As she said it with the others, Nadine pictured the butt of her lacrosse stick breaking Cheryl’s pretty nose.
“Yes, Cheryl.”
A smug, tight smile. “Good. Now we’re going for a run.”
Felix jogged through the desert in the middle of a ragged line of a dozen other kids, wondering which of them was going to drop first. It wouldn’t be him. He ran every day at home, and he’d gone to sleep the night before as soon as his head hit the pillow, ignoring the sniffles and whimpering that filled the dark interior of Cabin Four. The counselors and the rest of the freakshow Mormons or whatever they were could call him Inez and make him wear whatever they wanted; he’d put his head down, do what they told him, and when he got back to Philly he’d apologize to his father for the quinceañera—shredded taffeta and broken glass and his brother, Leo, screaming, blood on his face—and do his time until he could move out. He’d lost the round. Spun out. He could live with that.
Easy.
Ahead of the joggers a rust-spotted white pickup bumped and rattled over the uneven desert earth, its tires throwing up thin clouds of dust. A blocky blond man named Enoch sat in the bed with one leg hanging over the tailgate. He watched them through scratched sunglasses, his face expressionless. Felix wondered if Enoch had been through this, if he’d put on his mother’s nylons or given his boy cousins handies at Christmas and gotten his white ass shipped off to wherever the fuck they were—Utah or Arizona or whatever—so Pastor Eddie and the rest of his boy band could help him pray away the gay.
It didn’t matter. Just another thing to think about while the rutted earth flew past beneath his sneakers. A little to the left of their line Cheryl paced them easily, occasionally turning to run backward at a mocking reverse lope. Even sweaty and flushed she looked untouchable. Felix picked up his pace. On his left Nadine matched him stride for stride. She had a couple inches on him and her fucked-up face didn’t seem to be slowing her down, but he thought she was probably running to beat him, not to last. Most of the group’s girls had been at the camp for weeks at least. He and the rest of Cabin Four were the new meat, and he’d felt the eyes of the other eight on him since they’d met in the yard among other blocks and columns of counselors and kids.
“Pick it up, Blanchard!” Cheryl yelled.
Felix looked. Smith was flagging, her fine corn-silk hair plastered to her face and neck, her pale skin blotchy. He turned back to the truck. What was he supposed to do? Not like he could run for her. He could tell by the way the others darted looks in Smith’s direction they were all thinking the same thing. Ahead, the truck hit a patch of sand with a reverberating hiss, tires churning up a cloud of grit that swallowed them at once. Felix squeezed his eyes shut, stumbling over the loose, shifting terrain as flecks of stone and sand stung his face, his forearms, his ankles. A few desperate heartbeats and they were through it. Felix blinked rapidly, grit caught in his eyelashes, as Cheryl shouted, “Line up, line up!” at the straggling runners.
That was when Smith dropped. Whether she tripped or collapsed Felix couldn’t tell, but one moment she was wobbling along, face pale and blotchy, shining with sweat, and the next she was sprawled in the dirt, her whole body convulsing with dry heaves. The line came to an uneven stop. The truck drove on a few seconds longer before halting with a groan of metal and worn-out suspension. Felix stared at Smith, his own pulse loud in his ears.
“On your feet, Blanchard,” barked Cheryl. She jogged back through the midst of them to stand over the fallen girl. “Up.”
Smith struggled to her hands and knees, then retched. A string of yellow bile hung from her chin. “Can’t,” she husked. She retched again. “H-help. Can’t. Can’t.”
“All right,” said Cheryl after a short pause. She turned her back on the shivering girl. “Cleaver, get her moving.”
A big sunburned redhead, one of the “upperclassmen,” as Felix had heard others call the kids who’d been there longer, with her hair tied back in a tight, sleek bun, started toward Smith, a look of pure glee on her freckled and peeling face. She wore tight red shorts and a ratty T-shirt with an Indian brave’s head in profile on it and the legend GO TOMAHAWKS! A few of the other upperclassmen exchanged knowing looks. Giggles ran up and down the line. “Help her up, Betty!” someone shrieked, plainly delighted. If Cheryl heard them, she chose not to say anything. Betty Cleaver sank down on one knee beside Smith, laying a hand on the back of the girl’s neck as Smith retched again, her spine arching, more bile splattering against the loose red soil.
“Got it all out?” Cleaver asked, her voice dripping with sympathy.
Smith nodded shakily.
Something bad is going to happen, Felix thought. Blood and taffeta. Broken glass and screaming.
Cleaver patted Smith on the back, and then in one smooth motion she seized a fistful of Smith’s white-blond hair and shoved her face into her own puke. The smaller girl clawed desperately at Cleaver’s hand, but Betty held her there, grinding her face into the bile-soaked dirt. “You’re gonna make us miss breakfast, you fuckin’ gash,” Cleaver snarled. “That happens, I’m gonna tie you to the truck’s tailgate on the way back. You want that? You wanna be my little doggy?”
She rose, dragging Smith with her. The skinny girl’s face was covered in mud and yellowish-tan slime. She sobbed convulsively, hugging herself. “N-no,” she blubbered. “I’m s-s-sorry.”
Betty leaned in close. Felix hardly caught what she hissed in Smith’s ear.
“Then run.”
Smith ran.
Corey and the Beard, both on horseback, led the eight of them toward the mountains as the sun rose on the eastern horizon from a sea of heat shimmer. Shelby’s feet hurt. The sneakers they’d given her didn’t fit right and she could feel new blisters forming where they rubbed against bare skin. Her Wranglers pinched at the waist and the work shirt, which Ruth had bought for her years ago, made her feel like a misshapen sausage. She had stubble, her thighs were chafing, and she smelled like piss and sweat. The brim of the worn baseball cap—HINDLE HARDWARE: GET HAMMERED HERE!—Corey had tossed her itched against her freshly shaved scalp.
I wish I was dead, she thought. I wish the pills had worked. I wish I’d used a razor, or Stel’s gun.
The dry, crumbling earth dipped down into a canyon, walls of red and yellow rock rising to either side of their little party as they followed the incline. The sound of running water echoed from the stone and gorse, and stunted thorn trees grew wild in the shade. Lizards scurried under rocks and into holes and crevices as their party passed by. Bugs rose whining from the witchgrass, midges and horse flies and grasshoppers with their vivid brown and yellow wings.
Some of the others were doing even worse. Weedy little Brady looked like he hadn’t slept at all, and John was red in the face and wheezing like a pug with sunstroke, a far cry from his pompous handshakes—John Calvin Bates, so good to meet you—that morning when they’d gathered in the yard beside the flagpole. At least I don’t look like that, she thought with a guilty species of relief, watching him lumber along, thighs jiggling in his loose silver basketball shorts. It made things easier when she wasn’t the fattest, when she could protect herself from mockery simply by keeping her head down and trusting it to take the path of least resistance. She hated how secure it made her feel.
They crossed a fast-moving stream spilling down from the canyon’s wall and plunging into a crevice in its far side. Smooth stones shifted under Shelby’s feet. Her sneakers squelched as she climbed the far bank behind Gabe and Brady. “What do you think they’re gonna make us do?” Brady whispered. He had a high voice, thin and nervous.
“How the fuck should I know?” Gabe snapped.
“We’re gonna cornhole your mom, Brady,” said Malcolm, the skinny Black kid Shelby had met in the pavilion. He pushed his glasses up his sweat-slicked nose. “We’re all the way out here so civilians don’t have to watch.”
“Fuck you,” Brady shot back, blushing furiously.
“Quiet,” Corey shouted back over his shoulder. He frowned at Shelby, though she hadn’t spoken.
They went on in silence for a while. The canyon opened up around them, dotted with shocks of saw grass and bur sage and piles of fallen rocks sloughed from the stone walls. Little brown songbirds speckled with white hopped through the undergrowth, hunting for bugs in the dirt. John Calvin Bates, esquire, was practically gasping by the time they reached a broad flat stretch where someone had left a cluster of shovels driven into the earth beside a huge roll of cut wooden posts and wire fencing. Shelby felt like sitting down and crying. Her wet feet itched and stung.
“Postholes are marked,” said the Beard as he brought his horse around in a tight circle. It was huge, much bigger than the dainty little mares Shelby had ridden her summer at equestrian camp, its brown coat rough and dirty. “Need ’em three feet deep, then you take that bale and roll it out, get the ends of the wire around the bolts we sank here”—he gestured toward the nearer of the two stone walls where a pair of thumb-sized lengths of steel stood out from the rock at hip height—“and plant ’em.”
“What’s it for?” asked Gabe.
“Cattle,” Corey answered. His horse came around more slowly than the Beard’s, shaking its head as it picked its way over the uneven ground. “They graze down here. The fence should keep them out of the water. On a hot day they’ll drink too much and sweat themselves out. Die, even, if we don’t stop them.”
He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a tall bottle of Poland Spring, the sight of which transfixed Shelby instantly. “Look alive,” he said, and tossed it underhand at John, who almost fumbled it, before throwing another to Malcolm. The Beard flipped a third to Shelby. She grabbed for it, missed, and had to crawl after the rolling plastic cylinder to snatch it before it went down the embankment and into the stream. A few of the boys chuckled. She straightened up in time to see the counselors riding back toward her.
“Do you have any moleskin?” Shelby asked, face burning, as the Beard’s horse drew even with her. “I have a blister.”
He rode past without answering, Corey beside him. The horses started down the bank. Their tails swished from side to side, whisking flies off their haunches.
“We need sunscreen!” she shouted after them, but neither man turned, and after a few minutes they had crossed the stream and started back along the canyon, dwindling into the long shadows. Shelby’s chest felt tight. Adults might forget to pick you up from school, they might hit you or scream at you or rip up your diary and throw it in the fireplace, but what they didn’t do was abandon you in the desert with a couple bottles of water. This was something that happened in horror movies, car wrecks where the parents died and their plucky teens had to cross the Mojave on foot, wetted T-shirts wrapped around their heads.
“What do we do?” Brady asked. His voice shook.
