The Stars in the Sky

Chapter 38: Trust

"Just five more days," I whispered Sunday night, lying in bed, leaning up against Will. My boyfriend. "The kids leave after breakfast on Friday."

"Yeah," he answered, in his low rumble, against my neck, as he sucked on it, gliding his fingers up and down my bare arm. Letting out a sigh, he wrapped his arms around me in a big bear hug. "They gotta get here first, though." He squeezed me tight. "We got this." And I relaxed and enjoyed his comforting warmth, trying to not think any more about the self-imposed sexual moratorium, and then drifted to sleep.

The next morning, a group of kids arrived at Headlands; they were entirely different than any previous group. This time we had twenty-five twelve and thirteen year olds, from a Boys and Girls Club in East Los Angeles. Given the demographics of the area, I was expecting that they would all be Hispanic, like me, and they were.

When the bus arrived, the children and leaders spilled out and I repeated the drill that I had done with the other groups, waving and enthusiastically greeting them. I noticed, immediately, that this group seemed quieter than the group from Oakland, the kids keeping amongst themselves, not chattering as much, and giving each other space, rather than mingling together.

After I met their leaders and chaperones, I took them to the bunkhouses and showed them where they would stay. The kids were more careful about where they were sleeping than the other groups, more reluctant to stake a claim.

One nervous-looking, dark haired girl came up to me in the hall after she had set her duffle bag, sleeping bag, and pillow on a bottom bunk in the room. "I don't want to leave my things here. The door to the room doesn't lock."

"It will be safe, don't worry," I said.

She just looked at me. "Don't you have someplace, you know, safe, I can put them?"

"They'll be safe here," I repeated, and she looked at me skeptically and took off back down to the room. But she made me think. What would it be like if I didn't feel safe? If I didn't trust? This was a group of kids who did not seem like they knew each other very well, which meant that they probably did not trust each other either. We would have to work on that.

After they had all claimed bunks in the bunkhouse, deposited their luggage, and taken a tour of the chow hall, meeting Cookie, I met with them at the picnic tables. I wanted to break the ice. Not only did I need to learn their names, but I also wanted them to loosen up. They were just kids, right? There had to be a way of getting through to them this week.

"Okay, guys," I said. "We are going to play a name game so that I can know who you are and what you like to do." And I explained the game: we would go around in a circle and take turns saying our name and our favorite hobby. It was a game that took more time as we went on because each successive person had to first say the name and hobby of all of the people before him or her, before they introduced themselves. The repetition was a good way to get to know everyone quickly.

I started. "I'm Marie and I like to eat vegan food."

The girl next to me, pretty, with shoulder-length dark hair and glasses, said, "I'm Josephine and I like to listen to music, and this is Marie and she likes to eat vegan food." Then we continued with the next child, and so on.

Once we had gotten most of the way around the circle, the kids were starting to giggle at everyone's hobbies: "I like to eat gummy bears," "I like to play video games," "I like to watch YouTube," "I like to sleep in." Will walked by toward the end and I invited him to join us. Because he was late to the game, he didn't have the advantage of hearing everyone repeating all the names twenty times. He tried to remember the children's names and failed miserably. "This is, uh, Danny—"