“This is bullshit,” his hiking boots sloshing the mud underneath them. “This can’t even be legal.”

“Listen, Jay,…can I call you Jay?” (The older yet eerily chipper camp counselor could not call him Jay. His mother, as horrid as she was for sending him to a camp where everything and everyone was consistently damp and cold, named him Jason, much to the behest of the guy seemingly running the place) “it’s only for 6 weeks. Think of it as a rehabilitation program.”

“This is the weirdest rehab I’ve been to, and I’ve been to state ran ones”

The camp counselor was silent, brushing away the branches and the lichen (which Jay learned in the brochure on the way over is a type of fungus and not moss) that clung to them. They sloshed and struggled their way to the main cabin where, upon entry and eventual door closure, was greeted by at least 6 other kids his age. The older man took the soaked jacket from Jason’s shoulders and hung it on a hook next to the others’ jackets.

It was raining hard, the weather not even permitting a peek of sunlight through the clouds. Seattle had the wettest year on record in 2003, so naturally, Jason’s mother planned for his departure during a rainstorm, coining the term “exposure therapy”, which she didn’t actually know the real meaning of. The drive to Seattle was long, arduous and painfully boring. Imagine a 6 hour uninterrupted flight; no cell reception, no MP3 player, not even an GameBoy…with your mother.

“Yknow, JayJay, this wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t mess around so much. You and I didn’t have half of the issues we had when you were little. Then puberty hit and it was all downhill from there. You think they let you bring your own hot water on the plane? I want tea but don’t trust the water here. Does the coffee shop in the airport give you hot water? Do you gotta bring your own thermos? Do you-“

You see, Jason, a 16 year old hailing from Acadiana, Louisiana, was an addict. His addiction being that he had the unique ability to produce flames with his hands and set fire to anything without a pulse; except for one time he almost made his girlfriends brother turn into a piece of beef you forgot on the grill while eating BBQ… Burnt and sad to look at which prompted his mothers decision to bring him to Lake Lorelei Camp for Troubled Teens, although they both thought the name could have been better.

Lake Lorelei Camp is not a camp for normal teens and their normal teen issues with their normal teen lives, as much as the normal teens in question tell you that it’s a problem unique to them and them only. Lake Lorelei is a government appointed camp for not normal teens that can’t get a grasp on their powers or “abilities”, since some with “abilities” found “powers” to have a bit of an unnecessary God complex-y twinge to it.

Jason sat at the empty middle table, awaiting some grand, vastly dramatic introduction from the counselor. Instead, an older (ancient) woman, a nun with a menopausal mustache to rival Tom Selleck himself, served us bowls of fragrant, seemingly well seasoned beef stew over rice on a metal cart that was probably about as old as she was. The beef stew was thick, warm and hearty, and you could tell it was made with love -and the weather- in mind.

The counselor shrugged off his equally soaked jacket and said “Boys and girls, please, introduce yourselves to one another, eat our delicious and l’ll be seeing you for your abilities and skills training tomorrow.”