At the edge of the camp she found Brady, waifish in boxers and a too-big T-shirt, staring up at the top of the chain-link fence. He turned as she approached. His eyes were huge. “Are we still doing the plan?”
“The plan?”
“Calling your grandpa.”
She looked out at the open desert. Through the lattice of the fence it seemed as though the world were carved apart into dark little diamonds, none of it quite fitting with the rest. To pick up a phone and light a golden line of fire between this wasteland and New Jersey seemed like magic, and Brady had come here to do it with her. She reached for his hand. He gave it to her. There was no need to find whatever entrance Malcolm’s dog had used, because they were made of air. They could step over the fence. They could rise up forever into infinity.
“Let’s do it. Give me a boost.”
“What do you think pretty boy’s doing over there?” asked Malcolm. They were outside, though John couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there. Gabe stood a little ways off, just past the end of the row of cabins. It looked like he was staring at the moon. John had never noticed just how big the moon looked out here in the flat country. It seemed to take up half the sky, as huge and round and pale as he was.
Are those bad things to be? Do I dislike them?
It had never occurred to him to think about it, but here in the watery light with Malcolm beside him and the camp’s other kids all around them, thoughts felt looser, prone to crumble at a single touch. In the back of his mind John knew something was wrong, that maybe they’d been drugged, but whenever he tried to imagine why the pastor and his staff had done it he was swamped by waves of pure euphoria, the world around him blazing with wild color, the cabins transformed into soaring spires of oak and shingles like something out of a fairytale. Maybe it was like Ms. Armitage’s lessons. Some kind of brainwashing.
“Why do you call him that?” asked John. He knew he’d waited too long before answering, but he could see the lines connecting words, sagging wires of gold along which glowing beads slid silently, conveying thoughts from mind to mind, so it was harder to know when to speak, and what to say. Anyway, Malcolm would understand. He was so close, taller than John. They were holding hands, somehow.
Malcolm’s brow furrowed for a moment. “What, ‘pretty boy’? Just look at him.”
John brought a hand to Malcolm’s cheek before he could stop himself, before he could bury the urge to touch the other boy beneath a thousand different excuses. Fat. Useless. Stupid. Chickenshit. Why would he want you? Malcolm’s eyes went wide. He was speechless, for once. “But you’re prettier,” said John, and as a fierce blush washed over his chest and face he rose up on the balls of his feet and kissed the other boy. Malcolm let out a little squeal of delight and wrapped his long, thin arms tight around John. That cutting mouth was alive against John’s, that acid tongue jammed overenthusiastically past his lips and teeth to lap at nothing in particular.
Oh my God, he’s so bad at kissing, thought John. It delighted him, somehow, that someone so beautiful could be such absolute shit at making out. Their mouths made a seal, Malcolm trying to eat his nose and upper lip. They broke apart and John saw tears on Malcolm’s cheeks, diamond-bright and trailing silver fire behind them.
“It’s okay,” said John. He smiled. “I’ll show you how I like it.”
“That’s where you go,” whispered Nadine, running her fingers through the fuzz on Shelby’s scalp. The soft hairs parted the skin of her palms, but there was no pain. Her body had begun to open. Every sensation seemed to echo through it and rebound out into the night, magnified to a thundering pitch, a shout of joy that resonated at reality’s precise frequency and so became it. Every breath tore her open wider, a joyous wound gaping in the moonlight, Shelby’s fingers inside her and her mouth on Nadine’s throat.
“I want to touch you perfectly,” said Nadine. “I want you to feel nothing but joy. I love you so much. Are you here with me?”
Is this real?
“It is,” said Shelby. “It is. I’m real. I’m yours. They cut me out of my mother and shipped me to America, they stole me for themselves, but it was really so I could be here with you. I’m going to be with you forever.” Shelby’s mouth found Nadine’s ear and waves of bright white pleasure washed over her, cupping her skull in their foamy swells, racing up her sinuses and bursting from her pores in a clean mist. She opened her mouth to taste the air. The earth was cold and stuck to her bare ass as she shifted, the rough wood of the cabin’s side scratching her back.
Shelby’s lips moved like a moth’s wings, soft against the inner ridges of her ear. “Sometimes I pretend my mother, my real mother, knew I was a girl.”
Nadine thought maybe she came then, a gentle roar passing through her, her legs going weak and the muscles banding her pelvis unclenching, and she wrapped the other girl in her arms and kissed her on the lips, the chin, the eyelids. “You’re a girl,” she whispered back. Someone was screaming somewhere, but the shapes in the thoroughfare were just shapes, twisting and shifting in the light. Shelby’s face was the surface of the world. “You’re a girl. You’re a girl.”
She guided Shelby’s hand down the neck of her shirt to cup her breast. “Are you here with me?” she asked again. The word was red and white and yellow, flashing as it sank into itself like Wile E. Coyote leaving a hole in the shape of his silhouette through wall after wall until the outline of it shrank down to nothing, reduced to a pinprick by perspective. She fell into it and it closed soft and warm around her and grew arms that held her tight and a round, earnest face with a button nose and a little double chin, which she loved.
“I’m here with you,” said Shelby, leaning her forehead against Nadine’s. “I’m here. I’m here.”
For a while Gabe lay in the dirt and watched Malcolm’s glistening finger, slick with spit, push slowly up and into John. He looks like ice cream, thought Gabe. He looks like a dish of ice cream, so sweet and big and soft. I want to hold him on my tongue. I want to sleep against him and be a baby again and start over with different parents. I want to put his breast in my mouth. He has breasts, and it’s not fair that he does, it’s disgusting, or it’s beautiful, or I hate him, or something is very wrong.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was alone, the cabins a ways off and the voices of the others rendered soft and insubstantial by the distance. He kept picturing himself tumbling over the ground, driven by a great, wild wind that roared until his skin began to peel from his bones, until ice seeped into the cracks in his skeleton and broke him apart over the long, slow centuries until he sank into the sand of a long, dark sweep of shore and then was gone.
When he was nine, his aunt and uncle, his mother’s sister, Lorraine, and her husband, Glen—with his pink polos and moussed blond hair—had taken him to the Massachusetts Museum of Fine Arts to see The Birth of Venus. There had been a fight afterward, his mother and her sister cutting at each other with the cold politeness that was their family’s favorite knife, exchanging words like concerned about the impact of pornography on his development and things are changing; it’s not like it was in the seventies, but Gabe hadn’t cared about that. All he’d been able to think about was Venus in that shell, the sweet candy curves and folds of her, the faraway look in her eyes and the wind pulling at her pale golden hair as she stepped out into the world. He had looked at himself in the mirror that night and then spent half an hour dragging a safety pin along his inner arm until the huge and awful feeling in his stomach went away. He hadn’t seen his aunt since, except at Christmas and Thanksgiving up at Nana’s house in Madbury.
I want to come out of the sea, he thought, and all that desperation climbed up out of him as though he were throwing up a snake, a centipede as long as he was tall. He was on his knees coughing and bile was clinging to his lips, and where it puddled in the dirt he saw those foaming breakers smashing themselves on the sand, and the clear wash as they kissed the earth and drew back to the sea, and her pale feet, fat and soft like little dinner rolls, sinking into the silt, crabs no bigger than fingernails scuttling over her toes, and he felt her hand on the back of his neck and the salty kiss of her wet lips, the weight of her soaking mane of hair like the one the unknown man had cut away from him the day he’d come to camp.
“Oh my God,” said Gabe, and his voice broke. The air was shimmering and something was calving from him like ice from a glacier, falling away and taking with it a terrible, crushing weight he hadn’t known was resting squarely on his chest. A cascade of other nameless things went with it and then he was rocketing up into the stars and sinking down into the warm embrace of earth and waves were breaking over him with awesome force, as they had on the molten rock at the dawn of creation when the first bacteria wriggled to life in pools of sulfurous water. A flower opening, and opening, and opening. “Oh my God.”
I’m a girl.
It was easy to sneak into the crater past the few ranch hands smoking around its perimeter, as though the rest of the world were blind and it was only Jo and Brady who could see. The moonlight led them down the paths of the garden tiers, past the little pools and rivulets where pondweed waved in obscure currents and strange segmented creatures Jo had never seen before undulated through the crystal flow, armored bodies shimmering. The word that came to mind was “trilobite,” but they didn’t look like that. They looked older. Stranger. She bent to touch one and it squirted away from her hand in a rush of bubbles, eyes blinking along the edges of its plates.
In a clearing in a bamboo grove they found a nest of hummingbirds, a bulb of dry grass spun into a little house hanging from the stalks, and inside the jewel-bright birds were sleeping in a pile of glinting feathers and sharp beaks. That’s what I want, thought Jo. To be beautiful and loved and always touched, always against the people who are mine, who I belong to. She thought about touching one of them, feeling the sleek shine of its feathers, but as she drew closer the pile of iridescent plumage resolved in the moonlight into a nightmarish spectacle. She drew her hand back from the entrance to the nest, staring in fascinated horror at the thing that looked like a hummingbird but wasn’t, which had buried its needle-thin beak in the back of another bird’s neck and now drank from it as though its body were a flower. Eyes opened in the false bird’s flank, watching her.
Cuckoo, she thought suddenly, not quite knowing why. Huge body swelling from a hidden egg. Beak gaping, never sated, dumb cry, silly like its name. A nature program? One of her old Discovery Channel tapes? Gray feathers. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.
“What is it?” Brady whispered.
“Nothing,” she answered. They went.
By the time they reached the house Jo felt as though she were surfacing. Colors were less vibrant, sounds less clear and cutting. She felt gray and drained and frightened, worn out after their long walk from the camp and grateful they’d had the presence of mind to go back to their cabins for their shoes before climbing the fence and striking out into the boundless dark. What had happened to them? It was like a pit was opening up inside her, a dark void of exhaustion. Her headache was coming back and for a moment she thought Malcolm was beside her, a tall shape moving in the shadows, dark eyes afraid behind their mocking glint, but just as she opened her mouth to call his name she realized that it was only one of Mrs. Glover’s tomato frames. She blinked, white spots dancing in her vision.
“There’s someone on the porch,” said Brady, crouching down and pulling her with him. “I think it’s Garth.”
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, thought Jo. It kept happening, thoughts slipping away into strings of nonsense. It didn’t matter. Garth stood at the rail maybe fifteen yards from where they crouched, the cherry of his cigarette glowing in the dark. With the porch lights behind him he was little more than a silhouette, but Jo could see the shotgun resting on his shoulder. The front door stood at his back. Jo thought frantically.
How can we get him to move?
All around them, a chorus of metallic clicks rose from the grass and undergrowth. A chorus of hisses like a nest of rattlers waking from deep sleep, and then the lukewarm arcs of sprinklers flashing silver in the light. Garth stepped back to avoid the spray. He hesitated, then turned and set off around the corner of the porch toward the other door on the barn-facing side of the house. The sprinklers chik-chik-chik-ed, catching Jo and Brady across their backs. Even the tepid drizzle felt frigid in the cold.
“Come on,” Jo whispered, taking Brady’s hand.
They went.
Gabe could hear the others, but he couldn’t see them. He’d wandered off from the avenue between the cabins and he wanted to find Shelby, wanted to tell her that he understood, that he got it. He wanted to cry with her and ask her what to do, to apologize for avoiding her and every unkind thought he’d had about her. Things were starting to come back into focus. There was no light yet but he could sense the sunrise coming like a premonition. A white seed burning high above the horizon. He swayed through the cold, fluid gloom by the showers and ran his still-tingling palms over his chest and the concave plane of his stomach, trying to drag the image of his womanhood he’d touched at the height of whatever it was they’d all been through over his real flesh. Pelvic bones too prominent, emphasizing narrow hips, flat ass, his legs with their hatefully stubborn thighs, always jiggling no matter how strictly he stuck to his diets or how long he went without water. Euphoria, picked at like a blister, voided itself.
