by Andrew Smith
Max spooned a blob of oatmeal he’d topped with milk and grape jelly into his mouth. “Look around you. Let me know if you see any regular boys here.”
“You should get stoned more often if it makes you eat like that,” I said.
Max bit into a bagel. “That fat camp summer almost killed me.”
“Mrs. Nussbaum says all us guys only have about fifty years to live anyway,” Cobie Petersen said. “We might as well try and die fat.”
Trent Mendibles, the boy with the hairiest legs anyone had ever seen, perked his head up and said, “Wait. You guys got stoned last night?”
“No,” Max said. “It was just a . . . uh . . . figure of speech.”
“Nothing’s better than getting zombied out and blasting away assholes on BQTNP,” Trent said.
Trent Mendibles didn’t think about many things.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, hairy gamer dude from Ohio,” Cobie Petersen mumbled into his hands.
“Hook me up with some weed. I want to get high,” Trent said.
Cobie and Max answered simultaneously, like they were singing the Jupiter-Jesus Boys song.
They said, “No.”
Trent Mendibles leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Give me some. Or I’ll tell Larry what you guys did.”
For a moment, it became deathly quiet at our table in the pavilion. I looked at Trent, then Max, and finally to Cobie. Robin Sexton seemed oblivious, as usual.
And Cobie Petersen raised his eyes from his palms and calmly told Trent Mendibles, “I will kill you when you’re asleep tonight.”
Max added, “He will. Believe me. I’ll help him.”
Trent Mendibles sat back on the bench. “You guys are fuckers.”
Then Cobie put his head down on the table and said, “Ariel. Go get me something to eat.”
Horace, Mars cabin’s counselor, whose condoms were stolen the night before by Cobie Petersen and my brother Max, stood up at the Mars boys’ table and bellowed, “All right! Clean up and get out to the rec field for competition!”
Cobie Petersen, the strongest boy at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, missed breakfast. It was going to cost our team significantly.
We five boys of Jupiter got dragged through the mud five times that day.
Cobie Petersen was our anchor. But he was useless—dead on his feet. We all were. Well, except for Robin Sexton and Trent Mendibles. But they were useless anyway.
I had played tug-of-war before; who hasn’t? But I had no idea that at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys the game would involve a wide and deep pit of soupy mud. Every planet at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys destroyed our team in the contest. By the time the first four cabins had their way with us, our knees were scuffed and bloodied, our T-shirts were torn and hung from our shoulders like drapes of wet cement, and Robin Sexton was crying because he’d lost his shorts in the mud pit.
At least his earbuds stayed in.
Larry was mad at us—again—but this time it was for losing. If he suspected we’d done something wrong while we were supposed to have been sleeping the night before, he didn’t show it. But to make matters worse, the final team to defeat the mud-coated boys of Jupiter was Mars. We were eliminated, humiliated, and out of clean clothes. Robin Sexton had to wallow around in the pit, feeling for his lost shorts.
Larry tossed everyone’s sheets and duffel bags of clothes out Jupiter’s screen door. He told us not to bother stepping foot in our cabin until everything was clean.
He banished the five of us to the disgusting showers, and afterward, we had to stand in the laundry room, wrapped in towels for two hours while we washed and dried all Jupiter’s laundry. Actually, Max, Cobie, and I didn’t stand so much as sit down and fall asleep on the damp concrete floor with our backs to the wall and our towels modestly and securely tucked between our legs.
- - -
Clean, dry, and a little bit bloodied, we came back home to Jupiter.
It was entirely unrealistic to have held out any hope that we’d be able to rest until dinnertime.
As soon as I came through the cabin door with my bag of everything I owned including the sheets for my plastic bed, Larry pointed an authoritative finger at my forehead.
“You. Marcel Marceau. Mrs. Nussbaum wants to see you in her office. You might as well get it over with, ’cause these four are waiting their turns right behind you. Get going. And she wants you to bring your index card.”
It was like having the wind knocked out of me. We all knew there would be some private one-on-one sessions with Mrs. Nussbaum during our stay at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, but it almost seemed brutally unfair that I was chosen to be the first boy from Jupiter to have to go.
Cobie Petersen patted my back. “Have fun, dude. And don’t let her get any girl sperm in you. You never know what that shit might do to a guy.”
“Yeah,” Max agreed. “You never know.”
I was terrified and disgusted at the same time. How could I possibly face Mrs. Nussbaum after what I learned about her theories and her years of scientific studies on a wide variety of males between the ages of twelve and seventeen years?
I actually considered running off into the woods and attempting some form of escape. And it seemed to me that with every day that passed at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Bucky Littlejohn’s act of desperation became more heroic and godlike.
Larry grabbed the duffel bag of laundry from my hands and tossed it onto my crumpling plastic-coated cot. Then he handed my folded index card to me.
“Suck it up, iceman,” he said. “You know where to go.”
- - -
Mrs. Nussbaum’s office was in a small cottage located at the front gate to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. I took my time walking there. My stomach churned as I read the welcoming message on the gate.
Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys
Where Boys Rediscover the Fun of Boyhood!
I tried to anticipate the questions she might ask me, in order to prepare myself with evasive and shortened answers, but I kept thinking about her book and what kinds of horrible experiments she could possibly be conducting behind closed doors.
What could I do? There was no way out.
We were all doomed to extinction.
I stopped and chewed on my lip when I got to Mrs. Nussbaum’s. I flipped my folded index card over and over inside my pocket. In fact, both my hands were tucked deeply into my pockets, which was something I never did.
A brass plate hung on the slatted siding by the front door. It said: MARTHA NUSSBAUM, MD, PHD
And as soon as I stepped one foot onto the porch of her cottage, Mrs. Nussbaum flung the front door open and, in her high-pitched, wildly gleeful tone, squealed, “Ariel! So very nice to see you today! Come in! Come in!”
Mrs. Nussbaum looked like an enormous sock puppet in her white lab smock.
“You said it wrong,” I said.
“Huh?”
“My name. It’s Ah-riel,” I pointed out.
“Oh! That sounds lovely when you say it!”
Then she repeated my name three times—a kind of witch’s curse, I thought—and told me three more times to come in! come in! come in!
ALL IN THE NAME OF RESEARCH, ARIEL
The front room of the cottage was dim and windowless, lit only by a yellowish incandescent lamp that stood behind a tufted chair in the corner.
I half expected to see Alex, our crow, perched on it. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all paneled wood, which made the place seem even darker, and everywhere was the clutter of what looked like medical antiques: a high-backed rolltop desk with a glass case displaying gleaming instruments and leather-bound books; another cabinet as tall as Mrs. Nussbaum with dozens of small square drawers; and a rack of shelves with old cork-stoppered bottles.
It looked like a stage set from
a horror movie.
“Oh my! Look at your knees!”
I did what Mrs. Nussbaum said and looked at my knees. They were raw and bloody from being dragged around on a rope all morning.
“It was tug-of-war day,” I said.
“Let’s fix you up, Ariel! Come, come!”
And Mrs. Nussbaum waved me through a back doorway and into a beige, fluorescent-lighted, and much more modern examination room. It was as sterile as a boiled thermometer. The floor was linoleum with tan and green tiles, and the walls were smooth and spotless with racks of examination instruments attached by coiled black rubber cords to their power sources. Beside these hung a blood pressure device with black rubber balls dangling from thick Velcro cuffs. In the corner of the room, angling out diagonally, sat a green vinyl examination bed that was covered by a long strip of white paper, and there was some kind of tray table on wheels beside it that had a sheet of blue paper partially covering a scary-looking set of stainless steel doctor’s implements.
It was even more terrifying than I could have imagined, made worse by the posters on the walls: one showing a front and a back view of the musculature and internal organs of a human, and two others, labeled “The Anatomy of the Eye” and “The Male Reproductive System.”
Who would hang an enormous chart of the internal structures of the male reproductive system at a summer camp for deranged boys?
I was nearly frozen in fear.
Then Mrs. Nussbaum said, “Take off your shirt, shoes, and socks, and hop up on the examination table, so I can have a look at you.”
What could I do?
“I thought you were a psychologist,” I said.
“Well! Aren’t you talkative today? It’s so nice to see this breakthrough! I happen to be a medical doctor and a psychologist! Everything you could ever need all rolled into one!”
And she makes her own sperm, too, I thought.
Then Mrs. Nussbaum put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Now, off with your shirt, young man! I promise I won’t hurt you, Ahh-riel!”
And that made me feel even worse.
After taking off my shirt and shoes and socks, I climbed up onto the corner of Mrs. Nussbaum’s examination table. I nervously kept my hands folded over my fly and tried not to look at the colorful cutaway diagram of the enormous penis and testicles on the wall to my left. Mrs. Nussbaum sat on a small, black rolling stool and slid herself right up to my knees, so close I could feel her breath tickling my leg hairs. She put her cold hand on top of my bare thigh. I flinched when she touched me.
“You seem scared.”
I didn’t answer her.
“These are nasty scrapes, you poor thing.”
Mrs. Nussbaum wheeled away from me and went to a counter with a stainless steel sink. She pulled some blue examination gloves from a paper carton beside the sink and squeaked her hands into them.
My heart sank.
Nothing good ever happens to you when you’re all alone in a room with a grown-up who is putting on medical gloves.
She scooted back to my little corner of the paper-topped examination table. Then Mrs. Nussbaum squeezed some slippery goo from a white tube and smeared it with her gloved fingertip onto my scrapes.
It stung so bad tears pooled in my eyes and I held my breath. I also couldn’t help thinking about Cobie Petersen’s final warning to me—that this was very likely the dreaded girl sperm.
As though she’d read my mind, Mrs. Nussbaum said, “This is antibiotic ointment. So you won’t get an infection.”
And I thought, why would she care if I got an infection? She wanted all of us to die, anyway.
Mrs. Nussbaum stood up, snapped the gloves off her hands, and dropped them into a small metal waste can beside the door.
“Now I want to have a look at your eyes,” she said.
“I can see fine.”
“Don’t be silly. There’s no reason to be frightened.”
This wasn’t going well. I wondered how many parts of me Mrs. Nussbaum was going to inspect. I glanced at the penis chart and concentrated on a silent prayer to any deity who might be listening that Mrs. Nussbaum would not go there.
She unhooked one of the metal instruments that was connected to the wall with a corkscrewed black rubber cable and pointed it at my face. I had never seen one of these devices before. There was a soft rubber cup on one side that she pressed over my eye. Then a light came on and Mrs. Nussbaum put her face right up to the other side of the instrument and looked through it.
“I want you to keep your eye open and just look directly into the light.”
I imagined this was the vision people reported seeing when they died and then somehow got brought back to life.
I swallowed. “Okay.”
Mrs. Nussbaum pivoted the thing around as though she were trying to see every tiny spot inside my eyeball. She looked and looked for so long that I thought I would go blind.
“I need to blink,” I said.
“Okay. This one looks good.”
Mrs. Nussbaum turned the light off and pulled the little machine away.
I rubbed my eye. Half the universe looked like a red blob.
Then she said, “Now, let’s take a look inside the other one.”
The light came back on; the soft cup pressed down onto my left eye.
“Is something wrong?” I said.
“No. Not at all.”
“I’m wondering what you’re looking for. I’ve never had anyone do this to me before.”
“Oh! Don’t be silly!” Mrs. Nussbaum’s voice raised an octave or two. “It’s just a normal exam. It’s for a study I’m doing on boys’ vision.”
When Mrs. Nussbaum was finished looking inside my eyes, I sat there, pretty much entirely blind. I nearly jumped off the table when something cold pressed against my chest.
“Ariel! It’s only a stethoscope!”
“I can’t see.”
Mrs. Nussbaum moved the stethoscope around, then pressed it onto my back and told me to inhale.
“Did you bring your little card for me?”
I slid my hand into my pocket and handed her my index card. I listened to the sound of her unfolding it. My vision was taking its time coming back.
“Hmmm . . . ,” she said.
Here is another thing I know: It is never good news when a doctor says hmmm.
“So. Tell me. Your father is Jake Burgess, from Alex Division, isn’t he?”
Why would she even waste her time asking?
I nodded.
“It’s a small world!” Mrs. Nussbaum said in her dolphin-pitched voice, “I work for Alex Division, too!”
I had no comment.
Then she asked, “What do you mean, inside a refrigerator?”
Although she’d encouraged us to do so, I had not changed my answer from the first time I met Mrs. Nussbaum and she’d asked the question if there was any place I’d rather be than here at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, where it would be.
I began to see shapes. Mrs. Nussbaum looked like an enormous plum with eyes. She leaned closer to me.
“Well, what does this mean, Ariel?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you like it here at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys?”
I thought about it. “It’s not the worst place I’ve ever been.”
“And where is the worst place you’ve ever been?” Mrs. Nussbaum asked.
I did not answer her.
“You know what I find striking about you—about all the Alex boys—you, Max, and Cobie?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re not like the other boys, are you?”
That was incredibly observant of her, I thought. But the way she called us the Alex boys made me wonder if she meant something else.
Mrs. Nussbau
m went on, “I mean to say I find you to be particularly compelling, Ariel.”
I frowned.
“Oh! I don’t mean that in an inappropriate way, Ariel! I just find you so interesting. I’d really like to hear about your life—you know, what happened to you, and how you ended up here with the Burgesses. That’s what I mean.”
“Oh.”
I wasn’t going to tell her anything.
“But the thing that strikes me about you three Alex boys is that I can’t seem to grasp why it was your parents sent you here to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys in the first place.”
“Because it was free,” I said.
Mrs. Nussbaum squealed, “Oh! I see! The parents are taking a vacation from their sons!”
I shrugged and gave her a very American teenager “whatever” look.
“Tell me, did you ever meet an English army officer named Major Harrison Knott?”
I had already decided to stop answering her questions, but I sensed she could tell I was lying to her when I said, “No.”
“That’s fine, Ariel. That’s fine.”
She handed my card back to me.
“Are we finished?”
“Oh, no! Just a couple more things. I need to look into your ears—I hope you washed them out today!—and your mouth, and then there’s just one last thing and I’ll let you run back to Jupiter!”
So, as promised, Mrs. Nussbaum—Dr. Martha K. Nussbaum, inventor of girl sperm—probed and prodded and shined lights all over inside my ears and mouth, and even up my nostrils. It was like she was looking for something she was certain would be there but couldn’t find—like she was searching for a set of lost car keys. I’ll admit the examination was upsetting. I wondered if there was any way I could suggest to my American father, Jake Burgess, that he and his friends at Alex Division work on the development of boy eggs. But I also concluded that boy eggs would have two major setbacks: First, they would be able to produce offspring of either gender, and possibly a third, YY human—whatever that would be—and second, that there would be no place to implant boy eggs after you made them. Where would you stick a fertilized boy egg? Every scenario I imagined was horrifying.
