Something I learned as a camp counselor is that striking up a conversation with a kid is like striking a match. With my camper Lily, I roamed around in the dark at first, grasping at Disney princesses, sports, books, best friends, and favorite animals. Then she said she was the fastest, faster than her older brother, and the sparks didn’t take long to fly. Soon we were flashing through the dining hall to the music room and then to archery and arts and crafts. I think if she had a motto, it would be “Why walk when you can run?” I lost every race, and, admittedly, not all of them on purpose.
After yet another crushing defeat, we were panting by the cabins when Lily said she wanted to change into her Sally Skellington shirt. Sally is a character from The Nightmare Before Christmas, with a distinct patchwork body held together by stitches. “I’m just like Sally, see?” Lily said, and asked her mom if she could show me the scars from her surgery. When Lily was born, she had been diagnosed with a coarctation of the aorta and later an atrial septal defect. She had back-to-back surgeries and both her lungs collapsed.
At camp, some of the older campers during Heart Week were reluctant to go to the pool because of their scars. As we get older, we might assign deeper meanings to scars as badges of survival. Or perhaps we hate them because they act as reminders of our own fragility. Maybe they make us self conscious at the pool. We try to hide them like they’re tattoos we didn’t ask for. But to a kid, to Lily, they were just an extra seam or two, and that made her like Sally—a heroine.
When I think of Lily, I think of dumping glitter in her hair at arts and crafts, dancing in tutus with her on stage at the camp talent show, and putting her shoes on the way she liked: left shoe on the right foot, right shoe on the left foot. I think of a kid being a kid, in ways that had nothing to do with her scars.
She showed me the shiny pink remnant of her fight for her life and then tugged me out the door: “Let’s go boating and fishing next. Race ya!”
Emily Liu
Atlanta, Georgia