Your smile fades in the summer.

Among the rolling hills and crowded forests of central Pennsylvania, nowhere near any major cities or major highways, is Camp Woodward.

Driving to Woodward, you’ll pass more Amish horse-and-buggies than you will cars. Woodward is surrounded by effectively nothing, kind of like Camp Green Lake in Holes.

Except instead of being a juvenile delinquent camp, Woodward is a 40-acre dreamland with about a dozen skateparks, a bunch of gymnastic facilities and overnight cabins. It seems it was made explicitly for teenagers who can’t sit still.

I discovered Woodward through Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX and grew obsessed. All I was interested in at 15 was skateboarding and girls, and Camp Woodward brought them together. I could not fathom a more perfect place. Woodward was a pressure cooker of teenage excitement and hormones, and I got to go for a week with a bunch of friends and it was fucking RADICAL.

There was little in the way of actual guidance and instruction at Woodward, which in hindsight makes sense because what rational being would try to herd around hundreds of teens for hours everyday. You never knew what you’d come across as you’d skate from park to park. One day, we skated with Chris Cole at a concrete park, the next I won a highest-hippie-jump contest (yes, 11 years later I’m still proud of that). This is it, I remembering thinking to myself, this is the height of luxury.

I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but one afternoon Rowden and I struck up a conversation with two girls who were there for the gymnastics camp.

Their names were Kaitlyn and Ashley. I think it was Ashley. I’m really plumbing the depths of my memory here as it is. Let’s call her Ashley. Anyway, Rowden and Ashley broke the ice, and I was trying to ignore the part of my brain that was screaming holy-shit-this-cute-girl-is-talking-to-me as Kaitlyn and I got to know each other.

I cannot recall anything specific that we talked about. It wasn’t like we had a deep connection or anything. Kaitlyn was bashful, equally goofy as I and she would even feign interest when I’d ramble on about skating, ska or whatever else I could think of to fill silence.

Over the course of the week, we’d meet for breakfast in the morning, run into each other throughout the day, and text each other from our cabins at night. Kaitlyn was the first girl I remember being well and truly smitten with, the foundation upon which all my future crushes have been built. She was just delightful.

On the last day of camp, Kaitlyn and I hugged and said goodbye.

I went back to Woodward the next year and remember texting Kaitlyn in the weeks before, asking if she was going back as well. She was, but the week after me. My adolescent heart sank. I had no illusions that we had a future together, but at that age any attention from a girl was to be coveted. That was the last time Kaitlyn and I ever talked.

Somehow, all these years later, I still have her number saved. Every time I’ve gotten a new phone and transferred my contacts, “Kaitlyn from woodward” has been brought over, the same name and number that was initially entered into my old LG flip phone all those years ago.

We met on the eve of MySpace, well before the days of Facebook, and we never learned each other’s last names. I couldn’t try to track her down even if I wanted to.

She was from Northern Virginia, so there is a very slim geographical chance that our paths will someday cross, but even if they did, it’s not like we’d recognize each other. The version of me she knew had a fro and wore torn up skinny KR3W jeans and a sweat-stained Operation Ivy t-shirt. Things have changed.

I have no plans of ever calling or texting her. For all I know, she got a new number years ago. I guess I keep her number saved as a way to remember what life was like at that age, when puppy love felt like the most important thing in the world. There is someone out there who had a big impact on me, and I wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her.

For me, a side-effect of adulthood has been a tendency to hedge my bets, to be a little more reluctant in getting excited about things for fear of getting let down.

But that was not my ethos as a teenager. When I was at Woodward, I dove in head first into everything I found interesting, wasting no time becoming invested in the people and things that got me stoked.

I think the memories of people who affected you at that age are worth holding on to. And I think holding onto that youthful brand of reckless optimism is even more important.