“When I first got here,” said the boy who had come down from the mountains, “I was confused. I was angry.”
The other graduates stood in the shadows behind him, firelight flickering across their faces. They didn’t look like they’d been hiking. They didn’t even look like the rest of the campers around the fire. They looked like catalog models, almost, even in their scuffed and soiled flannel shirts and ripped-up jeans. The girls were slim, the boys broad-shouldered. They had been silent since they took their places.
Light and shadow from the bonfire danced over the speaker’s handsome face, slightly sunburned and with a spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose and spreading out onto his cheeks. Beside him, Pastor Eddie sat in a canvas camp chair with his long legs crossed and his huge dinner-plate hands folded on his knee. The firelight flashed in his glasses. Jo couldn’t stop thinking about the sounds she’d heard from upstairs in the Glover house a few days earlier, the grunt and creak of an old mattress getting a hard workout. The thin, feminine cries of “Oh, EDDIE.”
“Back home in Montana I was getting into trouble. I had the wrong friends, made the wrong choices, let myself get fooled into thinking I knew what was good for me.” The boy chewed his lower lip. “I thought I was in love with a boy. An older boy. A man, I guess. He’d give me things. Take me out. I felt special. Wanted. And when he kissed me, when he’d do things to me … I’d tell myself that it was what I wanted.”
Dave, sitting on a log on his other side, put a fatherly hand on the kid’s shoulder. The other counselor who’d gone out with the graduating class sat across the fire from where Jo sat with John and Shelby, who was still sniffling as she had been since lunch. Marianne, the woman Nadine had called Names-and-Dates. Her arm was still wrapped in bandages where Nadine had bit her. Remind me not to fight Nadine, thought Jo, staring at the other woman as the boy kept talking tearfully about getting his butthole stretched out by some college freshman.
“Pastor Eddie … you helped me understand how to move forward with my life. How to want a future. That you had the patience to reach out to me, that you even wanted to, after what you went through with your daughter … I’m so grateful. I don’t have any words.”
Daughter?
Pastor Eddie nodded his huge head in acknowledgment. Jo thought again of the grunting from upstairs, the steady thud of headboard against wall. She’d walked in on her parents once, when they’d still shared a bedroom, and she could remember the trail of silvery slime her father had left along her mother’s thigh when he’d pulled out in a fumbling hurry and crossed the room in three long strides to slam the door. Did the pastor leave a trail like that along the sunken plane of his wife’s belly? Did his huge hands press bruises into her thin and birdlike arms?
The handsome boy put his hands on his knees and rose to his feet. “Our bodies have a memory of what we’re supposed to be,” he said. “Dave taught me that, and when I get home I’m going to live by it. I’m going to tell my father…” He stopped, and for a moment Jo felt a deep and total certainty that this was all rehearsed, right down to his emotional pause and swallow, and then he continued, eyes glittering with tears: “I’m going to thank him for making me do this, and I’m going to become a man he can be proud of.”
I wish I’d tried harder to get Smith to come with us the other night, Jo thought suddenly, digging her nails into her palms. I wish Nadine was here. I wish my parents weren’t such fucking Nazis.
Dave started applauding. Pastor Eddie and the graduates picked it up and a lukewarm wave went around the circle. The kids on kitchen duty were passing out paper plates of hot dogs and beans. Just outside the ring of firelight stood Garth and a few of the camp’s other ranch hands. The tips of cigarettes glowed red, like dying stars. Jo saw the gleam of metal. A shotgun’s barrels. For a while there wasn’t much sound except for the scrape of plastic forks and the mushy, muted chorus of chewing mouths.
“We should look for them tonight,” John whispered in Jo’s ear. “Shelby’s freaking out.”
Before she could respond, Pastor Eddie stood and the whole circle fell silent. Slowly, the pastor began to unbuckle his belt as one of the graduates brought out a backless canvas camp stool and set it up not far from the fire. A moment later, four others emerged from the shadows, each pair supporting a third figure between them. First came Nadine, and when the firelight touched her face Jo’s breath caught in her throat. The other girl’s old bruises were mottled with dark, shiny new ones, her nose swollen, and her cheek scraped and lacerated, little shreds of skin dangling from tiny cuts. Her escorts forced her to her knees and pushed her across the camp stool.
The pastor’s huge fingers moved deftly, and the fine leather slithered through the belt loops of his slacks with a rasping hiss. Once he had it wrapped around his fist, he stepped behind Nadine and jerked down her jeans and underpants. A few people gasped. Even Enoch looked queasy. Pastor Eddie spoke, his voice a velvety, crackling rumble. “I told you all back on your first day what I’d do if you took advantage,” he said. “A camper caught this little hussy stealing from the mess.”
Jo looked for Betty and found her grinning like a jackal a few yards from where the pastor stood. The belt cracked like a whip against Nadine’s bare ass. A little way down the circle Shelby tried to get to her feet. Malcolm pulled her back. Jo’s ears were ringing. Her thoughts kept slipping through her fingers, little dribs and drabs of the last summer her family had spent on Lake Winnipesaukee before Oba-chan got sick. The way her giggles had echoed from the pontoons under the Ketterings’ raft, where she’d had her first kiss with Jamie Kettering, the younger kids’ feet thumping against the boards just overhead. A glass shattering two rooms over and her father’s voice rising in a cruel, needling whine as her mother began to sob.
The belt rose and fell. Nadine jerked against the seat, arms pinned by the two graduates escorting her. Their faces showed a mix of sympathy and grave seriousness, as though they were bailiffs and the campfire a court. Jo thought of the winter her aunt Mariko’s house burned down, of the day they’d driven out so that Jo’s mother could help her file her insurance claim and Jo had sat in the car and watched the cold wind strip ash from the house’s blackened skeleton.
Nadine screamed at the belt’s sixth stroke. Her voice broke at the next, and before the twelfth she was sobbing like a child. She was a child. They all were. Jo couldn’t look away. It felt like watching Linda Hamilton cry, or Batman. Nadine was still crying when the graduates dragged her upright and turned her to face Pastor Eddie. The big man was breathing hard, his face flushed. “You got anything you’d like to say to me, young lady? To your fellow campers?”
She spat in his face. Bloody mucus glistened in his mustache and on the right lens of his glasses. He brought his hand up and the buckle of his belt split her lips and rocked her head back. That was when it registered for Jo that the girl holding Nadine’s left arm was Candace, Gabe’s friend, who she’d eaten lunch with a few times. A split second later, as the graduates led Nadine away and two more of them hauled a gray-faced Felix toward the stool, she realized she hadn’t seen the other girl since she’d been called in at the house four days earlier. She’s thinner, too, she thought, watching Candace retreat into the darkness. She’s too thin. That’s impossible.
She caught a glimpse of Nadine’s backside, a horror of bloody welts and open wounds, and then the night swallowed all three retreating figures. Something in the fire popped with a noise like a firecracker going off, logs collapsing inward, sparks and cinders rising in a scintillating cloud that lit the faces of the campers up like daybreak. Terror. Nausea. Something that looked for a fleeting moment like arousal.
“You’ve got a choice to make here,” Pastor Eddie rumbled. Felix knelt in front of him, head bent, a graduate to his either side holding him down by the shoulders. “Grace or punishment. Responsibility or rebellion. As hard as I’m hittin’ your little friends, the world’s gonna hit you one hell of a lot harder if you don’t wise up.
“You think if you make it through the summer and go home the way you left it, things are going to get easier? No. Next comes reform school. Juvie. Some of you maybe get tried as adults, wind up doing real time. Plenty of queers in the big house, but those people don’t look like you want them to look. They won’t touch you how you want to be touched.” He licked his lips and bared his teeth in a humorless snarl of a smile. “You remember, no matter what happens next, you can’t say nobody ever gave you a chance.”
His arm went up. The buckle caught the firelight with a dazzling flash and then it came down and the sharp, hard slap of leather against flesh echoed through the dark.
Gabe caught up with Candace under the hanging lights while the other campers were still lining up to brush their teeth in the mess hall bathrooms. “Hey!” he called, reaching for the sleeve of her shirt. “Wait up! Are you okay?”
She turned just before his fingers brushed the fabric of her shirt. Gabe took an instinctive step back; her face was lost in the deep gloom between two pools of light, which faded in stages up the length of her body. “I’m fine,” she said. He could just make out the shape of her face, thinner and more angular but still recognizable. He thought she was smiling at him. “I’m going home tomorrow.”
He’d wanted to ask her why she’d helped them beat Nadine, what had happened to her in the wilderness, why she looked so different, but the words seemed to dry up and stick in his throat. Even more than the sight of Pastor Eddie with blood sprayed across his face he found that Candace frightened him, that there was something here he wasn’t seeing but could feel, like the film of oily pond scum that clung to you when you got out of the water at Elm Brook Park. He fumbled for something to say.
“I’ll … I’ll give you my address,” he said lamely. “We can keep in touch.”
She didn’t move. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he could feel them boring into him, peeling back his face to expose the falseness of his smile, the hesitation in his words, and something deeper, something he wanted to hide from her the way he hid the sissy porn he watched on the family computer, something frilly and weak and maggoty soft that squirmed away from her deeper into the recesses of his thoughts. He couldn’t bear to look at it himself. He cleared his throat. “Or … or not. We don’t have to.”
“No,” she said at last. “I’d love that. Give Corey the details and he’ll get them to me.”
He nodded, not trusting his voice, and before he could think whether to hug her or shake her hand or what, she turned and left, her golden hair catching the lamplight. On the back of her neck was a strange little constellation of moles, raised and dark. And then she was gone.
I’m digging up Roy, Gabe thought suddenly. He didn’t know where the phrase had come from, or what it meant, but he could feel it in his gut. The others were coming now. He could hear them. He stepped into the alley between Cabins One and Three, waiting for the throng to reach him so he could slip into it.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” asked Malcolm as they followed Corey and Garth through the dark and back toward the cabins. “What happened to her? She was only gone a week.”
All Shelby could think of was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which Stel had shown her once on a rainy October night. People running in the streets. Emotionless faces in a crowd swiveling to follow any trace of feeling. She’d seen Candace too, fifty impossible pounds lighter, sleek and glistening like a backup dancer in a music video, but she couldn’t make herself speak. It was too insane to say out loud.
She’s been replaced.
And besides, Shelby couldn’t stop thinking about Nadine, about that beautiful face deformed by bruises and swelling, about the horror of her striped and bloodied ass when the graduates had dragged her off with her jeans still down around her ankles. Felix, too. The toughest kids in camp beaten until they screamed, until snot dangled from their nostrils and their mouths hung open in silent agony. Being tough doesn’t mean shit. It won’t save you. They don’t want us to have leaders.
She was still trapped in her own thoughts long after the cabin lights went out and the boys of Cabin Two had drifted into their own troubled dreams. Barbs of moonlight slid over the warped floorboards. She thought of the time Stel had left, of the two months last winter when it had been just her and Ruth in the big, empty apartment. There was a feeling in the air, then, a kind of aching, sticky tension like the humid low-pressure fronts that ran ahead of storms. Until the morning after Christmas.
You have no idea, the pain of being a woman. What we go through every month. Do you see this? Judy Chicago painted it in her menstrual blood in 1971, before anyone had ever thought aboutyou. Her body ripped itself apart, tore itself open, and she made art out of it, and you think you can just sweep in and make it yours?
I don’t—
Stop. Just stop. If I hear one more lie out of you—
You’re hurting me.
The kitchen. The burner. Squeal of metal against metal as she pushed the cast-iron skillet back. You want to know what it feels like? You want to know what you’re trying to take from us?
