Will You Be My Summer Fling?

Teenage Diaries is a column on navigating the oddities, culture, and experiences of high school in the modern era.

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In the past two months, I’ve graduated high school, partied hard, and said goodbye to all that à la Didion, some goodbyes being easier than others. Senior spring came and went with dulling celebratory bells, its prom night melodrama, and its strange, cloudy heat. And after the spring rains came the daffodils, and as they sprung from damp grass, so did relationships.

What happens when you put an 18 year old at the crossroads of the desire to cling to the comfortable fondness of high school and the yearning for fresh faces, new sites, and clean slates? In the no man’s land between two chapters, our awkward straddling manifests itself in our love lives. As our horizons expand from suburban basements to collegiate campus lawns, we make out, ask out, and break up. A friend confides that they wish they had committed to a relationship sooner, regretting not having experienced one in high school. Another shows me photos of weddings at Georgetown’s Dahlgren Chapel with admiration in her eyes—what could be sweeter than settling down with your college sweetheart after four years?

But in the valley resting quietly between senior spring and freshman fall is the summer fling. I grew up believing there was nothing more full of youth and passion than having a secret summer love. It’s a part of our teen cultural fabric, in our Disney Channel made-for-TV movies and in our sleepaway camp prayers. The secrecy a summer fling winks at us in light glinting off gentle swells of water, blue as our bruised grad party knees and hips. It beckons us from behind boxwoods and well-watered hydrangeas. You’re 18, giggling and thinking about texting him, and with a blink, you’re 12, ugly and mulling over asking for your camp crush’s address (you want him to give you the Hamptons one, that’s where he is all August).

I’ve always held the summer romance as a paragon, mostly because I spent a few of my formative tween summers high up in the Berkshire Mountains at an all-girls’ sleepaway camp where my peers were all beautiful already and petite and on satin pointe shoes. We had socials with our brother camp, where we had to cover our shoulders or knees to rub elbows with boys in Yankees jerseys and Nike crew socks pulled up all they way.

Boys at camp never looked at me with anything other than pity, but I watched my bunkmates, in jeans and striped Brandy tube tops, sidle up next to their respective boys: Noah, David, Charles, Jack S, Jack G, whoever. They would write letters to each other, shuttled back and forth across campgrounds by counselors having flings of their own. At the end of the season, we’d sing “Our Last Summer,” knowing that goodbye was so imminent and freeing, but still clutching to final conversations as they narrowly escaped our grasps.

These days, I’m still unsure of what to do. I tell myself to sleep on it, only to wake up to my Co-Star app telling me to “reach out to them,” but who “them” refers to is unclear. I stand paralyzed, and without love in the hot air, the heat is stifling and stale. I’m reading Honor Levy’s new novel when a past fling’s name appears on the page so suddenly that I drop it in the pool. Next to me is a couple on their honeymoon, the husband fidgeting with his new wedding band, and suddenly I’m ashamed.

This summer, I thought about it for a long time. Would I really be happier if I had someone to keep me company in this heat? I dreamt of sweltering days spent with someone old, someone new, someone borrowed (as much as any boy can be borrowed at my school, because if boys are like salt and bread, then we are all good neighbors, which we are not), and someone whose favorite color is red, no—blue. In the face of a great unknown, I’m stuck on the comfortable boys of youth. Someone tell me that they use the concept of utils, a unit of satisfaction, to judge decision making; if seeing someone will bring them more utils than not seeing a guy, then they’ll do it. It’s economical. I watch L’eclisse (1962), and Vittoria, wandering the streets of Rome, says men can be like souvenirs or pastimes, “There are times when holding a needle and thread, or a book, or a man—it’s all the same."

I’ve never been someone who does things for entertainment. What feels good, what makes the plot nice and rich for my imagined readers, is not what is necessarily good for me. I stumble into the wrong arms, laugh with my elbows hitched around someone else’s, wearing a borrowed coat. I’ve tried to convince myself that I’m someone who can dispose my feelings quickly, but I’m not. I limp off, quiet, cordial, and hurt.

I do wonder if I’m missing out on some quintessential teen experience. But after consulting a friend, she said that summer flings were dead, “Because then they go off to college and they cheat on you dts (down the shore) and snap a picture of the girl they r Hu with to u on accident.” For now, I dream about helping my daughters into a hammock by the pool, lifting them up by their pudgy arms. Maybe they will cry for no reason until they’re too grown to need me, and I will wonder why I didn’t have more summer flings. I look at Carolyn Bessette with her bouquet of lilies and wonder how many one-offs she had to get through before she found Jack.

My mother says I shouldn’t let things harden my heart, that a hardened heart leaves you with nothing to give to the ones who matter. So I let it soften in the sun. I drink raki with my best friend of 13 years in the old port of Chania, let its glowing burn reach my stomach, and suddenly, the thought of having a summer fling is further away than ever. My camp boys and basement kisses and laughs in fields and late nights are far enough to seem laughable.

In the meantime, my loves are cool winds and hikes along the caldera. I smell ripe peaches in the air at the farmstand and hay, and I feel at once young and full of newness. I admire tan skin from afar and stand in churches and feel crocheted lace with my fingers and the weight of the sky and the loving there is to be done in a lifetime. We always covered knees for the boys at camp, but when I had my first kiss, six years later, my shoulders were covered. It’s time to move on from playing my summer camp rules. I tread lightly through change, over pebbles and on Snapchat and through secrecy. I’ll try my hardest to be patient for now, but when August comes, I’ll dive head first into sneaker covered campus lawns and ask myself whether I’ll find what I’m looking for there.