AFTER STOPPING AT THE MAIN OFFICE for tape and staplers, we set off.
“Because animals need our help!” Lump said. She had very enthusiastically already passed out ten or so flyers to the group at the archery range. “Especially baby animals. Did you know that when I was in second grade we had a cat named Helicopter that Mom and Dad thought ran away? This was before Grandma moved in because Dad got sick. Dad has ghost hair because he has mesothelioma.”15
Behind us the archery group were making stupid goddamn faces and pointing to the posters in their hands.
“But so anyway, the cat, Helicopter, that Mom and Dad thought ran away, didn’t actually run away. He only ran away to the front yard and tried to hide under the hood of the truck because it was warm there and it was winter outside so it was cold everywhere else. Here,” she said, handing me some more flyers. “We should ask the people on the rock-climbing wall to put some flyers up top, or maybe have them make them into paper airplanes and throw them down to everybody.”
“We can put some up in the mess hall,” I said. “Lots of people, lots of eyes. Maximum exposure,” I said, trying to shift gears as fast as her.
“Good idea. We also still need to go to the barn. Anyway, so Mom told me to go warm up the truck so that she could drive me to school and we didn’t know that Helicopter had crawled up around the engine.”
“I can’t see this ending too great for Helicopter.”
Her tone never really changed from fast-paced conversational. There weren’t many ways this could turn out well for Helicopter the cat, and when I looked at her to see if she was tensing up for the inevitably grisly outcome, I saw someone who might as well be recapping a mildly interesting movie. Something as fucked up as watching your family deal with mesothelioma probably has that effect on you. I should know: the punch lines for half the jokes at any of my family gatherings, at least growing up, involved little kids getting shot.
“And I turned the car on but it sounded funny so I pressed the gas pedal all the way down even though Mom said never play with any of the pedals or buttons but I did and then Helicopter sort of blew up on the windshield.”
“Je-sus.” As a responsible Buddy, I tried not to smile at her delivery of the story but it sounded like every joke I grew up on. Jokes like, “Take out the trash or I’ll finish what your cousin started,” and “I knew he should have bought a bigger gun.”
Jokes that we all thought were legitimately funny too.
“I don’t warm up the truck anymore.” The way she said it, she knew it was fucked up and terrible but you could tell she thought it was a funny story too. At least a faraway kind of funny. That “a lot of the other parts of my life are destabilizing bullshit so I’m going to laugh at cats that explode” kind of funny.
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
“Not unless I bang on the truck first with a hockey stick, but Mom says that gives her pre-mat-sure wrinkles which doesn’t make any sense because old age gives you wrinkles and she’s forty-three.”
And I couldn’t not laugh; I laughed my real laugh.
We headed for the mess hall and handed flyers out to the stragglers we passed. I taped a LOST flyer under the word “Nakwatuk.” Test was inside, standing in front of a wheeled-in whiteboard, lecturing a group of older campers that I didn’t know. Kids from one of the other buses.
“Maybe we should come back later,” I said to Lump.
“Why?”
“Because Tes—” I cleared my throat. “Mister Test is in there talking to the older kids.” It seemed like the right thing to say to make her to think I was a responsible and capable adult.
“That’s perfect!” she said and flung the door open, like she wanted to show me how to be a responsible and capable child.
Test stopped mid-sentence, his hands still up, and the group of nine or ten kids all turned and looked at us at the same time.
“I need everyone’s attention! I have an announcement!”
Test gave me a look that said, “Seriously?” before softening and looking at Lump. “Allison, you can make your announcement when I’m finished. I have the floor right now.”
Lump’s face went deep red. “Don’t call me that.”
“I’m sorry?” he said, placing his loose fists on his hips and trying to look as parentally intimidating as possible.
“I said, please don’t call me that.” Some of the fire went out of her voice when she tried to match Test’s authority. Still, the words came out made of iron, even if they came out quiet.
Test nodded and asked the group in a sweeping, semi-rhetorical voice, “Where were we?”
“You okay?” I whispered to Lump.
“I don’t like it when other people call me Allison.”
Before I could say anything else, and before Lump could tell me who calls her Allison, Test went on. “Right: you’re walking in the woods. Right. So. You come to a split in the trail and standing between the two paths is an old man. He greets you and says that you have two choices.” Which was obvious because it was a two-pronged fork, and wrong because there are always other choices. “Choice one.” He drew one large red arrow veering left and one veering right, and pointed to the left arrow with his marker.
“He definitely needed the giant dry-erase board for this,” I said to Lump. Some of the red faded from her cheeks.
“You go left and you will be given one billion dollars. With a B.” The students looked back and forth between each other. A small grin slunk across his face and you could tell he was thinking, Got these boys eating out the palm of my hand. After a very dramatic two-second pause, he said, flippantly, “Or you go right and you get…” He fished a dingy penny out of his back pocket and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. After everyone saw the coin, he tossed it to the nearest fourth-or-fifth-grader. “But: if you choose the penny, your money will double every day for a month. A penny the first day, two pennies the second, four pennies the third day, eight on the fourth, and so on.” He shrugged like, “That’s it; pretty lame, I know.” He looked his audience over. “The tension at the crossroads is palatable as the old man looks you in the eye and waits for your answer. What do you do?”
I leaned down to Lump. “Tension’s not palatable; it’s palpable.” I considered telling her that, despite his best efforts and sly intentions, a billion dollars was without a doubt the correct choice here, but settled on the abridged, “Also, choose billion.” Her color returned to normal.
“Who says go left?” he asked. All of the hands went up.
“C’mon. Let’s go put up some flyers. We’ll come back when they’re done.”
We made our way around the hall, dropping flyers where people would see them. On the sneeze guard over the empty salad bar; taped to the microphone stand on the stage; on the fire exits.
“What about through here?” she said, standing in front of a large wooden door marked “Staff Only.” She twisted the knob but the door didn’t move.
“If it’s staff only,” I said, taping a flyer to the window, “it’s probably…” In my peripheral vision I saw a Lump-blur run shoulder-first into the door, rattling it on its hinges with a sound loud enough to echo through the hall. “Holy shit, Lump.”
I saw Test looking at me from his makeshift stage through the porthole window on the connecting door. I tried to convey that things were still okay in here by flashing a smile and giving him two thumbs-up.
She was backing up and getting ready to batter the door down. “Lump, stop,” I said. The red started creeping back into her cheeks. It wasn’t much, but it was there. I took a breath, clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, checked to see that Test had returned to talking to the kids, thought, Fuck it, and said, “Hang on.”
I handed her the flyers and tried the door. It was locked, but just barely. I took my wallet out and found a rewards card to a place called Bonnie’s Café; I pushed the card between the door frame and the latch bolt and forced the door open.
“Yes!” she said, pumping both of her fists, still holding the papers. We couldn’t see anything past the door but that didn’t stop her from heading straight for it. I grabbed the back of her coat, said “Hang on,” again, and felt around for a light switch.
The switch was high up on the wall, hidden in the cool, dry darkness. I flipped it on and we were looking at ten steep stairs leading to a maintenance tunnel.
“Can we?” she said, her eyes wide.
I jogged down the steps, looked down the tunnel, and came back up.
“Nobody’s going to see them if we put them down there,” I said.
“They might!” She looked at me until she scrunched her face up. “Fine. Can I look though?”
When I didn’t answer right away she shoved the flyers into my hands and sprinted down the steps. “It’s creepy down here!” she said without looking back at me.
And it was. The tunnel ran for maybe forty or fifty yards and was supposed to be lit by bare yellow bulbs every ten feet, except all of them but two had burned out: one bulb at the bottom of the stairs and one at the end of the tunnel. Under the last bulb there was a mess of tables, folding chairs, and decommissioned camp equipment.
I could hear Test and the campers wrapping up. “Lump. Go time!”
She ran up the stairs two at a time and we headed back toward Test, Lump moving somewhere between a power walk and a jog.
The whiteboard had a section of tallies under the left arrow and then what was supposed to be a mind-blowing equation under the right, except you could tell he’d realized his mistake during the presentation and had tried for a more creative math angle. He saw us approaching and asked the students to hang on a minute.
“Hi. Okay. Thanks. I have an announcement.” She studied their faces and waited for a response.
“What’s your announcement, Lump?” Test said. She didn’t tense up when he called her Lump.
“There is a deer missing. She’s just a baby and she escaped yesterday. I looked it up on the Internet … before, at home, because we’re not allowed to be on the Internet here … and the nightly average temp-er-rature has been in the record lows.”
“It’s just a deer,” one of the kids said. He was, inevitably, the Bryce of whatever cabin he belonged to.
The color filled her cheeks again. “She’s just a baby. She needs help.”
“Or,” the asshole kid continued, “maybe it’ll get hit by a truck and there’ll be one less deer to worry about.”
“Anthony—” Test said, stepping toward the little shit.
“There’s a reward,” I heard myself say before Test could move any closer, which was a thousand times better than what I had thought I was going to say. Test gave me the same “Are you kidding me” look from before.
Lump looked up at me and her eyes flashed. “Of a hundred…” she started to say until she saw me glaring at her. “I mean. Of fifty dollars.” She looked at me and I couldn’t keep glaring. “Yeah. Fifty dollars. We know what she looks like. What she exactly looks like. So don’t bring us just any deer.”
The righteous confidence in her voice was a booming, thunderous “fuck you” to the little bastard kid.
Since Charlie wasn’t around to high-five her, I took on the responsibility.