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“No,” I said.

“Genevieve,” my mom counseled. “We talked about this.” Horrible enough to recall, we had. That conversation—about how at Camp Frontier they didn’t brush their teeth, no one wore deodorant, and bathing was a weekly (maybe), not a daily, event—that conversation goes down in history as one of the worst talks my mom and I have ever had.

So I knew. No Clearasil.

But I was looking at my mom now, not Betsy. I mean, let’s cut to the chase— Betsy could giggle away in her bonnet and dress and believe that it was any year she wanted, but it was my mom who had written the check and I’m sure no one would have cashed it if it had been dated 1890. “I will cry every night,” I said in a low voice. “I will walk all the way home.” I could see on her face that she was close to giving in. “It’s just this one thing,” I said. “I’m giving up my whole summer, and all I want in return is to start high school not covered in acne scars.” She was deciding, I could tell, and then she frowned, which told me I’d won. She turned to Betsy.

“We’re asking an awful lot of a thirteen- year- old here,” she said. “I think we’ll still get the bulk of the experience even if we make this one exception.”

Betsy raised her eyebrows. “All right,” she said, “though my personal opinion is that clean water and proper nutrition—”

My mom cut her off. “Let’s drop it,” she said. She turned toward the stairs, her back straight and tall in her black dress that looked so much like mine. I was reminded for a horrific moment of the matching mother- daughter dresses she tried to force me to wear on Christmas when I was ten and already way too old for it.

I couldn’t help but wonder now: if I’d just sucked it up about the mother– daughter dress back then, would my mom have gotten this kind of thing out of her system, and let me spend the summer hanging out at the rec- center pool where I belonged?

The thought was enough to make me want to cry all over again.