Everything Beautiful in Its Time by Jenna Bush Hager

Author:Jenna Bush Hager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

Summer Rain

When we lived in Texas, my family attended church almost every week. I enjoyed going, though not because I was particularly devout. I was a chubby foodie (before foodie was a word) and went to church without kicking or screaming because afterward we went out for waffles covered in whipped cream and chocolate sauce at Roscoe White’s Easy Way Café. When I was older, the highlight of my confirmation retreat was, well, the boys—and one in particular, Jeff, the camp bad boy, who brought cigarettes, hidden under his Bible.

The place I finally found God, without any hope for some immediate earthly reward in the form of carbs or boys, was at a secular camp my father went to as a little boy and I attended as well, Camp Longhorn.

The summer after my freshman year of high school was a transformational time. My fellow cabinmates and I were cauldrons of teen drama and hormones. We had the Beatles’ Abbey Road on constant repeat, our moods careening between “Carry That Weight” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

When my high school boyfriend sent me flowers with a note testifying to his longing and devotion, someone in my cabin threw his gift on the ground outside. Who knows why? Envy or boredom, probably. Was it an accident? Who knows? It didn’t matter. My ensuing despair was off the charts. The dramatic weeping and wailing were such that you’d think I was Job, rather than a fifteen-year-old girl prevented from fully enjoying a bouquet of cheap carnations.

As little girls at Camp Longhorn, we’d played pickleball and had swim races. Now, as teens, we played new games—games such as who could overreact the most to a borrowed hairbrush or who could be more traumatized by a perceived insult.

One girl in our cabin, whom I’ll call Kelly, took no part in these hysterics. And yet she seemed sadder than any of us, lost in her headphones and her private pain—related, we were told, to some difficulties her family was having. It was clear to anyone who looked in her eyes that she was hurting badly.

Kelly had trouble sleeping, and sometimes she refused to get out of bed in the morning to go to the required activities. While we went out to swim or sail or laugh over our bowls of cereal, she stayed in bed. We’d also started to notice that she was developing scabs on her arms and legs, scabs unlike the ones the rest of us had from our encounters with brambles and gravel. Eventually we realized that these wounds were self-inflicted. She was cutting herself.

We didn’t understand her despair. The teenager we saw was not the girl we had known all those years. Just the summer before, Kelly had been a rambunctious eighth grader, her eyes filled with light. Now she told us she was tired and wanted to be alone. We felt powerless.

One day, when we returned to our cabin, we found Kelly sitting on her metal bunk bed. She had carved the word HELP into her arm and was bleeding heavily.

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