Friends, thought Shelby, leaning her head on Nadine’s shoulder as Gabe passed the bottle to Jo, who took it with a nervous smile. The dreams didn’t seem so frightening, all of a sudden. The headaches. Ms. Armitage’s silly classes. She closed her eyes, the heat of the vodka a pleasant burn in her stomach.
I have friends.
In Malcolm’s dream he was digging a hole. The ground was hard and rocky, fighting him for every shovelful of earth, and the sun beat down mercilessly on the back of his neck. He heard someone who sounded like his father say, “The shirt on his back!” but he didn’t know who they were, or where they might be. His father was gone. Sometimes Don would come home to sweep Malcolm and Mary off to dinner, to grin and joke and tell them stories about his work in Texas for one of the big oilfields, stories about men with names like Gatwood and Cotton, but he never stayed, and after dinner there was their mother crouched in the doorway like a starving vampire, watching them walk across the lawn, already rehearsing in her mind a litany of the sins committed against her.
Malcolm looked up. The hole had gotten deeper. He was in over his head now. On the lip above a crowd stood watching him, their faces lost in shadow, backlit by the sun, and from time to time warm droplets of their spit would strike his face or fall to the dirt beneath his feet, absorbed at once by the hungry earth. He kept digging. Deeper and deeper, the soil growing darker, turning muddy as moisture welled up from it. At length the shovel’s blade struck something solid, the shock of impact reverberating up its handle and his arms to rattle his teeth in their sockets. He set the implement aside and knelt to dig by hand.
Slowly, the shape of the buried thing took form. A long nose, slightly crooked where a neighbor kid, Mark Sussman, had broken it with a baseball bat. Cropped hair, tight and coarse. A wide, smiling mouth. High cheekbones and a little scar, barely noticeable, at the corner of the left eye where the emerald set in his mother’s ring—
The face’s eyes opened. Malcolm froze. The people above were talking now, voices low and excited. The face’s mouth moved. Mud dripped from its chin as it spoke in a voice he recognized at once as his fifth-grade teacher Ms. Landsman’s, soft and precise and respectably white.
“Kiss me, Malcolm.”
The voices above grew louder. He heard frantic wingbeats, though he couldn’t see a bird. “I don’t like girls,” he said as their lips met. His mouth tasted of earth and rain and something oily and bitter that he didn’t recognize. A tongue thrust its way into him, gliding over his teeth and then slipping back into the sour trenches between gums and lips. It was a kiss like nothing he’d ever experienced. The dry, chaste pecks he’d teased and wheedled from his fellow Boy Scouts. The sloppy lip-locking with Bruce Ramapoe, who’d thrown up on him right after and given him a black eye the next day at recess. This was a real kiss, a grown-up kiss, hungry and intimate.
Muddy fingers brushed his throat and the line of his jaw. His mouth felt oddly full, as though the questing tongue were swelling, and as a hand took hold of the back of his head he felt that slick, fat muscle split and split again, tendrils forcing themselves deeper, caressing the back of his throat, the tender clapper of his uvula. He gagged, recoiling, and the face came with him, the mud erupting as the buried thing emerged, kicking its way free of its slimy, shit-colored womb and forcing its tongues deeper into Malcolm’s throat. His back was against the wall of the shaft. He could see, at an oblique angle, that its face was hollowing out, becoming gaunt. He retched, bile burning in his nostrils, but the thing only reached deeper as the muscles of his esophagus convulsed.
Something came unstuck, and for a moment he surfaced flailing from the dream, confused by the sheets entangling him, by the warm, sticky wetness soaking into the front of his boxers, by the alien shapes of the bedframe and metal springs of the bunk above his, and somewhere beyond wood and air and the harsh light of the overheads strung up between the cabins, seven wild pink lanterns burned in a circle, and beyond them something huge and raw and hungry snuffled at the edge of their campfire, and then he was back in the hole and the thing that was him and not him stood over where he sagged slack and powerless within the negative impression it had left climbing out of the dirt. A womb in the earth that fit him like a second skin down to the last pube.
“Wait,” he tried to say, but only a strained breath escaped his lungs, and then mud rained down on him, hard enough to bruise and stun, and did not stop until the world was black and cold and silent.
Nadine pulled herself through the trapdoor in the floor of Cabin Two and knelt to help Jo and Felix up after her. Her head was swimming pleasantly as they restacked the linens. She felt warm. Her stomach fluttered with the memory of her kiss goodbye. She’d never really thought about being with a transvestite, but Shelby felt like a girl in her arms, soft and shy and so achingly sweet. She found herself grinning as she shut the door, though in the pit of her stomach a little worm of guilt squirmed restlessly at the thought of Tess’s dimpled smile.
In silence they replaced the closet’s false bottom. Smith stirred in her bunk when Felix closed the closet door. She blinked owlishly at them from within her blankets, her big eyes catching the light that fell through the gaps in the cabin’s walls. “Was it fun?” Smith whispered.
“You should come next time,” Nadine whispered back, fighting the urge to giggle. Beneath her drunken euphoria she could feel her niggling doubts about the dreams trying to resurface, but maybe they’d gotten overexcited, started convincing themselves they’d seen things they hadn’t. She knew it happened sometimes. Her mother was like that; whenever someone got sick, an hour later she’d be retching in the bathroom and moaning about her fever. “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
But when she woke in the gray gloom just before dawn, her head pounding and her mouth sour, Smith’s bed was empty, her sheets and blankets folded neatly at its foot.
VIII THE BARN
Gabe felt sick. The heat, even with the sun still creeping up over the horizon, was boiling, and his head felt as though someone had put it in a vise while he was sleeping. His stomach churned sourly, cramping with each shaky heave of the shovel’s blade. They were digging postholes again. Corey and Garth had led their cabin and two of the boys from Eight out while it was still dark, the last faint blush of starlight making the counselors’ horses appear limned in silver as they rode. One of the other boys, a stringy little fifteen-year-old named Ben who Gabe didn’t know well, had cried for most of the walk out.
He couldn’t shake the dream, the one they’d all had. He’d told himself a dozen times that it was mass hysteria, that they were all feeling scared and alone and looking for things to pin those feelings on, trying to comfort himself with his therapist mother’s cold platitudes, but nothing worked. People don’t have the same dreams, he thought as he dug. Not far off the ranch’s cows were ambling down a broken slope, mothers nosing their calves over the rocks and desert driftwood, lowing in the heat as the first ghostly shimmers danced atop the nearby ridge. It’s impossible.
By silent agreement the other boys stopped digging and joined him to watch the herd pass. Gabe leaned on his shovel, breathing hard. There must have been fifty cows. Maybe more. He wondered how you were supposed to keep track of all of them. The desert seemed endless, and the more he saw of it the more he realized that beneath its flat expanse and empty sky was a second infinity, one of canyons and shale and hidden riverbeds run dry and snarled with gorse and creosote.
“Max and James were gone when we woke up,” said Ben, his voice hoarse. Fat, pimply Stuart Carmichael, the other boy from Eight, nodded, looking like he wanted to cry, too.
“Their beds were empty,” Ben croaked. “Stripped. Dave said they left for a hike with Pastor Eddie, that it’s a retreat for kids who’ve shown they’re ready to really commit.”
“Do you believe him?” asked John. The fat boy’s face was pale beneath his sunburn.
Ben shook his head, eyes wide and frightened. “I heard something outside the cabin last night,” he said. His voice was small. “It was scratching at our door and … it was sniffing.”
The hairs on the back of Gabe’s neck stood up. He felt suddenly exposed out on the open ground in the shadow of the ridge. There was an ache in his chest for the idea of a home that wanted him, that would care if he was safe or not, if he was warm, if he was fed. You’re not going to have this life, his mother had said to him a little while before the men from Resolution came and dragged him from the house. Her narrow face was pinched with fury, her hands curled together white-knuckled on the kitchen table. You have no excuse for behaving this way. You’re trying to hurt me. To hurt your father.
The smell of her perfume came without warning to the forefront of his memory. A thin and clinging cloud of citrus over the buttery scent of vanilla. He nearly retched. He could smell her sour sweat beneath it, and the musty stink of the lake house his grandparents had left to her. They’d been alone. His dad and his little sister, Mackenzie, had gone out for ice cream. Gabe hadn’t wanted any. Already at eight years of age he had begun to feel out the unspoken virtue of starvation, the sickly shadow pleasure of denying himself something in which others would indulge.
I’m going to give you an examination, and it’s best we keep it between just the two of us. That’s called doctor-patient confidentiality. Do you understand, honey?
She’d never called him honey before, and although he knew something was wrong, although his skin prickled with goose bumps and his thoughts began to stretch into a single timeless, disembodied smear as she bent in front of him where he sat at the kitchen table, he wanted her to say it again. He wanted her to love him, to act the way the other moms at Hebrew school acted when they came to pick their kids up. Hugs. Ruffled hair. He could feel the wrongness sweeping through the camp. He could feel the lake reaching for him from out of the past, a wave driving the other kids before it, sweeping them all toward something at the edge of understanding.
We have to get out of here, he realized, staring out into the vast and empty desert. I don’t know how, but we have to get out. Before it’s too late.
“Where’s Smith?” Nadine asked Cheryl as the counselor entered the cabin. Cheryl looked at her with cool disinterest. Nadine had to fight to keep from blushing. She knew she was breaking out. Her hair was tangled, and she had a slight hangover, a kind of fuzzy, dirty feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could feel her period coming, twisting the soft tissues cradled in her pelvis into a tangle of writhing eels.
“Good morning, girls,” said Cheryl. She paused, expectant.
“Good morning, Cheryl,” Jo and Felix chorused back unevenly. Nadine did flush, then, with anger at her friends for caving in so easily.
The counselor gave a little nod and stalked past Felix to inspect the bunks. Jo shot Nadine a panicked look. They’d been up talking half the night while Felix snored—he’d fallen asleep as soon as his head hit his pillow. They’d rinsed out their mouths as best they could, but the tap in the bathroom was on some kind of meter and only ran for twenty seconds a night, its flow sluggish and lukewarm even after the temperature dropped. The bottle of Absolut was buried in the loose soil under the cabin, but Nadine knew the look on Jo’s face, the unreasoning terror of someone certain she’d been bad and could not escape the consequences of it. She narrowed her eyes at the other girl and mouthed Be cool the moment Cheryl’s back was turned.
“Can you tell us where Smith went?” Felix asked as Cheryl straightened up from his bunk, apparently satisfied by its tight corners. “She wasn’t here when we woke up.”
The counselor smiled, just a little, an expression of such maddening smugness that Nadine immediately pictured herself bashing her teeth in with a brick. “That’s really none of your business, Vargas.”
“We’re not going anywhere until you tell us where Smith is.” Nadine regretted it as soon as it was out of her mouth. It was a stupid thing to say, a stupid hill to die on, but trying to walk it back now would just make her look stupid and weak. “What did you do to her?”
Cheryl looked Nadine up and down. The counselor’s expression was unreadable. She was so composed, even this early in the day, her short black pixie cut freshly gelled, her stare dark and cool and catlike. “Not a thing,” she said at last. “Enoch and the pastor came and collected her early this morning for private counseling, which she requested herself.” She took a step toward Nadine. “Anything else I can clear up for you, Donovan?”
Nadine held the older woman’s stare. “No.”
For a moment she thought Cheryl might hit her, but the counselor just nodded and turned to lead them out. “What the fuck are you doing?” Felix hissed in her ear as they went down the cabin’s steps. The other campers were flooding into the thoroughfare. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
“She’s lying,” Nadine muttered back. The other girls were joining them now. Betty and Athena. Sarah Becker, who everyone called Pecker, and Fawn DeAngelis with her scar where she’d had her cleft palate repaired. “Whatever they did with Smith—”
“Donovan!”
