It’s happening again, this time at zoo camp. When I asked Simon if he made any new friends besides Mark, a boy he befriended on the first day, and Sasha, a friend from KIP who serendipitously ended up with him without any planning on her parents’ or my part, the report was as follows:
Well, there’s this girl Ella who always wants to be with me. She holds my hand all the time and doesn’t want me to play with anyone else. Today she was supposed to be paired with Sasha, but she wouldn’t leave me, so we had to work as threes. She kisses me, too. Today she only kissed me one time, but yesterday she kissed me a whole bunch. Our teachers tell us we shouldn’t kiss our zoo camp friends, just our moms and dads.
This would mark the summer continuation of a now-familiar pattern, that pattern being girls liking Simon and Simon not understanding what is going on. With school out for seven weeks now and only one girl at Louisville Nature Center camp two weeks ago, I had forgotten about this.
The other things that haven’t changed? The animatronic dinosaurs they took the kids to see were too scary for him, and he’s asking sufficiently difficult questions that his counselor, a kindergarten teacher, has brought in other zoo educators to answer them. Bright, timid, girl-appealing: That’s my boy!