Just go back to lunch, Jo told herself even as she scurried after Nadine, crossing the gap between Cabins Ten and Eight in a few breathless steps. Slip in and pretend you were there the whole time. Nobody’s going to notice. Still, she hunched down when Nadine did, advancing at a snail’s pace until they were practically on top of each other at the end of the cabin’s rear wall. There, walking down the empty lane between the rows of housing, was Cheryl. A cold thrill ran up Jo’s spine. The petite counselor, so effortlessly doll-like and perfect with her dirty blond bob and her fitted khakis, had flipped her out of bed that morning without so much as a grunt of effort.
“She fucking scares me,” she whispered to Nadine.
“There’s something wrong with her,” Nadine whispered back grudgingly, apparently resigned to having an accomplice. “I saw her crawling around in the garden at the house, like an animal. I wanna see what she does when no one’s around.”
It should have seemed funny, but Jo couldn’t find it in her to smile. Instead her mouth went dry, and when she spoke her voice quavered like an old woman’s: “Maybe she dropped a contact or something.”
Jo had dreamed the night before of a woman crawling on all fours, more like a spider than a baby, long white hair a curtain hiding her face and trailing over the ground. It’s just some weird coincidence, she thought, watching Cheryl vanish beyond the next cabin. They waited a breath. Two. Three, then dashed across the gap. Jo felt like she was back at practice with the rest of the swim team, helpless to stop herself drifting after Angie Ceriello wherever she went, sneaking glances at the girl’s long, muscular legs as she mounted the dive stand or leaning forward to smell the chlorine and the lilac shampoo in her hair while sitting behind her in the bleachers between heats.
Oji had always told her she was like a cat, wanting only what she couldn’t have, and here she was again, sniffing after another mean white girl who didn’t give a shit about her or anyone else. When Smith had gone down on the morning run, Nadine had just looked annoyed at the delay. It had been Jo who’d dragged the skinny, gasping girl back to her feet. So why aren’t you sitting with Smith right now?
“What the fuck is she doing?” Nadine murmured. Jo sidled over beside her and peered around the corner of the cabin, standing on tiptoe to look over the other girl’s tawny head.
Across the stretch of bare dirt, Cheryl knelt by Cabin Five, fiddling with something near the ground. It was the plywood lattice closing off the crawl space underneath. She worked a yard-long section of it loose, set it aside, then dropped to her belly and slithered through the gap and out of sight. Jo watched the counselor’s boots disappear into the dark beneath the cabin. Waiting in silence, a creeping awareness of the lattice rising halfway up Jo’s own calves put the hairs on the back of her neck on end. What if another counselor was under there now, watching them from the dark, just waiting to slip out and creep silently after them until they were close enough to touch …
“Maybe she went out the back,” Jo whispered, fighting the urge to crouch down and peer through the flaking pressboard slats into the gloom under Cabin Six. Do the counselors slide under there to sleep at night? Do they listen to us through the floorboards?
The seconds dragged, piling up like a wave about to break until finally Cabin Five’s front door banged open and Cheryl stepped out, bolted the door behind her, and set off back toward the mess, brushing dirt from her windbreaker as she went. Jo followed Nadine around the corner toward the cabin’s front to watch the counselor go, a petite silhouette with her shadow thrown out long and spidery behind her by the sinking afternoon sun.
“How did she do that?” asked Jo. “Some kind of trapdoor?”
Nadine smiled, showing teeth. “I don’t know,” she said with relish, “but I’m going to find out.”
Shelby looked up from the picked-apart remnants of her burrito, ripped up in search of offending slivers of meat, as the muted babble of the mess hall quieted. Corey stood at the head of the room in front of the serving counter, the people bustling behind it just dark shapes veiled in the steam from a big industrial dishwasher. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Campers,” he began. “Chef Jason and the kitchen staff worked hard to make your lunch; you’re going to show them some respect by cleaning up after yourselves. Bates, Glass, you’re in the kitchen. Parisi, Horn, start bussing tables. Trays stacked on the counter, leftovers in the orts bucket here.” He kicked a white liquid sheetrock bucket around which a few flies circled lazily. “The rest of you, get these tables into rows facing the far end of the hall. Class starts in ten minutes.”
She barely had time to wonder what the hell “class” meant at Camp Resolution before Dave appeared at her shoulder. “Up and at ’em, Glass,” he said, his tone as warm and even as it had been in the kitchen of Tyler’s apartment; as it had been the whole way from New York. “Come on, you could use the exercise.”
It made it so much worse, somehow, the way he joked around and smiled. He looked like he probably had kids at home. She wondered, as he gripped her arm and towed her from her seat and toward the kitchen door, if he dragged them around the same way. The kitchen was like a sauna, the air thick enough to chew and stinking of grease and oil. Dave led her past a pair of young Latino men in stained whites chatting in rapid-fire Spanish as they wiped down stainless steel counters and a crooked, pockmarked old white man smoking a drooping cigarette and chopping a wilted head of lettuce. The dishwasher, a huge steel cube fitted into a stand bolted to the floor and fed by a fat tangle of pipes, released a boiling wave of steam at the back of the crowded, noisy space as John, already sweating freely, lifted it by the handle. Dave let go of her arm.
“Good skill, working in a kitchen,” he said, scratching his stubbled chin. “World always needs dishwashers.”
He left, brushing past her and trading a few hushed words with the smoking man on his way back to the door. Already the dry, stale air of the mess felt like a distant memory. Her shirt, only half-dry after the ordeal in the canyon, was clinging to her skin again, her boxers riding up into the swamp between her thighs. She stepped toward John, who edged aside to make room for her between the dishwasher and the drying rack. “Hey,” he said, his voice small. “They won’t give us gloves, so it’s best to just go as fast as you can.”
His soft little hands were already red and swelling. He plucked a cookpot from the billowing steam and swung it over to the rack and Shelby dove in beside him and seized a Pyrex pan by its upper edge. It burned, so hot she almost screamed, almost dropped it, slotting it into the drying rack crooked and then stuffing her smarting fingers into her mouth. A memory threatened. Ruth. A burner glowing orange, then cherry red. John stopped for a moment, his expression softening. “I know,” said the fat boy. “Take a second. I’ll keep going.”
Reluctantly, she took her fingers from her tongue. “No, that’s okay. I can do it.”
They shuttled cookware to the rack, the pain of each contact between flesh and metal, glass, or crockery layering atop itself until it seemed like from the wrist down she was just one giant throb. She wondered if this was what Paul Atreides had felt like with his hand in the Reverend Mother’s box of pain, forced to prove he could endure any agony in service to a greater goal. One of the young prep cooks wheeled over a plastic bus bucket full of dirty trays just as they were finishing. John brought the hood down and pressed a red button on the stand. More steam squirted from its rattling bulk. Shelby ran a stinging palm over her scalp, wiping sweat from her cropped hair. She and John exchanged a look. The hood came up. They dove back into it.
The smoking chef watched them for a while, his expression flatly reptilian. Shelby found it hard to care. She could hardly breathe in the smothering heat, and a cloudy blister the color of spoiled milk had formed on the heel of her hand; she had to concentrate to avoid popping it. And then they were done, the trays all scoured and racked, the clatter of dishes replaced by the low murmur of conversation from the mess and the slow, deliberate thunk of the smoking man’s chef’s knife against the butcher block as he diced tomatoes.
“Done?” he growled, a fine dusting of ash drifting from the cigarette’s end as he spoke.
“Yes, sir,” said John.
He turned back to his tomatoes. “Then get out of my kitchen.”
They left, scalded and trembling, hands blistered and clothes damp. Shelby felt somehow worse emerging into the clear air of the mess than she had in the kitchen’s dank swamp, as though she were an amphibian lost in the desert. Nausea seized her stomach and she nearly pressed her palms to her belly before remembering how raw they were, and how little she wanted the rest of the camp looking at her middle where her jeans squeezed her tummy into two doughy rolls. She closed her fists instead, fighting the urge to retch as her nails touched gummy pink burns.
The other kids had rearranged the mess. The tables stood in four rows with a few school desks and folding chairs pulled in from elsewhere in the building sprinkled throughout and a whiteboard on a rolling wooden stand set at the head of the room. A tall, handsome middle-aged woman stood in front of it, her steely gaze locked on John and Shelby. Her lips twisted with distaste. “Take your seats, boys.”
They separated, John trudging toward a seat at one of the tables at the back of the room, Shelby making her way stiffly toward the middle where a single desk chair stood empty. For a moment she was paralyzed with the fear she might not fit, that the folding desk would squeeze her, make her look like too much sausage in not enough casing. Relief washed over her as she settled in and found two or three inches between the desk and her stomach.
The woman at the front of the room was writing on the whiteboard, her dry-erase marker squeaking with each stroke and loop. “My name,” she said in tandem with the marker, “is Ms. Armitage.” She turned back toward them. She had a strong jaw and wore heavy plastic-framed glasses with fine chains hanging from their arms. In her long, billowing gray dress and dark cardigan she looked like one of Ruth’s gallery friends. “The pastor retains my services to see that you stay current with your schoolwork. I have yet to let him down and do not intend to start now.” She pursed her lips. “To that end, your performance in this classroom is directly connected to your privileges at Camp Resolution. Desserts, free periods, phone calls home—all of these things can be yours so long as you apply yourselves, and all of them can be taken away should you fail to do so.”
The mess was silent. By the door, Dave sat in a folding chair with one leg stretched across the threshold, a line of golden sunlight cutting across the toe of his work boot. On the desk in front of Shelby was a scratched and battered textbook with a bland illustration of a lighthouse on the cover above the text THE LAKE METHOD printed in faded type and then in smaller font, beneath it, CORE CURRICULUM GRADES 8–12. Ms. Armitage was still going over the finer points of crime and punishment, so Shelby opened the book, flipped to the middle, and picked out a word problem at random.
If the cardinal of Utrecht and the cardinal of Bamberg build a summer house in Naples, will it help the leper’s stammer?
She scanned down to the next one, perplexed.
If the moon is waxing gibbous and the limpid limpets shimmer, who is watching from its zenith as the bursar carves his dinner?
She flipped forward a few pages. There were dozens of them. More than that. Hundreds. Tongue twisters, maybe? Some kind of elocution exercise like they’d had at her friend Cara’s private school? Shelby paged through the textbook until she found the start of a new chapter, announced with the title EIDETICS in a stacked block font. Someone had doodled a little cartoon Ms. Armitage getting railed by Ronald McDonald just under the header and above the lesson.
The following exercises are intended to strengthen and expand your memory. From the fragments provided for each problem, reconstruct the original sentence to the best of your ability.
1. H v n ea c l i be en nfo di g f sh.
2. i g h mu c f he sp er .
“Am I boring you, Mr. Glass?”
Shelby looked up and sank down into her seat at the same time, her cheeks burning. Ms. Armitage was staring at her, dark eyes flat and merciless behind her glasses, which burned like the corona of a double eclipse in the sunlight falling through the high, small windows near the ceiling.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I was—”
“Distracted,” Ms. Armitage finished for her, a cruel sneer twisting her mouth. “Focused elsewhere. Not. Paying. Attention.”
