“And Balak said, “What have you done to me? I took you to curse my enemies, and, look, you have done nothing but bless.”

Balak Numbers 22:2

Arguments about women’s equality with men probably go back at least to some pillow talk that Mark Antony had with Cleopatra over a bowl of grapes, but in the nineteen seventies it seemed that this was the only thing adults ever talked about. My mom worked as the only woman in a group of male industrial engineers, and she probably pissed off half her co-workers with her “anything you can do I can do better… A LOT better” attitude. My dad, on the other hand, once told me that if he ever boarded a plane that was on the runway, and that he heard the words “this is your captain speaking” in a woman’s voice, he would bolt off that plane even if it meant punching a window out with his elbow.

The subject really exploded, though, by the time I got to Camp Seminole that summer, because the hot topic became “The Battle of the Sexes.” Apparently, some tennis hustler by the name of Bobby Riggs made a challenge with Billie Jean King, the top women’s tennis player at the time, to a match which would determine once-and-for-all, for absolutely every possible talent imaginable, who was better: men or women.  The match was going to be held in September, after we all returned to school, but the spirit of the challenge was everywhere in the air, like the black storm clouds covering up the sky that get you prepared for the inevitable lightning storm.

It was coming up on the third week of camp when the dreaded “Color Wars” would be held. For Color Wars, they’d take all the third, fourth and fifth graders, divide us into two teams, the black and the red, and for the next days we’d all compete at just about everything. Mostly it was stuff that involved sports – maybe punchball, or running, or how far you could throw a baseball. They’d assign scores, and then one team would be crowned the “Seminole Chiefs” and they’d get special privileges for the rest of the summer, while the losers would always get the second best of everything. For dessert, the winners would get things like the prized chocolate ice cream eclairs, and the losers would get vanilla Dixie cups, and so on. But there was also an unwritten rule that the winning team got to boss around the losers. Winners would deliberately untie their sneakers and tell losers to bend over and tie ‘em back, and they had to do it.

At the beginning of Color Wars, each team leader did a draft of all the kids, choosing the best ones one-at-a-time. The only rules were that the two teams needed to have the same number of third, fourth, and fifth graders, and they both had to have the same number of boys and girls. Well, I was totally hopeless at all the sports that were part of the competition, and so me and my friend Rob and a few other boys were in the group that they called the “faggits”. We were the left overs that none of the teams wanted, and they fought to try to make sure the OTHER team had to take us. I remember reading in comic book advertisements about the “ninety-eight-pound weakling”, the pathetic losers that no proper male should ever be. Jesus! I was only seventy-five pounds – what did that make me? I should make it clear that when the other campers called us faggits, none of them had the slightest conception of what a homosexual was. It was just a way of calling us wimps, only much much worse.

But this year, all the boy and girl counselors at Camp Smelly Hole, as we called it, were hot into The Battle of the Sexes, arguing over who was better. So, they decided to settle the question in their own way. They would turn Color Wars into its own Battle of the Sexes. Boys versus Girls.

The Girls’ counselors were no dopes. They knew that their team couldn’t compete in feats of strength or speed, so they had negotiated with the Boys’ counselors an entirely new set of contests based on things like how long you could balance a grapefruit on your head, or how tall a tower you could build with dominoes in two minutes. Then after all the smaller contests were over would come the pièce de résistance: The Quest for Elijah’s Cup. If that name sounds a little weird to you, it’s because, as I learned later, they got this idea out of a book of summer camp games, where it was originally called “The Quest for the Holy Grail”, but this was a Jewish camp. The counselors had to give it a little cultural translation so that if any of our parents heard about it, they wouldn’t think that our camp was trying to convert us to into Catholics.

In The Quest for Elijah’s Cup, the counselors would set things up by hiding some shabby old drinking goblet at an obscure location on the campgrounds. Each team would have a king or a queen who would know where the cup was hidden. Then each team would have a knight who would be fed yes-or-no questions from their team about where the cup was hidden. The knight would pose this question to his or her tyrannical monarch. Armed with this information the teams would go on a free for all hunt, and the team that found Elijah’s Cup would win a whole lot of points.

I thought that this new set up was fantastic. For one, I no longer had to suffer the humiliation of being the last person chosen on my team, because the teams had been preselected by sex. But just as wonderful was the fact that few of these contests required any particular athletic abilities, of which I had none. Our teams had a full two days to prepare for the illustrious event, to assign who was doing what, and to create any strategies. I really wanted to be our team’s King for The Quest. That had a lot of advantages. It meant that they would dress me up for the event and make me look very important, it meant that I’d be the sole bearer of a great secret for my team, but most important it was because the only talent I’d need would be the ability to say YES and NO when asked questions about where the cup was hidden.

Last year the two team leaders were Martin Brodsky and Jay Scharf, who had the sort of personalities that could bully their way into any favored position. This time there was only room for one leader of all the boys in our age group. When the boys’ team elected Brodsky as the team captain, Scharf immediately went on a raging tantrum, turning over picnic tables and screaming in the faces of everyone who didn’t vote for him.  Before I had any opportunity to throw my crown into the ring, the counselors persuaded Brodsky to assign the role of king to Scharf as a way of preventing him from doing any permanent damage.

I was now stuck without a role to play in The Battle of the Sexes. It was at lunchtime, as I had a mass of egg salad sandwich in my mouth, that I felt a stinging slap on my back that sent shards of egg flying into at least three people’s juice cups. I turned around and there was Brodsky!

“BEN FISHBEIN! I need to talk to you!” Brodsky pulled me out of the mess hall over to a table under the trees. “Everyone says that you’re completely useless and I think that they’re right. Is there any possible talent that you have which we can put to use for the Color War?”

“I guess I can balance a grapefruit on my head.” Brodsky gave me a look as though I said I could throw a ball from the outfield to home plate, much less to second base. “Your hair is just a bunch of peach fuzz! We need someone with real curly dirty hair that can hold a grapefruit in place!”  I thought some more and came up with a pretty good suggestion. “How about making me the knight in The Quest?  All I have to do is pass along questions from the team to Scharf, and then tell them if he said ‘yes’ or ‘no’.“ Brodsky gave this deep thought. “We only get to ask one question every ninety seconds. Suppose you have five people screaming in your ear with different questions to ask. How do you pick the right one?”

Oh my God. Being the knight required me to make CHOICES. I pictured Barry and Greg and Ernest and some other kids all pulling at my shirt, and all I could do was stare out into space in fear.

“Forget it” he told me. But then his face enlivened with the smile of wisdom and satisfaction. “Wait! I have a role for you. You’re hardly a boy to begin with. How would you like to be… A SPY?”

That sounded awesome. I knew what a spy’s job was. I had seen all the reruns of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, and at least five James Bond movies. Of all the things required of a spy, I could identify only three that I couldn’t do. I couldn’t fight or shoot anyone. I could never survive having a tarantula crawl on my face. And I couldn’t imagine kissing a girl or see any reason why one would want to kiss me. But none of those seemed likely to be in the job description.

“I’ll do it!”

“OK, then your job is to hang around with the enemy and find out their secrets so that us boys have an unfair advantage. You think you can do that?”

“Sure!”

Now that I had a purpose in life, I could feel my heart beating through my neck with the excitement of taking it on. I immediately turned on the record player in my brain and dropped the needle on the James Bond theme. I skipped our next group activity and walked into the room where the fifth-grade girls were doing an arts and crafts project, painting rocks with pictures of things like animals and rainbows. I pretended to be searching around the shelves of the room as I strolled around trying to listen in to any strategic girl conversations, but all I heard was: “Hey, what are you doing here?” “I’m looking for a pot I made last week.” “What do you need your stupid pot for NOW?” “I just… wanted to see if I did something right.” The arts and crafts counselor turned to me and said “Ben, your group is coming here later, is there any reason you need to be looking for it while we’re trying to hold a class?” I had failed my first spy test. “Ben, I think you should join the rest of your group at the swimming pool…” Suddenly the James Bond theme I had been listening to turned ominous and warped. I could practically feel the tarantula crawling up my chest. I turned and as I walked through the door, I heard the entire group of girls explode with laughter. Oh my god, after a lifetime of being laughed at by the boys, being laughed at by the girls took me to a new undiscovered low point.

I retreated to the back of the building where the shuffleboard courts were, now abandoned. I tried to distract myself by playing solitaire shuffleboard, first shoving black pucks and then red pucks. Even then I was hopeless. I’d root for black, and then red would win. I’d root for red and black would win. I started another round, and then I heard a girl’s voice call out to me. “It doesn’t make sense playing by yourself. Do you want to play shuffleboard?” I turned around and saw a skinny girl in overalls with sandy brown hair shaped in a pudding bowl haircut. “I’m Penny. My real name is Penina, but nobody calls me that.” “I’m Ben.” “I know. I saw you kicked out of arts and crafts. I said I needed to be excused to go to the bathroom, but I’m not going back. I hate arts and crafts. Painting rocks is stupid.” She looked around and picked up a pair of rocks each about the size of a plum. “I’d rather throw ‘em than paint ‘em.” She gave one to me and then hurled the other one across the courts and into the woods, where it smacked into a tree. “Got it! You try.” I followed her movement and hurled the stone at the tree, but it barely made it into the dirt area before there was a single tree. “I had a lot of practice,” she said. “We should stick to shuffleboard.”

I am not ashamed to say that of the five games of shuffleboard I played with Penny, I won two. I was better at getting my pucks into the high scoring positions, but she was better at knocking them out. As we played, Penny told me of how much she hated the stupid “girlie” activities like arts & crafts and folk dancing, and that she was no good at either of them. “I just want to paint designs and they want me to paint real things. But my real things look retarded and ugly.”  I told her how I hated sports, especially team sports. Whenever it was my turn at, say, punchball, I’d always get thrown out, and be blamed if our team lost. “I kinda hate team sports too,” she told me. That seemed incredible. “But I saw you throw that rock. You must be the star of the team!” “It’s my fault,” she said while she was knocking one of my pucks into another universe. “I get angry with the other girls when they mess up, like not making the throw to me at first base. I can run into the outfield, get the ball and bring it back to the base faster than half of them can even find the damn ball. I try taking over, and then the counselors say I’m not a team player, and then the other girls get mad, and then I just storm off the field. I hate most of those girls.”

Those words: “I hate most of those girls” started to echo around the inside of my skull, as the James Bond theme bubbled up. “If you really hate them, how would you like to get back at them?” She looked at me like I was a little crazy, but she was obviously interested. “How?”

“The Battle of the Sexes is coming up in two days. How would you like to be… a DOUBLE AGENT?!!”

Now she was looking at me like I was a LOT crazy. “You don’t know what a double agent is? That’s a spy who, let’s just say for example, pretends to work for the girls, but really works for the boys.”

“I can’t play on the boys’ team.” “You don’t have to. A spy passes along information. A double agent passes along BAD information to the bad guys, and GOOD information to the good guys. That’s if they’re a good double agent. A bad one of course does the opposite.”

I saw Penny close her eyes and clench her fists, as she attempted to fathom the profound implications of second level spy craft. “THE QUEST FOR ELIJAH’S CUP! I know just what we can do! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I had no idea what she was thinking but it promised to be a doozy. “When the girl’s team gets the answers to their questions from the queen, I can pass them along to you, and then the boys’ team will have twice as many clues! And then I can also spread the wrong answers to as many of the girls as possible!”

I felt myself graduating in that moment to the next level of spy-hood. The trumpets of the Bond theme were double punching their notes at full volume. Secret Agent Ben Fishbein had found his very own Pussy Galore, and she was named Penny…

“By the way, My name is Ben. Ben Fishbein. What’s your last name?”

“Garfinkle.”

I had found my very own Pussy Galore, and she was named Penny Garfinkle! Oh my God, even the initials matched!

I told Penny that we should meet the next day to make more plans. She raised her eyebrow and seemed annoyed, but then she shrugged and said “Sure, whatever.” I was now impatient to find Brodsky and tell him what great advances I’d made in my spy craft.

I ran to the swimming pool dressing room where I found Brodsky wringing out his swim shorts and drying his hair. “The counselor was looking for you,” he told me. “We thought you got carried away by a bear” “I went spying around the girls’ group, and you’ll never believe it, but I found a double agent!” The boys of course, being well versed in TV and movie spy craft, knew exactly what a double agent was.  I detailed our scheme to find Elijah’s cup.

“What’s her name?” I gave it some thought and then decided that this was an asset I was better off not sharing, so I told Brodsky that she swore me to secrecy. It would be just me and her working together.

“Good work, faggit.”

That was as close as I’d ever gotten to receiving a complement from Brodsky, and of course he had to ruin it. He just couldn’t say something nice without adding “faggit.”  For a second, I considered telling him to go screw himself and to drop the whole plot, but I really wanted this to succeed, so I just walked away.

The next day, when we were choosing sides for punchball, I told both Brodsky and Scharf to not bother picking me, so that I could go off and do my spy work. I searched all around the camp until I saw that now it was the girls’ group time to be swimming. I finally found Penny while she was up on the diving board, and when she saw me, she lost her balance and wound up doing a belly-flop. I watched for her to recover and waved her to come over, but she was furious. She waved me away and then turned around to ignore me. She seemed to be having second thoughts.  I ran away to the area behind the dressing rooms where there were some picnic tables, and just sat there, trying to figure out how to re-recruit her. Maybe I could find someone else to be a double agent, but now that Penny knew my game, she could rat me out to the entire girls’ team. I could very well be finished. I crossed my arms and put my head into them. I needed a new plan.

“We can’t be seen together you idiot! And we can’t play hooky during our activities! Wait until lunch. Eat fast. Then go way into the woods and meet me behind the old deserted cabin – but if any of the girls see you going that way, then just go back to lunch and we’ll figure something else out!”

I suffered the rest of the morning through swimming and then through game room, and then finally made it to lunch. No one has ever eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich faster than I did. I flipped the sandwich open so that the jelly lubricated my throat as I swallowed huge chunks of sandwich and washed them down with milk. Then I made a giant circle around the camp so that I could get to the deserted cabin unseen. Somehow Penny managed to already be there before me.

“What more plans did you want to make?” she asked me. “I dunno, shouldn’t we make more plans? Like do we have a dead drop location, or should we pass along information inside a hollow piece of wood?” “You don’t have to make PLANS. I told you everything we need to know. It’s going to be crazy tomorrow. Everyone will be running around. I go up to where we get clues. Then I just run around. We pass each other and I tell you the clue. Then you pass it to the boys, and meanwhile I’ll try to confuse the girls. Then I go and get another clue and we keep doing that until the boys find Elijah’s cup. Is there anything you don’t understand?”

It seemed too easy. “What if we can’t find each other?”

“It’s crappy old Camp Seminole, not China. I look for you; you look for me. You have to be adaptable. Are you good with the plan? If not, then we should just…”

“I’m good.” Every second this all seemed to be in danger of falling apart. I had to go along.

“Good.” Then Penny smacked my shoulder. “Tag. You’re it.” She started running further into the woods and then stopped when she saw I was just standing there. “Now you gotta catch me!” She kept running all around the woods, zigging when I zagged. It was hopeless. Finally, I found a big tree, crouched behind it, and waited.

“Ben? Are you there? Are you okay?”

I gave her a smack on the bottom of her leg, yanked the shoelace on one of her sneakers, and ran. “You’re it.”

I scooted through the forest back to where everyone was eating. I hurled myself into my seat and picked up my carton of milk like I had always been there. In a second, I saw her return to the lunch room. She glanced over to me for a fraction of a second and pretended to ignore me, maintaining the secret of our unholy alliance.

This year’s Color War was nothing like ever before because for the first time, the entire reputation of every person’s sex depended on it.

The first event was the grapefruit balance. Five kids of each team were lined up and given a grapefruit to hold on top of their skull while the rest of us circled them and either cheered or booed. But it seemed so obvious to us boys that this game was rigged. One of the girls had hair that looked like Medusa’s snakes, and each snake was made out of Brillo. On the count of three, everyone let go of their grapefruit. They almost all went flopping to the ground in two seconds flat. But then there were just two kids left. It was Medusa matched off against a skinny third-grade kid, Josh. Josh must have been raised in the circus because he jiggled and bobbed as he had his grapefruit dancing around his skull. He’d smile and taunt Medusa, who just stood straight and motionless as her head-full of boa constrictors did all the work. Finally, Josh’s grapefruit got a mind of its own, fell down in the back, and hit him in the butt, as Medusa stayed the course and won her team ten points.  Girlie hair had beat out manly talent. It was so unfair!

The rest of the day saw the fortunes of our sex teeter back and forth like a kid just learning to roller skate. In the egg-on-a-spoon race, one girl was leaving everyone else way behind her until she dropped her egg just two feet from the finish line. Two of the boys glided past her for first and second place as she stood there, contemplating the tragedies of the universe in her egg yolk as it bled into the earth. Two more girls finished, leaving only a third-grade boy who was paralyzed in fear and barely got three steps past his starting position. His position in the race was so hopeless that one of the girls kept taunting him “Hey, loser, whaddya think, your shoelaces are tied together?” When the referee blew the whistle, he got so frustrated that he took his egg off his spoon and started chasing her through the crowd, forcing everyone to back away. When he saw that she was getting away, he hurled the egg in her direction. For that act of unsportsmanlike behavior, our team lost three of the twelve points we’d have earned, putting us just one point behind the girls. The counselors warned us that if he had succeeded in hitting her with the egg, we’d have lost fifteen of the twelve points we earned.

The events had worn us out for the entire day until it was three PM and time for the competition to end all competitions: The Quest for Elijah’s Cup. The senior boys’ and girls’ counselors, Jake and Rosalee, explained that everything we’d been doing today led to this moment – and indeed the scoring was so close, that whichever sex successfully recovered Elijah’s Cup would indeed be deemed the greater sex from this day forth – or at least until Bobby Riggs faced off with Billy Jean King in September.

We were all brought onto inner grass area of the race track in the middle of the camp grounds. The counselors had managed to move two lifeguard chairs into the arena so that they were facing each other about fifty feet apart.  Our king, Jay Sharf, was marched in along with the girls’ queen, an overweight girl named Margot Gimble, as the counselors played the funked up Deodato version of the theme from “2001 A Space Odyssey” on the PA system. They were each wearing royal robes made out of leftover blankets, and crowns made out of a ring of cardboard, with leaves glued on to make them spikey. The music stopped. “King Solomon The Wise and Queen Esther The Virtuous will now take their position on their royal thrones!” We all gathered around our monarchs, and the knights were introduced. Our knight turned out to be my friend Rob. I realized that I’d been so involved in my role as spy that I had no idea until now that he had been selected for this important position that seemingly required no talent. The counselors went over the rules one more time. No one speaks to the king or queen directly – the campers speak to their knight, the knight speaks to the sovereign, and vice versa. All questions must be answerable by “Yes” or “No.” Each knight may ask their sovereign only one question every ninety seconds, the knights had sole decision on which question gets asked, and a counselor of the opposing team was present near each throne to ensure that the rules would be obeyed.

And most important: the girls’ team and the boys’ team were sufficiently separated so that none of the girls could hear the boys’ questions and answers, and vice versa.

Ha.

Over the PA system we heard a boy and girl counselor say in unison: “THE QUEST FOR THE ELIJAH’S CUP HEREBY BEGINS!”

As every boy began screaming questions at Rob, I immediately realized I was incredibly lucky to not be in his position. Barry Besmirtnick was probably asking as many questions as all the other kids combined, just rattling everything off that came into his ADHD saturated head. Finally, Rob spoke up.

“Oh, king, is the cup north of where you are sitting?”

Besmirtnick give Rob a shove. “Not one person wanted you to ask that question! You’re not supposed to ask your own question!”

“There were too many questions so I made up my own.”

“It’s a stupid question.”

Sharf meanwhile was totally flummoxed. “Does anyone know which way north is?”

Rob had no idea even though he asked the question. Besmirtnick came to the rescue and pointed north. Who knows if he was right, but it got the job done.

“Yes!” said Sharf. Rob ran back to everyone. “Yes! The cup is in that general direction.”

All the boys spread out feebly trying to cover half of the entire campground. I snuck away toward where the girls were dispersing in an attempt to find my double agent.

She wasn’t with the main cluster of girls and now they were all scattering. I had less than ninety seconds to find her before a new question would be asked, after which I’d start to lose track of the whole clue game. With maybe thirty seconds to go, I decided to return to the boys’ court where our knight and king were. Halfway there I felt a slap on my shoulder, turned around, and saw Penny. I was furious.

“We have to be fast! I have the clue!” she said. “You don’t have to move anything to find the cup.” I told her that next time we should PLAN and meet at the shuffleboard courts.

She evaporated into the cloud of girls. I listened for the next clue. Rob wasn’t ambushed so badly this time, so he just took the first question he got, and we learned that the cup was indoors. Well, that was a big help. There were just three buildings on the “north” side. If I could just narrow it down from there… Before I went to the shuffleboard courts, I grabbed a few people and told them what I knew, including the secret clue I got from Penny. “How do you know that?” Besmirtnick asked me. “JUST TRUST ME! Don’t waste time moving things around!” I ran back to the shuffleboard courts and arrived just as Penny got there. “Ben, you have to stand on a ladder to see it!” “Hmmm… if I could only figure out which…” and then I stopped just before I said the word “building.”  Penny looked eagerly at me, and I realized that I was the only person in the whole camp who knew both the boys’ clues and the girl’s clues.  Maybe she could help me, but that would mean I’d have to give her the boys’ clues. If I made a mistake, I could blow it all. It turned out that Penny read my mind.

“That’s okay, Ben. You don’t have to tell me anything. And if you did, I’d swear on anything to not tell the other girls.”

It was at this moment I felt myself stepping into the edge of manhood. Did I trust her? After so many of my own teammates would either ignore me or call me a faggit, here was someone from the other world who seemed to understand me and have fun with me, and who, much like myself, was a pariah in her own world. But I needed a little something more to help me feel sure.

“Would you swear on The Ten Commandments?” She gave me one of her looks like I was crazy. “What’s that thing on your neck?” I pointed to some sort of gold pendant that she wore on a chain that was shaped like the two tablets which God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.

“My grandma gave me that after she died. She brought it here from Latvia. She died a year ago and it was the only thing she willed to anyone. She had like no money at all.”

She took off the locket that her grandmother had given her and clutched it in her hand like it was a diamond. She looked me in the eye and said “Ben, I swear on the love of my grandmother that I will not tell anyone anything you tell me.”

“It’s gotta be in either the sports shed, the assembly room, or the building with the bathrooms.”

Penny gave this deep thought. “They’re not going to hide it in a bathroom, because whichever they pick, either the girls can’t go in, or the boys can’t go in. And… the assembly hall is just a gigantic room with a stage. You don’t need a ladder to see anything there. But, wait! The sports shed has a ladder there that you use to get the baseball gloves and things on the high shelves!”

Penny was brilliant. She was not only a top-notch double agent, she had a mind like Sherlock Holmes.

“Ben, that’s probably good enough, but you need to tell every boy on your team. There’s still a lot of places to look up there. Meanwhile, go back and get the next clue and see if you can narrow it down even more.”

“Meet me here again!”

As I ran back to the court, I grabbed every kid I could and told them exactly where to look. Only a few kids were at the court. I grabbed Rob and told him what his next question should be. “It’s gotta be either in the area above where they have the scooters and bicycles or by the other wall over the ping pong tables. Ask if it’s near the scooters and bikes.”

Rob did as I suggested, and Sharf just shrugged and said “no.” I raced back to the shed screaming “Get a ladder and check in the shed on the top shelf over the game tables!” at every boy I could wrestle up. But before I got to the shed, I heard huge cheers coming from the girls’ part of the court.

I looked back, and I saw Penny standing on the queen’s throne, holding the Elijah’s cup over her head!  All the girls were surrounding her grabbing each other by the shoulders, jumping up and down and screaming.

“GIRLS RULE! BOYS DROOL! GIRLS RULE! BOYS DROOL!”

My entire brain had fallen out of my head and was replaced by a dense fog. I stumbled over to the girls’ side and asked where they found it.

“It was under the stage in the assembly hall. You open that little cabinet where they store the microphones and wires and that’s where she found it.”

None of it made sense. It was supposed to be exposed, not in a cabinet. You had to climb a ladder to get to it, not crawl down. There was only one explanation, and I couldn’t believe it. Penny lied. She wasn’t a double agent. She was a triple agent. She had out spied me.

Now I could see both Sharf and Brodsky walking together toward me. “HEY FAGGIT!” they shouted, one after another. Brodsky stepped forward. “You were supposed to be our spy. How did you mess up?”

“I just told everyone what I knew.”

“Well, you got played, faggit. You got played by a girl.”

Sharf chimed in. “You made boys look bad compared to girls. Every boy in the universe will curse your name forever.”

I tried my best save. “Well not forever. Not if Bobby Riggs wins.”

“They’ll still hate you. I’ll hate you. Sharf will hate you,” Brodsky told me, as he and Sharf just walked away, not bothering to look behind them at the kid who loused up everything.

I suppose that if anything good came of this, it was that for the remainder of my camping experience, I no longer cared about what any of the boys thought about me. Sharf and Brodsky had gotten their insults out of their system, and now they just ignored me. They did take on the duty of informing all the other boys how I had been the sole source of male humiliation at Camp Seminole. One by one, as I encountered other boys at our various activities, an entire new sub-activity emerged: piling “Ben is so dumb” jokes onto me. “Ben is so dumb, he failed a blood test.” “Ben is so dumb, he tried to alphabetize his M&Ms”, “Ben is so dumb, when someone told him to make up his mind, he put lipstick on his forehead.”

None of it mattered. All that mattered was getting a hold of Penny, the first girl I ever trusted. I suffered through the weekend, when the girls were all off doing things far away from where the boys were. The next Monday, it was an easy matter for me to get out of punchball, especially now that absolutely no one wanted anything to do with me. I ran to the swimming pool and hid behind a bush, where I couldn’t see what was going on in the pool, but where I could look up just enough and see the diving board. Finally, when I saw her walk to the edge I came out of hiding to where she could see me. At first I couldn’t tell if she actually didn’t notice me, or if she was just avoiding looking at me. When she jumped and did another tell-tale belly flop, I could tell that she knew I was there. I stayed for the whole period staring at the pool area through the fence and she kept ignoring me for the whole period.

The next Wednesday was the same schedule as Monday, so I came by the pool again, this time in full sight. The other girls started to notice and told me to get the hell away. One of the girls said she was going to call a counselor, until Penny went over to her and changed her mind. The girl walked away and then Penny walked over to me.

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you think I’m doing here?”

“You’re mad that the boys lost. That doesn’t mean you have to hang around here and bother me.”

“I’m not touching you. I trusted you. I thought you wanted to work for the boys’ team.”

“Why would I do that? I’m still a girl, you knucklehead.”

We just stared at each other. It must have been a whole minute and neither of us had anything to say.  I needed to put some fear and remorse into her evil heart.

“You know, you’re going to send your grandmother to Hell for lying when you swore on her Ten Commandments.”

She obviously had no answer for that. She turned around, ran back to the water, and jumped in.

We still had a week and half of camp to go, and all I wanted to do was to go home. None of the boys wanted anything to do with me and neither did Penny. I tried finding things to do that required as little movement and involvement with the other kids as possible. On Friday, when we had punchball again, I just walked away and headed for the shuffleboard courts where I could play against myself. I got a perfect shot, landing my red puck right in the middle of the triangle with a “10” in it. Then from behind me, a black puck went flying past me and blew my puck off the court entirely. It was Penny.

“What are YOU doing here?”

“I wanted you to know that I didn’t lie on my grandmother’s Ten Commandments.”

“You swore that you wouldn’t tell the other girls our clues.”

“I didn’t breathe a word to a single girl. I just went and got the Elijah’s cup myself.”

I tried not to show that I thought that this was pretty crafty of her.

“You lied to me. You gave us all bad clues.”

“I told you, I’m still a girl.”

“I thought you hated the girls.”

“I still do. I hate them more than ever. I thought I’d get the girls in my group to like me more if I could win the contest for them. That lasted all of ten minutes. They cheered me and said ‘Thank you, Penny! You’re the best! You helped prove that girls are better than boys!’ And then by the time we got to dinner they were all saying that I was stuck up and just wanted to show off like I always do. I hate them and they hate me and nothing I do will ever ever change that in a million years. I’ve been miserable this whole month and the only time I had any fun was with you, and I tricked you. And now you hate me too, and you should.”

I knew what it was like to be hated by everyone. I don’t think either of us deserved that.

“Of course you tricked me. That’s what spies do.”

“I’m not a spy. I only became a spy to be your friend.”

“Well, all the boys hate me, and all the girls hate you, so I guess I’m still your friend.”

For a minute I think she was just standing there deciding if I really meant what I said, or if I was just engaging in yet a fourth level of spy craft. But she must have realized that all the games were over, that all the winners and losers had been determined, and that all the crosses and double crosses and triple crosses no longer had a reason for their existence. Because in that moment I experienced the most incredible thing that had ever happened to me in my life up to that time. Penny walked over and kissed me. To this day, I can still remember the uniquely girlish moisture of her lips grazing my right earlobe and then sliding down to their proper position on my cheek, until she pulled away and looked right at me. Never had I been more frightened in my search for the appropriate thing to say, and I think neither had she. All she could do was crouch down to the floor, yank open my right sneaker lace, smack me on the shoulder, and say “You’re it,” as she turned around and ran into the woods.

The summer no longer seemed endless. When it was indeed over, my head was foggy, and I tried to cling to what felt like a dream, but I knew I was awake. She got on a bus with all the kids that were going upstate; I got on a different one that was going to the city. On the ride back, I realized that for all my mistakes, I had advanced on the ladder of spy hood. Against all rational expectations, a girl had kissed me. Someday with practice, I could learn to fight and to shoot a gun.  As far as being able to survive having a tarantula crawl on my face, that might be a little too much, even for a seasoned spy like me.