Thank you to everyone who has read and contacted me about Benji and August’s Story! Your support means everything to me! If you want to continue reading about Benji, check out Ben’s Weekend Trip to Utah, where he starts college at the Colorado School of Mines. I reply to all emails at [email protected]
Epilogue: LH491
The silence of this morning feels like a held breath. There's no reveille, no bugle, just the low hum of the transformer behind the dining hall and the distant cry of a gull over the canal. I'm awake long before the pale gray light fully claims the room, watching the slow rise and fall of August's chest where he's curled facing me, one hand tucked under his cheek. Memorizing.
A soft knock at the door fractures the stillness. It’s not Brady anymore. It’s firm, administrative.
I slip out from under the sleeping bag, the air cool on my skin, and pull the blue Kappa shorts before cracking the door open a sliver.
Darren stands there, already looking like a man halfway home, Honda keys in hand. “Morning, Ben. Sorry to bug you so early.”
“It’s okay. What’s up?”
“I’ve got a favor to ask. A big one.” He runs a hand through his hair. “My CRV is packed to the gills with my own gear. There’s no way I’m fitting August and his giant suitcases in there, too. Any chance you could run him to Sea-Tac? His flight’s at two.”
The request lands in my stomach with a strange, heavy finality. Of course. It makes perfect sense. It’s also the last thing in the world I want to do, to be the one who physically delivers him to the point of departure.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to rub away something in my eye. “Of course I can. No problem.”
“You’re a lifesaver,” Darren says, genuine relief in his voice. “I’ll settle up with you for gas. Just make sure he’s at Departures by 11, okay? Lufthansa, International.”
“Got it.”
He gives me a grateful nod and heads off down the row, his mind already on the freeway. I close the door and lean against it.
August is sitting up in bed now, the sleeping bag pooled over his waist. He’d heard everything.
“So,” he says, his morning voice coarse. “You are my chauffeur again.”
“Looks that way.”
He nods slowly, as we both realize it. The plan had always been abstract: Darren would take you back to SEA-TAC. Now it’s specific, intimate, and mine. I will take you.
“I should wear my own uniform,” he says, almost to himself. “For the picture. And for… traveling home.”
He gets up and goes to his dresser, pulling out the items he’s worn only a handful of times: the distinctive crimson shirt of the Dutch Explorers with dark blue pants. He lays them out on his bunk with a care that feels ceremonial.
We get ready in a quiet that’s different from our usual morning routine. There’s no schedule to keep. Just the slow, deliberate motions of filing a summer away. I pull on my Class A’s, the uniform I’ll wear in the photo that will hang in Fort Duckabush. The leather marmot lanyard feels heavy and unfamiliar around my neck.
When August is dressed, he stands by the foot of his bed, looking strangely formal and profoundly out of place. The bright red shirt is a slash of foreign color in the drab room. The long pants complete the effect. He looks exactly like what he is: a scout from another continent, who somehow ended up here.
“Well?” he asks, a hesitant smile touching his lips. “Do I look like I am going home?”
“You look…” I search for the right word. “Perfect.”
He pulls on his dark blue Camp Parsons staff jacket over the crimson shirt, leaving it unzipped. The combination is jarring: a clash of identities, of countries. The Dutch scout peeking out from under the American camp staff shell.
The walk to the dining hall is silent. The camp is a ghost of itself, populated only by staff moving slowly, carrying boxes or duffels to their cars. The air smells of dew and saltwater.
Breakfast is a subdued, buffet-style affair. No waiters, no announcements. Just a final meal together. We sit with Eddie, Natalie, and Ryan. The conversation is light, punctuated by long stretches where everyone just looks at their plates. Ryan asks August about his connecting flight. Eddie just claps him on the back, his eyes suspiciously bright, and says, “Don’t forget to add me back on Instagram, Auggie.”
After we’ve cleared our trays, Steve’s voice cuts through the muddled tones. “Staff photo! On the Grill steps in ten! Look sharp!”
A collective movement begins. We file out of the dining hall and across the main clearing toward the Silver Marmot Grill. The morning sun is still low, casting long, sharp shadows. The wide wooden steps of the Grill are the traditional stage for this final act.
Steve and Darren start arranging us by height, a familiar chaos. Area Directors in the back row, CIT’s and teenage staff crouching in front. I'm placed near the center, a few rows back.
Amir finds his place right behind me, the blue laces of his Sentinel Marmot medallion and another medallion: a crescent and star etched in bronze catching the slivers of light through the trees against his tan uniform.
Natalie ends up beside me, our elbows almost touching. She doesn't say anything. Neither do I. But when she catches my eye for a brief second, there's something there, not the frustration from the mistletoe confrontation, not the forced cheerfulness she's worn all summer. Just a quiet acknowledgment. A shared understanding that whatever the summer of 2022 was, we were both here for it.
August, with his height, is directed in the second to last row, near Eddie and Ryan.
In a sea of tan BSA shirts and blue Parsons jackets, one brilliant crimson shirt peeks out like a beacon. Fransen, August. The exchange staff. The visual proof of the world he brought with him and is now taking away. He looks straight at the camera, his newly short hair making him look older, his expression calm but resolute. A piece of the Netherlands is forever grafted into the history of Camp Parsons.
The photographer, a volunteer from the council, calls out, “Alright, everyone! Big smiles! Think of the brownies!”
A ripple of laughter. We smile. The camera flashes, once, twice.
“Got it!”
And just like that, it’s done. The summer of 2022 is no longer an empty frame. It is now a fact. A piece of history. We are all ghosts now.
The group dissolves quickly after that. No lingering. The photo was the last collective task. Now, there is only leaving.
August zips up his jacket one last time, hiding the red shirt. We go back to our room to collect his suitcases from Banting, the massive ones he arrived with, now stuffed with two months of life, a polished marlinspike, and a wooden plaque.
He stands for a moment, looking at the now-empty room. At the two bare cots. At the windowsill, where only his pewter windmill remains.
He picks it up, turns it over in his hands once, then crosses to me and presses it into my palm.
"For you, Westcott," he says solemnly. "So you remember there is a small country that was first to recognize yours."
I stare at it, throat tight. Then I reach into my duffel and pull out the shiny blue Champion C9 basketball shorts, the ones he'd worn, the ones that still carry the ghost of him pressed against me inside my sleeping bag.
I hold them out. He takes them without a word, holds them to his chest for just a second, then folds them carefully into the very top of his suitcase.
Neither of us says what this means. We don't have to.
"Ready?" I ask, my keys jingling in my hand.
He takes a deep breath, the scent of pine and damp earth filling his lungs one last time. He looks at me, his green eyes clear in the morning light.
"Ready," he says as we start toward the overflow parking lot.
When we get there, Brady is at the edge of the lot, loading his duffel into the back of his Camry with a dented bumper. He catches my eye and waves, not a dramatic goodbye, just a casual lift of the hand, like we’ll see each other tomorrow.
I wave back. We never talked about the night he knocked on our door after lights out. I don't think he ever knew how close he came.
August and I don’t look back after we load the Subaru and drive down the winding camp road. We pass the bell, the trading post, and turn south onto the main highway. The trees close in behind us, and just like that, Camp Parsons is gone.
The drive to Sea-Tac is quiet, but not the quiet of an Olympic Mountain trail: the hushed cathedral of cedars, the muffled hush of moss, the distant cry of a gull swallowed by trees. This is the quiet of the Highway 101 corridor: the relentless hum of tires on asphalt, the whoosh of passing semis, the low murmur of a radio neither of us is listening to.
There isn’t much back and forth. There’s nothing left to say that won’t make the air in the car feel thinner. August stares out the window, watching the dense evergreens of the peninsula give way to the suburban sprawl of Olympia and Tacoma, then the industrial edges of Fife. The landscape, shedding its wilderness, turning back into the world.
When the Tacoma Dome slides past my window, a huge, gray spaceship of a building, the weight of it all finally crashes down on me. It’s over. The buffer of camp is gone. I am back in the city, back in the real world with its traffic and its deadlines and its vast, impersonal distances. My summer, the structured chaos of Parsons, the authority of the commissioner jacket, the secret language of shared bunks, is in the rearview mirror, shrinking with every mile.
In just five days, I have to pack my dad’s truck and drive with him for two days to engineering school in Colorado. To a place of weathered rocks and calculus equations, where no one knows what a Silver Marmot is, and my only uniform will be a hard hat and safety vest.
The silence in the car isn’t empty. It’s full of that future. Full of the ghost of his seat already empty.
The airport signage begins, a relentless march of arrows and acronyms. INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURES. TERMINAL. CHECK-IN.
I follow the signs, my hands tight on the wheel, navigating the familiar curves of the Airport Expressway. It feels like a betrayal to deliver him to this edifice built for leaving.
After another minute, I pull up to the curb at Emirates and Lufthansa, the engine idling. The urgency of the airport swallows us, people wheeling suitcases, hugging, crying, moving. A Port Authority cop eyes us, ready to shoo us along.
This is it. The geometry of goodbye is no longer a tangled knot on a narrow cot. It’s the dipping center console of my mom’s old 2006 Subaru Outback.
August unbuckles his seatbelt. The click is deafening.
“Okay,” he says, his voice soft. He turns to look at me, and for a second, he’s not the confident exchange staffer or the playful Auggie. He’s just a guy, far from home, about to get on a plane. “Thank you. For the ride. For… everything, Benji.”
He leans across the center console. It’s an awkward angle, all elbows and seatbelts. He doesn’t go for my lips. He presses a firm, desperate kiss to my cheek, his stubble scratching my skin. It’s a kiss that says everything he can’t say here, in the bright, public light of the departure level.
He pulls back, his green eyes glistening. “Westcott,” he whispers, our broken code now a plea.
I can’t speak. My throat is sealed shut. I just nod, my own vision blurring.
He gets out. The dome light comes on, a shocking intrusion. He opens the back hatch and heaves his massive suitcases onto the curb with a final, solid thump. He slams the hatch shut, gives me one last, long look through the window, then turns, shouldering his backpack, and walks toward the automatic doors without looking back.
August doesn’t vanish. He is absorbed. The sliding doors open, swallow his crimson-and-blue form, and close.
Then he’s gone.
The cop is now waving at me, impatient. I put the car in drive. My cheek burns where August’s lips just were.
I merge back into the river of cars leaving the airport, all of us carrying our own empty spaces. I drive North, toward downtown, toward what I will still call home for another few days.
In a week, I’ll be starting a new life in Colorado. But for now, during this long, quiet drive back to Lynnwood, the only thing waiting for me is the memory of a summer, already folded flat and perfect, like a photograph placed carefully in an empty frame.
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