“Don’t look at me,” said Malcolm, holding up his hands. “You think I know anyone who wants to drive out to wherever we are just to pick my ass up?”
“Can you be serious for five minutes?” Nadine snapped.
Malcolm’s smile vanished like the sun going behind the clouds. A look of pure venom twisted his features, then disappeared just as quickly. He looked down at his feet. “Yeah.”
Felix wondered if there was anyone who’d come to get him. His mother had cried when the Camp Resolution people came for him, but she’d always cried when his father hit him, too. It had never stopped Manny’s fist. He didn’t know Tío Lalo’s number, he couldn’t call Leo without risking getting one of his parents—and even if he got through, Leo would have to believe him, and get a car, and figure something out for afterward. He realized he was clenching his fists hard enough to make his hands ache. He forced himself to relax.
“We could call Oji—my grandpa,” Jo said shyly. “He’s in a retirement home in New Jersey, but he’d … I think he’d come. I think he’d believe me. I don’t know for sure.”
“No one’s for sure,” said Gabe. He sounded bitter.
Nadine turned on him. “Do you actually want to help, or do you want to sit there finding new reasons it’s okay to be a useless fucking pussy?”
Gabe stared in astonishment. Silence fell again. Felix still felt hollow, his skin prickling with dread, but after a few heartbeats he forced out, “I’ll help.”
“Me too,” Brady whispered.
One by one the others muttered their agreement. It didn’t feel much like the Three Musketeers crossing their swords, but Felix knew that was a little kid’s way of looking at it anyway. They were talking about pitting themselves against adults, against people whose authority over them was as total as it was unquestioned, who had the right to drive and carry guns and drink themselves stupid without worrying they’d get caught. They were talking, he realized with a cold thrill, about fighting their parents.
“All right,” said Nadine once the last of them had given half-hearted assent. “Cheryl told us it’s more than twenty miles to the nearest town. A long way. It would take, like, two or three days to walk that far. At least. Next person to get kitchen duty, see if you can take some of those shitty granola bars they give us. They’re light and they have a lot of calories.”
Felix looked around at the others. Soft, shy Shelby. Gabe, just skin and bones, and Malcolm not much more than that. John, who he’d seen struggle to walk three miles. Out there in that heat, no cover, nothing to eat or drink but what they could carry … could they make it? He shoved the thought out of his head. They had to. For the first time in his life he had friends, real friends; he wasn’t going to let them get murdered by Jesus freaks or die of dehydration.
Malcolm shook his head like he was trying to dislodge something. His lips peeled back from his teeth. “So we have to get past the fence, hike to the farmhouse, get inside, call Jo’s grandpa and hope he feels like a road trip, then make it who knows how many miles to a town we know nothing about where, if all of these things go the way we want, he’ll be waiting for us so we can … what? Go on the run? What do we know about surviving on our own? We’re supposed to just trust this geezer to figure it out?” He was crying now. “You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re going to get us killed. I don’t know what was at my door. Maybe I was dreaming. We won’t even make it past the fence.”
“Shut UP,” Nadine snarled, loud enough that the rest of them fell silent, listening for the sound of footsteps or the rattle of a key. Just when Felix thought Malcolm would start ranting or Nadine would lose it and deck him, Jo cleared her throat. The whole room looked to her.
“Um,” said Jo, working her hands back into the sleeves of her too-large turtleneck. “Malcolm, you said you saw a dog last week, right?”
Malcolm blinked slowly, tears still streaming down his cheeks. “Yeah, so?”
“If it could get in through the fence,” said Jo, “there must be a way out.”
Felix stared at her, wondering what it was like to be able to unpick a situation like that, to know what to say to calm everyone down and show them a new way forward. He didn’t have it. He’d felt the lack of it all his life, the same way he so often felt others pairing off by means of some hidden language, disappearing into private worlds he couldn’t see or hear or touch. He’d watched it happen between Nadine and Shelby with a dull ache of envy in the pit of his stomach, a certainty that no one would ever show him the way to that beautiful place of being wanted, and of wanting.
The crisis was over. They were committed. In the dark of the cabin, they made their plans.
The next few days passed quickly for Gabe, though at first he felt a horrified certainty that every counselor who glanced his way was about to uncover their secret. It was even worse when they started stealing from the mess during kitchen duty. The pantry and the tiny restroom for the kitchen staff were off the same corridor, and if you were quick you could slip from the bathroom and load your pockets with protein bars and trail mix, but it made his heart pound and his palms sweat. He was grateful he was off duty today; he didn’t think he could face it two days in a row, especially not after the miserable class Ms. Armitage was inflicting on them.
“The arm is made up of four independent muscle groups,” Armitage continued, jabbing the point of her dry-erase marker at the diagram she’d drawn on the whiteboard. Gabe blinked, trying to bring his notebook into focus. His head was swimming, his stomach sour with anxiety. He could hardly read his own handwriting. Something from yesterday’s lesson on metempsychosic transmission, the movement of thoughts as discrete chemical entities through physical matter.
“Each subgroup receives impulses from the cogitare carnis, which roughly translated means ‘gray matter,’ which in turn pass through the evictii carnii, or ganglion clusters, secondary processing centers for the commands our brains send to our limbs. The end result is that the hundreds of different muscular structures in our bodies act as a unified whole, even though the human animal is in fact a colony of independent organisms. Now, can anyone tell me what keeps our muscles functioning in unity?”
A hand shot up. Betty’s girlfriend, the unibrow with the smug smile. Ms. Armitage nodded in acknowledgment. “Allostatic pressure,” the girl said crisply.
“Very good, Athena. Can you define that for us?”
“The intersection between social and environmental stressors and the body’s natural impulse to change in order to maintain homeostasis.”
“That’s right. The body wants to change, but it wants to stay in balance, too.”
Gabe had no idea what any of it meant. Horseshit, probably. Except there was so much of it, and it all made a kind of horrible internal sense. Just like John had said. Gabe felt cold. His body kept trying to force those thoughts out like pus from a wound, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Jo’s tear-stained face when she’d told the rest of them at lunch the other day that Nadine had been badly beaten during their morning run, and how they’d woken to find Smith’s bed empty. His collapse that same day, which he didn’t remember, though he still felt tired and vaguely sick. It had scared John, though, and the fat boy wasn’t the chicken other people pegged him for.
They scratched through incomprehensible word problems and short two-paragraph essays for the next forty minutes—What is the smallest number of phonemes needed to command thought? Define the haptic requirements involved in crossing the stochastic threshold—and then suddenly the sun had sunk behind the mountains and the others were returning the tables to their original positions. The cook and his helpers had pulled the segmented steel partition down over the serving window to the kitchen at some point and now the chafing dishes stood empty, the cans of Sterno under them squirreled away somewhere.
If we’re going to get out, Nadine had said during their planning session, which they’d started referring to half-jokingly as “the summit,” we’re gonna need food.
They’re panicking, he told himself as he helped another boy maneuver their table back into position. It’s just a fucked-up Bible camp teaching us fucked-up shit. Where exactly are we supposed to go after we get out, anyway? Even if Jo’s grandpa does come for us, what can he do? Our parents will call the cops. They’ll call the FBI.
No. There was no way they’d make it to a town, much less out of whatever state they were in. Safer to stay and let Pastor Eddie feel them up and speak in tongues, or whatever he wanted to do. Afterward they could go home and maybe, if they were lucky and played their cards right, they wouldn’t have to go to military school. Hoping for anything better was just daydreaming, though a little part of him knew he was just turning away from his terror. He knew something was wrong.
Ms. Armitage cleared her throat, silencing the last hushed murmurs and the scrape of metal table legs dragged over concrete. “Tonight the outgoing campers return from their wilderness expedition with David and Marianne for a fireside graduation dinner.” Her dark eyes swept the room. The single antique air conditioner mounted in one of the high windows chugged pitifully, leaking down the concrete wall to where a puddle spread over the floor and seeped into the cracks in it.
“Some of you have made a real effort in your work; I imagine the young people returning from the culmination of theirs will have a great deal to offer you. Those of you who have elected to treat your lessons with the same flippant disregard with which you approach the question of your development into adults of quality, perhaps you’ll learn something. To that end, the following campers have performed with the least distinction in this week’s lessons and are solely responsible for tomorrow’s cleanup and kitchen shifts. Cross, Babbage, Glass—”
Gabe glanced at Shelby, trying to catch her eye—it still felt weird to think of her as a girl, a roiling knot of discomfort in his chest that put an edge on everything he said to her—but she was holding her head in her hands and didn’t see him. Probably freaking out about Nadine, who’d showed up for lunch yesterday looking worse than Gabe did. Or maybe about the trek through the desert Nadine was telling them they had to risk. Like they’d last ten minutes out there. Kids were getting up now, leaving their desks. John, a few seats over from Gabe, smiled shyly at him before joining the crowd pushing toward the door.
He’d never make it, Gabe thought. It felt like a cruel thing to think, but wasn’t he just being honest? He’s too soft. He’d never last the whole way, and he eats so much …
A sudden sharp, stabbing pain lanced through Gabe’s thoughts. It felt as though someone were forcing a nail out through his forehead from the inside of his skull. Is anyone else getting headaches? He staggered after John and Shelby. Ahead of him John was deep in conversation with Malcolm, still bruised and limping—they were all beat to shit, really—and beyond them the doorway yawned out onto the barren thoroughfare, washed in sunset colors and sparkling with little points of blackness that burst and faded in his vision. The air conditioner rattled in its rubber and plastic window mount.
“Where are Felix and Nadine?” asked Shelby.
“They were gone when the lesson ended,” said John. The blood drained from his face.
It’s just a headache, Gabe told himself, gripping the door frame for purchase as he stepped outside. He kept thinking about phlox. A flower. Purple. Spiky needles.
It’s just a headache.
