“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.
“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.