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During one of Darcy’s extended breaks from college, she wound up working as a summer camp counselor in Wisconsin. The camp was just close enough to civilization for weekly trips to Walmart or Shopko, but far enough away that leaving the grounds to drink elsewhere wasn’t really an option.
The nightly open bar for counselors moved just often enough not to catch the attention of any of the actual adults running the camp. It alternated between the one lecture hall, the storage room under the stage, and an old, barely used gym full of mats and old weight benches. Usually, they’d drink for a while and then roam the grounds with baseball bats looking for rogue campers trying to sneak into each other’s bunks.
On a really good night, they caught some kids in the commissary and got to chase them halfway across the grounds before the swim instructor from Australia (Darcy totally did not sign up to help with swimming just to spend time with his abs) tackled the boys, and Darcy managed to corner the girls behind the soccer field. After the requisite humiliation had been doled out and the horny 16-year-olds returned to their respective bunks, Darcy, high on adrenaline, had demonstrated to her Australian co-worker just what the teens had been planning to do with the commissary’s pool table.
If Darcy’s campers thought her smug expression the next morning was from catching them out after curfew, that was fine by her. She spent the rest of the summer corralling teens with gusto and working off frustration at being stuck in Wisconsin by practicing diplomatic relations whenever possible. Her country needed her.
***
When Darcy first moved out to New Mexico, she was coming off a bad primary campaign and mostly living out of her car. She had a few bags of clothes, a box of assorted electronics and personal items, and her baseball bat. She didn’t figure it would be much use against the evils of astrophysics, but it had been her good luck token for years.
She had signed up for the internship on a whim, and ok, maybe because it kept her from having to go back to campus for another semester. Her last six months had been filled with 14 hour days and had used up all the passion she could muster for the time being. When they lost, Darcy accepted the first out-of-state position she was offered in an effort to avoid commercials that would remind her she’d been beaten by a guy who thought Mexican and criminal had the same definition.
A few months of making coffee, filing, and entering data sounded like a welcome opportunity to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. Her parents weren’t crazy about the idea, but they were more relieved that she hadn’t completely dropped out this time around.
Darcy arrived in Puente Antiguo on Sunday evening, when everything in town except the bar was closed. She found the lab without much trouble; it was the only other public building with lights on. She knocked for a while, but whoever was inside didn’t seem to notice, so she lay back on the trunk of her car and glared up at the stars.
She had started to doze off when the snickering started to her left. After a minute or two, the tell-tale sounds of drunk kids filtered over more clearly. Darcy sat up, making as little noise as she could, and reached through her back window to grab the baseball bat. Astrophysics was a bit out of her comfort zone, but drunk teenage boys? That, she could handle.
Using the trailer parked next to her car for cover, she moved far enough to make out two boys getting ready to spray-paint the side of the station and one more unzipping his fly. Whatever the boys expected in the way of consequences, Darcy was sure that a pissed off idealist screaming at them and wielding a bat like a billy club wasn’t it. It took about 30 seconds and a few judiciously placed butt shots to convince them they were definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Darcy was leaning on the bat, satisfied with herself, when Jane emerged to see what the noise was all about. Too busy getting the hell out of Arizona to do the usual Google research, Darcy had vaguely imagined a fussy middle aged woman in a lab coat. This woman, in an oversized Eeyore pajama top with half a poptart stuck behind her ear and a pencil in her mouth was far more Darcy’s speed. She eyed Darcy, the baseball ball, and what looked like the beginnings of a giant, red penis sprayed on her wall and broke into a huge grin.
This internship definitely had possibilities.