for a kid in a fistfight and got kicked in the balls for it. A big, nice kid.

I think all three of us may have been on the same team that year. You gotta realize that we went to basketball camp a bunch of times, and those years all kind of blend together now, twenty years later. I think we won the championship that year too. If I remember, in the three years I was at basketball camp, the team I was on won the championship during two of them. I think I have the trophies sitting around somewhere.

Anyway, back in the dorm, the three of us had neighbors. A couple of brothers, the O’Connors. Jay and Leigh. For those of you paying attention, that’s the same Leigh who wrote yesterday’s post and the one from a couple of weeks back about McCann Melton. This is where we first met. Both Jay and Leigh were great. Funny as hell. At some point during the week, Leigh and I skipped a whole bunch of stuff to sit around and talk. I forgot the subject, but he reminded me just this past weekend. He said we were talking about building tunnels underneath Swampscott, going from our houses to the ocean so that we could escape in case of attack. I assume we meant the Russians. Later that year, Leigh would show up on my Pop Warner football team, and we’d get to be good friends back home too.

Leigh and Adam didn’t have the best relationship that year. They knew each other, and I think they even liked each other at the beginning of the week. Then, for some reason, Adam and I tried to convince Leigh that Adam was from Australia. I’m pretty sure that Leigh believed it, if only for a little while, and when he found out different, Leigh held it against him. Plus, Adam had long fingernails, and if a kid with long fingernails is defending you in basketball, let me tell you, you automatically don’t like that kid. They didn’t get into a fight or anything, but they didn’t get along with each other the way I got along with each of them individually. Which is to say they were friends, but mostly friends through me.

On the last night of camp, some kid got homesick. He basically locked himself in his closet with his teddy bear. Plus, and I swear to God on this, I remember him wearing red pajamas. Can you picture that? A kid, in a closet, with a teddy bear, in red pajamas? It’s right out of a fucking storybook. Everybody was standing around the closet trying to talk him out. His roommate was standing right in front of the closet and talking to the rest of us as if the kid couldn’t hear him. Calling him crazy and stuff. As if that’s what would help the kid out of the closet.

For some reason, Leigh and I decided that we would be in charge of the situation. I don’t remember exactly how we convinced anyone else of that, but people seemed to go along with it, almost as if they were happy that someone else would deal with the situation. I don’t think we talked the kid out of the closet, but we did get him to stop crying and to open the closet door. We thought that was good enough. He wasn’t hiding anymore, at least. The last image I have him is of him a on pillow in the closet, teddy bear under his arm, thumb in his mouth, but I might be making that last part up, about the thumb. Either way, he should have had his thumb in his mouth, because he was acting like little fucking baby.

As Leigh and I walked back to our dorm rooms, feeling good about what we had accomplished, we came up with a plan to notify each other in case there was a development in the situation. Normally, we would have been able to walk outside our rooms and knock on each other’s door, but we were coming up on lights out, and no one was allowed in the hallways after lights out. As neighbors, however, we were able to communicate both through the wall and between our windows. We decided that if there any developments in the situation, all we would do is knock on our shared wall, and then the other one would go to the window to find out what was happening. We thought it was a brilliant plan, and we parted ways feeling good about what we had done and what we would do. I don’t have any memory of what we thought might happen. As if the kid coming out of the closet would necessitate us urgently communicating about that fact. But we had a plan. Just in case.

I don’t think I was in the room for more than fifteen minutes when I heard Leigh’s knock on the wall. I was sitting on the bunk-bed, mostly listening for it, and when it finally came, I jumped out and ran full blast to the window, seeing too late that the window was still closed. I ducked my head as much as I could at the last moment, and took the full brunt of the window’s force on my forehead. I bounced back, as if I had just run into—well, a window that didn’t break. Instead of shards of glass cutting my face and neck and my head plunged through a window, I was looking at a spidered-window. Where my head had hit, there was a tight smattering of fractured glass, and then, jutting out to each of the corners, webs of white lines. As I was growing up, I told people I got the scar when I put my head through a window, but the truth is I got the scar on a window.

I turned around and looked at Adam and Greg. Adam’s eyes squinted and Greg’s eyes widened. Adam wanted to get a closer look, but before he could, Greg slammed out the door and screamed, “COUNSELOR!” I put my hand to my forehead, and pulled it away to see blood. I looked at Adam again. He looked a little grossed out. I looked back at the blood. And then the tears started to flow.

I remember being ushered around the hallways at breakneck speed. Kids banging on every door they came to, screaming “COUNSELOR!” One of the other Swampscott kids walked up to me in his tighty-whities (well, at that point, it was just “underwear;” we’d never heard of boxers), and I remember thinking, despite the fact that I was bleeding from the head, how weird it was that a kid my age actually slept in just his underwear.

We finally stumbled into a room that was full of counselors. I can still see all of them turning toward us. We’re a giant crowd of screaming kids pushing along some other kid who has blood dripping down his face. A lot of the grownups didn’t move, but a bunch of them jumped from their chairs and came right over. One of them was a gym teacher at Adam’s school. Miss Shinay, or however you spell that. In a whole camp full of kids, it had to be kids from her town. She knew it from the moment they barged in the door. She went into automatic mode. These kids would be safe.

They laid me down on my back and Miss Shinay went to work on my forehead. Who knows from where, but she had bandages and tape in her hand. She cleaned me up and put a bandage right over it. Then her and Mr. Squires (another Swampscott adult) took me to the hospital. I don’t remember being in the waiting room that long. I don’t suspect Henniker, NH has a lot of emergency cases. I do remember the doctor saying to me, “Whoever put on this bandage did a heck of a job. You’re not going to need stitches because of it.” I remember Miss Shinay looking very proud of that over the doctor’s shoulder. Though I kind of always wanted to have stitches, I was happy because she had done a good job and someone had told her so.

When we got back to the camp, my coach took me up to the room of one of the camp’s co-owners, Don Nelson (the other was Satch Sanders), a former Boston Celtic and, at that time, the coach of the Golden State Warriors. Don Nelson opened up one of the drawers in his bureau and took out a huge T-shirt, the front of which had a picture of a dinosaur, under which it read “Basketball-a-saurus,” and then gave an archeological description of the lifestyle of the Basketball-a-sauri (”they are usually found dribbling and shooting,” or something like that). He turned the T-shirt around, took a magic marker off his desk, and wrote, “To Kyle, Get well! Don Nelson.” I was the happiest kid on the planet.

Twenty years later, the only people who remember or can even notice the scar on my forehead are Adam and Leigh. Even Dawn, the love of my life, a woman who has looked deeply at face and head more times than you’d be comfortable hearing, never noticed the scar. It’s not that it’s not there. It’s that only Adam and Leigh can still see it.

And this past weekend, we had them both up to Vermont. Leigh’s married now and Adam’s engaged. It’s twenty years later, and we’re all still friends. That’s pretty fucking cool.