She seemed to want to make some kind of point, so Shelby kept her mouth shut and her eyes downcast. When an adult wanted to take a piss on your head, it was best to close your eyes and let it happen.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Ms. Armitage, and the smug, breathy pleasure in the woman’s voice made Shelby feel uncomfortable, like she was hearing something she shouldn’t, “you and the other boys will join Enoch for an hour of calisthenics before bed check.”
A collective groan rose up around the mess, then faded just as quickly when Ms. Armitage raised a single slender finger. More than one boy shot a dirty look at Shelby. Don’t cry, she told herself as her eyes burned and a lump formed at the back of her throat, the unfairness of it pressing the breath from her lungs. It’ll only make it worse. Just take it. Take it.
“Open your textbooks to chapter one,” said Ms. Armitage, turning back to her board. “We’ll begin with basic psychobiology.”
Gabe’s brain felt like pudding as he filed with the others out of the mess and into the fading light of early evening. Someone had strung low-wattage bulbs between the cabins’ eaves and the rows of housing sat immersed in overlapping pools of soft yellow light. Moths and midges circled the burning filaments, battering themselves against the glass. The pavilion was dark, its entry flaps billowing slightly in the hot, dry breeze, but beyond it in the direction of the parking lot a bonfire had been lit and the dark silhouettes of people sat on logs and folding chairs around it. The counselors were waiting in the gathering dusk to shepherd them from the mess hall toward the blaze.
“Think they’d let us out of here if we jumped in the fire?” Malcolm muttered from the corner of his mouth. “We probably wouldn’t die.”
Gabe stifled a giggle. He felt a little lightheaded; he’d only picked at breakfast and lunch, and class had left him turned around and listless, his thoughts popping like pimples before they were fully formed. First a lecture he hadn’t understood about cellular memory and something called recombinant evolution he hadn’t gotten to yet at Saint Michael’s. Evolutionary lines coming apart and reuniting, coming apart and reuniting until they were more like a braid than a tree. It kind of made sense. The word problems Armitage had given them were slipperier, some kind of algebra that had given him an intense but short-lived headache right between his eyes. He didn’t even know what the Lake configuration was, much less how to solve for its obscure and oddly named variables.
Corey and the Beard, who Gabe had overheard Enoch call Garth earlier, shepherded them toward the firelight’s edge. Gabe sank down onto the dirt and pebbles, grateful to be off his feet and out of the stale, stifling air of the mess. The day seemed to fall on him all at once. The sunburn on the back of his neck and his shaved scalp were starting to sting and itch in earnest, his skin tight and hot where it had cooked while he dug postholes for the cattle fence. His back, shoulders, and arms ached fiercely. All around the fire the other kids settled cross-legged or onto logs mummified by the desert air and polished smooth by use, faces bathed in dancing firelight. Red and orange painting skin.
Pastor Eddie pushed his stick into the fire, sparks and cinders flying as a burnt-through log collapsed. Five kids Gabe didn’t recognize sat around the pastor, apparently exempt from class. There was something about them that made him uncomfortable, something quiet and still and unnervingly watchful. It was hard to get a clear look at their faces in the firelight, which threw deep shadows on them all. Dave and a few of the other ranch hand–looking men who seemed to always hover at the edge of things stood smoking off in the dark near the chain-link fence, the glow of their cigarettes’ cherries waxing and waning with each drag.
“First day’s tough,” said Pastor Eddie after a few moments had passed with only the pop and crackle of the fire to break the silence. “Bet your blood’s pumpin’, though. Bet you haven’t worked that hard a day in your lives. Am I right?”
No one said anything.
“I was down the mines when I was a boy. Eight years old, pickin’ up spill, humpin’ water sixty, seventy feet underground.” His small, dark eyes glittered in the firelight as he looked around at them, and Gabe felt a sympathetic spasm of claustrophobia clutch his throat. “I bet most of you haven’t been worked yet. Not really. Rich parents, soft hands, think the world owes you something just for waking up.”
Gabe thought it was pretty fuckin’ bold of a guy forcing teenagers to work his ranch land for free to carp about their lack of calluses, a sentiment he saw reflected in more than one hard, angry face around the fire.
“And why wouldn’t you expect it?” Pastor Eddie asked. He sounded genuine. “Look where you are now, tossed to someone else by parents who don’t have the guts to teach you themselves how to be in the world. The minute things got hard, they pushed you out of the nest and paid someone else to fix the problem. Throw money at it, right?”
Gabe wondered what it had been like, the conversation when his parents decided to get rid of him. He could picture his father swearing, pacing, jabbing a finger toward the floor as he said things like “unbelievable” and “learn some respect” and “sissy.” Had his mother cried? Somehow he didn’t think so. Maybe she would have for his little sister, Mackenzie, or even for Celia, his father’s daughter from his last marriage who kept cutting herself and getting detention for smoking on school grounds, but not for Gabe. There was something cold between them. Something ugly. There always had been, since the lake.
“You’re confused right now,” said Pastor Eddie. “Your age, that’s natural. What isn’t is what you’ve all gotten yourselves into without real men to show you limits, set some boundaries. With your mothers out playing boardroom power games instead of giving you a household. They’re weak, and they abandoned you.”
A few of the kids around the fire were crying. Gabe swallowed, fighting the urge himself. A few places down the circle, the fat boy, John, was sniffling and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. Crying like a girl. He looked like a girl, with his fat tits resting on top of the shelf of his belly and his soft, round face, his double chin and the stretch marks on his big heavy thighs. He looked like a fat girl, and Gabe found himself hating him for it, contempt bubbling at the back of his throat so hot it almost burned to keep it inside. If our parents are weak, what are we? He wrenched his gaze from John and stared at Pastor Eddie, at that huge, long slab of a face with its thick mustache and little glasses. We’re supposed to, what, thank you? Love you?
He thought of Francis straddling his hips, of that lean, muscular ass rubbing against his hard cock, pressing it against his belly until he could hardly breathe, until he wanted to scream. I’m not fucking confused, thought Gabe. Just say it. Just call us faggots. Stop fucking lying and say it.
“I know this place seems harsh right now, but you can trust us,” said Pastor Eddie. “We only want what’s best for you.”
Oh, there it is, thought Gabe, realizing with nauseous disgust that in some frightened corner of his heart, some little piece of himself still cowering behind the locker room door against which his father stood pressed and breathing angrily, he’d been hoping against hope that there was something gentle hidden inside Pastor Eddie. The thing they say when they want to hurt you.
There were hot dogs, blistered and split by the heat of the fire, and more lies. Lies about hard work, about movies and TV, about heavy metal and makeup and women’s clothing. Gabe kept thinking about Ms. Armitage and her psychobiology lecture, the way everything familiar in what she said seemed to morph midsentence into something alien. Evolution wasn’t a braid. That was bullshit. Fake science. Evolution was a road continually diverging, an unimaginably vast tree stretching back to a single squirming cell, each generation a billion coin tosses fed through the meat grinder of eat or be eaten. How the fuck would it be a braid? Snakes didn’t turn back into lizards. Birds didn’t grow fangs and swell to huge and terrible sizes, dinosaurs reborn out of chicken coops and pet shops. He picked at his hot dog bun, putting a shred of mushed white bread on his tongue for every two he dropped to the dirt or flicked into the fire.
Why was she telling us all that shit?
Malcolm grabbed his sleeve, jolting him from his thoughts. “The fuck was that?” the other boy hissed in his ear.
Gabe followed Malcolm’s stare, squinting out into the dark beyond the fence to where the black outlines of the camp’s small fleet of vans and trucks loomed against the stars. Nothing. He jerked his arm from Malcolm’s grip, annoyed. “What?”
“Eyes, like when you see a skunk in the headlights, you know? The way their eyes glow?”
Gabe looked out at the cars again. He had a dim memory of seeing eyes like that on a camping trip in Maine. The flat, silvery gleam of something watching him from the woods beside one of the campground’s wide dirt trails. The hoarse chuff of an animal’s breath. He’d almost peed himself. Had nightmares for weeks. He swallowed, the night suddenly colder than it had been. “What about it?”
“I saw that, the eyes, over by the fence. A lot of them. I think it was dogs or something. Coyotes? Are there coyotes here?”
“What would they eat?” asked Gabe, and now the hair on the back of his neck was on end, and was that a smear of deeper darkness in among the cars? A shadow moving in the shadows. He swallowed. Calm down, he told himself. You’re freaking over nothing. “There’s nothing out here.”
“What else could it be?”
He looked back to the fire. Pastor Eddie was deep in conversation with Enoch, and some of the other counselors were getting their campers back into their groups, getting ready to head for the cabins. The five strange campers, the ones he hadn’t seen before tonight, stared at the rest of them, oddly expressionless. “Fuck should I know?” he hissed, tossing the rest of his hot dog into the fire and standing up abruptly. The blood rushed to his head and for a second he thought he might keel over, the firepit yawning huge and distorted, flames licking at the soles of his sneakers. Then it passed. Corey was coming toward them, clapping his hands together.
“All right, Cabin Six!” he called. “Form up on me!”
VI LIGHTS OUT
ONE WEEK LATER
Malcolm didn’t remember the day his brother had died. He’d been four years old when Ian, just barely sixteen, drew his last breath in a shitty apartment on the outskirts of Riverside. He’d been staying with friends—Malcolm later pieced together from gossip and eavesdropping that Ian had run away from their parents’ home a few weeks earlier—and one night he’d gone into the bathroom in their little apartment, locked the door, and opened up his wrists with a razor. There hadn’t been a note. Malcolm had a vague memory of wandering among headstones while his mother screamed and screamed and screamed, her voice getting hoarser with each awful shriek until the only sound left was a raw, guttural sucking, like a pig rooting through mud.
Ghuh-ghuh-ghuh.
Sometimes he wondered what they’d been like, his parents, before Ian died. His aunt Charlotte always said his mother, Gloria, had been wild as a girl, though she hadn’t deigned to expand on what exactly that meant. As for his father, everyone liked Don LeFay. He was handsome and charming and knew how to make people comfortable, and how to make himself scarce when things got ugly. Why do you always leave when she gets going? Malcolm had asked the older man once, not long after his ninth birthday. It’s just me and Mary with her when you’re gone, and she gets so mad. She made Mary put her hand in the door and—
Little man, Don had said, cuffing him playfully on the shoulder. Sometimes you just need to get away. He slipped off the side of the bed and brought his fists up, jabbing and feinting. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
What’s that mean?
Means you can’t get into trouble if trouble can’t find you.
Except Don never stung, and whenever Malcolm tried to do what he did, to put a smile on people’s faces, to disarm them and endear himself, create an easy little bond in the space of a few words, a handful of expressions, it just got everyone pissed. That, he figured, was why Betty and her little gang were beating on him now. He’d never worked out how to do the floating part.
