Nadine slid out from under his palm, fumbling through the kitchen drawers until she found a set of mismatched potholders scarred black with carbonized fabric where they’d been used to grip hot metal. The oven belched a cloud of thick, greasy steam into her face when opened. She wrestled the black pan and its sizzling cargo up onto the range. Yellow bone glistened where it jutted from rings of half-molten fat. Slices of pineapple clung to the grayish-brown meat that bulged between the roast’s twine trusses. An inch of oily, clouded drippings sloshed in the pan’s bottom. She reached over it to shut off the oven, and as she did a flash of motion through the window caught her eye. A grinning face in the undergrowth. Limbs pushing through the vegetation. Then it was gone. Nadine couldn’t breathe.
It took all her restraint not to scream, but something must have crossed her face, some look of horror, because suddenly Pastor Eddie was beside her, one huge hand tipping her face up toward his, the other like a vise on her upper arm. “What’s wrong, honey?” he asked, and his breath stank the same as the meat, but with an edge of mint and something else. A feeble, sugary sweetness. “You burn yourself?”
The other girls were watching. Only Felix kept at his cleaning, scrubbing on his knees in the corner of the kitchen. Doing his time. “It was the steam,” Nadine lied, casting her eyes down in the way she knew men like him wanted her to. Shy. Embarrassed. Her heart was racing. “It … it was hotter than I thought it would be. That’s all.”
He chuckled. “You girls,” he said. He released his grip on her arm and swiped a finger over the roast’s flank, then brought it to his mouth. The juices stained his mustache as he sucked them off. “Always jumping at something.”
He left, heavy footsteps receding into the house, and gradually the kitchen’s quiet chatter resumed. The click-click-click of knives on cutting boards. The soft, fleshy ripping sound of Candace plucking her fat chicken. Nadine drifted back to the sink, turning the hot water on and reaching for a gunk-crusted serving bowl afloat in the soapy basin. The ceramic burned her palms and there were no rubber gloves that she could see. It didn’t matter. Outside, the hummingbirds darted like little jewels through the sunlight, bobbing and weaving around one of their plastic feeders, but Nadine couldn’t shake what she’d seen through the smeared and spotted kitchen window.
Cheryl, face twisted into a lined rictus, crawling roachlike through the garden on all fours.
V PELLETS
Once the fence was up they walked back to camp for lunch. The return trip was worse; not only was Gabe exhausted, starving, and sunburned, but the other boys—even that whale who’d gone around shaking their hands that morning—had done what boys always did, clicking together in some unspoken ritual of insults and raised fists until they were us and Gabe was them, left to stand outside their little warrior circle. His hair was bothering him, too. The short, fuzzy feel of it, like a small animal’s pelt. Francis had loved his hair, had liked to play with it when they lay together, after. Chestnut locks spilling loose between pale, callused fingers.
Even Francis didn’t talk to you at school, whispered a nasty little voice in the back of Gabe’s mind. He knew you didn’t fit. He knew everyone would smell you on him, the loser stink of you. He’s probably doing damage control right now, telling the other baseball team douches you tried to suck his cock, that you’re in love with him, a pathetic little fag he feels bad for. Disgusting.
The other boys laughed at something Malcolm had said. Gabe hadn’t heard it. On their hike out he’d felt them all watching him, peeling sweaty clothes from his body with their eyes, drawn in by his beauty and his silence. Now they’d sniffed out its real name—awkwardness—and there was nothing left to draw their eyes. He dropped back behind the others, making space for his self-pity. A ways ahead Corey and Enoch rode atop their horses with the sun at their backs, and past them the compound danced in a shimmering heat haze. The world’s most depressing oasis.
He didn’t see what tripped him. A rock. A patch of sand. A prairie dog hole. Through the thousand ways his feet were crying out in agony it was impossible to log one more. All he felt was a flat, gray sense of bottomless despair as he plummeted face-first toward the ground. Of course. It slapped him breathless before he could get his hands out to break his fall, leaving his head ringing and his lungs straining fruitlessly for air. He rolled a little way down a shallow incline, ledges of brittle earth collapsing under him, and managed to suck in his first breath just as he flopped into a pile of something soft, wet, and reeking of vomit and moldy cheese. Sour dust and clinging debris coated the inside of his mouth. He scrambled back with an undignified squeal of horror, spitting and wiping his face on the sleeve of his flannel. On the ground where he’d landed, his face and right shoulder imprinted in its mashed length, was a heap of wet, hairy, knobby little bundles no bigger than two fingers held up side by side.
“Back on your feet, Horn,” Corey yelled from the front of the line. A few boys were coming toward Gabe, sliding and hopping down the shallow incline so that waves of dust and loose dirt washed over Gabe where he sat sprawled on his ass, coughing up flecks of who knew what.
“Pretty boy fell in some cow shit!” Malcolm hollered back. “We’ll get him!”
“That’s not shit,” said John, puffing and red in the face, as he skidded to a halt, one hand going to Gabe’s shoulder before he drew it hastily back. He looked befuddled, and Gabe felt a moment of white-hot attraction to the huge and reassuring bulk of him. The soft, broad strength of his presence. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Gabe wheezed, not knowing what else to say.
“It’s pellets,” said Brady, crouching beside the pile. He had an absurd voice, high and squeaky, and up close Gabe could see traces of dried, cracking eyeliner at the corners of his eyes. “Owls throw them up after they eat something.” He blushed, looking from John to Gabe to Andrew and back in a nervous series of twitches. “A-all the parts they can’t digest, like hair and bones.”
“Gee, thanks, Ranger Rick,” said Malcolm, but he squatted down to look just the same as John helped Gabe to his feet. A little way up the incline Andrew stood looking queasily down at the heap of owl pellets, or whatever they were. Malcolm leaned forward a bit, drawing a collective hiss from the rest of them, and snatched something thumb-sized out of the pile. Gabe saw part of a little skull. A mouse, maybe, or a songbird. “Well, then what the hell threw this up?”
An uneasy silence fell. Andrew had gone pale and Brady looked nauseous. Gabe cleared his throat and spat on the ground. “A big fuckin’ owl, genius.”
The other boys laughed, and just like that, for the first time in his life, Gabe felt the curtain part, felt himself led through into the warmth of brotherly love, and for a few minutes he forgot about his blistered, throbbing feet and sunburned shoulders, his parched mouth and the flecks of owl pellet still stuck to his face. For a few minutes, walking up the hill with the other boys to rejoin the disgruntled marchers and their counselors, he felt like he belonged.
In his heart, though, he knew no owl that ever lived could have vomited up that awful thing.
Lunch was cold black beans with little shreds of pork rolled up in stale tortillas. The other boys came in late as Felix was wolfing down his second. They were sunburned and filthy, their shirts soaked with sweat, and for a moment he felt an awful, wrenching pain in the pit of his stomach that he didn’t stink like they did. He crushed it down. You aren’t going to cry, he told himself, and under the table he dug his short, square nails into his palm until he calmed. Eat.
A few of them came to sit at his table. Gabe and Malcolm and the fat boy, John. Candace, seated to Felix’s left, gave Gabe a shy smile. “How many Michelin stars you guys think this place has?” asked Malcolm, picking at his dry triangle of cornbread. “Two? I’d say three, but the sommelier is really phoning it in.”
Candace laughed. Felix took another flavorless bite. None of the food at Camp Resolution smelled or tasted like anything. Just different textures and configurations of oily, salty nothing that sat like a brick in his stomach. He chewed, glancing over at Nadine at the next table. She still looked shaken after whatever she’d glimpsed through the kitchen window. He’d seen her go pale. Maybe a counselor raping a kid in the garden? This seemed like the kind of place kids got raped.
It’s not your problem, he told himself, forcing down another mouthful of cold, chewy burrito. Let her worry about it, if she’s so fucking tough.
“… and there were all these, like, lumps of hair and bones and stuff in a big pile,” Malcolm was saying, gesturing rapidly as he spoke. He slung an arm around Gabe’s shoulders and pulled the taller boy into a one-sided hug. “He wiped out right in the middle of it and came up looking like he blew a Fraggle.”
Gabe had a fussy, irritated look on his face that made Felix think of his little sister, Clara, when she stayed up too late and started turning everything into a fight. Don’t think about Clara, thought Felix, chewing faster. He swallowed, almost choked, and then ripped off a huge mouthful of greasy nothing. Get ready for the next thing they do to you. Eat. Hydrate. Sooner or later someone’s going to hurt you. Beat you. Someone’s going to wait until you’re down and then start kicking. Push your face into your own puke.
He felt a sudden surge of nausea at the thought of Betty with Smith’s hair wrapped tight around her fist. That grin. That freckled, peeling skin, like something underneath was trying to get out. What leaves a pile of hair and bones in the middle of the desert? A scene from an old National Geographic nature documentary surfaced in his mind’s eye. A pale, ghostly looking owl hacking and retching until it brought up a turd-shaped clot of indigestible material. Maybe they do it together, in a flock.
“Hey, Speedy Gonzalez.” He looked up. Malcolm, elbows on the table and chin cupped in his hands, was grinning at him from a bare few inches away. “Save some for the war orphans.”
Felix stared at him, cheeks bulging with half-chewed burrito. What the fuck was wrong with everyone else? Why were they acting like this was all some big adventure at sleepaway camp? He swallowed and dropped the heel of the burrito to his tray. “Why don’t you fuck off?”
“Jeez,” said Malcolm, his smile fading. “Tough crowd.”
“Do you ever shut up?” Felix snapped.
Malcolm’s smile returned at once, like a light switching on. “Put your cock in my mouth and find out!”
Felix stared, mouth hanging open, as Gabe and John started laughing. Even Candace let out a shrill little giggle. Felix shook his head, smiling in spite of himself. “You couldn’t handle it,” he said. His voice sounded pleasingly gruff to his own ears. He missed his brothers with crushing, all-encompassing despair, a need deep in the pit of his stomach to have Leo ruffle his hair and the twins, Marco and Julian, whining at him to help them beat a level in Super Mario Brothers. Tears threatened, and perhaps a little more than threatened, but the other boys turned graciously to talk to one another as he dried his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt, and he felt himself begin to love them for it.
Don’t think about that.
He cleared his throat. “So,” he said to Gabe. “You fell in a bunch of owl shit?”
“We’re gonna get caught,” hissed Jo, scrambling to keep up with Nadine as the taller girl slunk out from behind the trash cans in back of the mess hall. “We should have gone to lunch with everyone else!”
“Then stop following me,” Nadine shot back. “Maybe if you suck Enoch’s dick he’ll let you off the hook.”
Jo flushed, but she didn’t turn back. Wherever Nadine was sneaking off to, it was probably more interesting than cold burritos. “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
Nadine ignored her. They crossed the open stretch of dirt between the mess and Cabin Ten at a brisk clip. Jo’s legs still burned from their morning run, but after an afternoon in the cool, musty darkness of the farmhouse’s laundry room it felt good to warm her muscles up again. They circled around the back of the cabin, passing under its barred windows. “At least tell me what we’re doing,” Jo panted as Nadine, hugging the splintered clapboards, peered around the corner of the cabin.
“I’m following Cheryl,” Nadine hissed. “You need to shut the fuck up before you get us caught.”
