Baby, let’s talk about this lat—
We’re going to talk about it now. Andrew, you stay right there, and I don’t want any tears. You have no right to be upset right now.
Shelby was washing her hands when movement in the dirty mirror over the sinks caught her eye. She turned, heart thumping, but it was only Nadine. The girl stood in the recessed doorway, her face in shadow. The worst of her swelling had gone down, her bruises faded to greens and yellows. Her dirty flannel, its sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and torn black jeans, her tawny hair up in a huge, unruly ponytail, she looked like something out of a fantasy, some log-splitting butch all sweaty from stacking cordwood against the wall of a mountainside cabin.
“This is the boys’ room,” said Shelby. She regretted it immediately, heat rising in her face as her stomach did a queasy kind of flip.
Nadine stepped closer. She was thinner than Shelby, but three or four inches taller, and in the dusty sunlight slanting through the little windows the bruises on her cheekbone looked like wax, tight and shiny. “What, are you gonna narc?”
“No. I—I wouldn’t.”
The other girl cracked her knuckles, first her right hand’s, then her left’s. “Good,” she said, flashing a chipped incisor with a sudden smile. “I’m Nadine. Pretty sure one of the counselors hid something here. Wanna help me find it?”
If she’d asked Shelby to get on her knees and lick the floor tiles, Shelby might have hesitated. She nodded, not trusting her voice, and followed the other girl into the stall farthest from the door.
“I heard that bitch with the names and dates on her arm banging around in here earlier,” said Nadine as she lifted the cover off the toilet’s tank, revealing rust-red water and the rubber and steel guts of the pump. She bent down close, then straightened and replaced the cover, roughened ceramic grinding against porcelain. “I bit the shit out of her arm when they put me in the van. That’s how I got these.” She tapped a forefinger under each of her black eyes in turn.
I wish you’d bite my arm. I wish you’d punch me in the face.
“Her name’s Marianne,” said Shelby, turning her attention to the toilet paper dispenser. The plastic housing came off with a squeak, revealing the runty last few sheets of a roll of cheap brown tissue. “I heard her and Corey, our counselor, talking. She said she has a yeast infection.”
Nadine wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
Shelby tried not to stare at the back of the other girl’s neck as Nadine squatted to run a hand over the tile wall behind the toilet. Lean muscles shifted under freckled skin. A faint smell of sweat hung in the air over the bathroom’s mélange of mildew, piss, and lemon. All Shelby needed to do was reach down and brush her fingertips over that smooth skin, that constellation of cinnamon spilled over cream. What would it feel like to touch you there? she wondered, and then with an effort of will she forced herself to look at the graffiti cut into the wooden walls of the stall instead. Nadine wouldn’t want some fat loser half-girl. She could have anyone. Shelby ran her fingertips over the words I love you Terry F. cut crudely just under the door latch. Below them was a little carving of what looked like Pastor Eddie, his face scratched out by a penknife or a nail.
They moved on to the next stall. Shelby was working another dispenser case loose, struggling with the plastic catches, when Nadine’s tapping produced a hollow sort of clink. They exchanged an excited look. The first tile came free with a little wriggling. The second slipped out with a tap. The third clattered to the bathroom floor on its own as Nadine thrust her arm into the gap and pulled out a short-necked glass bottle as long as her forearm, its front covered in cursive under the word ABSOLUT. The tall girl grinned, hefting the fifth. “Bingo.”
“Glass!” came a shout from just outside the bathroom.
Shelby nearly jumped out of her skin, but Nadine only turned and eased the stall door shut. She shot the bolt, then looked back at Shelby, smiled wickedly, and took her by the shoulder to guide her up onto the toilet seat. Shelby crouched down, her brain whirring frantically as she stared into Nadine’s twinkling blue eyes. The other girl’s feet were planted in a wide stance and she was undoing the buttons and zipper of her jeans, exposing sandy curls. She thrust her hips out, hands braced on the stall’s sides, and with an expression of extreme concentration she started to piss, the untidy stream speckling Shelby’s shoes and splashing into the bowl.
“Hey!” Corey called again, and now she could hear his footsteps echoing from the tile walls, could see the shadow of his legs stride past the next stall over and come to a halt before their own. The door shook as he tried the handle. “What’s the holdup, Glass? You expect us to wait on you?”
Shelby swallowed. Nadine, still peeing, though now in spurts, gave her a little nod. Tell him something, the other girl mouthed. Shelby tried not to stare at her mound and the pink lips of her vulva as she tugged her panties up and rebuttoned her jeans. “Just … I’ll just be a minute,” Shelby squeaked. She felt hot. Her balance was precarious, her belly squished against her legs.
A pause. The worst pause in the world, and for a moment Shelby was sure Corey would rip the stall door from its hinges and she’d wake up in her bed at home, and it would all have been a daydream stuffed inside a nightmare. Nadine’s face would be sucked up into nothingness, would fade within an hour into a vague blur of overlapping crushes.
Corey cleared his throat. “We’re hiking out in five minutes,” he said. “You’re late, Garth comes in here and gets you. You think he’ll be as polite about it as I am?”
“No, sir.”
Another pause, and then the satisfied reply: “Then I’ll see you at the flagpole.”
“Yes, sir.”
Footsteps. They held their breath together, she and Nadine, the stall smelling of piss and disinfectant, until they were sure he was gone. Shelby let out a nervous titter and immediately felt herself turn purple. What are you laughing at? Why is she staring at you? She probably thinks you’re insane, sitting here giggling while—
“What’s your name?” Nadine whispered. Her face was so close Shelby could see the tooth marks in her lower lip and where the Band-Aid across her broken nose had started peeling away from her skin. A thin residue of adhesive made a ghostly outline where the strip had clung to her.
“Shelby.”
The other girl smiled. Her lips parted as she leaned in. Their mouths came together and she tasted like morning breath and cinnamon, like sweat and orange juice and pussy, gross and hot and perfect. Sucking and nipping. Spit between them when they parted to breathe. Too much tongue, teeth scraping Shelby’s chin. Hungry.
Perfect, perfect.
Perfect.
Malcolm started wide awake, the dream he’d been having already swirling into rags of wet, disjointed images. Pale phlox blooming. His cousin Leon’s dog, Bones, barking madly at a man without a face. Five little fingers clutching a doorjamb.
The other boys of Cabin Nine were sound asleep. Franklin’s snoring filled the cramped space—two bunks, a linen closet, and a bathroom little bigger than a phone booth, its only partition a heavy canvas sheet hanging from a curtain rod. In the bunk above Vick was talking in his sleep, a ceaseless nonsense mutter, and across the room Carlton Sweet, the camp’s only other Black kid, lay curled into a ball under his blanket.
Something was scratching at the cabin door. Malcolm rose up slowly onto one elbow, fumbling for his glasses in the dark. Every inch of his body hurt like hell, the bruises where Betty had kicked him throbbing in sync. There was something moving in the slit of moonlight coming in under the door. His fingers found plastic and he slid the lenses up his nose, squinting as the gloom came into focus, a wash of grays and browns and blacks, and beneath the door a wriggling shape. Fingers? His heart was pounding in his ears. Vick’s muttering grew louder. Malcolm listened for a moment as the other boy hissed “Mommy, Mommy” in a flat, cold voice.
He slipped out of his bunk, the floorboards rough and cool under his feet, and took a step toward the door. You’re having a nightmare, he thought calmly as he lowered himself to the floor. This isn’t real. You’re home in Riverside in your bed and Mom is crying in the next room over, crying and crying like she always is, but never any tears.
The things—fingers?—under the door withdrew without a sound. Malcolm knelt, holding still, and pressed his bruised cheek to the floorboards. He could see the scratches where whatever it was had dug into the door’s soft and graying pine. Nothing else remained.
The moonlight vanished. A pair of gleaming silver eyes replaced it. Malcolm lay very still. In some deep recess of his brain a little voice was screaming that now was the time to run, that he should roll under his bunk and hope against hope whatever it was looking in hadn’t seen him yet. A low, meaty waft of breath washed over his face as whatever it was let out a rattling exhale, and then in an instant it was gone, the moonlight shining once more on the splintered boards.
His heart pounding, his mouth dry, Malcolm got up from the floor and went to bed.
VII THE HOLE
The first thump yanked Shelby up and out of sleep. By the second, Gabe and John were out of bed. Brady sat hunched in his bunk, his eyes wide and the blankets pulled up to his chin. Shelby set foot to the cold planks just as the third thump rattled the door to the linen closet.
Gabe darted forward and opened it. He’d gotten a match from somewhere and its flame cast a wan yellow light over the interior. Threadbare sheets and pillowcases sealed in plastic waited silently within, some fallen from the highest shelf, others neatly stacked, and for a moment they all looked shamefacedly at one another.
Then the tallest stack began to tip.
