As a sixth grader, Anna Neu decides she's going to fall in love at science camp.
Anna Neu has several interests including improv, sketch comedy and voiceover work. She is a trained dancer and Michael Howard Studio Conservatory taught actor. She performs at the Magnet Theater on weekends in shows such as The Armando Diaz Experience and has been on several house teams there. Her voice can be heard on a handful of episodes of The Truth Podcast. Also a Moth Story Slam winner.
This story originally aired on April 19, 2019 in an episode titled “Older and Wiser.”
Story Transcript
In sixth grade at Gilbert H. Hood Middle School in Derry, New Hampshire, we were told that we were going to go on this week-long, overnight camp trip to Ferry Beach Science Camp. We’ll learn about the stars and the tides and the forest and have these amazing science teachers and also get to see our classmates outside of school.
But what I was most excited about was falling in love because I was told, by some friends of mine who are older, that this camp was a special, magical place where kids found their soul mates. So I went into this with high expectations.
The reason why I wanted so badly to fall in love, I think, is because I would watch so many romantic movies with my mom at a young age. We watched Notting Hill and Sense and Sensibility and a lot of Nora Ephron flicks, and I would just watch my mom cry as she watched these movies. I was like, “Oh, this must be important. I need this.”
Since this was a special camp and I didn’t know when this opportunity would come around again after sixth grade, I had to do this now.
And I wasn’t particularly good with boys, especially boys that I liked. I was kind of like violent. There were boys on the playground who would call me Anna Banana, like, “Hey, Anna Banana.” It was probably flirting but I would chase them and I would then throw them into tire swings.
One day, there was this boy who said it and I just got so angry I chased him and I threw him into a tire pyramid. He bumped his head so hard that he had this enormous welt on his head and had to go to the nurse’s office and I had to go to the vice principal, which was way scarier than going to the principal because our principal looked like Santa Claus and only talked to the good kids so I knew I had done something wrong. Then I also had to call his parents to apologize.
After that, my desire to chase kind of dwindled then I became much more introverted and shy around boys that I liked and, thus, I was invisible.
But the kind of boy I liked was this boy named Nick in my Creative Writing class. He was really smart and witty and cute and he was a little chubby and he was like a little pocket-sized Zach Galifianakis and he didn’t notice me at all. The kind of boy that noticed me was a boy, a tuba-player named Brandon.
See, I played the bass guitar in marching band, which makes no sense. I was kind of put in the side corner in front of the brass section and those boys would tease me and they would empty their spit valves on my head all the time. Brandon was the worst of them. So I knew who I liked and I knew who I didn’t like, and what I needed was for this camp to bring me to the person that I liked, to build up my confidence and just to allow this magical thing to happen.
So the week comes. I’m very excited. I pack my favorite outfit, which is this Mighty Mouse sweatshirt and my brother’s large cargo shorts, because I was like a little skater girl. I got to board with my best friend and the week kicks off. We’re learning about the tides, we’re catching fireflies and we’re making s’mores while learning about the stars.
During lunch hours, we would sing these little science songs, one of which I remember was, “Predators and prey, producers and decay are in the food chain, chain-chain”. It’s catchy.
And also these rumors were coming true. I was seeing all around me my friends falling in love. They were pairing off and running off to hold hands or kissing when the teachers weren’t looking. I was extremely jealous because this wasn’t happening for me. And Nick was nowhere to be found. I’m not sure if he even ended up coming. He wasn’t in my group.
But then a boy did come up to me and talk to me. He asked if he could sit with me and he asked if he could have lunch with me, and it was Brandon the tuba player. I didn’t want to talk to him but, I don't know. Maybe in the science camp light he looked a little different. Maybe. I don't know. That joke he just made I normally wouldn’t find funny but, ha. Maybe.
Then I thought to myself, “I can’t deny this. Maybe this is what the camp is telling me to do. I’m supposed to fall in love with Brandon? Maybe.”
This is like a force of nature that I can’t control and I should just go with it, I guess. I always assumed that it would be someone else but you can be proven wrong. So the rest of the week just turned out to be this rom-com montage where we run down the beach together and he’d carry me on his shoulders and he'd run until he fell, because I was much heavier than him.
Some of his friends would tease him about liking me because I was a nerd. They said some pretty mean things and his response was like, “Well, I’m still going to hang out with her.”
Okay. He kind of defended me. All right. Then the last day he came up to me and he had this perfect little shell. He handed it to me and he asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend, and I said, “Yeah. Okay.”
I left the camp thinking, “Well, this isn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be, but I’m falling in love and this is great. And I have a boyfriend. I have to go tell my best friend Monica.” She was my neighbor across the street. She was a year older and wiser so I thought, “Okay. I’m going to go show off my new boyfriend.”
I go there. She's eating up all these details but then she wants me to call him. She wants to see what he sounds like.
I’m nervous because I've never called a boy before, and I’m nervous because I’m calling Brandon. He picks up. It’s a little awkward, but then we start talking about our memories from camp.
Then he says, “You know, I’m real excited about this because I've wanted this for a really long time. That’s why I'd been flirting with you in band. There's just this little thing that I forgot to mention to you. Here’s the thing. So I have a girlfriend at home but, you know, so what’s just going to happen is I just need like two weeks and then I'll break up with her, but then like it’s got to be a secret and then I need like a little bit of buffer time because I can’t go from girlfriend to girlfriend. But then after that, we’re good.”
Then I remembered I don’t like Brandon.
The next day I go to school and I see him at his desk. I walked up to him slowly. I looked him right in the eyes. I took the single shell out of my pocket and I put it right in the center of his desk. He dropped his head to the table and covered his face with his hands. I didn’t have to say anything else. He knew.
Then everything went back to normal and he continued to tease me in band. And I continued to have a crush on Nick and he never noticed. Then I went back to watching romantic movies with my mom, only now, I had just come out the other side of my first breakup so I was a new woman. A wiser woman.
So when I would watch these movies I would enjoy them, yes, but I also had a very discerning eye. I watched Sleepless in Seattle and I thought to myself, “Oh, no. Meg Ryan, what are you doing? Yes, you might have just met Tom Hanks at the end of this movie but do you really know who he is? You only know of him from a radio show and a letter. Over time, you may discover that he's a tuba player named Brandon.”
Thank you.