L Lark
Part I
Though Cody Simmer does not believe in the monster of Oxwater Lake, he is the fifth to see it and the first to photograph it—an out-of-focus cell phone shot that shows the beast’s back breaking through a layer of summer-thick algae. This happens during his morning row with the kids from Blue Bear cabin. Afterwards they clutch each other on the lake’s bank, pink-faced and screaming, “Did you see it, Cody? Did you see it? Did you see it?”
“No,” he’d replies, pocketing the phone and tying the rowboat to the dock without another word.
*
Cody Simmer is nineteen years old and he is afraid of the dark. He is also afraid of large dogs, old elevators, and the noises that ricochet through his apartment’s stairwell at night.
But darkness is the worst. This is why his heart does not slow until well into the afternoon, when he forces himself to gather his laundry and drag it across the camp to the employee facilities. He is not scared of the lake because of the monster, he tells himself. He is scared because the water is deep and black.
Cody has been away from Oxwater for too long to be able to cope with mysteries.
Harris Webb is sitting cross-legged on top of the camp’s only washing machine, reading a paperback copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. With his teeth buried in the skin of his lower lip, Harris’s expression is ambiguous. He does not move when Cody drags his laundry basket into the room, and shoves three loads’ worth of clothes into the empty machine. Harris licks his finger, turns a page, and stares at the text as if it were revealing some devastating secret about the universe.
Cody starts a wash cycle. The stillness of the room is put to rest by the tidal whirr of the water pumps and the sound of a quarter tumbling against the machine’s walls. Only then does Harris acknowledge Cody with a nod and an impassive smile.
Cody hates when people smile at him, hates the obligation to smile back. He hopes Harris has finally given up trying to talk about what happened last summer.
“My parents said they’re not letting anyone swim or go boating in the lake until the monster is dead,” Harris says. The vibration of the washing machine makes his voice sound as if he is speaking through spinning fan blades.
“That’s crazy. There’s no monster.”
“Heather Cromley says you saw it this morning.”
“Heather Cromley is eight years old.”
“She said you took a picture.”
Cody’s phone remains silent in his pocket. There is no reception at Oxwater, but occasionally he manages to pick up Wi-Fi from the general store two miles down the road. He’s avoided even that indulgence for some time now, unable to cope with the reminder that his friends are enjoying their last summer before college in places where buildings have a thirteenth floor and no one carries acorns in their pocket to ward off ghosts.
Harris unfolds his legs and drops one down against the face of the washing machine. He is composed of more protruding angles and lines than he had been last year.
“I don’t know what I saw,” Cody says. “And it happened too fast. I didn’t get a picture.”
Harris dog-ears his page and tilts his head. The light slanting in from the window casts his face in silhouette, and Cody has to draw it from memory. Harris has a mouth like a frog, wide and jutting, and eyes that approach every object with the same tremulous concern. Harris is eighteen, one year younger than Cody, but his frame is slight and Cody often confuses him for a camper if he has his back turned.
“Well,” Harris says, turning his eyes down to examine his hands. Cody had once felt one of Harris’s hangnails snag in the hairs at the base of his neck, but he hasn’t thought about that for nine months, and he is not going to start dwelling on that now. “Maybe next time.”
There’s not going to be a next time, Cody thinks, because there is no monster, but he feels his throat constrict because he is not entirely sure can believe the lie.
*
Camp Oxwater has been nestled between the base of the Pocono Mountains and the dark expanse of Oxwater Lake for thirty years. The air is thick with the scent of pine sap. Cody can feel it coating his lungs. At night, mosquitoes hum outside his cabin. He imagines breathing them in and the way they would become trapped inside his body, struggling against the muck.
Darcy Webb, Harris’s mother, had been the maid of honor at his parents’ wedding. As a result of this, Cody has spent every summer at Camp Oxwater since the age of eight.
As for Harris, Cody has begun to suspect that he has never left these grounds, even for school. The gulfs in his practical knowledge are frighteningly wide, and three months of each year in Cody’s childhood have been spent chasing after Harris to keep him from wedging knives into electrical sockets or tossing rocks at wasp’s nests.
This is why Cody does not understand Harris’s statement when the boy approaches him the following day.
“Elasmosaurus platyurus,” said Harris.
“God bless you.”
Cody is the leader of Blue Bear cabin; Harris, Red Rabbit. These children are between eight and ten, Oxwater’s youngest campers. Cody knows he has been burdened with this responsibility because of his outward projection of unending patience. Harris—well, he suspects Harris might have trouble communicating with anyone who walked the path of puberty.
Today, Blue Bear and Red Rabbit are scheduled for an arts and crafts activity together. This means that Cody and Harris will proceed to make eighteen macaroni pictures while the campers chase each other throughout the cafeteria, yelping and belching and killing insects in staggering numbers.
“No, Elasmosaurus platyurus,” Harris repeats, adding the last bit of dried pasta to what appears to be a giant alien scaling the side of the Empire State Building. “Otherwise known as a plesiosaurus. Estimated to have gone extinct over sixty-five million years ago. It’s the same dinosaur they suspect the Loch Ness monster to be.”
“You’re joking.”
“You’ve claimed many times I have no sense of humor.”
Cody closes his eyes and thinks of eating Italian ice in Central Park…and of Cynthia Harper, who might finally hook up with him now that she is moving to Boston in the fall. He thinks of how wonderful it will be to sleep in his parent’s eighth-floor apartment, where the risk of being eaten by a coyote in the night is negligible enough to ignore.
“Cody…”
“I heard you. I’ve just chosen not to let this conversation proceed.”
Harris stares at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Cody tries and tries not to think of the way Harris’s mouth had been dry and warm, the way their teeth had clicked together, and the way Harris’s neck had smelled of pine and insect repellent and campfire smoke.
*
That week the monster is sighted for the sixth, seventh, and eighth time, though never more than a curved spine breaching the water’s surface or the glimpse of an elongated neck in the distance. At night, Cody stares at the mass of gray skin captured by his cell phone camera with his finger hovering over the delete button.
It could have been anything, really, he tells himself. Anything.
But the campers are no longer allowed within forty feet of Oxwater Lake, and yesterday a news van arrived at the camp’s entrance. Harris met them at the gate, waving violently, and gave the reporter an enthusiastic tour, ending at Oxwater Lake. Cody had been there when they’d arrived, surrounded by Blue Bear kids who’d begged to go watch the newscast.
“My research has led me to believe that the monster may in fact be the last living species of dinosaur, making it a discovery of great scientific importance,” Harris says to the cameras. Both the children and reporters stare at him as if he were the sole source of stability in a rapidly tipping world.
“If I am correct, we have little to worry about. They have never been known to consume human prey and subsist primarily on small fish and cephalopods.”
Later, Harris flops unto the ground next to him uninvited, hair green from the reflection of sunlight on the grass. Cody expects him to speak, but Harris presses his cheek against the soil and inhales. Cody watches his ribs expand and contract, but he’s not looking anywhere else, not ever again. Around them, the babble of the children is constant and steady.
Cody misses his early summers at Oxwater—wading shin-deep in the frog ponds and plucking bees from Harris’s shoulders. Those days are gone now and must remain gone. Maybe he should write a letter to his parents, complain about the prehistoric animal rearing up out of the black water, ask to go back to New York, and then maybe Cynthia will let him fuck her, and that will forever dispel the memory of wanting to reach across his sleeping bag and move Harris’s hair out of his ears.
“I’m so happy,” Harris said finally, and knowing Cody will not respond, adds, “About the monster.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No,” Harris says, into the earth. “I’m just not afraid.”
*
Cody cannot trust his own memories of The Incident last year. They are uncomfortable but not unpleasant. He wants so badly to wince and cringe and retch dryly into the camp’s portable toilets, but he can’t.
It had happened like this: Harris was chopping vegetables in the mess hall, Cody watching over him. Harris’s cooking privileges had recently been reinstated after a two-year period of forced abstinence following an incident known as The Great Oxwater Kitchen Fire. Now they were alone and Cody was eyeing the knife because Harris’s fingers seemed too relaxed to hold a pencil. The knife tipped and wobbled over the cutting board, but it was impossible to tell the moment Harris actually cut himself.
“Cody,” Harris said. He was holding the wrist of his right hand. There was a slim cut on his index finger, but his expression seemed to register no pain. He eyed the wound skeptically, as if he had never considered this issue to be within the realm of possibility.
“Idiot,” Cody said, but didn’t mean it. He fetched the first aid kit from the Blue Bear cabin and bandaged Harris’s finger. Blood did not bother him. Next year, he would graduate from high school and study biology at Columbia, then medical school, and then he would never see Harris or his bleeding finger again.
“This next year is my last,” he said, without being sure why.
“Yes,” Harris continued, watching Cody’s hands over his own.
“What are you going to do, Harris? You can’t stay here forever.”
Harris blinked. Cody watched the words DOES NOT COMPUTE flash across Harris’s eyes.
“This is my home.”
Cody taped the gauze in place and drew back, but Harris’s eyes did not leave the place where their hands had been joined.
“Why don’t you go to school? You’re smart, sometimes. You can get a job. You can do anything you want.”
“Anything I want,” Harris repeated, his voice flat. His attention shifted to the half-sliced tomato on the countertop. “I like it here.”
Cody sighed, picked up the discarded knife, and began slicing.
“I do too, but this isn’t real life.”
By now, Cody knew that he was Harris’s only link to the world beyond. Every year Cody brought pictures and playbills, Japanese candy, American comic books, cell phones, and MP3 players, and loved the way Harris’s eyes widened in dumbfounded amazement.
“I like it when you’re here,” Harris said, disregarding Cody’s second statement. He reached out and dabbed up an eyelash from Cody’s cheek.
Cody’s hand froze mid-motion.
“I like you,” Harris said again, his bandaged finger scratching Cody’s forearm. After a moment, he pressed the digit into the soft crook of Cody’s elbow and left it there. Cody watched his arm lean into Harris’s touch, until the pressure of his finger on Cody’s veins was too much and his fingertips went slack.
The knife clattered to the countertop. Harris moved closer, and their knees knocked together. It was painful. Cody wanted to move away, but didn’t. A group of older campers approached the mess hall and then continued along the path toward Oxwater Lake. When their voices faded, Harris took another step forward.
“Harris,” Cody said. “I don’t know…what—”
Perhaps it was because Harris had never had any friends aside from Cody, or that he’d never experienced the awkward humiliation of grade school. Maybe he was just so socially crippled that he didn’t know to be nervous. Harris reached out, took Cody by the collar, and pulled him in. In the end, Cody could not know who closed the distance between them, only that Harris tasted like honey graham crackers.
It was nothing like kissing Cynthia Harper…or any of the girls from high school, drunk and eager and sloppy. It was not pleasant at first. In fact, it hurt. Harris’s teeth scraped across the dry skin of his lower lip, and Cody was sure the sharp edge of the bandage had nicked his cheek.
Harris drew back, as if he had only just realized what was happening, but this time Cody was sure he was the one who lurched forward, recapturing Harris’s mouth mid-word. He’d never thought about Harris like this, never, even when they’d spent hours a day swimming naked in the canals that lead to Oxwater Lake, but now that it was happening, it seemed natural.
Cody and Harris, together. Like they’d always been.
“No,” Cody said, although he wasn’t sure why, since this felt good, and Harris’s fingers had moved to his lower back and were pressing in with a force that was more than enough to remind Cody that he was not making out with a girl. “Stop.”
Harris did, and pulled back, his mouth wet and downturned. He did not speak, but inhaled as if about to begin a sentence. Cody waited, realizing his hands were still bobbing in the air where he had once been clutching Harris’s ribs, but he couldn’t drop them now without breaking the terrible stillness that stood between what had just happened and its backlash, crouched and ready in the future.
He was unable to suppress the sigh of relief that escaped his mouth when Harris turned away.
“I should have figured,” the other boy muttered, “Sorry.”
He did not have the chance to respond, and three days later, he was on a train to Manhattan, where he could forget about Harris’s warmth beneath the cold shadows of Fifth Avenue.
*
The next day the newscasters are back because the remains of an eight-foot gar washed up on the shore of Lake Oxwater, and the wounds on its side look exactly like they were made by row after row of giant teeth. Cody only gets to see the fish because Harris wakes him up by tapping frantically on the glass of his cabin at six in the morning.
Cody hates waking up before sunrise. Pre-morning darkness is the worst; in the city, they have gurgling late-night buses, and sirens, and taxis vying for parking space, but here, there is nothing but Harris’s arrhythmic breathing.
“You have to see—I just want you to see, so that you…” Harris says, beckoning Cody along. “I want you to believe me.”
Cody is struck with a rush of misplaced sympathy, but he’s not about to let Harris know that, especially not when he’s running on four hours of sleep and he’s supposed to take Blue Bear hiking up Mount Oxwater in two hours. The thought of the altitude makes him dizzy. Cody is not entirely afraid of heights, but he used to dream of the mountains, bending forward toward the camp, impossibly large.
Cody smells the fish before he sees it. He feels his stomach seize, but Harris seems unperturbed, so he is too embarrassed to voice his discomfort.
The fish is tipped on its side, mouth open. The rising sun hits its scales at an angle, and Cody is temporarily blinded. He stumbles and reaches out to grasp Harris by the forearm. Harris does not pull away, but continues walking, oblivious.
“Anything could have done that,” Cody whispers. He hasn’t yet let go of Harris’s arm, but the movement would be too obvious now. They remain connected, watching two men in lab coats haul the fish unto a hospital stretcher. The mattress sags under its weight; Cody had not seen the chunk missing from its torso until now.
“They say it was bitten by something much bigger than it is,” Harris says, and bends his elbow so that Cody’s finger slides into the crook and stays there. Harris does not seem to notice. His eyes are exuberant. “It’s amazing.”
This time, Cody does not argue.
*
Cody masturbates unenthusiastically, thighs sore from the day’s earlier hike up the mountain. Then he sleeps. Next to him, his uncharged cell phone sits on the nightstand.
He dreams. At first, about New York City, feeling claustrophobic beneath the shadows that fall on his back and shoulders. He dreams about Cynthia Harper’s tits, and the frozen lemonade kiosks in Central Park, and then about Lake Oxwater.
In the dream, he is stumbling down the fishing pier with Harris’s hand clutching the back of his shirt. He dreams about Harris pressing into him over the black water, Harris’s breath warm on the skin behind Cody’s ear. The other boy’s face is dark. The shadows beneath his brow and chin seem too heavy. Cody leans in, searching for a hint of reflected light in Harris’s eyes, but finds none. It’s so unsettling that it makes the moment Harris lurches forward and pushes his mouth against Cody’s seem mundane in comparison.
It doesn’t hurt, like it did in the real world. In fact, Cody feels nothing, aside from the cold wetness of Harris’s tongue, and curls of water vapor rising into his clothing and hair.
After a moment, Harris draws back. “You shouldn’t be afraid,” he says. It’s a dream voice, bouncing joyfully between Cody’s ears.
“The monster isn’t real.”
“I’m not talking about the monster,” Harris says, but that doesn’t matter, because a shape has unfurled out of the water behind him. He does not seem to notice, although the water running off the animal’s muzzle showers down onto his hair.
Cody wants to run, take off down the old fishing pier, back to Blue Bear Cabin, where he can fall asleep listening to the long sleep-breaths of the children in the next room. He gains the courage to test his legs, feels his calves tighten in preparation, but Harris’s grip on his arms does not falter.
Harris kisses him again. This time it is soft and brief, and over before Cody has a chance to react. The monster tilts its head down to watch, but makes no other motion.
“Don’t be afraid,” Harris says again.
Cody, for a moment, believes him.
*
Cody hears the steady tone of the generators in the distance, and a series of intermittent thumps that are too loud to come from the raccoons that come to steal sequins and glitter glue from the storage cabins.
He has been lying in bed, staring at an empty patch of sky through the window. Cody hooks his fingers over the window ledge and pulls himself up. Outside in silhouette is the hunched figure of Harris, dragging behind him the rowboat that had recently been placed into storage.
Cody indulges in a long moment of hesitation. There is no reason to try to stop him, he figures, even though he is already searching beneath his bed for a pair of flip-flops.
There is nothing in the lake, he knows, though an hour of every evening has been spent staring at a grainy photograph on his cell phone screen. Harris will ride around all night, and maybe that will finally quell his obsession with the monster, and life around Oxwater can return to normal.
“I hate you so much,” Cody whispers, shutting the cabin door behind him.
Harris doesn’t notice him until he is pulling the boat up to the edge of the lake.
“Hello,” he says, unexcited, as if he’d known Cody would be there all along.
“Hello,” Cody says. Harris’s skin is ruddy from too much sun, but the whites of his eyes are like beacons in the darkness. “I thought you might need help.”
“I don’t.” Harris lifts a cord that’s been dangling from his neck. On the other end is the rusted key that Cody knows opens the lock to the storage shed where the boat is kept. “I’ve been doing this every night, all summer.”
Cody helps him to push the boat out regardless. Harris settles into his seat, pulling a paperback book from the waistband of his jeans. It’s too dark to read the title, but Cody recognizes the cover. It’s A Wrinkle in Time—Cody read it in elementary school, but he can’t remember anything about it.
Harris makes Cody row, of course, and remains silent until they travel far into the lake. He reaches down, flounders about along the boat’s bottom, and emerges with a can of anchovies. Cody watches him drop them one by one into the lake. The cradle of mountains around them amplifies the sound they make as they hit the water.
Cody doesn’t bother to ask. He knows he can’t grapple with Harris’s logic.
“Aren’t you my friend anymore?” Harris asks, propping his head against the palm of his hand.
“Of course I am. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Harris is silent for a long time, staring out at the water’s surface. “I was glad about the monster. I thought it would give me an excuse to talk to you again.”
“You don’t need an excuse.”
“Yes, I do,” Harris says, with such authority that Cody doesn’t bother to question him.
He leans back into the boat and feels it rock as he shifts his weight. He wants to tell Harris to move his foot, to turn the boat around, to crack a genuine smile for the first time all summer, but he can’t, physically can’t. He feels like he’s swallowed a mouthful of lake water and now there is algae coating his throat and lungs, and if he tries to speak, it’ll just pitter out of his mouth ineffectually.
“Cody,” Harris says and leans forward. Cody feels his body respond involuntarily before realizing that Harris’s eyes are not fixed on him but on a spot just over his left shoulder. Harris attempts to repeat his name, but it comes out as a mess of vowels.
Cody has the feeling that he shouldn’t turn around. He has the feeling that if he turns around, that will be the end of everything he thought he knew about Camp Oxwater and the world, and he’s not ready for that.
Across the boat, Harris is grappling with the oar. Cody reaches out for his own, but his grip falters when the boat rises and tips to the side. It takes him a moment to steady himself, and give the boat one powerful heave, but by that time, the water has stilled.
It doesn’t matter. They row until the boat lurches against the banks of Lake Oxwater, and then they keep rowing until they realize they’ve hit the shore, and stumble out of the boat, holding each other by the elbows. Their run is directionless until one of them locks onto a faint sodium light in the distance, and they tumble toward it together, finally collapsing into the grass, muscles spasming in odd syncopation.
“I didn’t actually see it,” Cody says, once he’s evened his breathing. His leg is still wedged beneath Harris’s, and he can feel the other boy’s calves tense. The sound in his ears reminds him of driving too fast with the windows down.
“I didn’t see anything.”
For a long time, Harris does not speak. His skin looks sallow in the yellow light, and there is a moth sifting through his hair. Cody wants to take back what he’s said, wants to erase the look of betrayal from Harris’s eyes, but he’s been hurtling down this path for so long, he’d not sure he can turn around.
Harris never replies. Instead, he stands, brushes the dirt from his jeans, and disappears into the unearthly darkness of the camp.
The fear—which he has lived with for so long now, that is seems powerful and alive—crawls back to settle in Cody’s throat.
*
The following morning, Kimberly Stout goes missing.
She is a ten-year-old from Green Goose. Cody can’t recall her face—by their second week at Oxwater, every kid resembles the same greasy, devastatingly sunburned creature—but he knows she kept her hair in a braid. She wore pink shoelaces and refused to use a fork.
Peter Bentley is her cabin leader. Cody finds Peter lingering in front of the mess hall, holding a lit flashlight, despite the fact that the sun has fully risen. He looks like he’s just witnessed a car accident.
“One of the other girls said she saw Kimberly heading for the lake. You don’t think—?” he begins, but interrupts himself to listen to a twig snapping in the distance. Cody knows Darcy Webb led a search party into the woods three hours ago, but the counselors have been ordered to stay at the camp and watch over the children.
“No,” Cody says. “That’s impossible.”
He is lying, but as it turns out, he’s right.
Kimberly Stout strolls into the mess hall that evening, interrupting a solemn dinner shared by the campers, parents, and volunteer rescue workers from the town below. She is soaking wet, barefoot, and there is a mint green tendril of duckweed in her bangs. Her skin is faintly blue, but she is smiling.
“That was awesome!” she says, oblivious to the dumbfounded stares of everyone around her. Cody finds Harris’s face in the crowd, and sees that he has hooked his index finger over his bottom lip and is also grinningly wildly.
The girl is not given the chance to speak again, because her parents descend on her at that moment. They are weary and smell of liquor and the cheap detergent they use on airline blankets. Cody has met them before. Kimberly’s father is in politics. Her mother writes religious novels. Cody does not think they are going to be very happy that their daughter was kidnapped by a monster.
“I saw—” Kimberly begins, but her mother clamps a hand over her mouth.
“Not until we speak to a lawyer,” she says, picking a mayfly out of Kimberly’s ear. “When we enrolled our daughter into this camp, no one felt the need to mention there was a creature living in the lake.”
The entire Webb family is visibly rattled, except for Harris. The threat of legal action has done nothing to smother the delight in his eyes. He is staring at Kimberly with what Cody might misinterpret as romantic love if he did not know Harris so well.
“Kimberly,” Harris calls as her parents begin to usher her out of the cafeteria.
“It was amazing!” she yells back.
Cody does not understand, but Harris obviously does.
He turns to Cody and raises a fist in victory.
*
At night, there are noises.
Or wails, more properly.
Oxwater has always had its fair share of strange sounds, but none like this—long and deep and lonely, like a voice from a dream in the moment before waking.
*
Cody has one of those moments we have all had. It goes like this:
Something bad happens and you move on, because you don’t have a choice but to keep on waking up and brushing your teeth and walking out into the sunlight with your hand pulled over your eyes. Something bad happens, and you think you’ll feel something, but you don’t.
Then one day, you’re standing beneath the showerhead, and you feel as though your heart is struggling to restart after years of deep stillness, but by now, the period in which you had to react has come and gone. It’s too late to scream and cry and beg, so you just stand there with the water heavy on your hair and shoulders, unable to move.
Somehow, you step out of the shower and into the bathroom. Somehow, you wipe away the steam on the mirror and comb your hair, and then put on a shirt, pants, and a matching pair of shoes. You stumble out into the world, and life proceeds as usual.
But you’re not the same, and you can’t say why or how.
You might not even be there at all.
As Cody reaches for the doorknob of Red Rabbit Cabin, he is unsure as to whether or not his palm will actually grip the metal or if it will pass through it, useless and intangible. But it’s cool and firm beneath his hand.
Cody turns the knob and pushes.
The room seems empty. Cody knows the campers are out on horseback riding lesson, but Harris is not immediately visible. Cody catches the other boy’s reflection first, shirtless and barefoot, hair damp from the shower. His spine looks knobby and prehistoric beneath his skin.
“Hey,” Cody says before Harris turns around. He knows Harris may be thin, but he’s strong. “I think we should go out on the water again,” Cody goes on, when Harris refuses to fill the silence. “I want to look for the monster. I lied. I did take a picture of it.”
Harris moves out of the bathroom, silently gathering his shirt and shoes. There is an open book on the nightstand, facedown and pressed flat, tension across the wear on the spine. It’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which Cody has never read.
“Are you even listening to me?”
Harris bends down to tie his shoes, his hair brushing against Cody’s shin.
“I’m confused.”
“So am I,” Cody mutters, because Harris’s forehead is resting on the side of his knee, and neither one of them seems to be making an attempt to move.
Harris stands, his body freckled with rusty water. Cody stares at the mosquitoes trapped in the window screen.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps, suddenly forgetting why he came. This is stupid, but Harris’s breath is audible and comforting, like rain sliding down an aluminum roof. Cody wonders what it’d be like to press his ear against Harris’s chest—wonders if he would hear Harris’s heart bellowing against his ear like the monster does in the night, deep and filled with strange longing.
“S’okay,” Harris mutters, tugging self-consciously at the towel on his waist. Above them, the cabin’s ceiling fan spins on high and Harris’s arms are covered in gooseflesh.
“I just wanted to tell you that we should look for the monster again.”
Harris takes another step forward. He is close enough to touch Cody’s face, and so he does. His eyes remain flat, as if his hand has acted autonomously and his brain has not had the chance to react. Cody imagines he can still feel the scar on Harris’s finger, a slice of sunken skin that will stay with him forever.
He’s unsure whether he’s about to start sobbing or laughing, so instead he leans forward and presses his mouth against Harris’s. It is not a kiss, not really. They remain close-mouthed and awkward, but he can feel Harris’s pulse against his bottom lip.
“I thought,” Harris begins, without moving. It’s good to feel Harris speak against his mouth. He tastes like mint toothpaste.
“Yeah,” Cody says.
“So?”
“So.”
Harris kisses him properly. Or at least, he attempts to.
“Not so hard.”
“Sorry.” Harris pulls away.
Cody is left standing with his mouth open, listening to insects slapping against the windowpane.
Harris is still sunburned. There is a strip of skin on his nose, curling back like a white snail, and for a moment, Cody is afraid that this is rejection. That he will never get the satisfaction of peeling away the dried skin from Harris’s shoulders.
But Harris’s eyes are warm, like they were the first time Cody met him. Back when they’d just been campers and Cody had spent the first week homesick and terrified of the nighttime bear rumbles from the forest. Harris slept on the top bunk, and at night he would let his upper body dangle down and tell Cody that bears mostly ate plants anyway, and there were no monsters out there.
At least, there hadn’t been at the time.
“Why now?” Harris mutters.
“I don’t know,” Cody says, which is the truth. “It’s the monster, maybe. Possibly. I want to go look for it again, and we might both get eaten.”
“Not eaten. Drowned, potentially and accidentally,” Harris clarifies.
Cody kisses him. This time, it feels good.
Harris’s chest is damp and bony, and Cody presses his palms flat against it, feeling Harris’s heart flit against his skin like a wounded sparrow. He is vaguely aware that Harris’s penis is half-hard beneath his towel, but his brain is not entirely certain what to do with this information. It’s one thing to kiss another boy, but he hasn’t thought beyond that.
He’s fooled around with girls before. Sorta. In theory, this should be easier, but he can’t seem to make his hands slide any lower. Harris is still kissing him, sloppy and enthusiastic, but his shoulders are stiff and Cody can practically feel the muscles in his back, locked and rigid against his spine.
He hadn’t expected Harris to be the reticent one, but now it seems obvious. Of course Harris would force him to take the next step. Harris is a bastard, but Cody is tired of being afraid.
He reaches down to cup Harris’s erection in his palm.
“Ah,” Harris gasps and jumps back, which was not exactly the reaction Cody had been hoping for. The towel has slipped low on his waist, and Cody’s brain settles uselessly on the muscles of Harris’s too-narrow hips.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Cody says, as he watches a swell of terror rise in Harris’s face. His stance is hunched and unassertive, water dripping from his bangs to his eyebrows. Cody struggles with a moment of ground-tilting vertigo.
“Let’s, uh, let’s plan for tonight,” Harris says.
Cody feels the world around him creak and moan, sagging under pressure.
*
Heather Cromley appears an hour later, beating on the door of Red Rabbit cabin with a pink fist. Cody curses into Harris’s shoulder because he’s finally coaxed the other boy onto the sheets with him, and they’re studying a map of Lake Oxwater with their heads leaning against the same bedpost, the smell of oak rubbing off on their hair.
Heather Cromley stumbles into the room and folds over, hands balanced on her knees. Her breath sounds like a door being ripped from its hinges, and her jeans are covered with stinkweed. Heather Cromley’s mother sends her to Oxwater with expensive madras shorts and white sunglasses, but by the second week, she’s always managed to compile a closet full of clothing borrowed from the boys in the next cabin.
“Mr. Cody,” she says, “We’ve been looking for—did you hear? It’s here!”
“What’s here?” Cody says, hoping an eight-year-old can’t interpret the pink streak across his cheeks and nose. Thankfully, Harris has dressed, but his lips are bruised like he’s been eating grape Popsicles.
“The monster! It’s here, it’s dead, and it’s here!”
The muscles in Cody’s thighs give out, but he scrambles after Harris, barefoot and blinded by the sunlight.
*
Cody smells the monster before he sees it.
It is not what he expects, a mixture of brine and rubbery fat, but rather a bitter smell like a blood orange and not entirely unpleasant. By the time he finally catches up to Harris, Cody is scratched and bleeding from the overgrown hedges on the path to Oxwater Lake, and the bottoms of his feet ache from the burning soil.
Harris looks worse for wear. There are grass shavings in his toenails, and he is blinking down at them, rubbing two fingers along his left brow. He does not look up as Cody approaches and drops a hand on his shoulder, which he does more to steady himself than to comfort Harris.
“It’s dead,” Harris mutters, but Cody can already see that.
The creature alternately heaves and shrivels. There must be bacteria multiplying in its stomach. It is massive and purple, neck spiraled counter-clockwise against its back. Cody does not want to look into its exposed eye; it is circular and lidless, the color of watered-down lemonade.
He turns back to Harris to say, “I think I owe you an apology,” but the boy is already gone, lumbering uphill with his hands in his pockets.
Part II
Harris does not return to the lake, not even to watch a group of graduate students haul the monster onto a giant blue tarp and then drag it into a U-Haul truck. In the sun, the monster has pruned and turned a speckled pink. The skies have blackened with crows and vultures, screeching and clobbering each other in midair, while a student waits with a long-handled broom to shoo them off the carcass when they get too close.
Cody, on the other hand, cannot seem to pull himself away from the lake. This is all well and good for the kids in Blue Bear Cabin, who have eschewed all their other activities in favor of a vigil around the monster. Cody has never seen them so quiet. They stand shoulder to shoulder, forming a long row, still and silent.
“What is it?” Heather Cromley asks him, her eyes hidden beneath the shadow of a baseball cap. She sounds older, as if witnessing this spectacle has unleashed some adult understanding that had been cocooned inside her all along.
“I don’t know,” Cody says, which is the truth.
They fall quiet again, listening to the asthmatic gasps of gasses shifting inside the animal’s stomach.
No one knows, and tomorrow, the monster will be gone from Lake Oxwater forever.
*
Harris does not say anything when Cody follows him into the woods, the light of their campfire trembling in the distance. Harris has never missed a campfire; Cody used to like watching him handle roasted marshmallows with the tips of his fingers.
“Where are you going?” Cody calls out. The woods are dark, and full of bears and snakes and other terrible life forms. All around him, he hears branches creak and snap. “Hey, man! Stop!”
Since the monster’s death, Harris has been content enough to offer his mouth up for kissing, but he’s refused to speak about Oxwater Lake and shies away whenever Cody’s hands wander below his waist. I really should have figured, Cody thinks. With his narrow shoulders, and children’s books, and the way his eyes wobbled in the sunlight, Harris has always seemed entirely asexual.
Ahead of him, Harris finally comes to a stop and slumps against a tree trunk, pushing his sneakers beneath a pile of last year’s fallen leaves. He does not look up when Cody approaches, swinging a branch ahead of him to tear down the cobwebs.
Harris’s face is hidden by turquoise shadow.
“I’m sorry,” he mutters. His voice does not sound human. Cody thinks of a wounded dog, grunting and struggling in the dirt. Cody is afraid of big dogs. Cody is afraid of darkness, and car accidents, and earthquakes, but he thinks of the monster now, bloated and bruised on the shoreline, and only feels sad.
“Don’t be.”
“I just…I think…” Harris begins, but can’t finish.
Cody drops his hand down on Harris’s neck, cradling the base of his skull. “Don’t be,” he repeats. “I understand.”
*
It’s because he loves the darkness, Cody realizes. This happens late in the night, as his pulse finally falls in line with the rhythm of the croaking frogs outside. Harris loves the mystery. It is why he won’t leave this place, with its bottomless lakes and its nightmarish forests, and the monsters that whip and churn beneath the water. He regards the civilization outside in the same way he watches a storm collecting along the horizon—a rush of electricity and light that will cast away the hidden places of the world.
Harris never actually wanted to see the monster, Cody knows. Harris just wanted to know it was there, to feel his heart overflow with desperate happiness, because it meant Camp Oxwater still kept secrets from him.
*
For the first time in Cody’s memory, the campers beg and whine until someone drives into town and picks up a dozen newspapers from the general store. Everyone is desperate for news on the monster—the palm-sized articles that appear on the third page of the local section, detailing the latest scientific findings from the university.
Only the Red Rabbit kids are forbidden to handle this literature. Harris performs regular raids on their cabin when they disappear for archery or horseback riding, scooping them up in one shot and waddling to the Dumpsters. Cody catches him there, standing in repose, as if awaiting instructions.
“What are you doing?” Cody snaps, and watches Harris’s spine tilt slowly to the left.
Harris refuses to answer him.
*
That evening, the monster is spotted for the twelfth time. Cody has to ask Harris’s mother to confirm the story three times before he begins to make sense of it. This is what happened:
Peter Bentley and Bree Watts, leaders of Green Goose and Purple Porcupine respectively, had snuck down to the edge of Lake Oxwater to engage in what Darcy Webb had insisted were the most heinous of activities.
“He had his hand on her breasts,” she hisses, and Cody decides not to mention that he’s been trying to get into her son’s pants for the last two weeks. “The thing rears up out of the water behind them in one swoop. Bree had my husband’s camera with her, and she managed to snap a photo. Here.”
Cody takes the Polaroid. He does not mention that this is not the first photograph of the monster in existence. It is better than his, showing the long neck of the monster parallel to the tree line. Harris will be so pleased.
“You know what I think?” Darcy says, reaching out to take Cody’s wrist in her hand. Her hands are calloused from years of gardening gloves, and firewood, and glue.
“I think there’s a lot of monsters out there in the lake. I never told anyone this, not even Harris, but—I swear, sometimes, I hear them call out to each other in the night. They are lonely sounds, and lately louder and more desperate. I think they know one of them is missing. I think they’re looking for him.”
Cody pushes the Polaroid back into Darcy’s hand and folds her fingers over it. Cody can remember when Darcy Webb looked like a supermodel from the sixties, tanning topless on the dock in a pair of oversized white-rimmed sunglasses. Now her clothes are bleached from insect repellent and Cody is certain that she has forgotten how to apply mascara, but he wishes he could keep his hands suspended over hers for just a moment longer.
“Oh, Cody,” she says. Her breath is cold against his cheek. “Please make sure Harris doesn’t go out on the lake at night. You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”
Cody thinks of the bronze key, still dangling from Harris’s throat. “Sure thing,” he lies.
*
“We’re breaking out of here,” Cody whispers through the screen. Harris is staring up at him from beneath the comforter, a cloth mask pushed up on his forehead. When they’d shared a cabin, Harris couldn’t sleep with the lights on, but Cody was too terrified to leave them off. Harris had worn the mask in compromise.
“Grab your shoes.”
Cody watches Harris stumble out of his bed and feel for his sandals in the dark. The camp has been in chaos since the latest monster sighting, and they have not spoken all day. From outside the cabin, Cody cannot tell whether or not the curve to Harris’s lips is a grin or a scowl. It doesn’t matter. By the time he appears outside, shrugging on a white T-shirt, Cody has covered Harris’s mouth with his own.
“You seem optimistic,” Harris mutters.
Cody doesn’t quite understand, but he’s enjoying the kissing and the way Harris’s eyes seem to retain the reflection of his lantern, even after he’s turned away. “I thought you’d be happy.” Cody’s hand travels down Harris’s breastplate. The key is there, heart-warmed and heavy. “You were so upset when you thought it had died.”
“It did die,” Harris says, which Cody supposes is true. “Of course there are more out there. They must mate, Cody. They must reproduce in some way.”
Cody knows this. He’s going to study biology at Columbia. He wouldn’t even believe in monsters if he had not seen them for himself.
“Then, what—?”
Harris kisses him to shut him up. It’s not fair play, but Cody lets it happen. He takes Harris by the wrist and tugs him in the direction of the storage cabinet. Together, they pull the boat down toward Oxwater Lake, switching off at intervals.
It is an unusually cool night. The scent of pine, crisp and antiseptic, fills Cody with complete gratification. Even the sky is winter-clear. He was to squint against the stars whenever he looks up.
The lake is flat. Harris rolls his jeans to the knee and drags the boat in. For a moment, watching water creep up the fraying strands of Harris’s pants, Cody thinks he will never be able to leave this place. Not if this boy is here, reading and dreaming and sneaking out in the middle of the night to search for monsters he has always known were there.
“Let’s go,” Harris says, and they do.
The sky is reflected perfectly on the surface of the lake. Cody has to fight a wave of vertigo, hand heavy on Harris’s knee. It feels like they are encased in a shell of stars and infinite nothingness.
“Don’t be afraid,” Harris says, not for the first time.
“I’m not,” Cody says and means it.
*
They do not spot the monster that night or the next. It doesn’t matter. After their third excursion, they haul the boat back into the storage shed, and Harris takes Cody’s hands. For a long time, he does nothing, staring down at the places where their calluses rub together and flake off into the soil below.
“Do you hear that?” Harris says quietly. Cody’s nose brushes against his cheek.
It takes him a moment, and he feels it first—a low-frequency vibration in his jaw and eardrums. Cody thinks of the electrical wiring outside his window in New York, or the potential energy suspended in the air a moment before lightning hits.
“Is it them?” he whispers. The sound burrows into the valves of his heart, deep and lonely. Darcy Webb was right. This is a mourning call, an expression of grief. He has never heard it before, but it must be embedded deeply into his genetic code, his most primitive of memories.
Harris says instead, “I’m not ready to leave this place,” and punctuates the sentence by kissing the crook of Cody’s mouth. “But I may be, one day.”
Cody understands. He doesn’t think he’s quite interested in summer courses, anyway.
They walk without speaking, stepping carefully over luminescent white stones and crickets and candy bar wrappers. Owls watch from overhead, faces flat and cruel and beautiful. Harris’s hair is damp beneath Cody’s fingers.
They come to the edge of the forest, and then Harris kisses him in earnest, placing his palms on Cody’s stomach. After a moment, Harris tugs the shirt off him and flattens it against the ground. He allows himself to be guided down, feeling dried grass crackle beneath them. Harris’s mouth finds the untouched places behind his ears, along his jawline, his Adam’s apple.
Cody Simmer and Harris Webb are not afraid because they are together, clinging to one another in the darkness, while the voice of a lonely monster winds its way through the woods around them.