Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [8]
I took this photo one busy summer afternoon.
Note: if you want to seem like a super-creepy person, be an adult, by yourself, taking photos of children and people on a beach.
As a kid, I was curious but not remotely adventurous, if that makes sense. I wanted to climb the diving board to see the view out to the other side of Morses Pond, but I didn’t want to swim over there. The far side of the pond was so filled with weeds and algae that it was a pretty copper-y color, and I wanted to get a better view. Once I got to the top of the ladder to the diving board, I could see way across the pond. The weeds and algae were indeed very pretty. Even further out, I saw Wellesley Center, where my favorite children’s bookstore was. I was glad I did it, and I turned to climb down.
That’s when Scott, the handsome counselor who was wading in the deep end of the pond, yelled up at me. (Again, not sure if he was actually handsome, or just handsome by my aforementioned criteria.)
SCOTT: You’re not allowed to climb back down the ladder! You have to dive!
I froze. This was the big-kid diving board and it really was extremely high. I inched backward, pretending not to hear.
SCOTT: Don’t even think about it. It’s against the rules. Once you’re up there, there’s only one way down.
ME: Is that the camp’s rules or the pond’s rules?
There was a pause as Scott thought about this. It annoyed him that I had a follow-up question.
SCOTT: It’s the same. You cannot climb back down!
ME: I really don’t want to jump.
SCOTT: Well, you’re just going to stand there, then.
Two bigger kids were now standing at the base of the ladder, impatiently waiting for their turn.
I think it was the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. I was too scared to jump off, but I was also scared of getting in trouble with the camp and of bringing shame to my family. And, most important, embarrassing Vijay. (Summers at this point were just a terrifying countdown to the moment when I would somehow embarrass my poor older brother, whose shame stung worse than my own. Would I eat too many Popsicles at lunch, leaving none for some other kid and leave myself open to ridicule as Popsicle Pig? Would I get a mud stain on the back of my shorts and become Shitty Pants?)
Scott probably thought he was doing something really good for me, or maybe this was something his mean stepdad did to him and he was exorcising the bad experience on me, but whatever he was trying to do, it sucked. All I remember is crazy, panicky, ice-cold fear shooting through my limbs. Unable to say, “Screw you, dude, I’m going down the ladder, and I’m going to call my mom from the payphone to pick me up and take me home,” I closed my eyes and just let myself fall into the water.
The sight of a fat child falling, lifeless, from a high distance into a pond is kind of an amazing sight, I’ll bet. You know when a kid’s getting a shot or a tooth removed, how you tell them that it’s not going to be as bad as they’re imagining it will be? Well, this was a hundred times worse than what I had imagined.
First of all, it hurt. I don’t know how it happened, but I got a huge cut from falling into the water. (It was on the back of my left knee; to this day, I have a four-inch dark brown scar there.) Three people, including Scott, pulled me out of the water. They rushed me to shore, to the First Aid room, which, weirdly, had injections for anaphylactic shock and an eye wash but no paper towels. Scott patted down the back of my leg with beach towels.
Ultimately they got it to stop bleeding, and Scott begged me not to tell my parents. I remember him asking me four or five times. God knows what that must’ve looked like to an observer, a seventeen-year-old boy exhorting a disoriented, bleeding six-year-old “not to tell her parents” something. But this was Morses Pond, and that’s the kind of thing that happened there.
The scene of the cover-up.
Lessons? When I was kid, my parents smartly raised us to