“We should kill them when they come back,” said a muscular boy named Vick. His expression was hard, his olive skin flushed dark with anger and the heat. “Beat their heads in. Two of us could take the horses and bring back help.”
Shelby couldn’t think of anything to say. She knew she’d fuck it up if she tried to fight. She’d hurt herself, or someone else. She’d run. Cry. You just don’t want to be responsible for anything, she told herself in a voice that sounded much like Ruth’s. You don’t want to try so you won’t be able to fail.
“Ride where?” Gabe asked, his tone edged with hysteria. “Some hick town where everyone has Pastor Eddie on speed dial?”
“At least it’s an idea.”
Shelby wet her lips. “They have guns. Some of the staff had them when we got in yesterday. There must be twelve or thirteen counselors, half as many ranch guys. Pastor Eddie.”
Vick glared at her. “Well, what do you think we should do, General Tso?”
She stared back at him, openmouthed.
“There’s no need for that,” John said in a small voice, which made her feel bad for everything she’d thought about him earlier. “They want us to fight each other.”
Malcolm, who had plopped down on a flat-topped rock as soon as they’d stopped walking, got to his feet with a groan and held his arms out like a referee as Vick advanced and John retreated, cowering. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I think we better shut up and build the fuckin’ fence.”
IV HOUSEWORK
The camp’s showers were outdoors, a single wooden stall big enough for ten of them to wash at once attached to the back of the mess hall. Jo hated them as soon as she stepped through the creaky plank gate. She hated the smell of mildew, the crunching gravel underfoot, the bare pipes of the showerheads and the graying particle board walls of the stall where they hung their clothes on metal hooks. It made her think of locker rooms, of the smell of chlorine in the air and her parents’ faces when she’d told them, still floating from her win in the day’s last freestyle relay, a towel draped over her shoulders like a cape. It made her think of the ride home.
The water pressure was slack. It drooled over her, tepid and smelling of chemicals, as she palmed a chunk of rock-hard soap from a metal tray nailed to the mess hall’s plank siding and started working up a lather. The other girls and the transsexual, Felix, who bunked in her cabin, stepped under the misting, fitful spray. He’s kind of hot, she thought, wondering if that made her less or more of a lesbian. Tall, strong, little Gomez Addams mustache …
She soaped between her legs, hating the way her thighs felt, jiggly and formless. After her parents had made her quit swim team, she’d spent months lying in bed while her muscle tone dribbled away like the sudsy water soaking into the dirt beneath the packed-in gravel. The morning run still throbbed in her legs and hips. Maybe I can get back into shape out here, she thought, trying not to stare at wet skin, at bare breasts, at water trickling into asscracks and dripping from bushes. It was so close to some of the porn she’d watched hunched in the den in the middle of the night and then studiously deleted from the family computer’s browser history. Shoddy reproductions of prison showers and locker rooms. Cheap fabric tearing. Lip gloss. The artificial glow of bronzer and the gleam of clear undercoat on pointed nails.
Mom, Dad, there’s something I want to tell you.
Faces falling. Smiles growing brittle. They’d driven in silence to pick up Oji-chan from his shogi night, a dozen old Japanese people pushing tiles around wooden boards and smoking awful imported cigarettes, and Jo’s mother had turned to her and said “Not one word” as Oji approached across the parking lot. He’d known something was wrong, though. The whole ride home he’d held Jo’s hand while she cried and her parents refused to discuss the reason why.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Did something happen to Joanna? Asuka! Explain yourself.”
Her mother speaking terse and rapid Japanese, too fast and low for Jo to follow as they pulled out of the parking lot and into traffic. Downtown West Caldwell all lit up at night and a thin scum of dirty snow and slush still on the sidewalks.
A long, dead silence, and then he spoke, his voice heavy. “She would be ashamed of you if she were still alive.”
By the end of the week her parents had put him in a retirement home in Essex Fells, though half their Japanese friends stopped talking to them over it, and the house on Lincoln Street, never lively, became a tomb. Sometimes at night Oji would call, and if Jo reached the phone before her mother he would say, voice trembling with grief and fury: “I love you. There is nothing wrong with you, my brave girl,” and she would mumble something back, feeling dead, feeling like meat rotting on a scaffolding of bone.
I want to fuck all of you, she thought at the girls around her, a black void opening in the pit of her stomach. In the corner of the stall the big redhead, Betty, who’d hurt Smith during the run, was touching herself under the farthest showerhead, the muscles in her broad shoulders flexing, tensing. Another girl, slim and olive-skinned with thick black eyebrows and rows of scars on the insides of her skinny thighs stood on tiptoe next to her, whispering in her ear. Jo’s throat felt tight. Her clit was stiff and aching. Please, don’t look at me.
The water cut out. Jo drew a shuddering, sucking breath that was almost a sob. As the last drops spattered on the gravel underfoot she heard what the girl with the eyebrows was whispering to Betty.
“… beautiful baby, my little thing, helpless and weak…”
The voice trailed off. Naked bodies jostled for rough towels at the hooks. Jo fought the urge to cry as she watched a fat girl help a shaking Smith towel off and dress herself. I don’t want to be here, she thought. They spilled out of the shower; Cheryl was waiting to escort them to breakfast.
I don’t want to have to be brave.
You’re such an idiot, thought John, planting his foot on the back of his shovel’s head and throwing his weight against it. The blade bit into the hard, dry earth. At least being fat was good for something. Telling them your full name? Shaking hands? What are you, running for office? Are you workshopping campaign slogans? John Calvin Bates, a dork you can kick in the nads.
“You’re making me feel bad for that shovel,” said Malcolm, who was digging at the marker to John’s left. A few of the other boys laughed and the Black kid’s grin widened as John blushed. “When you hear ‘all you can eat’ at the buffet, do you think it’s an ad or a dare?”
Two markers over, Vick busted out laughing like Malcolm’s joke was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. The stocky boy doubled over, leaning hard on the handle of his shovel as he wheezed. “I have a slow metabolism,” John said stiffly, raising his voice to be heard over the laughter. He levered a load of dirt and pebbles out of the hole and jammed the blade back into it, kicking down on it harder than he needed to. He jiggled with the force of it and felt his blush deepen. There was a roaring sound in his ears.
“Well, when it finally gets here it sure has its work cut out for it,” Malcolm drawled. He was pretty, which made John even angrier. Sharp cheekbones, soft mouth, and long, dark eyelashes. “You ever hear of Richard Simmons?”
“He probably ate him,” Vick wheezed. He was laughing so hard there were tears in the corners of his eyes.
Of course it’s the same here, John thought, driving the shovel in again. He set his jaw and heaved, levering a stone the size of his fist out of the posthole and tipping it onto the growing pile of reddish earth beside it. Of course it’s just like Saint Peter’s, just like Concord High, just like fucking Bible camp. Just like home.
All night he’d lain awake with a dull ache in his throat, a lump of homesickness so bad he’d hardly been able to breathe, but what was at home? His father’s disgusted expression at the dinner table. Grant and Lisa, so thin, so perfect, looking at him like he was something mildly interesting they’d found under a rock while his stepmother ranted about how no one at her WeightWatchers group could really be honest with themselves, how they were always lying and backsliding, sneak-eating candy bars from their purses, sabotaging and enabling each other and everyone knew but the facilitator was so soft on them, so forgiving even though it hurt them in the end, even though it really wasn’t professional, and they all resented her, poor innocent Sheila—who had married John’s dad after cancer picked his soft, round mother’s bones clean and flicked the shriveled stick of her away—for her self-control and because she’d joined to work on body fat percentage and not weight, wasn’t that sad, wasn’t it sad, didn’t they all agree it was sad, sad, sad the way those cows just couldn’t control themselves and made it everyone else’s problem?
“Seriously, man, did you watch The Blob and think There’s a look I could pull off?”
Crunch. Heave. Thud. Another shovelful onto the pile. John’s shoulders were burning, but it felt good to hurt. It made Malcolm’s voice and Vick’s hysterical hyena cackle and the chuckling of the other boys feel far away and small. He was strong. Stronger than them. He could bench two hundred pounds, even though it made him sick and woozy. His dad had looked excited when John sat up red-faced from the padded bench, like he was seeing John for the first time, or like he was seeing another son, useful and handsome and not at all embarrassing to him.
When that son had failed to materialize, had stayed buried under the rolls and folds of disappointment now sweating and itching in the brutal sunlight, his father had gotten a different look, pinched and furious and wide-eyed.
“If you’re not going to take this seriously,” he’d said at dinner one night, and John had known with an instant flush of shame that “this” was his body, his entire existence, “then for your own good, I’m going to do it for you.”
Malcolm’s voice punched through his fugue.
“Mr. Michelin, what sets your tires apart from your competitors’?”
John started toward the other boy before he knew what he was doing. His grip tightened on the shovel’s haft. He saw the moment Malcolm went from trying to think of another joke to knee-jerk fear and it made him feel strong and rotten at the same time. Vaguely, he sensed that the other kids were drawing back, dropping their shovels and saying things like, “Ah, fuck!” and “Kick his ass, Shamu!”
A hand fell on John’s arm. He turned, tensing up, but it was just the Asian kid, Andrew, short and kind of pear-shaped, hair shaved down to black stubble. The one he’d spoken up for earlier. Oh, thought John, somehow completely certain, as he met Andrew’s stare and all the anger drained out of his body. The shovel’s blade thunked to the dirt. She’s a girl.
“Come on,” said Andrew. She had a soft, high voice that crackled just a little. “Let it go.”
