We meet in the church parking lot and stuff our ratty sleeping bags into the back of a rickety school bus. No one checks our bags. The bus zips out highway 55, making a brief stop in Plymouth to pick up a few stray kids.
We’ll stay in the East cabin, two campers per room, girls on the near side, boys on the far. The bus-ride is spent in intense roommate negotiation. After Annandale, we turn left onto a dusty road. If it’s late enough in the season, the smell of quintessential Minnesota prairie wafts through the open windows.
It’s 1984. Most of us are 15. I am not.
We’re crowded into one of the sleeping rooms, all of the girls. Someone brought a tape player. Someone else brought the tape: Purple Rain.
We listen over and over: Let’s Go Crazy, Take Me With U, The Beautiful Ones, Computer Blue, Darling Nikki, When Doves Cry, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star, Purple Rain, Let’s Go Crazy, Take Me With U, The Beautiful Ones, Computer Blue, Darling Nikki, When Doves Cry, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star, Purple Rain, Let’s Go Crazy, Take Me With U, The Beautiful Ones, Computer Blue, Darling Nikki, When Doves Cry, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star, Purple Rain, Let’s Go Crazy, Take Me With U, The Beautiful Ones, Computer Blue, Darling Nikki, When Doves Cry, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star, Purple Rain, Let’s Go Crazy, Take Me With U, The Beautiful Ones, Computer Blue, Darling Nikki, When Doves Cry, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star, Purple Rain.
Standing on the beds in single-gendered abandonment, young bodies twisting, virginal brains open to our Prince. Teach us. Take us.
The moment shines in my memory. No beginning, no end. Only youth.