“You’re here to learn how to be men. How to be women. First thing tomorrow you’ll have help from young people of quality, people who know your struggles and have overcome them, and from me and my staff. For tonight I’m only asking you to sit, work through that anger you’re feeling, and think about the kind of life you want.” The big hands made fists, knuckles standing out. “I think you’ll be surprised what you can figure out just sitting quietly.” He smiled. “Now get some supper in you, then it’s lights-out.”
Gabe poked at the mound of steamed spinach heaped in the corner pocket of his plastic dinner tray. Grayish creamed corn. A sticky lozenge of something like cornbread. The chili was the worst of it, thick and glutinous and an awful shade of neon red. All around him the mess tent was full of the sound of kids eating, shoveling food into their mouths, chewing noisily, talking to each other in low voices.
You should eat, he thought, but the voice in his head was his mother’s, colorless and coolly mocking under its veneer of commonsense advice. Cover up those collarbones.
Skinny girls made him angry. He didn’t understand it, but just the sight of one was enough to make him want to scream. I’m better than you, their ribs and the knobs of their spines seemed to hiss at him. My every step is effortless. Weightless. While you plod on the dirty earth I soar above you, drenched in sunlight. His mind kept straying back to the woman sitting in the wicker chair on the platform in the pavilion, to the fleshless lines of her skull, the elegance of her long, thin fingers, and the blue traceries of veins visible on her scalp through her hair.
He thought of her, and he ate nothing. His stomach snarled and begged until he drained three plastic cups of tepid water from the beading red cooler on the serving table. A fake wood top and folding metal legs. Two big women in aprons dishing chili out to kids, the youngest of whom looked about thirteen, the oldest maybe a few years older than him. Seventeen. Eighteen, maybe, if that was legal. Or probably even if it wasn’t. He went back to his table at the edge of the mess cabin. There were about sixty kids under its sagging roof, most of whom he recognized from the tent. The others, sunburned and weathered, he guessed had been here longer. Eight counselors strode the aisles between plastic folding chairs, one or two tapping nightsticks against their legs, others stopping to talk and joke.
“You should eat,” said the girl sitting across from him, who was fat and thus, according to the hidden calculus of how Gabe saw the world, safe. “They work the boys really hard.”
He flashed a smile, the most charming he could drag out of his sweaty, itchy, crop-haired walking skin suit. Fat girls usually liked him. In eighth grade he’d had a friend named Bea who’d followed him everywhere like a sad-eyed little puppy, doing his homework and laughing at his jokes with nervous, almost frantic intensity until finally he’d let her jerk him off in the woods past the playground. After that the sight of her had made him sick, made him think of the pearlescent slick of his cum on her soft forearm, the jiggle of her breasts as her wrist moved and the skin of his penis slid up and down with the motion of her palm, exposing its swollen purple head. After they’d parted he’d thrown up over the roots of an old pine tree not far from the river where the other kids were jumping off Black Moth Rock and hunting for crayfish in the shallows.
Before that, though, she’d been nice, and kind of comforting to have around. He caught himself staring, the girl looking back at him with wary incredulity. You’re going to need friends if you want to survive here. “Sorry,” he said, clawing another smile up from somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach. “This place is freaking me out. I’m Gabe.”
She blushed a gratifying shade of pink. “Candace. I got here last week. It’s not … not that bad, if you do what they say.”
A week. How long are they going to keep us here?
“What do they make you do?”
“Mostly we just work. The girls cook and clean and stuff in the big house and the barn; the boys are outside. There are cattle. Fences. Getting rid of prairie dogs and coyotes.” She said it kai-oats, like Foghorn Leghorn. “They have etiquette classes, too. Like how to be a lady, how to be a man. And they make us exercise.” Her blush deepened, real shame reddening her cheeks as she looked down at her tray. “That’ll probably be easy for you.”
“That’s really unfair,” he said, trying his best to sound sympathetic. The thought of her round, heavy body jiggling as she labored through a set of jumping jacks made him feel both contemptuous and keenly interested. “I bet you’re better at it than you think.”
She smiled shyly, eyes flicking up, then down again. The servers were clearing off the tables, assisted by a handful of kids, as the counselors started going table to table and rousting everyone to their feet. Gabe took a hasty bite of spinach, chewing fast. “Is he serious about the belt? The pastor guy?”
Candace met his stare again, and this time she held it. “He’s really, really serious,” she said. “Don’t make him mad. Just do what he tells you to do. If you piss him off it’s not even the belt you have to worry about.”
“What, is he a pedo or something?”
She shook her head. “After the belt, he gives you to the other kids.”
After dinner, counselors broke the new arrivals into ten groups of four and led them through the dark to their cabins, which had bars on all the windows and locked from the outside. The other kids, fifteen or twenty of them, remained behind with Dave and a few other ranch hands.
They put Shelby in with a tall, skinny boy named Gabe, a younger kid with an overbite and a rat tail who couldn’t stop crying long enough to tell her his name, and John, the fattest boy she’d ever seen, who stared at them all like they were aliens abducting him. Their names—the names on their birth certificates—were on little steel plaques nailed to the frames of their bunks.
Their counselor couldn’t have been older than twenty, a sunburned ginger in Wranglers with a flat-top buzz and acne scars dotting his cheeks and throat. He’d introduced himself as Corey Fudder—Gabe had mouthed “motherfudder” at her behind his back on the walk from the mess to their cabin—and now stood blocking the doorway, the white glare of sodium spotlights blinding behind him.
“You’ll do orientation tomorrow,” he said as they settled into their bunks, Shelby scurrying up into the one over Gabe’s. It made her feel a little safer, looking down at the rest of them. “For tonight, all you need to know is that you might be able to break out of the cabin. Put your back into it, use your head, and maybe. But if you do, there’s about a hundred miles of open desert in every direction, and when we bring you back you’re gonna sleep cuffed to your bed. You’re boys, and you don’t want to be here, and Pastor Eddie says it’s healthy you fight back a little, but think about the desert before you waste all our time and maybe get yourselves snakebit.”
He left, shutting the door behind him and locking it. First the thunk of the deadbolt, then the click of a key in its hole and the smooth, heavy turning of tumblers. The bunks’ plastic mattresses crinkled as bodies shifted in the sudden gloom. White light leaked in through the doorframe.
“Motherfudder,” came Gabe’s scratchy voice, unmistakably faggy.
Shelby giggled nervously into her hands. The boy with the rat tail—the nameplate on his bunk read BRADY—just kept crying, and John didn’t say anything at all. He turned toward the wall and lay down on his side on top of the sheets and the single thin blanket, ribbed and pea green. Shelby thought about saying something, about putting out some feelers to the others, but as her eyes adjusted to the dark the boy-ness of them seemed to close in tight around her, pressing her back against the wall and driving her under the covers. She could feel the name nailed to the side of her bunk as though it were a burning coal, and the last two days of unshowered misery—squatting to piss in a bucket bolted to the truck’s bed, eating what Enoch or Dave threw in to her—crashed down and flattened her against the crinkling mattress, a leaden weight like a barbell sitting on her chest.
I can’t do this, she thought, wanting Stel, wanting her on a good day when Ruth was traveling or at the gallery and the two of them would make pizza bagels and ice cream sundaes and snuggle on the couch watching scary movies. The kind of thing Ruth hated. Classless, she’d say when she caught them at it. Cold, thin line of her lips. Shelby sucked in a ragged breath and pushed her fist into her mouth to stifle her sobs. I can’t do this.
It was a long time before sleep came.
III FUN RUN
The desert was endless and Nadine was digging in it, her undershirt sticking to her sweaty back, her hands blistered where they gripped the shovel’s shaft. Sometimes it rained and the rain was thick and viscous and smelled like the hairy trench of skin between pussy and butthole, rank and sour and gamey. Her little sister Nina called her “butthole” sometimes, when she was angry. She shouted it like a real swear. Butthole, butthole. As though it meant something on its own.
The hole Nadine was digging in grew deeper. She could hear Tess’s voice somewhere under the hard, dry dirt. That voice. Valley girl with a hint of a lisp, and those baby blues looking up at her, that soft little mouth moaning another finger like a question. I want your whole fist. I want it. Nate …
She dug faster, the shovel biting into the rain-soaked earth with wet, flatulent squelches. I’m digging up Roy, she thought suddenly, remembering the way the old hound dog had whimpered after her father backed his truck over him. Wet and shaking, parts all twisted the wrong ways. They had buried him in the backyard, shoveling in silence in the sweltering Kentucky heat, and she was digging him up here, who knew how many thousand miles away, and people were watching from the edges of the grave above. Her parents. The Kleins and the Heisses from First Lutheran, and Reverend Joseph. Tess and her mother. Her lacrosse team. Jody and Alison and Danielle. They all expected something of her.
The shovel’s blade found something hard, the shock of impact traveling up through her blistered palms and aching arms. She panted as she yanked it free and drove it into the dirt a short way off, then knelt to continue with her hands. The people looking down at her were talking, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying, only hear the mush-mouthed susurrus of it, like they were grown-ups in a Charlie Brown movie. Wa-wa, wa-wa-wa-wa. It hurt to dig. Her nails chipped and tore. Her blisters burst. She clawed at dark, wet soil that gave way to blue clay and then to fine white sand that spilled through her fingers as she scooped it from the hole. There. Something pale. That taint smell again, thick and sweaty, and she dug deep and had it in her hands, pulling it up as white sand ran down its cheeks like tears.
Her own face, expressionless and serene, eyes shut, hair still mostly buried. The voices on the lip of the grave went quiet all at once. Nadine could hear herself breathing. She could hear her heartbeat and the churn of her guts. Her mouth was so dry. When had she last had water?
The face—her face—opened its eyes and she recoiled from it, scuttling backward on all fours until she slammed into the striated wall of the grave and it gave way against her, spilling her out of the dream and into the predawn silence of the cabin.
She lay very still. I’m in bed, she thought, looking across the room to where Jo and Felix slept in their bunks, the former curled up like a roly-poly whose rock had just been lifted, the latter sprawled and snoring. Light fell gray through the doorframe and chinks in the walls and the flat roof. A line of ants marched in and out of shadow from a knothole in a floorboard to the wall. Already the dream was sliding away from her. Something about buttholes.
Smith stirred in the bunk above Nadine’s, mumbling in her sleep. The cabin’s steps creaked. The lock rattled. Hide beside the door, Nadine thought, sliding her legs over the bed’s edge. Adrenaline sang through her, bringing the cabin into brutal clarity. Her toes met the floorboards silently as she gathered the sheet around her. Twist this up, loop it around her neck when she comes in. Get her on the floor and put your knee on her spine. Pull. Pull hard.
Except it wouldn’t matter. Maybe she’d turn out to be a real badass and kill the counselor, John McClane–style. Maybe the counselor would put her on her ass. Either way there’d be a dozen more people waiting outside for her, and even if she somehow got past them then there was the desert stretching away flat and endless except for the mountains, which she’d die trying to cross without supplies or warm clothes. She didn’t even know which state she was in. So she sat on the edge of her bed, pulse thundering, and forced herself to stay still as the door swung outward and their counselor, Cheryl, stepped inside.
Cheryl was tiny, maybe five-two or five-three, the only one of Pastor Eddie’s staff Nadine had seen so far who was shorter than most of the kids. Still, there was something serious about her, something that frightened Nadine in a way even Names-and-Dates’s fist crashing into her face hadn’t done. Her cold black stare slid over the cabin’s interior as she came to a halt in the middle of the room, crushing a section of the ant column under the sole of her left boot. The survivors filed onward, uncomprehending.
“Out of bed,” said Cheryl. Her voice, high and a little breathy, filled the cabin effortlessly. “Now.”
Nadine got up, letting the sheet drop to the mattress. Felix, blinking sleep out of his eyes, rolled out of his bunk and dropped to the floor in his T-shirt and briefs as Smith climbed down to stand next to Nadine, hugging herself. Jo didn’t move. Whether she was asleep or faking Nadine never found out, because in three quick steps Cheryl had crossed the cabin, pushed Felix out of her way, and dragged Jo out of bed by the ear and a fistful of fabric. The stocky girl crashed to the floor with a cry, thrashing in a tangle of sheets and limbs. Cheryl flipped her over neatly with the toe of her boot.
“I said out of bed,” the counselor repeated. “Tomorrow you will be dressed and standing at attention when I come in. Beds will be made, clothes folded or in the hamper.” She put her foot on Jo’s chest. “You are not butches. You aren’t studs, bull dykes, or any other macho perversion. You are ladies, and you’re going to learn to act like it.” She turned toward Nadine and Smith. “Let me hear a ‘Yes, Cheryl.’”
