Gabe felt sick. The heat, even with the sun still creeping up over the horizon, was boiling, and his head felt as though someone had put it in a vise while he was sleeping. His stomach churned sourly, cramping with each shaky heave of the shovel’s blade. They were digging postholes again. Corey and Garth had led their cabin and two of the boys from Eight out while it was still dark, the last faint blush of starlight making the counselors’ horses appear limned in silver as they rode. One of the other boys, a stringy little fifteen-year-old named Ben who Gabe didn’t know well, had cried for most of the walk out.
He couldn’t shake the dream, the one they’d all had. He’d told himself a dozen times that it was mass hysteria, that they were all feeling scared and alone and looking for things to pin those feelings on, trying to comfort himself with his therapist mother’s cold platitudes, but nothing worked. People don’t have the same dreams, he thought as he dug. Not far off the ranch’s cows were ambling down a broken slope, mothers nosing their calves over the rocks and desert driftwood, lowing in the heat as the first ghostly shimmers danced atop the nearby ridge. It’s impossible.
By silent agreement the other boys stopped digging and joined him to watch the herd pass. Gabe leaned on his shovel, breathing hard. There must have been fifty cows. Maybe more. He wondered how you were supposed to keep track of all of them. The desert seemed endless, and the more he saw of it the more he realized that beneath its flat expanse and empty sky was a second infinity, one of canyons and shale and hidden riverbeds run dry and snarled with gorse and creosote.
“Max and James were gone when we woke up,” said Ben, his voice hoarse. Fat, pimply Stuart Carmichael, the other boy from Eight, nodded, looking like he wanted to cry, too.
“Their beds were empty,” Ben croaked. “Stripped. Dave said they left for a hike with Pastor Eddie, that it’s a retreat for kids who’ve shown they’re ready to really commit.”
“Do you believe him?” asked John. The fat boy’s face was pale beneath his sunburn.
Ben shook his head, eyes wide and frightened. “I heard something outside the cabin last night,” he said. His voice was small. “It was scratching at our door and … it was sniffing.”
The hairs on the back of Gabe’s neck stood up. He felt suddenly exposed out on the open ground in the shadow of the ridge. There was an ache in his chest for the idea of a home that wanted him, that would care if he was safe or not, if he was warm, if he was fed. You’re not going to have this life, his mother had said to him a little while before the men from Resolution came and dragged him from the house. Her narrow face was pinched with fury, her hands curled together white-knuckled on the kitchen table. You have no excuse for behaving this way. You’re trying to hurt me. To hurt your father.
The smell of her perfume came without warning to the forefront of his memory. A thin and clinging cloud of citrus over the buttery scent of vanilla. He nearly retched. He could smell her sour sweat beneath it, and the musty stink of the lake house his grandparents had left to her. They’d been alone. His dad and his little sister, Mackenzie, had gone out for ice cream. Gabe hadn’t wanted any. Already at eight years of age he had begun to feel out the unspoken virtue of starvation, the sickly shadow pleasure of denying himself something in which others would indulge.
I’m going to give you an examination, and it’s best we keep it between just the two of us. That’s called doctor-patient confidentiality. Do you understand, honey?
She’d never called him honey before, and although he knew something was wrong, although his skin prickled with goose bumps and his thoughts began to stretch into a single timeless, disembodied smear as she bent in front of him where he sat at the kitchen table, he wanted her to say it again. He wanted her to love him, to act the way the other moms at Hebrew school acted when they came to pick their kids up. Hugs. Ruffled hair. He could feel the wrongness sweeping through the camp. He could feel the lake reaching for him from out of the past, a wave driving the other kids before it, sweeping them all toward something at the edge of understanding.
We have to get out of here, he realized, staring out into the vast and empty desert. I don’t know how, but we have to get out. Before it’s too late.
“Where’s Smith?” Nadine asked Cheryl as the counselor entered the cabin. Cheryl looked at her with cool disinterest. Nadine had to fight to keep from blushing. She knew she was breaking out. Her hair was tangled, and she had a slight hangover, a kind of fuzzy, dirty feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could feel her period coming, twisting the soft tissues cradled in her pelvis into a tangle of writhing eels.
“Good morning, girls,” said Cheryl. She paused, expectant.
“Good morning, Cheryl,” Jo and Felix chorused back unevenly. Nadine did flush, then, with anger at her friends for caving in so easily.
The counselor gave a little nod and stalked past Felix to inspect the bunks. Jo shot Nadine a panicked look. They’d been up talking half the night while Felix snored—he’d fallen asleep as soon as his head hit his pillow. They’d rinsed out their mouths as best they could, but the tap in the bathroom was on some kind of meter and only ran for twenty seconds a night, its flow sluggish and lukewarm even after the temperature dropped. The bottle of Absolut was buried in the loose soil under the cabin, but Nadine knew the look on Jo’s face, the unreasoning terror of someone certain she’d been bad and could not escape the consequences of it. She narrowed her eyes at the other girl and mouthed Be cool the moment Cheryl’s back was turned.
“Can you tell us where Smith went?” Felix asked as Cheryl straightened up from his bunk, apparently satisfied by its tight corners. “She wasn’t here when we woke up.”
The counselor smiled, just a little, an expression of such maddening smugness that Nadine immediately pictured herself bashing her teeth in with a brick. “That’s really none of your business, Vargas.”
“We’re not going anywhere until you tell us where Smith is.” Nadine regretted it as soon as it was out of her mouth. It was a stupid thing to say, a stupid hill to die on, but trying to walk it back now would just make her look stupid and weak. “What did you do to her?”
Cheryl looked Nadine up and down. The counselor’s expression was unreadable. She was so composed, even this early in the day, her short black pixie cut freshly gelled, her stare dark and cool and catlike. “Not a thing,” she said at last. “Enoch and the pastor came and collected her early this morning for private counseling, which she requested herself.” She took a step toward Nadine. “Anything else I can clear up for you, Donovan?”
Nadine held the older woman’s stare. “No.”
For a moment she thought Cheryl might hit her, but the counselor just nodded and turned to lead them out. “What the fuck are you doing?” Felix hissed in her ear as they went down the cabin’s steps. The other campers were flooding into the thoroughfare. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
“She’s lying,” Nadine muttered back. The other girls were joining them now. Betty and Athena. Sarah Becker, who everyone called Pecker, and Fawn DeAngelis with her scar where she’d had her cleft palate repaired. “Whatever they did with Smith—”
“Donovan!”
Cheryl stood a few yards off, pointing toward the worn-out tires piled against the south wall of Cabin Four. The other squads of campers were starting to stare. “Get me one of those. Now.”
Nadine’s heart sank into her stomach, but there was nothing to gain by stalling. She trudged over and hefted one of the frayed and ragged tires, sliding her arm through its center so its weight rested on her right shoulder. It was already starting to rub her skin raw by the time she lugged it back to where the other girls were waiting for her.
“The truck’s been riding off-center,” Cheryl said with bored disdain. “I want a spare with us on the morning run, just in case. You don’t mind carrying it, do you, Donovan?”
Betty, standing with her clique behind the counselor, gave a shrill, dirty little giggle.
“No, ma’am,” said Nadine, her cheeks burning. I’m going to fucking kill you, you bitch. You fucking asshole. I’m going to cut your face up. “Not at all.”
That smug smile again, this time without a hint of pretense that it was anything else. “Good.”
Felix jogged a little way ahead of the others, trying not to listen to the sound of Nadine’s labored breathing. Even with the tire she was keeping up, more or less, but the last time he’d looked back her face had been a waxy, ghoulish gray. Sometimes he thought he had the hots for her, with her long, slender legs and that wild mane of tawny hair, her broken nose and crazy grin. Other times she made him sick and angry, made him want to cover himself up and hide.
Keep your head down, he thought, trying not to think about how hungover he was. His head pounded with every loping step. His stomach churned. He tasted bile. Do your time.
The ground melted away beneath his feet. He thought of Linford Christie winning gold in Barcelona, those legs scything over the track’s pebbled red-brown surface, that smile breaking like dawn at the finish line. That was going to be him at the end of the summer. He’d blow through the ribbon and never look back, never think about this place or his weird dreams again. Who cared if they’d all dreamed about some hole? It’s not like it meant anything. He’d had lots of nightmares before. At six years old he’d woken up screaming every night for a week from dreams of a bear getting into the house, its huge claws ripping the wallpaper, its hot breath snorting in rancid puffs under his bedroom door.
“Pick it up, Igarashi!” Cheryl shouted back at Jo. The truck went through a patch of loose earth, tires filling the world with a smoky haze of grit. “Let’s see some hustle!”
That was when Nadine fell. Felix felt it in his bones at the hollow pwup of the tire bouncing off hard-packed soil. The rest of the group stumbled to a ragged halt. Felix nearly tripped. His head was swimming. His mouth was dry and still tasted faintly of puke. A short way back Nadine was struggling to get to her feet, the camp a hazy blur in the distance beyond her. Her shoulder was raw and bleeding where the tire had rubbed against it while she ran. Part of her dirty tank top was soaked with it.
“On your feet, Donovan!” Cheryl barked, striding back toward the rest of them. Betty and her clique fell in around her like jackals slinking after a lioness. Nadine got her knee under her and shrugged the tire from her shoulder. It fell with another hollow thwack of rubber against dirt, raising a little ring of dust. Nadine’s hair was dark and matted with sweat. Not so tough now.
Keep your head down. Do your time.
Cheryl came to a halt an arm’s length from Nadine, hands on her hips. In her dark, form-fitting tracksuit she looked like she’d just stepped out of Enter the Dragon. Her bare arms glistened with sweat. “Did I tell you to put that down?”
Nadine looked up at her with such pure hatred that for a moment Felix thought the other girl might try to throw herself at Cheryl, but instead she bent and looped her arms around the tire, flipping it up on its edge before trying again to stand. Points of color burned in her pale cheeks. Her legs trembled.
Keep your head down. Do your time.
“Benson, Schwarz,” said Cheryl, her lip curling in disdain. “Help her up.”
Celine and Dana started toward the struggling girl. Celine’s big, bulging eyes were wet with excitement. Dana looked nervous, almost tearful, hanging back a little as Celine grabbed hold of Nadine’s hair and bounced the girl’s face off the tire, blackening her mouth with dirt and soft rubber. Nadine groaned, collapsing on her belly, and Dana shuffled forward and kicked her half-heartedly between the legs.
The shout tore out of Felix before he could stop himself, not the shrill complaint he always feared when he raised his voice but, for all that it cracked a little, a man’s voice, hard and stern. “Leave her the fuck alone!”
Betty grabbed him from behind just as he started toward Nadine. Cleaver was bigger than him, two or three inches taller and at least thirty pounds heavier. He struggled, trying to stomp on her foot and only succeeding in bruising his heel on a rock. She got an arm across his windpipe. “Let her go!” he wheezed, thrashing in the redhead’s grip. “You’re gonna kill her!”
Cheryl looked at him. “They’re just trying to help her, Vargas.” Her dark eyes gleamed with a kind of flat, satisfied complacency more terrifying than the most naked malice. The other girls watched, frozen. Jo was crying, her arms pinned to her sides by Athena. Celine kept dragging Nadine forward by her arm, then bending down to simper with fake concern as Nadine got to her hands and knees and crawled a few pitiful feet. There was blood on the inner thighs of her Wranglers.
“You’re next, faggot,” Betty whispered in Felix’s ear.
Nadine hated the sounds Mrs. Glover made during sex. Even in the kitchen, even through the ringing in her right ear where Celine had kicked her, she could hear the pastor’s wife keening like an animal upstairs. Bedsprings creaked and groaned. Flakes of plaster drifted from the kitchen ceiling to float in the sink. It made her think of her own mother, who she’d heard gasping and moaning more than once when her parents thought no one was listening. It was so fake. So staged. The breathy, girlish exclamations of “Oh, Eddie” like he was taking her on a magic carpet ride beneath a sea of stars instead of ramming his dick up into her mildewy box. Nadine scrubbed at a copper-bottom stock pot, scratched hands raw and stinging. She wanted to march into their bedroom and dump the pot of filthy, boiling water on both of them, even if she’d have to gouge her eyes out later.
Godddd, came Mrs. Glover’s deep, guttural groan, muffled by the intervening floor. Oh Godddd, Eddie, Eddie.
Felix and the girls pretended not to hear it, though Jo’s face was beet red as she hulled peas at the kitchen table. The thump and creak of the bed frame and box spring grew louder. Faster. Nadine scrubbed harder at the Pyrex baking dish she was cleaning. They get to do this to us, and I had to put my hand over Tess’s mouth when I got her off. She scrubbed faster, fighting the stubborn crust of whatever the dish had held. I have to kiss Shelby in a bathroom stall, breathing in the smell of piss and bleach.
Oh, Eddie. Yes. Harder. Harder.
A phone rang, an earsplitting clatter of handset against cradle. Nadine dropped the Pyrex, which broke cleanly into three pieces. “Shit,” she hissed, trying to fish the shards out of the soapy water. The phone rang again, and suddenly the pounding from upstairs stopped cold.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” someone shouted from the living room. Enoch, she thought. The screen door banged, then the sound of a key fumbled into a lock. The phone’s third ring cut off abruptly. Ignoring Jo’s warning look, Nadine crept toward the door to the living room, wiping her soapy hands on her jeans. Heavy footsteps overhead. She peered around the doorframe just in time to see Pastor Eddie come bounding down the stairs in nothing but a pair of wrinkled tan slacks. He met Enoch coming through the little office, always kept locked, to the right of the front door, and without pausing grabbed his son by the front of his shirt and shoved him back against the wall.
“You called Harlon last night,” Pastor Eddie rumbled, his face brick red. “About the truck? Isn’t that right?”
Nadine couldn’t see Enoch’s face from where she stood, but she could hear his terror. “Yes, sir.”
“Did you turn the ringer on?”
Enoch mumbled something.
“Speak up,” said Eddie. Nadine knew that tone. Her father had used it with her more than once before the belt came off.
Enoch swallowed. “He had to step away and I didn’t want to miss his call back in case—”
The pastor slapped his son across the face with a crack that echoed from the walls and silenced the whole farmhouse. Nadine didn’t care. She wasn’t listening. They have a phone. She smiled, the effort tugging at the fresh scabs on her cheek and over her right eyebrow. They have a fucking phone.
Too late she realized Felix and the girls had gone silent for another reason. Blinding pain lanced from her ear as a hand seized hold of it and twisted cruelly, dragging her back from the doorframe. It was Cheryl. The counselor pulled her farther back into the kitchen, jaw set and nostrils flared. “Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong,” she snapped. “You’re a guest in this house. Don’t forget it.”
Nadine almost laughed, but the pain in her ear and jaw was overwhelming. When she grabbed at Cheryl’s arm, the counselor seized Nadine’s wrist and twisted it behind her back, forcing her to turn while keeping her neck taut and burning. At the table, Felix stared fixedly at the potato he was peeling. Jo was crying. Nadine’s face felt hot, caustic shame burning her cheeks. “Let me go,” she said, and felt pitiful as soon as she’d said it.
“March,” said Cheryl, pushing her toward the back door. Nadine hobbled forward, helpless, so angry she could hardly see. “I’m not done with you.”
Cheryl marched Nadine across the yard and toward the ramshackle hulk of the barn. Chickens scattered from their path, squawking and flapping. Nadine thought for some reason of Gonzo’s pet chicken, Camilla, on The Muppet Show, every episode of which her uncle Rick had fastidiously taped during what her grandmother called, with quivering disapproval, his Mary Jane years. Cheryl smelled a little like her grandmother, a slightly chemical reek of mothballs and herbal liniment. I’m going to kill you, Nadine thought matter-of-factly, looking at the counselor’s smug profile. Whatever kind of fucking freak you are, scuttling around on your belly, I’m going to cut your throat and shit in the slit.
Even thinking it felt flat and pitiful. She wasn’t going to kill anyone. She wasn’t going to change anything. Cheryl had her by the ear, the same way her father had dragged her around as a little girl when she did something to set him off, or when he decided she had. Cheryl set her shoulder against the sliding barn door, splintered wood rattling in its rusty track, and the warm, grassy stink of cow manure flooded Nadine’s mouth and nostrils. Horned heads turned toward her. Big, dark eyes blinked slowly. Cheryl released her ear and kicked her, hard, in the back of the knee. Nadine dropped with a grunt to the straw-covered concrete floor, the impact rattling her teeth.
“You’re a slow learner, aren’t you?” said Cheryl. She sounded pleased, like the prospect of Nadine’s stupidity was a little personal gift for her. “Shovel’s by the door. Wheelbarrow’s in the empty stall. Compost is around the back at the edge of the garden. Muck the rest of these stalls out. And watch out for Doris; she bites.”
“Which one’s Doris?” Nadine coughed, but Cheryl was already gone. A brown cow stuck her head over her stall door and snorted in the silence, flicking her ears to dislodge flies. Nadine stayed kneeling for a while, indulging in sullen fantasies of sinking her teeth into Cheryl’s face. Truthfully, though, mucking stalls sounded better than washing dishes. She’d done it a few summers at Gorse Brook Farm, where she’d taken riding lessons. She liked the stink of it, the burn in her arms after hours of shoveling shit. It made her think of her father coming home from rec league basketball, or a job site on a hot day, his T-shirt dark under the arms and around the neck.
The shoveling was hard with her bruised ribs and aching arms, but it felt good to be alone for once. The cows were mostly content to chew their cud as she worked, heaping the dented and rusty wheelbarrow with manure and pushing it around behind the barn to where flowers, weeds, and what she thought might be bamboo grew from a huge hill of refuse. Broken eggshells, apple cores, corn cobs, and other detritus lay heaped among piles of cow shit, some of them already growing grass. By the time she’d finished half the barn’s twenty stalls she’d built up a pleasant sweat. She liked to build up a sweat. It made her feel the same way she did when Tess called her Nate in bed. Once she thought she heard something moving in the hayloft, but when she made her way up the groaning ladder there was nothing to see but a couple of rats skittering among the moldy bales.
It took her the better part of the afternoon to notice the smell. She caught her first whiff of it as she was cleaning out Doris’s stall, eighth on the left—she’d identified the cow when Doris tried to take a bite out of her ear. It cut through the sweet, grassy stench of the manure and the warm musk of the cows themselves, a note a little like the stuffy, slightly tallowy perfume her great aunt Christine always wore. They put little bits of shit and weasel oil and rotting things in perfume, she remembered. To make it smell like sex, and like death. There was a sweetness to it, though, a sticky, syrupy scent. She leaned the shovel against a post and followed the stink toward the rear of the barn. As she did, the buzzing of flies emerged from the stamping and chewing of the cows.
The smell was coming from the last stall on the right. Flies swarmed over the half gate and the cracked and weathered lintel. The drone of their wings filled the air. It set Nadine’s teeth on edge. Her skin crawled as she lifted the heavy wooden latch and the insects, taking flight, bumped against her and crawled over her arm and the sleeve of her flannel. She hauled the gate open, its rusted hinges creaking. The smell intensified. She raised her arm to cover her mouth and nostrils, her eyes watering at the putrid stench.
Inside the stall, beneath a living carpet of flies, a dead cow lay on its side, tongue protruding from its mouth, one empty eye socket staring at her in mute judgment. Maggots writhed in that dark pit. Beetles burrowed through the matted, shit-caked hide, which had begun to slough from the bones and rotten meat beneath.
The seething whine of the flies became a roar, a staticky sound like a TV blasting on a dead channel. The glistening black carpet of their bodies undulated over the carcass, circling the yellowed pillars of its ribs, the fat ropes of its guts, which had spilled from its burst belly. Nadine took a step back without meaning to, her hand flying to her forehead as a headache burned itself in through her temple, a white-hot needle from her eye to the nape of her neck. The world swam before her, shadows stretching and melting in the corners of the barn’s dark alcoves. She swayed, grasping for something to hold on to, and as her hand found the splintered wood of what felt like an antique plow, a voice spoke from the stall.
Nadine.
Her childhood dentist, Dr. Campbell, who had died in a car accident when she was eleven, was crouched beside the carcass, flies crawling through the pitiful landscape of his graying combover and on the lenses of his thick Coke-bottle glasses. Open wide, Nadine, he said, but his voice wasn’t his, it was the dead static howl of the swarm. He smiled hugely, flashing crowded rows of rotten teeth, and crept toward her on all fours. His nails were mottled blue and green, as though his hand had been slammed in a car door. He reached for her and she saw that there was shit trapped under them, a toxic brown crust of sludge. She felt something in her belly stretching, a feeling somewhere between gagging and the hot, convulsive pressure of a hand inside her.
It’s only going to hurt for a second.
His index finger touched her lip. Behind him, the dead cow’s foreleg twitched. Something squirmed within the gawping, vacant mouth. Nadine screamed as her headache burned brighter. She squeezed her eyes shut and in a flash of acrid purple and white light she saw a foot-long clot of matted hair and crushed slivers of bone lying half buried in the loose, crumbling desert earth. There was something inside it. A wet thing, rubbery and slick. A mouth full of baby teeth. A finger where its tongue should be.
Nadine vomited. Her knees gave out, and she fell hard on her rear, legs splayed to either side of the puddle of her own puke, around which flies already gathered. Dr. Campbell was gone, and with him the sickly, feverish sensation of being stretched, replaced by a sense of griminess, as though her skin had been sprayed with rotten honey.
Sitting in the hay, the hot pain of the headache ebbing now, Nadine could make out ragged bite marks in the cow’s flank and belly. They were too big to have been made by rats or weasels, the wrong shape for a coyote or a dog.
Oh, God, she realized with mounting horror, bile welling up again at the back of her throat. They’re human.
Shelby looked up from her hole just in time to see Gabe puke. He stretched back like a bow, staring into the sky at an angle, and then bent double and vomited all over his own shoes. John hurried toward Gabe. He caught the smaller boy as Gabe’s legs buckled, and for a moment Shelby thought he’d fainted.
“Get it out of me!” Gabe screamed, jerking upright. He kicked and struggled in John’s arms. His eyes rolled back into his head until only the whites showed. Shelby’s mouth felt dry. She was nauseous and couldn’t seem to find her breath. Her shovel fell to the dirt with a clank. The others were running toward Gabe and John. “Get it out! Get it out!” Gabe vomited again. This time there was blood in it. He began to thrash, the sinews in his throat standing out like cables.
“Help me!” shouted John. His mouth was bleeding where Gabe’s skull had split his lip. He dragged the spasming boy toward the shade of a nearby boulder. “He’s gonna hurt himself.”
Shelby scrambled out of her half-dug hole. It took her, Ben, and Stuart together to hold Gabe down once John had wrestled him to the ground. Brady stripped off his shirt and folded it to stuff under Gabe’s head, then stood by with a fearful look. Slowly, Gabe’s convulsions slackened, becoming tics, and then faded to nothing. He blinked. He had such pretty eyes, deep and gray with long, thick lashes. Shelby let go of his ankles as the others stepped back.
Brady knelt and held a water bottle for him. Gabe took slow sips, then turned his head and spat into the dirt. “What happened?” He croaked. “My head hurts.”
“I don’t know,” said John. The fat boy’s face was the color of milk. Stuart was crying while Ben held him, looking helpless and lost. “You were begging us to get something out of you.”
Shelby’s headache pulsed at her temples. She saw the point of white fire again, the mote of light dancing on the boulder’s side just above Gabe’s head. On her right, Stuart squeezed his eyes shut and put the heel of his hand to his forehead, as though he had an ice cream headache. Gooseflesh crawled up Shelby’s arms, heat or no heat. “I want to go home,” she whispered to nobody, though what she really wanted was to have a home she could go back to.
“It’s getting closer,” Gabe murmured, his eyelids fluttering. “It’s kissing Nadine now.”
“Keep him in the shade,” Shelby forced herself to say, stepping back from Gabe and the others. Her heart was pounding. She wanted to bolt, to run back to camp and make someone bring her to Nadine, get a knife and threaten to kill herself unless they let Nadine go. She sounded like a stranger to herself as she kept talking in that calm, measured tone. “Give him water. A little bit at a time. I’ll finish digging his hole.”
“Closer,” whispered Gabe. “Getting closer.”
At lunch the mess was dotted here and there with empty seats. Jo thought of Smith’s bare mattress as she worked her way mechanically through her beans and meat loaf. Wonder Bread and margarine on the side; a white-person-food triple threat. Her friend Sammy’s mother cooked the same way. Skinless chicken breasts, unseasoned. Undercooked boiled potatoes cut into glistening chunks. Plain broccoli steamed until it was barely solid anymore. It made her want to cry, all the bad food she’d eaten. She pushed her meat loaf around its lonely partition of her scratched and heat-warped plastic tray. Her mother had never really cooked. Her grandparents had done most of that, and then Oji by himself after Oba-chan died of cancer. In the last few years, since her father’s promotion to junior partner at his firm, they had mostly stopped having dinner together at all. The thought of eating bowls of charcoal-cooked chicken and sticky rice in the kitchen with Oji after finishing her homework, of his lumpy homemade mochi and the smell of spicy stock simmering on the stove, brought tears to her eyes. She wiped them on her sleeve as Felix joined her. Nadine hadn’t come back with them. Cheryl had dragged her away during the drama over the phone.
The phone. Jo kept turning it over and over in her mind. If they could just figure out where they were, what state, the name of a town, they could call someone. It was just conceivable they might even be able to get out of this place before whatever insane shit was in the air finally chose its moment. It would be soon. She could feel it coming.
“Nadine here yet?” she asked Felix. He shook his head and started wolfing down his meat loaf the way he always did, like it was an enemy fortification he had to demolish.
Jo spotted her a moment later coming from the serving counter. Nadine limped toward them through the milling campers. She looked terrible and smelled worse. Her hair was lank and damp with sweat. There were fresh bruises layered over her fading ones, and blood on her flannel work shirt. Her boots and the cuffs of her jeans were crusted with nameless muck. Slowly, as though it hurt her to do it, she lowered herself onto the bench across the table and leaned forward, resting her head in her hands. Kids at neighboring tables stared at her.
“Are you okay?” Jo asked.
Nadine only shook her head. For a while the three of them ate in silence as more counselors led their groups in. Jo sank down a little in her seat as Names-and-Dates arrived with Betty and her little minions in tow. The big redheaded girl was laughing shrilly about something while Celine and Dana tittered. Athena, trailing a little behind the others, scanned the mess with her cold, dark stare. Jo didn’t like the way Athena looked at people. It was the way you were supposed to look at the things you found when you flipped over a rock: interested, but a little repulsed, too.
“Was it Betty?” Felix asked. “Did she fuck with you again?”
“No,” said Nadine. Her voice sounded raw and strained. She looked up from her plate. “We have to get out of here,” she said. Her knuckles were white on her spoon. “There’s something bad happening. Something wrong.” She took a deep breath, like she was about to climb that last rung and step up onto the high dive. “I think they’re going to kill us.
“We have to get out.”