Give Me a Sign(5)

But will it be weird going back to Gray Wolf after all this time? It’s a pretty small camp. Will anyone there remember me? My counselors all seemed so much older and cooler, though they were probably around my current age.

The idea is at least worth a Google search to see if they’re hiring soon.

Chapter Three

Okay, the Gray Wolf web page hasn’t been updated since the nineties. I’ve literally never seen a site this old before. It only has a home page with the name of the camp, the address, and an office number.

Ugh, I don’t want to struggle through a call. How have they seriously not included a contact form yet? I could ask my mom to do it for me, but how would that look, trying to apply for a job by having my mother place a phone call for me? Someone needs to fix this website, like, yesterday.

I give up and scroll through Instagram, where I’ve been paying more attention to posts from people I went to camp with. People I haven’t seen in ages—like Ethan, who was a first-year counselor during my last summer at Gray Wolf three years ago. When I see his photo holding up a staff polo, I actually stop to read the caption announcing that he’s just been promoted to assistant director for this summer.

Ahh, I feel weird messaging him. But I do want to apply for a camp job, and he might be able to help. What’s the worst that could happen? He could just ignore this message if he has no idea who I am. But I remember him being really friendly and outgoing, so it’s worth a try.

Lilah: Hi Ethan! Congrats on the new job! You probably don’t remember me, but I used to go to Gray Wolf and was actually wondering if there are any counselor positions to apply for this summer. I didn’t see anything on the website.

I hit Send. Time to Google search for some ASL lessons and confront how much I actually remember. Languages can be “use it or lose it,” and sign language is no different. Eventually, I find a Deaf-taught series on YouTube and am relieved at how much vocab I remember. I race through the first few lessons at 2x speed, since I’m already confident in the alphabet, colors, numbers, family members, and so on.

I’m watching the video, practicing, when a notification pops up.

Ethan: Of course I remember you. We’d love to have you back! And yeah . . . we need a budget to update that site. What’s your email? I’ll share it with our camp director, Gary. We’ll be looking soon.

“Yes, yes, yes,” I say to myself, quickly typing out and sending my email address. This is all going so well! I really didn’t expect my plan to come together this easily.

Lilah: Thank you so much! And congratulations again :）

* * *

For the next several weeks, I constantly refresh my email. There’s less than a month left of school, and my friends have already lined up their summer plans. My mom’s got it in mind that I’m going to do summer school to help fix my grades. I haven’t told my parents about Gray Wolf yet, because have I even applied, really? All I did was give Ethan my email address. There hasn’t been any sort of interview, and summer is already right around the corner.

So far, I’ve resisted the urge to message Ethan again, since that may come across as desperate. If they haven’t contacted me by now, maybe they don’t plan to. Who am I to skip several years of camp and think I can waltz back in and get the job? If Ethan remembers me, he must also know I wasn’t fluent in ASL. Is that one of the job requirements?

Maybe I got my hopes up too high about being a counselor this summer.

Whether or not I get this job, I want to improve my ASL. So I pull up the video lessons again. I’ve reached the point where the signs are half familiar, half brand-new. Like, when it comes to weather signs, I totally know words we’d have used at camp, like “rain,” “wind,” or “lightning.” But I’ve never seen “hurricane,” “earthquake,” or “drought” before.

My eleven-year-old brother plops down on the couch beside me, still in his jersey and cleats from a soccer game he had this morning.

“What are you doing?” Max asks, wiping the sweat that drips from his short brown hair down his tanned neck.

“Ew, go shower.” I scrunch up my nose.

Max stares at the vocabulary video that’s paused on my screen. “Do I need to ——。”

“What?” I look back toward him.

“Do I need to know all this?”

My brother has the same kind of hearing loss I do, though one of his ears reaches further down the severe category. But we have hearing parents, and like most other deaf and hard of hearing kids, we’ve been raised with the goal of being hearing-passing. As far as we know, our hearing loss is genetic, even though there’s no apparent family history of deafness. But we didn’t have any childhood illnesses or head injuries, either. We were simply born with less hearing.

“If you want.” I shrug. Max has never been to Gray Wolf, so his exposure to sign language is even less than mine. Instead of ASL lessons, Max and I got years of speech therapy. Which is fine, I guess, but why not both? “I learned a ton when I first went to Deaf camp.”

“You learned there?” he repeats to confirm he heard correctly.

“Yeah.”

He nods, furrowing his eyebrows. “I don’t know. Do you really have to go for the whole summer?”

“Well, it’s two months. There’s still some time at home.”