I decided to go to Camp Eagle Hill for one more year. I was fourteen and had been going there for five years. I had been a very little boy in the lower camp and then, nearly half a life later, I was one of the older kids, hanging around the Lake Side bunk house waiting for David and Ian to finish up their Hebrew lessons so we could play basketball or tennis or blow off sports altogether and hit frogs with our tennis rackets against Big Red, the gymnasium where we played deck hockey and had “Sing,” the final event of Color War.

I was too old for camp, really. I was slowly becoming leery of Billy Joel, thought “Sing” was corny, and was developing a strong adolescent impulse against having things required of me. But camp was still a salve, a place where nothing went wrong beyond the occasional broken bone, and where I, like it or not, belonged. The camp plaques in the dining hall proved it. There I was, Billy “The Gangster of Love” Sothern, among the campers in the “Fly Skimmers,” in Hill Top 6, Summer of 1987. There again, Billy “Southern Comfort” Sothern, in Club Clueless in Hill Top 8, the following summer, and so on. People were not suspicious of me here, unlike in my new hometown, where a seventh-grade curiosity about marijuana and huffing Scotchgard had gotten me a reputation for being a “druggie.”

For this reason, when our counselor’s money went missing—a couple hundred dollars in tips from a recent parents’ weekend—no one suspected me, though we were all certain that one of the boys in the bunk had taken the money. Our counselor, Brian Levow, devised the kind of justice that makes sense only at camp, and demanded that we all gather a hundred yards away from the cabin. He explained that he did not want to know who took the money. He only wanted it returned. He said that each of us would go back to the cabin, enter it, spend a minute inside, and return, and he asked that the person who took the money use this opportunity to return it to a drawer in his music-cassette storage box. We all agreed.

Brian sent in my friend Ian first. Ian rolled his eyes at the ridiculousness of having to do this, because, of course, he hadn’t taken the money. But Brian smacked him in the head, and that convinced him to go. Ian went and quickly returned. Next, Brian directed another boy, Josh, to go into the cabin. This was Josh’s first year at camp and I didn’t like or trust him. He was not one of us, had...