FOURTEEN: THE NATURE OF THIN ICE: PART TWO

“THEY REALLY DIDN’T GIVE you a cabin to lord over?” Michael said as he dealt the next hand. The cabins had agreed on a cease-fire on the grounds that Faisal had threatened to suffocate one of them if they didn’t at least pretend to try to sleep. On account of official lights-out, we’d set up the card table under the harsh fluorescents of the connecting bathroom. The lights made the stark contrast of the black and white bars on my ref shirt even more defined.

“Nope. They needed Buddies, but Cabin Lordship was full up,” I said,14 picking up my cards. I risked a look at Faisal, who didn’t have the same “You’re a bullshitter” look on his face from earlier because he was staring into his cards.

“Wait. How much are tens worth?” he asked Michael.

“Tens are worth ten.”

“And nines?” Faisal asked.

“Nines are also worth ten,” Michael said, helpfully.

“Are eights tens?” he said, visibly trying to sort the rules out in his head.

“No, eights are eight. I told you.”

“This game is nonsense.”

“Unless,” Michael continued, “it’s an eight of clubs. Then it’s a ten.”

“Awful, unwinnable, horseshit nonsense.”

“It’s better than Porns—”

“You shut your terrible mouth!” Faisal said.

“It’s not my fault you don’t understand Tens.”

“No one understands Tens! Hey: remember that time your girlfriend betrayed your trust and murdered you in front of a bunch of kids?”

“I have an Uno card,” I said, holding the card up between two fingers.

Michael whistled. “Bad news, man. Bad news,” he said. “You have to go elbow-drop one of Faisal’s kids.”

“No he doesn’t,” a voice said from the darkness behind Faisal. A chorus of small voices shushed the kid and outright told him to shut up.

“Shut up or we’ll come search under your mattresses,” Michael said without looking back.

“What do you possibly think you’re going to find under a kid’s mattress?” Faisal said. “They have all of the porn already. All of it. Inside of their telephones.” He turned his attention to me. “So what did Test do to you?” he asked me as he laid a card down.

My stomach turned into a brief sour knot and I wanted to ask him why he couldn’t leave it alone, but I realized that his not talking about it would have been just as conspicuous.

“You can’t play reds yet,” Michael said.

Faisal stared at him and didn’t pick the card up.

It was pure eye contact and zero sound.

No breathing.

They burst into a lightning round of Rock, Paper, Scissors that Faisal immediately won; he fist pumped and Michael said “shit” and one of the kids in the dark told him that he wasn’t allowed to say “shit.”

Faisal marked ten points on his scorecard, muttering, “Tell me I don’t understand Tens; I’m the motherfucking king of Tens.” He looked at me and said, “Future reference: there’s usually a bluff clause in his games—he tries to build his cheating ass a loophole into any games we have because he is a bad fucking person. Anyway. Test.”

“Right: he just wanted to have a few words with me about the nature of thin ice.” If he pressed the issue, there was enough truth I could give them without giving it all away. I lined up my options: lie and tell them that I was on Test’s shit list because he thought I smelled like weed; tell them he was just trying to break me in; tell them anything except the fact that Test knew my whole story and was telling me that I belonged here too.

How would that conversation even go? Hey, guys, Mr. Test was telling me to drop my attitude because I deserve to be here too. Oh, right, because I inadvertently helped burn down a bowling alley right before watching my cousin get shot.

Still, even Test had thought we were only talking about the thin ice underfoot and not the ice that had somehow found its way into all of the beams that held me up.

“Ooh, I know that talk. Did he call you ‘mister’?”

“He did,” I said.

“He seems especially vigilant about his hard-on for you,” Michael said. “I mean, I get him hating Faisal—Faisal shot him with a bow and arrow.”

“Test loves me,” Faisal said. “I tickle his fancy. I’m the Test Tickler.” He heard what he said, smiled before going very serious, then pumped both of his fists up and exclaimed, “I am the Testicler!” and the darkness around us busted up.

“Not really sure why he’s got it in for me. Guess I just have one of those faces. By the way, did you get Lump to Sheila?”

I knew the nurse’s name was Shelly. They didn’t know me and they didn’t know that I was supposed to be a miracle or a criminal and it was stupid and little but it felt good to act like I didn’t know what the nurse’s name was. It felt good acting like I knew how to just be someone playing cards past bedtime who had nothing special or unique about him, not even a good memory.

“Is that the girl whose ear fell off when the can of beans exploded?” Michael asked. “I never knew her name was Lump. Also who’s Sheila? Do you mean Shelly? The nurse?”

“Right, Shelly,” I said, nodding. “She used to fall down a lot. Lump, I mean,” I said.

“She’s fine. And her ear didn’t fall off,” Faisal said. “She wouldn’t stop talking about that deer. Shelly didn’t have any paper for her to make flyers, so I think she’s doing it tomorrow in Arts and Crafts. Kept saying that after she found it, her new name was going to be Katniss.”

The darkness behind Faisal spat forth a child made of shapes, and his hair was a latchkey-kid hatchet job, the same kid Faisal had been cracking up on the bus. He walked past our table without saying a word, clenching his briefs, ignoring us and the catcalls behind him. He shuffled up to the low urinal as close as possible and pulled his underwear down around his ankles. The faces in the dark laughed like shitty little hyenas and the kid at the urinal kept his head down until the dribble in front of him tapered off.

“Trevor, my man, how you doing?” Faisal asked the kid when he’d finished and had started scrubbing his hands with pink liquid soap.

“Fine,” he said with his back to us.

“Moses, this is Trevor. Now, me? I hear Trevor’s a card shark; one the fifth-grader babes would not stop talking about it,” Faisal told us in a very loud and confidential voice. “Up for a game of cards, Trev?”

“No, thanks,” he said as he walked back into the cackling darkness.

We were quiet for a moment until Michael started dealing another hand.

“That’s Trevor,” Faisal said to me. “Trevor has to pee a lot. According to WebMD it’s an anxiety thing.”

“You WebMD’d Trevor?” Michael asked.

Faisal pointed at him and cocked his head to the side, his eyes big and accusing. Michael fanned his hands out and raised his eyebrows until something clicked and he said, “Goddammit.”

“He doesn’t believe me that he has a problem with turning everything into verbs,” Faisal informed me.

“Michael or Trevor?” I asked and let them take it away; I leaned back and let the natural waves of their conversation ebb and flow.

“Mike. Trevor just has to pee a lot.”

“It’s not a problem. Saying it’s a problem implies something negative. It’s not my fault I’m a word-birthing grammar wizard,” Michael said matter-of-factly.

“You’re not a grammar wizard, you’re just too lazy to put together a complete sentence with real words and you have a God complex.”

“I didn’t come up with WebMD as a transitive verb!” he said, leaning into the card table.

“To say nothing of your God complex,” Faisal added.

“Well.”

“And no, since you asked. Trevor told me on the bus. Hang on.” Faisal tossed his cards facedown on the table and walked over to the urinal. In one swift motion he had his pants pulled down all the way around his ankles and proceeded to take the longest, loudest piss I’d ever heard, and all the darkness laughed. It was a laughter so complete that even Trevor had to have been part of it.

Michael leaned over to me so that all the ears in the abundant darkness couldn’t hear what he said. “We like Trevor. Some of the little shithead kids here don’t.” He said it to me because, somehow, I was still there and I was still involved.

I picked up my cards and pretended to be figuring out my next move when I said, “Which ones?”

“You’ll know them when you see them. Mostly Bryce and his little douchebag friends. You probably heard them, swearing and being little monsters in the back of the bus.”

Faisal sat back down. “Getting the skinny on Bryce and his little douchebag friends?”

“Yep,” I said. “I remember them from the bus.”

“We still haven’t figured out how to get rid of him,” Michael said. “We should make shirts. It’ll just be a picture of Bryce’s face with the text WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT written in all caps over the top.”

“I still like Matty’s idea.”

“The piñata full of bees?”

“No, covering him in honey and bear pheromones and leaving him in the middle of the woods.”

Forty-five minutes later—after the cabins had gone completely quiet—they were still telling stories about the things Bryce had done last year. The stories had started off nearly silent so none of the students would hear them, but after a while they drifted up into a comfortable semi-whisper. Stories like how last fall, even though he was in the younger set of kids at the time, he had stolen three different cell phones and a 3DS from the older kids’ cabins.

And about how, when the Buddies had set up a Scrabble tournament and Trevor eliminated him in the first round, Bryce’s two-part revenge mission had consisted of (A) finding the trunk where they kept all the games and ripping them all in half before (B) beating up on Trevor until Trevor wet his pants.

“What’ve we got on him?” I said. Something in my stomach was cold; somewhere far in its fluid depths, there was a slithering, icy rope winding around my bones. Not because of the many juvenile injustices done to Trevor, but because I was starting to feel like it was any of my business.

This was how it always started with Charlie.

Always and without fail.

There would be something that one of us saw as some kind of injustice, some wrong we could right, and the stupid, caffeine-fueled plan would start to take shape.

“Got on him how?” Michael said.

“Like his weaknesses?” Faisal said.

“Sure,” I said, even though the last time I’d started making elaborate plans, I’d watched my cousin and my best friend get shot. Despite that fact and despite the sour knot in my guts, I started going through the catalog of classic rock songs to which the heroics would have to be set. One of the ass-kickers, one of the heavies, like “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. “Paint It Black” by The Stones.

“The good news is that I think he has the same weaknesses as most fifth-graders,” Michael said.

“Like, for example, the awkward, fat-but-gangly, almost-puberty physique. Not really sure what to do with their hands or how to use their different-sized feet,” Faisal chimed in.

“Really his only advantage is his low center of gravity,” Michael said. “Which doesn’t mean much if you hit him with a car. Although I do remember him being afraid of the dark.”

The only sound from the cabins was the occasional creaking of old mattresses and bed frames that sounded like they almost couldn’t hold the weight of those sleeping in them. The kind of creaking that makes you wonder if the ground will hold.

But even if the ground did break underfoot, I realized that I wasn’t trying to make my mouth smile to look normal; I wasn’t nodding along to a conversation I didn’t care about to keep them from asking questions or thinking I was weird or out of place.

I was just being me.