THE RETREAT.(Fellowship)

We met on Sundays at five-thirty. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at breakneck speeds, as an experiment in trust. We made collages about protecting the environment. We did skits about navigating the emotional crises of seventh and eighth grade. We sang along while advisers played songs by Cat Stevens. We wrote haikus on the theme of friendship and read them aloud:

A friend stands by you, Even when you're in trouble, So it's not so bad., , A friend is a person, You think you can depend on, And usually trust.

My own contribution to this exercise--

You get a haircut, Ordinary people laugh, Do friends? No, they don't.

--referred to certain realities at my junior high, not in the group. People in the group, even the people I didn't consider friends, weren't allowed to laugh at you that way. This was one reason I'd joined in the first place.

The group was called Fellowship--no definite article, no modifier--and it was sponsored by the First Congregational Church of Webster Groves, Missouri, with some help from the Evangelical United Church of Christ down the street. Most of the kids in seventh- and eighth-grade Fellowship had come up together through Sunday school at First Congregational and knew each other in almost cousin-like ways. We'd seen each other in miniature sports coats and clip-on ties or in plaid jumpers with velveteen bows, and we'd spent long minutes sitting in pews and staring at each other's defenseless parents while they worshipped, and one morning in the church basement, during a spirited singing of "Jesus Loves the Little Children," we'd all watched a little girl in white tights wet herself dramatically. Having been through these experiences together, we'd moved on into Fellowship with minimal social trauma.

The trouble began in ninth grade. Ninth graders had their own separate Fellowship group, as if in recognition of the particular toxicity of ninth-grade adolescence, and the first few ninth-grade meetings, in September, 1973, attracted rafts of newcomers who looked cooler and tougher and more experienced than most of us Congregational kids. There were girls with mouthwatering names like Julie Wolfrum and Brenda Pahmeier. There were guys with incipient beards and foot-long hair. There was a statuesque blond girl who incessantly practiced the guitar part to "The Needle and the Damage Done." All these kids raised their hands when our advisers asked who was planning to participate in the group's first weekend country retreat, in October.