Nadine wished for her lacrosse stick in that moment, a need so powerful she almost moaned at the thought of that reassuring length of titanium with its taped-over butt and the neat latticework of its head. Split that hateful smile in two. Bash this bitch’s head in until it broke down the middle, red and wet.
I’m going to murder you, you fucking cunt. I’m going to beat your brains out.
Names-and-Dates feinted toward her, fist raised, and Nadine banged her head on the van’s side jerking away on pure reflex. She blushed furiously as the older woman cocked her bloody fist back, smiling.
“Two for flinching.”
II CAMP RESOLUTION
“Do you know why you’re here, Gabe?” asked the woman at the desk in the air-conditioned trailer. Hard, bright desert sunlight fell across her face in narrow bands filtered through dusty Venetian blinds. Her wheat-colored hair hung pin-straight to her shoulders, framing a pinched mouth, pale eyes, a chinless slope of neck. She wore a ruched white blouse with puffy sleeves and a tan skirt that clung awkwardly to her narrow hips.
Maybe to teach you how to dress yourself so you don’t look like a nun going to prom?
Gabe shook his head. His skin felt grimy after who knew how long in the back of a van. Two men from Camp Resolution, which so far consisted of a couple of trailers and some rows of wind-scoured cabins with chicken wire on the windows in the middle of an endless, anonymous desert, had ridden with him the whole way. This is an opportunity for you, man, the blond one had kept saying. I wish I’d had a chance like this when I was your age.
Yeah, the other man had agreed, not looking at Gabe. Yeah.
“Your”—her gaze flicked down to the open manila folder on her desk, then back up to Gabe—“parents are worried about you. They want you to have a full life, to get into a good school, make a name for yourself, fall in love, raise children of your own. They want you to contribute to society, Gabe, and they know none of that can happen until you get help.”
He imagined spitting in her face. “Help with what?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.
She smiled at him, the same smile of feigned warmth he’d seen his aunt and mother use on one another when they were getting into it good and didn’t want to admit it. “With your homosexuality,” she cooed, pronouncing it carefully, as though she was afraid to let the word touch her tongue. “Another boy can’t give you a family, Gabe. He can’t give you love. All he can give you is the sickness they spread to each other.”
Gabe’s cheeks prickled with what he thought was probably an ugly flush, brick red and blotchy like his dad got when someone beat him in Scrabble, or the day Gabe had refused to come out of the locker room at his first swim meet. You made a commitment to Coach Hauser and the rest of your team. Staring down at his pelvis where the black Speedo clung to his skin and his flat, bony hips and the soft little bulge of his twelve-year-old crotch, feeling as though he might vomit. And then closer, like the older man was right up flush against the door to the pool. Do not make me come in there, Gabriel.
He clenched his teeth and forced a smile. “I’m not gay.”
“What a surprise that would be for the boy your father found you with.” She said it so tartly and with such tight, quivering relish that Gabe was sure she’d had it locked and loaded from the moment he walked in out of the baking desert heat. “What was his name?” She thumbed through his file, her French tips scratching at the printed pages, before stopping on a handwritten page near the end. “Francis.”
That big, strong body dwarfing his. A swaying mop of hair, strawberry blond, and gray eyes looking down at him with something between love and nausea. A thumb pressed to his bottom lip and his chin cupped like china by long fingers. Do you mind being the girl?
Never.
“Wrestling,” he bit out. “We were wrestling.”
“Your father tells us there was another boy. Michael Olsen.” Her eyes sparkled with delight even as a look of simpering concern plowed across her face. “When the counselors at Camp Sapawan found you together, were you wrestling then, too?”
He said nothing. The air in the trailer seemed suddenly thick, pressing in on his chest, wrapping tight around his throat. You don’t know what you’re talking about, he wanted to scream, but no words would come. He imagined the relief of dragging a bent safety pin’s dull point along his inner arm.
“What about the clothes you stole from the camp’s laundry facilities? I wasn’t aware skirts and stockings were typical wrestling attire.”
Michael’s mouth in the hollow of his armpit. Michael’s breath on the back of his neck. Michael’s tongue, Michael’s fingers, Michael’s soft, husky voice and quick little hands, Michael’s penis, Michael’s whispered promises and the sour taste of panic as the lights came on in the storeroom. Michael’s screams the next night, muffled by a dirty sock, when the older boys came to his bed after lights-out.
“We’re going to do our best to help you, Gabe,” she said, and somehow the tears in the corners of her eyes made Gabe so angry he could hardly see, so angry that he wanted to lunge across her desk and sink his teeth into her throat right above the silver cross necklace she’d probably bought at a kiosk in some mega-mall, or from a Kmart jewelry counter. “But if it’s going to work, you have to be honest with us. You have to want to get better.”
He never heard the man come up behind him, had no idea he was there until a thick, hairy arm coiled around his throat. His attacker tipped his chair back as Gabe kicked at empty air and clawed at the steel cable of muscle cutting off his oxygen supply. Then, over the strained hiss of his own breathing, he heard a high, whining buzz.
“No!” he screamed, but the clippers were already in his hair, sawing through the long auburn waves he’d fought his parents over month after month, year after year, the woman looking down at him with an expression of such smug, complacent contentment that he sobbed in frustrated rage and terror. He stubbed his toe kicking the edge of her desk, his vision darkening at the edges as the mosquito whine of the clippers slid over his skull, high and stupid and monotonous, going on and on and on until finally there was nothing left and he was hustled to the door by the man, whose face he never saw, and shoved down the creaky steps onto packed earth, gasping and blinking in the white-hot blaze of afternoon.
His scalp was covered in a fine dusting of peach fuzz. Loose hairs pricked and poked him as he plucked at the neck of his sweat-dampened T-shirt, staring as he did at the dusty dirt parking lot where another van was pulling up. There were already a dozen parked—more, maybe—and boys and girls around Gabe’s age lined up in the smothering sunlight under the watchful gaze of a man dressed head to toe in filthy denim who leaned against a solitary fence post, smoking. The long barrels of the shotgun resting on his shoulder glinted in the sunlight. Gabe had never held a gun in his life. Had seldom so much as seen one, except for at his uncle’s in the fall when the men and the other boys would suit up in camo and reflective neon orange and go stomping out into the woods to kill things.
Maybe it’s loaded with rubber pellets, he thought, hypnotized by the gun’s oiled gleam. Or rock salt. That’s a thing. Unless the plan is just to kill us if we run.
He pictured it for an exquisite moment, the arc of his body caught in the small of the back with a blast of lead, flesh shredding, the red heat of his spine coming apart as he bent like a bow in midair and the scabby desert soil rushed up to kiss him. It must have been fifty miles from the nearest gas station out here, and it was so flat. Nothing cast a shadow but the mountains. His mouth was already drying out, his eyes stinging from the glare.
I’m going to die out here.
At the edge of the compound, near the chain-link fence enclosing it, was a dusty, worn pavilion the color of oatmeal into which the staff herded the kids. Shelby shuffled with the others through the sagging entrance, its flaps drawn back and tied in place like the petals of some ugly carnivorous plant.
Her shaved scalp itched and burned after an hour spent standing in the sun as one by one the others were led up to the trailer with its pretty secretary and the bearded man and his clippers. The real girls got to keep their hair, of course. They were clustered together, nine or ten of them, around a tall, lean white girl with a mane of tawny hair, a butterfly Band-Aid across the bridge of her crooked nose, and two spectacular black eyes, the left swollen to a small, wet slit. She gave Shelby an appraising look as the crowd in the pavilion swelled, forcing them all toward the raw pine platform at the back of the space. The work lamps hanging from the poles swung to and fro as the crowd jostled for position.
“Whaddya think?” asked a skinny Black boy, arching an eyebrow at her. “Bet you they’re gonna teach us close-up magic. Maybe juggling.”
Shelby stared at him, unable to comprehend the joke, and then the crowd sucked him away and she was jostled back as, with a groan of bending wood, a man climbed onto the platform’s sanded boards. He was huge, closer to seven feet than six, with a deep chest and massive shoulders. A thick salt-and-pepper mustache covered his upper lip and he wore a light linen blazer over a white button-up. In a wicker chair behind him, far to the back, sat a tiny white woman with wispy blond hair and huge, pale eyes. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse and a dark skirt that brushed the boards.
“Welcome to Camp Resolution,” said the man. He had a deep, velvety voice with a slight crackle in it, as though his lungs were made of dried-out paper. “I’m Pastor Eddie. I bet some of you are pretty angry right now.”
He paused as though expecting laughter.
“Fuck you,” someone shouted. Shelby couldn’t see who.
“That’s good,” the pastor rumbled. He sounded contented, like a big cat stretching out before a nap. “You get that out your system, because starting right now, I hear one word of nasty talk from you, you get the belt. Out in the world you may be teenagers, might think you’re big tough rebels because MTV tells you so, but at Camp Resolution you’re a child until we say otherwise, and you will learn to live as children are meant to: in silence, with respect for your elders and betters. So I don’t want to hear no nasty talk”—the thick fingers of his right hand tapped the length of brown leather holding up his slacks—“and if I do, well, you’ve been warned.”
Another pause, this one tense and ugly.
“You’re here,” said Pastor Eddie, and all of a sudden there were tears in his dark little eyes, “because your parents love you. Because they don’t want to see you sell yourselves on street corners for pills and marijuana. They don’t want to see you lying in hospital beds with sores on your faces, lesions like the ones God laid on the Egyptians holding the children of Israel hostage the way you—you”—he jabbed his forefinger at them, sweeping it like a scythe—“are hostage to the pornographers in Washington and Hollywood and New York City, to the ideas they’ve planted in your heads, the lies they’ve told you.”
He calmed. The color faded from his sun-roughened cheeks. Behind him the little doll-woman in her chair had a hungry look on her gaunt, pinched face. Not far from Shelby a big fat white boy started crying, sniffling like a baby, and a lanky brown girl—boy?—with a butch haircut and a little mustache observed his tears with a look of flat disgust. Shelby hugged herself and dug her nails into her forearms.
