Chapter 1

Kenny Evans killed the engine and came to a brake-squealing stop punctuated by a couple of engine backfires in front of the Chief Joseph Lodge and Summer Camp. He was trailing a cloud of white smoke behind his 1961 multicolored VW bus. The beat-up old icon of the hippy sixties, replete with faded psychedelic paint job and peace signs, had to be very near the end of its useful life, and he was both relieved and thankful that it managed to make the hundred and ten-mile trip from the Seattle burbs without incident; i.e., breaking down on the highway, or being pulled over by the Washington State Patrol for polluting the air with a fog of smoking motor oil.

Who knew how many owners the old bus had gone through, and if the odometer was to be believed, it was pushing half a million miles. He was embarrassed to be seen in it, but his wallet was thin and his bank account was empty, and wheels were, after all, wheels. He bought it from a friend a few days earlier for a hundred and fifty bucks - as is, of course – for the express purpose of making this trip. He would have hitch-hiked, had he not needed something voluminous to haul his worldly possessions.

Kenny stepped inside the lodge’s main entrance, and through an open door across the lobby, he saw a prim, officious-looking lady who appeared to be in her fifties sitting behind a desk and tapping away on a computer keyboard. He flashed a friendly smile as he rapped lightly on her door to get her attention.

His smile and his knock went unanswered, but he persisted and said, “Good morning, Ma’am. Can you help me, please?”

She dragged her eyes away from the screen, peered at him over the tops of her granny glasses and asked in a rather bored tone, “You are?”

“My name is Kenny Evans, and I’m one of the new counselors. I was told to be here a day early for some kind of orientation.”

The woman sighed, clearly annoyed at the interruption, and flipped open a manila folder on her desk. She ran a bright pink fingernail down a list of names until she found his.

Peering again over the top of her glasses, she said, “I’ll need your driver’s license, your social security card, your First Aid card, and proof that all the required vaccinations are current.” She reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a form and slid it across her desk.

“And you’ll need to fill out this W-4.”

Kenny had come prepared. He took out his wallet and handed her his credentials. From his shirt pocket, he retrieved a small blue booklet containing the dates of all his vaccinations and laid it on her desk. As he filled out the W-4, the woman made copies of all the documents and handed them back, instructing, “Drive down the road marked Nez Perse Trail to the parking lot and leave your vehicle there. Follow the arrows and markers up to the dining hall. Barbara Hellman, our head counselor, should be there setting up for the orientation. She’ll tell you what cabin you’re assigned to.”

And to forestall any further wasting of her time, she added, “If you have any questions, ask Barbara.”

With that, she turned away and directed her attention back to her computer, making it abundantly clear that he was dismissed.

Kenny turned toward the door thinking, “Sheesh! What an ice queen! I hope they don’t allow her anywhere near the kids.”

He drove down the mountain through the tall pines to a gravel parking lot where he nosed the bus in between a mud-spattered Jeep Wrangler and an old Datsun pickup badly in need of some body work and a paint job. He found the trail, and then the building that apparently served as the camp’s dining hall and general meeting room.

Inside, a fit-looking woman dressed in khaki shorts and a camp T-shirt sporting the iconic portrait of the famous Nez Perse chief (Kenny wondered briefly if they had to pay some kind of royalty to the tribe for the use of that image), and red Nikes, and who appeared to be in her mid to late twenties, was collating some printed material on one of the trestle dining tables. When the screen door banged shut behind him, she looked up and smiled.

“Hi! You must be one of the newbies. Kenny, isn’t it? I’m Barb Hellman.”

“Ah, a friendly face at last,” he thought. Aloud, he said, “Uh, right. Kenny Evans. Am I the first one here?”

“Nope. Let me show you on this map where you’ll be bunking. You’ve still got time to haul your gear to your cabin before the staff meeting gets started. I guess you know the kids don’t arrive until tomorrow morning, don’t you?”

“I do, now.”

He stepped up beside her and bent over the table to look at a Xerox of a crudely-drawn map as she pointed to where they were, then traced her finger along a dotted line to the cabins near the lake shore. It wasn’t easy to keep his eyes on the map because it was apparent from the sway of her ample breasts and the visible nipple bumps on her T-shirt, that she was sans bra. And she smelled nice; a pleasant blend of girl sweat and scented soap. Oddly, her general aura, for lack of a better word, reminded him of something or someone, but exactly what or who eluded him.

She tapped a square on the map indicating a cabin and said, “You’ll be in number six with the fourteen-year-olds. Each cabin has eight bunks and a counselor’s room on the end, so you’ll have at least a little bit of privacy. Why don’t you go ahead and get settled, then be back here in, say, forty-five minutes? We’ll be serving lunch while Joshua Thomas and I go over the rules. Josh is the senior counselor for the boys and I’m the senior counselor for the girls, but we also do most of the administrative stuff.”

As she handed him the map, he kept thinking something about her was vaguely familiar, but he still couldn’t pin it down.

“It’s nice to meet you, Barb. Thanks for the map, and I guess I’ll see you again in about forty-five minutes.”

Once he got his gear hauled to number six, the last in a line of cabins strung out a few yards from the lakeshore, it took him all of about five minutes to get settled into his room. All he had by way of baggage was a couple of changes of clothing in a backpack, a shaving kit, his MacBook and his smart phone. Plus, his pride and joy, a gift from a very special person, his Diamondback mountain bike. His clothing barely took up two drawers of a three-drawer bureau, and his MacBook Pro, a surprise graduation gift from his dad whom he hadn’t seen in over ten years, took up most of the space on the small desk.

On the back of the map Barb had given him was the password for the camp’s high-speed wi-fi connection, giving him at least some hope he’d have access to his favorite porn sites.

Only one bar flashed on his phone. Iffy at best.

There was a pillow, a stack of bed linens, a blanket and a bath towel folded up on the institutional single bed.

He still had a few minutes before the meeting, so he tossed the linens onto the chair and flopped down on the bare mattress to rest his back from the two-hour drive. The last three miles on a poorly-maintained dirt road had rattled his bones, and he worried that the bus would shake apart before he found the Lodge.

As he lay with his hands behind his head, looking up at the slowly rotating fan suspended from an unpainted pinewood ceiling, he thought to himself, “I guess this isn’t gonna be so bad. Not a hell of a lot of money, but at least I get three squares a day and a clean bed to sleep on. Fourteen-year-olds, she said. Well, I think I can handle that. Probably a bunch of spoiled rotten, poor little rich kids, but if I establish my authority right off the bat, make ‘em believe I’m not averse to kicking a little butt ... figuratively, of course ... they ought to fall right in line.”

Kenneth Allan Evans was eighteen years old. Just. The day he graduated from high school two weeks earlier, he moved out of his mom’s house just as he promised her he would. It was a mutual agreement; she didn’t want him there and he didn’t want to be there. They had never gotten along, and the miserable harpy seemed hell-bent on making his life a constant challenge. She’d always been a world-class ball buster, which was the main reason his father moved out when the boy was just seven years old. Kenny laid all the blame for the split on his mother, and from that moment, he could hardly wait until he was old enough to move away like his father had. Although, in truth, from the age of fifteen, he’d actually spent very little time in that house.

The lead on the camp counselor job had been given to him a month before graduation by the woman who had, over the last three years, played the defining role in his life. From the day she invited him into her home just two doors down from his mom’s house, he was her devoted friend and student, and he grew to love her more that he’d ever loved anyone in his young life. And she returned that love in so many ways. She was everything to him; friend, foster mother, mentor, spiritual guide. Lover.

Either his biological mother never knew about his relationship with the woman, or she did and just didn’t give a damn. The latter was a distinct possibility because, for some reason, she had always resented the child’s intrusion in her life, and the less she had to do with him, the happier she was. Kenny could never fathom why she felt the way she did, he just knew she always had, and from his earliest childhood, he knew instinctively to keep his distance.

After his regular school day, and all day, every day, when there was no school, the lady who had introduced herself as Laura, a swarthy, ebony-haired, exotic woman of indeterminate age (twenties? thirties? forties?), devoted herself to the boy’s education, teaching him in-depth lessons on so many subjects. But to balance the intense education, she also played games with him, prepared meals for him, read stories to him, and, as a special treat, often plied him with wonderful homemade cookies and sweet, aromatic tea. From this wonderful woman, he learned of life and love, art and music, science and philosophy, even the art of friendly conversation. It was like there was nothing she couldn’t teach him, and over the short span of time they practically lived together, he was truly enchanted. Truly.

As Kenny developed through and beyond puberty, Laura gave him an education far in advance of anything his peers would ever be exposed to. Over those three years, she oversaw ... no, it’s more like she managed and directed the development of his mind, his social skills, and even his sexual skills. When she began schooling him on every aspect, every nuance of the art of making love, he took to it as the most wonderful and the most natural thing in the world, and he eagerly absorbed every detail of every lesson.

By the time Kenny and Laura parted company a month before his graduation from high school, the charming, enigmatic lady knew she had created in Kenny Evans a true prodigy, her pièces de résistance.

Her departure was sudden and a complete surprise to Kenny. He came home from school to find a moving van in front of her house, and several men loading up her furniture. He rushed up the front steps and into her living room, calling out, “Laura? Laura, what going on? Are you moving? You have to take me with you!”

One of the men loading her furniture asked, “Are you Kenny Evans?”

“Yes, I am. Where’s Laura?”

He handed Kenny an envelope and said, “She left on a plane to Switzerland this morning. She asked me to give you this.”

It was a short note. “Kenny, dearest, you have learned all that I can teach you. Now you must go to the web address I gave you and apply for the position we discussed. It is your destiny, my love. You’re no longer a child, and it’s time to spread your wings and fly. You’re my Cupid. You’re ready! Love, Laura.”

Kenny’s grief over her departure was surprisingly brief. On the third morning, he woke up feeling ready to face the world, and he sensed that, somehow, this was what Laura had been preparing him for all along. He just felt it in his bones. He was ready! For exactly what, he wasn’t sure.

A week after Laura disappeared from his life, Kenny found he was having a very hard time recalling what she looked like, and every succeeding day, it felt more and more like she had been a dream.

A lot of the job’s appeal was that it was out of town, far away from his mother. He followed Laura’s instructions and visited the web site that very same day, and applied for the position of camp counselor. Within a week, he had an in-depth (and rather strange) interview with a woman via Skype, and a week after that, he was contacted by email and given a date to show up at the Chief Joseph Lodge. Just that easy!

The hiring process might have been a little peculiar, but it was going to be his first real job, and it actually paid better than he expected, considering it included room and board. There had to be some special reason Laura wanted him to have that job, but she rarely explained herself. Kenny had always trusted her judgement, and there was no reason not to now.

In the back of his mind, he sometimes harbored some vague thoughts of applying to Washington State University in a year or so, but unless he could qualify for some kind of a grant or a full scholarship, there was no way in hell he could afford it. His mother was certainly no resource, and he wouldn’t have accepted a penny from her if she had offered. There were always student loans, but the idea of finishing college a hundred grand in debt was a bit scary. Maybe working for a year or two and earning a decent reference might help move things along and put him in a better position. He was young, yet. He still had time to work it all out.

Laura had always insisted that he would succeed in his life’s work, whatever that turned out to be. But she never allowed him to become smug, conceited or overconfident. He knew very well that, looks wise, he wasn’t some kind of Adonis, and smarts wise, he was no Steven Hawking, but he also knew that he was by no means a loser in either category. His mentor and lover had often assured him that he was rather handsome and that he possessed a higher than average IQ, so with a little planning, some hard work, and perhaps a soupçon of luck, he didn’t doubt he would do okay for himself.

Overall, Kenny believed his best quality was that he came across to other people as an honest, capable and self-confident young man. He impressed people as being quite mature for his age, again, thanks in great part to Laura’s careful guidance. He would work hard to live up to her expectations.

As he lay on his bed musing, Kenny wondered yet again where he might have run into Barb, but the answer just wouldn’t come. A couple of times, he thought he almost had it, but then it would slip away, leaving him frustrated. She had a pretty, if not glamorous face, with dark eyes, rather pale, creamy skin and a splash of freckles across her nose; all in all, a rather pixyish look. And he could hardly not notice that she was very nicely built under that T-shirt. He thought of the concentration it took to keep his eyes off her jiggling boobs as she leaned across the table to give him instructions on how to find his cabin.

Might she be a possibility? True, she was a few years older than him, but so what? Hell, Laura was probably a lot older than he was, and anyhow, he wasn’t looking for a life partner, just a fun tumble in the sheets from time to time. In all their time together, Laura had never discouraged him from trying to broaden his sexual experiences if an opportunity presented itself. Quite the opposite.

But then, Barbra Hellman was pretty darned good looking, so the odds were that she was already involved with someone, maybe with that Joshua character she mentioned. She might not have any interest at all in entertaining a rookie counselor. Or she might. You never know if you don’t ask.

Kenny’s dick began to swell a bit as he imagined the fine body under the T-shirt and shorts, and he was tempted to stroke one off, but he knew he didn’t have enough time to do it justice, so he got up and headed back up the hill for the lunch and the meeting. He’d save that mental image for bedtime.

The other counselors must have arrived in a clump, because there were already about a dozen people seated around the tables when he walked into the dining hall. He assumed the tall, slim guy locked in conversation with Barb, and wearing a matching camp T-shirt must be Joshua. At least he hoped he was, because about ten seconds of watching the guy’s mannerism told Kenny his sexual preferences probably didn’t lean toward women. His general carriage made him appear to be what the gay community might refer to as flaming.