Catholic camp

Date: 1/28/2020

My parents sent me to some sort of Catholic teen program, which was weird, because we’re Protestant. The priest came specifically to pick me up, with a couple other people, including a young man. I said I had to go to the bathroom, and then I intentionally spent a really long time in there, so when we finally left the sky was already dark. The priest berated me for taking so long, I apologized half-heartedly, and then we left with the young man driving. We drove to roughly the neighborhood of Our Lady Help of Christians, but the church we went into was nothing like that. I remember first driving through the church (it was very large and there weren’t pews or anything), then as soon as I thought it was weird that we were driving through a building, we were walking. It looked like a pretty typical Catholic church had been picked up and dropped inside a school gym. The priest stopped and looked around the church, and the rest of us kept going. Next we went into a big, crowded room a lot like the community space in the Greek Orthodox church in my town. It was full of people sitting at tables and eating. On my way in I passed a teenage girl my age who was sitting on a bench, facing out, with one foot on the bench next to her, and she was listening to music on her headphones. Somehow I knew that we were in the food kitchen of the UU church, even though in my town only the Catholic and Methodist churches have food kitchens. I don’t remember how I got there, but suddenly I was sitting in the corner of the room with a bunch of other teenagers and a couple of adults, including the priest. The priest introduced himself as Father M (I can’t remember what the rest of his name was but I remember that is started with an M). He started talking, but I could barely hear him over the noise of the crowd, and I started looking around at the other teens. One of them, who looked like Ola from Sex Education except that her hair was longer and had gold highlights, whispered to me, “what are you in for?” I told her “my parents are hoping I’ll go home straight” which they hadn’t explicitly told me but I thought was a good explanation for why they had suddenly decided to send me to Christian camp. She kissed me (right in front of the priest and everyone) and then I woke up.