Augusta

It was only two years ago that Augusta found herself walking passed the old cemetery crying in the middle of the night. Yes, this is a true story.  She was with a group of five brave Teen-Siders who had tried to do a Suicide Run that night. I stayed back at the cabin and had decided to wait for my boy-cabin friends there. It was a dark misty night, and everyone was packed up and ready to leave the camp except for me, I was the biggest procrastinator when it came to packing and unpacking, it would drive my counselors crazy. Luckily for me, most of the counselors and senior staff were sleeping, and I was left alone until the morning.
First there were rumors that started to circle around camp that night. One of the G-25 cabin girls started saying that she saw people in the woods who were probably senior staff watching us from behind the cabins. I laughed at this and convinced my friend to sneak over to the B-23 and B-24 cabins to wake up our guys. We only made it halfway across the field before she fell to the ground and started laughing hysterically I ended up having to pick up the heavy girl and bring her back to the cabin. Once we were safe away from getting in any big trouble, I finally got her to calm down and found out that one of the biggest rumors was true. Beilzy, the main guy in the camp was sleeping in a golf cart right under the flagpole.
There was nothing left for us to do but wait. We counted the minutes until we thought the suicide runners would get back, and even placed bets on if they would get back. We were pretty much set on none of them making it back, after all, there is a reason why they call it a suicide run. In a suicide run, a bunch of people from Teen-Side would run all the way up to the separate campus of Main-Side, ring the Main-Side’s bell, then run all the way back down and get inside their cabins without getting caught. This was known as a Suicide run because it was almost a guarantee that you were going to get caught.
I wasn’t really good friends with anyone who actually went, so I wasn’t that worried that probably none of them were going to make it back. It was getting really late (almost 4:00 AM) and I was starting to fall asleep on the damp porch. For some odd reason, I suddenly sat up. I was so startled by myself that I hardly heard my friend telling me that she hurt footsteps coming really fast towards us.
In a matter of minutes, Augusta came hysterically crying and ran onto the porch and collapsed on top of my sleeping bag. My friend and I looked at each other stunned to see her, and even more stunned to see her crying. I wasn’t that close to Augusta, but I was close enough to know that she never cries. She is always so happy and so brave and so strong. She was the kind of girl that other girls hated.
It took a while to calm Augusta down, but once we did, she shakily told her story. She and everyone she was with got to Main-Side fine and everything seemed ok, but then just as they were about to ring the bell, camp staff started to close in on them in every direction. Even though it was extremely dark, the camp staff still seemed to know who was there. They would yell “Marissa! Stay right where you are! And you too JD! Everyone get on the ground now!” The Camp Staff all had golf carts, and thanks to the puddles of mud on the ground, the one closest to Augusta got stuck. Like most girls in our cabin, Augusta was an extreme rebel, and instead of getting onto the muddy floor, she made an extreme dash for the woods through the gap in the golf carts. She kept running and running through the woods until she saw something that looked familiar: the main road to go back to Teen-Side. She was walking on that road for about a half hour before she realized she was lost. She told my friend and I that she was imagining how she was going to die. How she saw a few cars pass her and thought that one of them was either going to run over her or kidnap her. She Explained how she started crying when she passed a cat that had been run over, and imagined how that could so easily have been her. About an hour or so of walking on that same road, she noticed that she was walking next to the old cemetery. She looked around and saw the fireworks place across the street and the soccer field way passed the other end. She had walked about a block away from the camp. She started running back and that’s when she ran up the stares to the cabin in muddy sneakers and drenched clothes.
She was a hero from that moment forward and everyone knew it. Not only did she survive the Suicide Run, but she also left the actual campgrounds without consent. That next day when they called her name at flagpole, we all gave her a standing ovation with extra loud cheering. She was defiantly a legend: the ultimate camper.