Camp Spero

Camp Spero is a camp in Brown County for children whose parents had died. Aza Holmes and Davis Pickett attended for two summers after fifth and sixth grade, calling it “Sad Camp.” The place matters not only as part of their shared childhood but as the setting for a memory Aza later recognizes as an unusually intimate connection: the two children, scarcely speaking, looking together at the same sky.

Identity and Setting

Aza and Davis went to Camp Spero during two summers after fifth and sixth grade. Its informal name, “Sad Camp,” captures the circumstance that brought them there: it was for children who had lost parents. The text gives no further description of the camp’s program or daily life; its significance is conveyed through what Aza remembers happening there.

A Shared Memory

At camp, Aza once lay beside Davis at the edge of a dock, their legs hanging over the side and their backs against its rough-hewn planks. They stared up at a cloudless summer sky. Aza recalls that they did not talk much or even look at each other, yet the silence did not make the moment empty. They were attending to the same view, and that shared attention became a form of closeness distinct from conversation or eye contact.

Meaning in Aza’s Recollection

Years later, while speaking with Daisy Ramirez, Aza thinks about the camp memory as something she would have chosen to tell her if she could control the course of her thoughts. The recollection connects Camp Spero to Aza’s childhood fear and to her recognition that Davis belongs to her past, but it also preserves a quieter account of their bond: they had once shared a world without needing to explain it to each other. In the novel’s treatment of the location, the dock and open sky endure less as scenic detail than as the precise shape of a remembered intimacy.