“Fuckin’ immigrant piece of shit,” she spat, pistoning her foot into his stomach. “Go back to fucking Africa.”
“I’m from Connecticut,” he groaned. He tried to curl around the blow, tried to get his arms around her leg, but she was already drawing back for another kick. Stomach again. He coughed and spat a glob of bloody phlegm onto the dirt. “I haven’t even taken Africa out to dinner yet.”
For Christ’s sake, shut up.
The toe of her shoe caught him in the chin and his head snapped back against the wicker lattice that screened the crawl space under the cabin. He saw phlox, the spiky leaves and delicate tissue paper flowers, pale pink and purple, and his mother’s long, elegant hands turning the earth. I need you to be a man for me, Malcolm, she said, wrist-deep in that dark earth. God knows your father won’t. He doesn’t love me. Doesn’t love any of us. He’s leaving me.
Something warm and wet slapped his cheek. Spit, oozing down to drip from the tip of his nose. “I’ll tell Pastor Eddie if I catch you by the girls’ cabins again, you fuckin’ porch monkey.”
“I’m gay,” he croaked.
“Then what”—a kick to the chest—“the fuck”—and another, scraping his knuckles and shoulder as he curled into a ball—“are you doing”—and one final cannonball to the belly that left him gasping and heaving—“here.”
“Good question,” he wheezed, once he had the breath.
Shut up. Shut up. For once in your life, shut up.
The truth was he’d been on his way to the showers with the other boys when he saw something, or thought he had. A skinny dog, white and tan with a long pink tongue lolling from its muzzle, loping between the cabins. It seemed stupid now. Gabe had said as much at the bonfire back on their second night. There was nothing to eat out here, so how could a dog survive? The sole of Betty’s shoe on his ear squeezed the thought from his head.
“You’ve got a big mouth,” she said. Celine and Dana giggled. They were all clustered around him, the two of them and Athena. He could see their shoes. Their ankles.
“What’s going on here?”
A grown man’s voice. Garth’s. Malcolm squinted down the alley between cabins, looking between the girls’ legs at where the bearded man stood on the line between sun and shade, hands on his hips, leathery face impassive. In his mirrored sunglasses he looked like a shitkicker Secret Service agent.
“He was sneaking around,” Betty said sweetly. “I caught him looking in our window when we came back to change for house chores.”
“Get him up,” said Garth. “He’s had enough.”
The girls dragged Malcolm to his feet. Someone brushed dust from his T-shirt as Garth approached. “All right?” asked the older man as the girls parted before him. He was so big up close, only a few inches taller than Malcolm but probably forty or fifty pounds heavier, not sculpted but hard in the way men who worked all day were hard. Wide and thick and solid. He put a callused hand on Malcolm’s shoulder.
“Oh sure,” Malcolm wheezed. “I’m ready for my close-up and everything.”
Garth pushed him back against the cabin wall and seized his crotch in one hand, his throat in the other. Malcolm froze. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t find his voice. The girls were staring at him, Dana and Celine in shock, Athena with the same cold indifference she stared at everything, and Betty with a disgusting tangle of blind rage, fear, and breathless arousal pushing and pulling at her blunt features, her lips parting and sealing with each panting breath, sliding over red gums and big white teeth. Still it was safer to look at her, to lose himself in that horrible landscape of sunburned skin and twitching muscle, than it was to look at Garth, or to feel the man’s hands on him.
“You want to try that again?” the ranch hand said softly.
“Yes,” Malcolm heard himself say. He didn’t recognize his voice. He sounded like a little boy. “I’m fine, sorry.”
“Get to the showers,” said Garth. He let Malcolm go. “Girls, Cheryl’s looking for you by the flagpole. Now.”
The girls and the counselor left together, Betty throwing one last hateful look over her shoulder at Malcolm. She mouthed a word he’d been hearing all his life and he couldn’t find it in him to smile back at her or flip her off. What would it matter? He thought of his father joking and smiling as his mother worked herself into one of her moods, of the way he’d burned up and blown away out of their lives like paper touched to a lit match. A smile couldn’t save you. It was for you, for your own dignity. A way to say “You didn’t hurt me” to someone busy sticking a knife in your guts. It had never occurred to him, really. The idea of how much pain his father had endured.
Malcolm sank down into a nauseous crouch, trying to catch his breath. His stomach hurt. His head was pounding. He thought probably he had at least one broken rib. He stayed like that for a handful of heartbeats as his breathing evened out, his eyes adjusting to the gloom under Cabin Six, the darkness waiting there.
The dog stared back at him through the peeling lattice, panting in the heat.
Ms. Armitage’s lessons gave Jo a headache. It started between her eyes, a dull white heat burning at the center of her forehead, and crept out in both directions until it was throbbing behind her eyeballs, as though she could feel the optic nerves diagrammed in the Lake Curriculum chapter on the physical process of perception slowly and silently catching fire. At night after prayers or evening calisthenics or midnight hike or whatever their counselors decided they were going to do, she lay in her bunk and touched herself, trying to wash the pain away with the numbing wave of an orgasm. She would think of Cara Sobhian from swim team with her thick, strong thighs, or of Michelle Pfeiffer’s catlike face and mysterious smile in Ladyhawke, and brought herself over the lip of climax and into floating emptiness, but the white-hot point remained.
By the time the next day’s morning run was over, the last vestiges of the headache had usually faded. Her head stayed clear through kitchen or laundry or garden duty at the Glover house, though one morning she’d tried pulling up a patch of ugly brown weeds with tough, woody shoots and translucent seed pods and her hands had broken out into disgusting blisters, hives rising from her wrists and forearms until she looked as though she’d battered her arms and dipped them in boiling oil. That had brought the headache roaring back. It had gotten so bad as she sat in the cool darkness of the laundry room, bandages soaked in honey wrapped around her swollen forearms, that after a while spent staring at the wall while the others loaded, switched, and folded, she began to hallucinate a little white dot in the water-stained concrete. It felt like boiling bleach piped one droplet at a time onto the center of her forehead.
The white point on the wall crackled, and from it descended a thin white line until the whole of it resembled a kind of keyhole. The next day her headaches were gone, though the worst of the blisters lingered for several days afterward. At night the other girls oohed and ahhed over the crusty, oozing mess when she unwrapped her bandages to change them. No one had bothered giving her gauze, so she’d started tearing up some of the random assortment of T-shirts they’d taken from her dresser when they came to drive her south. Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson wrapped tight around her oozing wrists, their peeling faces all coiled together in mismatched strips.
The garden out back of the house was so lush, bursting with life and color. Even the air was heavy with moisture, the sun sparkling in drops of dew and hanging water vapor. Jo had heard one of the counselors call it the crater, and looking up from its basin, where on her hands and knees she weeded among the strawberry plants, it felt like the right word for it. There must be water underground, she thought, watching jewel-colored hummingbirds flit around one of the hanging feeders. Cheryl and one of the ranch hands were smoking on the porch, half-hidden by the crabapple tree. How else could this place exist?
A short way off Candace knelt among rows of sweet peas with her back to Jo. The other girl had been quiet for a few days now. Her cheeks looked hollow, like she’d lost weight, and at lunch she seldom spoke and only picked at her food listlessly. It wasn’t like the way Gabe avoided eating, spreading food around his tray, shredding little bites—Jo recognized her own bony mother’s fetish for starvation there. Candace’s sudden loss of appetite seemed more like the way animals stopped eating at the end, or how her Oba had refused food during chemo, even when her best and oldest friend, Mariko, had begged her, had sat by her bedside for hours, first pleading, then shouting, then crying in the stick-thin woman’s arms while Oji sat whey-faced in the corner and Jo and her parents waited outside with her mother’s cold, unsmiling sisters.
“Hey,” Jo called to the other girl. “You okay?”
Candace was silent a long time before answering. She wasn’t even weeding, just crouching with her hands in the dirt. When she did speak, her voice was oddly flat. “I can’t sleep. Can you sleep?”
Jo yanked a particularly stubborn weed out of the bed and tossed it over her shoulder onto her rapidly growing pile. “I sleep okay.” Long yellow grubs squirmed through the loose soil in the hole left by the weed’s roots. “Feels like they’re trying to wear us out so we don’t plot our great escape at night.”
In fact it felt like Mrs. Glover and the counselors had a special grudge against Candace. They assigned her all the worst jobs—scrubbing toilets, mucking the horse’s stalls in the barn and the chicken coops behind the house, raking up the rotten grass left behind by the mower—and seemed to delight in watching her sweat. They ignored her in the water line, refused to let her break to piss, and made her carry every bag of fertilizer and pile of gardening tools the yard crew needed.
“I’m tired,” said Candace. She was weeding now, though slowly. “I just can’t sleep. I have this headache…”
One of the grubs, which had squirmed to the surface of the soil, began to squirm out of its skin, which flaked and cracked as the wet flesh beneath oozed out, diaphanous wings unfolding limply from its sides. Jo watched it with disgusted fascination, the ghost of her own headache fluttering inside her skull, until the sound of footsteps drew her attention toward the distant house. Cheryl was coming toward them across the gardens, passing Nadine and Smith where they knelt digging potatoes out of mounds of dark soil, pushing through the tepee-shaped tomato frames. She stopped not far from Candace.
“Gruber. Mrs. Glover wants you at the house.”
Candace got up, wiping her dirty palms mechanically on her shorts. Her clothes looked loose. Her face was ashen. Cheryl led her away toward the house without another word as the newly hatched insect’s wings whirred into motion. It flitted away over the tilled rows and sumac stands, past the glazed panels of the greenhouse and up over the yew tree overtaking the glass oblong’s southern end where it vanished among pale green needles. Jo stared after it, her head throbbing.
Shelby had always sat to pee. When she was younger Ruth had liked this, had considered it the first sign of budding homosexuality and encouraged it the same way she encouraged Shelby’s love for Sailor Moon and baking and dancing to ABBA. She wanted the kind of polite and waifish gay boy her friends sometimes produced, something witty and dry and tastefully aristocratic to go with the little cream-colored Dior clutch she carried at openings.
Peeing while sitting down, though, proved to lead to an entirely different set of qualities. Stealing Ruth’s pantyhose. Trying on her lipstick, applied in messy smears and painstakingly shaped with a wetted cotton pad. It led to slumped shoulders and long hair—she missed her hair so badly then, sitting in the graffitied stall attached to the camp’s mess, that she began to cry a little—and to falsies lifted from Pussycat, the sex shop over on Fourth she’d slipped into one day after school where she’d seen two girls kissing in a back room, one sliding her fingers past the waistband of the other’s skirt to stroke the clear arch of a cock. That night Shelby had lain awake in her bed, the little rubber breastlets hidden beneath her mattress, her face burning at the memory of that hand and the coarse dark hairs at the root of the penis its thumb had stroked.
She wiped, not looking down, and stood to shimmy back into her ill-fitting jeans as a whirlpool formed in the stained porcelain bowl with a sound like a gurgling inhalation. It made her think of a movie Stel had shown her once, something scary and sticky with a man who grew a wet vaginal slit in his stomach for some reason. It had made that same glottal sucking sound when he put his fist inside himself. Ruth had come home halfway through and made them turn it off. Brain-dead garbage. Do you think this is the kind of thing he should be watching?
