Tori, propped on an elbow, tried to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. The blob that had followed them along the running path, the drunken redneck, had unnerved her. They had told the coaches about him when they returned to camp, and Coach P. went to call the Mammoth View Police Department. That hadn’t been the response any of them wanted. They wanted to hear that it was nothing to worry about, that it was their imaginations running wild. An incredulous snort would have been nice. Mary Bowen didn’t help matters when she later said that Coach P. couldn’t get through to the police. The phone was out. Tori had just reread the same sentence for a fifth time—“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning”—when Robin banged into the cabin. “Where’s Liesel?” she barked, her eyes jumping around the room.
Tori swung her legs off the bed. “Bathroom,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“An attack. An invasion. Come on.” She dashed out of the cabin, and Tori, barefoot, raced after her. They ran into Robin and Adrienne’s cabin, where half a dozen girls were pushed together on Robin’s bed, leaning into a clock radio. The radio crackled and sputtered, searching vainly for a signal and then suddenly finding one.
“. . . seen anything like . . .”
Static ate the rest of the sentence, but then the signal caught again.
“. . . at least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field . . .”
Robin turned to Tori. See, her look said.
The radio continued: “. . . will aid in the evacuation of homes within the range of military operations . . .”
They caught a few more half-sentences and snatches of words— “Eyes!” the announcer seemed to say more than once—before the static took over completely.
“What does this mean?” one of the girls finally said. Tori couldn’t tell who it was.
Everyone started to chatter about what it meant, about making phone calls to their parents, about bomb shelters. Alice, the girl who lived half a mile from Disneyland, started to cry. She jammed the back of her wrist into an eye to stanch the flow. Somebody patted her on the back, harder than was necessary.
Adrienne broke away from the babble. On the camp’s first day, Tori thought the pimply girl might be her friend, but Adrienne was desperate to be part of Mary Bowen’s coterie. With her frizzed black hair and general gormlessness, she had no idea how to go about it, except to make a fool of herself. She was still trying. “Bad, bad, Leroy Brown,” Adrienne sang at the top of her lungs. “The baddest man in the whole damn town.” She leaped onto her bed, bounced, and yanked her shirt up to flash the group. “Ahhgh!” Robin screeched, covering her eyes as if she’d been tricked into looking at the sun. Tori couldn’t take it, either. What was wrong with Adrienne?
Tori walked out of the cabin, slammed the door behind her, and sat at a picnic table. But there was no escape. Girls were spilling into the courtyard from other cabins; they were hurrying from the rec room. None of them seemed to notice Tori. They lingered in the open space: one with a foot on her knee like a pink flamingo garden ornament, another stretching her arms over her head as if warming up for ballet class. Summer, the redheaded girl who had the cabin next to Tori’s, appeared to be holding her breath. Her name was actually Dana, but everyone called her Summer, short for Summer Peach, her father’s nickname for her—because she was “so soft.” It was not a compliment, she said, her father also being her high school cross-country coach. The girls—there were ten of them standing around by now—looked like they were getting ready to do a Monty Python skit. After a moment, Summer ruined the tableau. She backed up slowly in a series of unsteady stutter-steps. Tori could see that she was crying, her breathing hard and scattered.
Tori thought about the first time she had noticed Summer, early in the camp’s first week. The girl was out on the track, white legs pumping with awkward, mechanical efficiency, a human Newton’s cradle. Now, once again, Tori found herself unable to take her eyes off the knobby-kneed girl. Until, with a sudden scrabbling of feet, Summer ducked inside her cabin and shut the door.
The sound of the door crashing against the frame set off a panic. Girls screamed and ran, looking over their shoulders. Liesel appeared on the path, her legs gleaming in the sun. She dropped her toiletries bag. It landed on the stone path with a thwock, the lid contorting into a silent scream. A plastic bottle fell out and rolled. Liesel made no effort to retrieve it. Tori followed her roommate’s eyes until she found the cause of the scene.
The dog stood at the gap between two cabins. Tori smiled. It hadn’t been a redneck or a bear across the ravine from the nature path, she realized. It was just a lost dog. A big German shepherd. The dog’s yellow eyes flicked there and there and there, marking the girls. It was panting heavily, like a pig snuffling in slop. The animal’s incisors flashed, but Tori noticed something else as well. She stood up without realizing it and moved around the side of the table to get a better look.
A small voice stopped her. Sofia was crouched at the edge of the courtyard, about twenty feet from the dog. She wore a plush red tracksuit that made her resemble a swaddled baby. A lumberjack cap, pulled down low, framed her face like a bowl cut. Her brown head was as round as Charlie Brown’s. “Tori—no,” she said. “You cannot save it.” Tori nodded. She liked Sofia so much. She was so sweet and sad, just like Charlie Brown. Tori held up her palm, indicating that everything was fine—and started moving again. When she made it to the side of the table and realized what she was seeing, she gasped.
There wasn’t much left of the dog: a steady stream of blood rolled out behind it, establishing its path. The wound was located high up in its midsection. The dog’s back legs seemed to be attached by little more than a smeared strand of vertebrae. The poor thing obviously had gotten out of its house and been attacked by a wolf—or maybe a bear. Tori’s mind jumped to Orangey, she couldn’t help it. Her dad had found the orange tabby under his car when Tori was eight years old. That very first night the cat jumped onto Tori’s bed, kneaded her stomach and settled in to sleep. When Tori got up in the morning, the cat followed her. That lasted for two weeks, two weeks of bliss for Tori, who spent so much of her time outside of school alone. Then Tori came home and found Orangey sitting on the front step as usual, but she had a subdued, cockeyed air about her. When Tori picked her up she discovered that the cat was bloody and whimpering. Her father wasn’t around so Tori ran three doors down with Orangey in her arms, because Mrs. Riley was always home. But on this day Mrs. Riley wasn’t home, or wouldn’t answer the door, and by that time Orangey wasn’t breathing anymore.
Tori stifled a sob. She remembered Orangey’s wounds vividly, and, looking at the heaving dog, she changed her mind about her diagnosis. It didn’t look like another animal had mauled it. It looked like a gunshot wound.
“Get back!”
Tori, startled, tripped, tumbling away from the dog.
That wasn’t Sofia, Tori realized. Sofia had probably never yelled in her life. Swinging around, Tori saw Coach Clancy easing into the courtyard, crouched low. The coach held out her left arm and made a long sweeping motion. Some of the girls, their eyes swiveling between Coach Clancy and the dog, moved out of the way. The coach was cradling a rifle in her right arm. She jerked upright all at once, aimed and fired.
The dog twisted out of the smoke and noise. Pieces of the animal burst in the air like firecrackers. The torso landed with a wet, grotesque thump on the steps of a cabin. Tori stared at it on the ground, the smell of burned hair sticking to her nasal cavities.
“It’s OK. It’s OK,” Coach Clancy said.
Tori held her hands to her ears. The ringing—buzzing—was back, worse than ever.
“Everything’s fine now,” the coach said. “Don’t worry.”
Liesel—outgoing, self-confident Liesel—crumpled in on herself. She cried extravagantly into her hands and wiped them on her cheeks, a tragedian’s game of peek-a-boo. Adrienne rushed to her, kneeled, and hugged the curve of Liesel’s back. She vigorously rubbed Liesel’s arms, as if trying to warm her up.
“What’s going to happen?”
Tori swung her head around, but, like in Robin and Adrienne’s cabin, she couldn’t tell who said it.
“It’s dead,” Coach Clancy said. “It can’t hurt you.”
“Not the dog. The world. What’s happening?”
Tori finally located the speaker. It was Eileen Blum, one of the older campers. Eileen stood at the edge of the path that led to the showers, her eyes like open manholes. She drew rasping breaths through an equally black, depthless mouth. Tori had never spoken to Eileen; she was too afraid. Rumor was, her boyfriend broke up with her on the last day of school and she gained twenty pounds in the three weeks before camp started. Liesel mocked her behind her back, saying Eileen’s Indian name was I Not Lean. But Tori found her fascinating. She liked to watch the other girls warm up every morning before she got started herself, and she always made sure to watch Eileen, marveling at her round belly rolling beneath her shirt, the seam of her short-shorts disappearing under her doughy thigh and then popping free, over and over, as she pumped her legs. Eileen was a woman, not a girl like the rest of them. And even with the extra weight, she was still fast—three days ago she ran 220 yards in twenty-four seconds. The problem, of course, was her endurance. She didn’t have any. Eileen hadn’t finished a slow run in the nearly two weeks they’d been there. She told Coach P. it was because she wasn’t dull enough to be a long-distance runner; she needed constant stimulation. Coach P. pointed out that she’d been invited to the camp because she won the CIF cross-country championship for the San Francisco section last year. Eileen just shrugged at that.
Coach Clancy looked away from Eileen and scanned the rest of the girls. She took a step back, as if she feared they might charge at her. “I know you’re all scared about what you’re hearing on the radio,” she said, her voice a little wobbly at first. “None of us is entirely sure what we heard. But this much we know for sure; you’re safe here.”
Tori glanced at Eileen, who had let her eyes drop to her shoes. Tori knew what Eileen was thinking. They weren’t safe anywhere. They never had been.