SubscribeStar Story: Luna and the Intern, Chapter One

Chapter One

“Luna! Where do I put the dirty towels?”

Ugh. This girl was going to be the end of me.

Okay, maybe Rose wasn’t that bad, but still. This was my third year working at the summer day camp, which made me both the oldest and the most experienced girl on our small team. Not that it was the most complicated job, with how easily I could jump back in between college semesters. This year, however, somebody at the head office decided it would be a good idea to try out an internship position of sorts.

In my opinion, it was totally ridiculous. Running the summer program mostly involved leading games and activities for kids. Not exactly a lot of useful experience to put on a résumé after the fact. While there was some more official stuff to take care of behind the scenes, I really only trusted myself and a handful of others to do all that correctly. Not some eighteen year old brat who had made it clear that she didn’t even want to be there.

Apparently, she had built a pretty successful babysitting business throughout her teenage years, and would be making a lot of money doing that every day for parents who relied on outside supervision when school wasn’t in session. Except she had been pressured by her own parents to get a real job before college, and they had some connection to our company’s leadership. So she had been hired at our branch for the trial run of the internship, with no interview. Nepotism in some form, even if it was an unpaid role she didn’t care about.

Rose literally told me to my face that working at a day camp was stupid, and that she had already turned down so many babysitting gigs. She could still work at night, but that wasn’t quite the same as juggling families to make bank over the summer.

I had to assume she was trying to get herself fired, with how she was speaking to me and a few of the others, but none of us actually had the authority to do that. All we could do was report her attitude and whatever else, and hope that someone else would deal with it.

Then there was her incompetence. It was entirely possible she was purposely acting like she had no idea what she was doing, though part of it was that she joined our site with no training whatsoever. That means I had to teach her on the fly, often while trying to wrangle two or three dozen kids at the same time. Hardly the best time to show someone the ropes, even if most of the boys and girls were familiar with the rules and routine. While there were some differences between the after school program and the summer day camp, anyone who was part of the former kind of knew how things worked.

“Literally where you put everything else that’s dirty,” I told her, a hint of my annoyance coming out in my response. For the most part, I was good at staying calm no matter how unruly the kids could be at times. I just wasn’t used to supervising a girl like Rose, “We’ll run the machines later.”

“Oh, right. Thanks!” She headed off in that direction, no doubt planning on texting for a few minutes in the private area before reemerging. For liability reasons, we had a pretty strict rule about using phones on the job. Most of us broke that rule here and there, myself included, as long as they weren’t out in a public space.

It didn’t help that Rose was a good half foot taller than me. That wasn’t really saying much, when I was almost always the shortest girl in the room, but my height could be particularly frustrating when trying to assert my authority. Some of the older tweens at the day camp were about my size, and there were times I could tell they were only behaving because getting in trouble with me meant getting in trouble with the office and/or their parents. Or, in Rose’s case, I could only boss her around so much when she blatantly didn’t care about the unpaid internship.

With her attitude throughout the first week at the job, I was surprised when she next approached me with a question about potentially doing more than the grunt work I had been giving her. There was still the usual bratty tone, but no dramatic sigh or exaggerated eye roll or anything. “Hey, so am I ever going to do anything in the office? I don’t know how anything here works.”

Calling it an ‘office’ was generous. We just had a room for staff members like myself to file paperwork, as well as a computer to put the relevant information online. Honestly, the space was mainly used for sending kids who got in trouble during the day. The only time we used it for official purposes was at the beginning and end of the day, as well as any necessary incident reports in between.

While I didn’t want to outright shut down the eighteen year old who was expressing some vague interest in the day camp beyond what she had experienced so far, I wasn’t sure what to tell her. “There’s not much to do, really,” I replied, “I’m barely in there myself most of the time.”

“Yeah, but someone said I’d actually learn useful shit here,” she said, “Can’t I look at your system, or fill out the next form, or register the next family?”

“Language, Rose,” I muttered, unable to help myself. It’s not that I viewed her as a child, or anything like that. Immature as she was, she was closer in age to me and the other few youth guidance counselors than she was to even the oldest kids we had. Similar to the rule about phones, however, we weren’t supposed to be swearing when anyone could be right around the corner.

She let out one of those little sighs, then replied, “I’m just saying. How am I supposed to do anything important this summer if I don’t practice? Can I do the next write-up? Or do the paperwork for a new kid, or something?”

“Well, we shouldn’t have you practicing with actual reports. Those go into our system, and it will be difficult to discipline a kid or take care of an injury if I’m trying to supervise you at the same time.” The rest of us actually had training for stuff like that. While I could try to teach her along the way, it just didn’t make sense to have an intern handle any of the administrative stuff during an already hectic day.

Rose considered that for a moment, then asked, “What if I practiced on you? You’re kind of, you know, ‘fun sized.’ No offense. We could pretend you’re a girl who just got in trouble, or something like that.”

Like, one of the kids? I did take some offense to that. “Sounds like a bit much,” I said, trying to stay polite when Rose was finally taking some interest in the job she had seemed so irritated towards early on, “Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it. We don’t get a lot of injuries, and that’s not really something you’ll have to worry about as an intern.”

“I thought the whole point of an internship is to actually learn stuff,” Rose huffed, “Isn’t this so I can do your job next summer, or whatever? Or am I just here to do busy work?”

I mean . . . How was I supposed to know? Rose was our first intern, ever, as one of the management ladies wanted to experiment with that this year. As far as I had been told, it was honestly more about the busy work Rose was whining about. Less to take advantage of a girl like her, and more because my own productivity would plummet if I was constantly babysitting her attempts to do my tasks when I already knew how to take care of them correctly and efficiently.

“There’s plenty of stuff to learn,” I replied. It was a difficult line to walk; I didn’t want to be dismissive, yet there was only so much I could suggest without complicating my own responsibilities. “If you have some down time, all the forms are right over there. You can go through an incident report as if we used the first aid kit on you, or make up the info of some imaginary girl if you want. Same with any of the forms.”

“Okay, but that’s not the same as actually doing it. Can I at least fill out a registration form for someone new?”

“Hmm, maybe,” I half-conceded, “I’ll have to check if those need to be done by a certified staff member. And we don’t get a lot of new sign-ups this late into the season.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” she rolled her eyes, “I’m never going to get any experience with any of this. Can’t we at least try something that will let me practice? We can pretend you’re a new girl for a few minutes. There’s always all that awkward time at the end of the day, anyway. And it will feel more real with another person, instead of some imaginary bull- some imaginary nonsense.”

I hesitated, not quite sure how to keep rejecting her ideas. If she was finally starting to take the experimental internship seriously, I didn’t want to be the one who ended up causing her to slip back into the attitude from before. At the same time, I didn’t like how she was using my size as a reason to have me help for what she had in mind, even if she was talking about it without any trace of teasing or judgment.

Maybe sensing my hesitation, or just speaking up again in the lingering silence, Rose said, “Please, Luna? It doesn’t have to be a whole thing. Just fill out one of those registration forms, and make sure I’m transferring all the information correctly afterwards. That’s how you do it, right? A paper version for here, and something on the computer for the office?”

Pretty much. Guess she had at least been paying attention a little bit when helping out in the private staff room. The request felt kind of immature, but I was starting to feel pressured to just go along with it. Partly to maybe motivate Rose to feel a bit more invested in her role, partly because I really needed to get back to work.

Splitting the difference, I said, “If I have time at lunch, maybe.” It wasn’t much of a break, when there was always some degree of supervision involved.

Rose wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easily, apparently. Pretty much as soon as everyone had settled in for lunch, she smiled and handed me a clipboard and a pen with a registration form on it. “Thank you again for doing this, Luna!” she said, with a smile, “Make sure you change your birth year to something appropriate. I think the rest is fine to keep as is!”

So much for the girl forgetting about my half-agreement. I felt a bit put on the spot with how she had gone so far as to give me the materials at a moment where I wasn’t exactly doing anything else but eating the small meal I had packed for myself. It would also only take a couple minutes, with how it was pretty basic information that was needed.

Internally sighing, I began filling the thing out. Name, address, phone number. The whole first section was stuff like that, and then it was onto details about parent/guardian information. If Rose wanted to, she could have just used my file in the office to do this herself; the only difference was that my parents were listed under ‘emergency contacts.’

As for the rest, I didn’t have anything that would help Rose with her practice. No dietary restrictions, no ongoing health issues, no mental health lines that could be checked. I just stuck with the ‘No Health Concerns’ bubble and moved on. After that, there was nothing else I could really do. There was a payment section and all that, but I didn’t have my credit card on me and I wasn’t about to give those numbers to a younger girl I didn’t know all that well.

We only hosted fifth grade students and below, as our games and activities were more geared towards those age groups. That meant the oldest I could be was ‘eleven,’ if I went with my actual birthday. I tried not to be insulted by Rose’s earlier suggestion about me pretending to be one of the kids. Reminding myself that this was a slightly different context, and that I wasn’t that small, I subtracted ten years from my birth year for the line I had skipped to begin with.

By the time I was done, Rose was halfway across the cafeteria talking to one of the other girls in charge. There was no reason to interrupt them, when I could finish my lunch in peace.

Eventually, Rose roamed back to my table, giving me a smile when she saw the completed form on the table next to me. “All done?” she asked, “Good work, sweetie. Meet me in the office later and we’ll get you officially registered.”

She gave me a wink, followed by a playful pat on the head, then strutted off with the clipboard.

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