by Ned Vizzini
“Not your business. I don’t need people knowing what a ghetto camp I go to.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Tell me that in a week. There was a nerdy white kid here last year, couldn’t make it to Visiting Day. Ran away.”
“My parents thought it would be good for me.”
“Real people, huh? They want you to be with real people instead of geniuses.”
“I’m not a genius.”
“I know that, Perry.”
“Call me Peregrine.”
“Peregrine?”
“Yeah.”
“Who do you think you are, an MC? I’m not gonna start calling you some stupid-ass name.”
“Sam … I’m different. Some weird things happened to me.”
“What?”
“I thought you might be able to tell me. I came in today and … I got in a fight, right?”
“What, do you have amnesia?”
“Just tell me what you remember.”
“You came in like it was prison, where you’re supposed to fight the first person you see. You picked on Ryu. I don’t know why you did it. I just sat back and watched you deck him. I couldn’t believe it. Counselors broke it up. You went to the nurse’s office. Now you’re here.”
“Who started the fight? I did?”
“Didn’t see.”
“Was he trying to take my miniature? I got this amazing new miniature for Pekker Cland, and—”
“What you two faggots talking about?” JB asks.
I start to answer, but Sam expertly pokes me in the thigh with the end of his hot-dog stick.
“Nothing.”
He slides down the log and leaves me alone, watching the skin of my hot dog turn black and puff out into nasty wide blisters.
50
FOLLOWING OUR COOKOUT, THE REST of which I spend sitting by myself trying to simultaneously ignore people and overhear their conversations, we have a “Hideaway Village powwow” chaired by camp director Dale Blaswell. All forty Hideaway Villagers gather at a set of picnic benches in a clearing central to the yurts. Behind us are the bathroom and showers, housed in a building that looks like a zoo shed meant to hold electrical equipment. Dale is all smiles, but something underneath looks reptilian and untrustworthy.
“Welcome, everyone, to Camp Washiska Lake!”
My fellow campers mmm dismissively.
“Let’s try that again. Welcome to Camp Washiska Lake!”
We cheer, obeying the rule of repeated crowd exhortation by adults.
“That’s better. That’s the kind of enthusiasm this place deserves.” Dale smooths out his mustache in two strokes like a villain in a western. “Camp Washiska Lake is one of the world’s special places. You may not realize it, but you are all about to embark on a journey that will introduce you to special places”—yes, he says special places twice—“and special people. I’m lucky; I get to be here every year. But unless you end up working here, you have a limited time to experience all that we have to offer. Now, rule number one at our camp is respect....”
I’m already gone. I can’t take seriously anyone’s offer to show me a special place now that I’ve really been to one. I’m probably ruined for life with special places. What if, when I get home, I win a trip to Ibiza? I won’t even care. And Ibiza is the resort destination where people go to have dance-floor sex with European girls. I read about it on the internet. It really is special for Earth.
I look at my fellow campers, trying to figure out how to survive the next eight weeks. There have to be vulnerabilities; there have to be friends. Ada wouldn’t want me to just be a loser until August. All I see, though, are kids bubbling in their own groups, snickering (at me?), whispering (about me?), and smiling (at my expense?).
Three of them are Ryu and his henchmen, the big Asian guy and the medium-sized one. They sit at the end of a picnic bench and eye me with death stares. It annoys me that my actions in the World of the Other Normals have earned me an enemy instead of a friend.
“Do they always give this talk?” I ask George, the big Hispanic kid in my yurt, as Dale drones on.
“Every year the same, yeah: respect, no drugs, no candy.”
“Where are you from?” Success! He’s talking to me!
“Sunset Park. I dunno when he’s gonna shut up so we can get to the dance.”
“What’s the dance like?”
“It’s when you get to see who’s gonna hook up with who for camp.”
“You know this girl Anna Margolis?”
“Pfff. What about her? She’s stuck-up.”
“I talked to her. She’s, well … I won’t say she’s stuck-up, but she’s anti-role-playing-game. It’s important that I kiss her, though.”
“It’s important what? You a weird little dude, you know that? What’s wrong with your hair? Don’t talk to me.”
George slides away. I sit stock-still. I breathe quickly. I hope no one notices, but they probably all notice—how could they not? I talk to a person and they move away, simple as that. George says something to JB. They both laugh while looking at me. I thought these people would see that I was different, that I’d done something amazing, something perhaps no human had ever done. No such luck. They see my face, my size … they certainly don’t care about my single pubic hair … they see a weak animal and they hurt the weak animal and how can I blame them for doing what comes naturally?
“Peregrine?” Dale Blaswell asks.
“What?”
“Are you paying attention?”
“Respect,” I say. “Respect, no drugs, no candy. Right?”
“Peregrine. I asked what people are most excited for at camp, so we can share our journeys later.”
“Uh … the dance,” I say. “I’m excited for the dance.”
“Good,” Dale says. He rubs his mustache and furrows his brow over his beady eyes, making them even beadier. I feel like he knows what I almost said: I’m excited to go back to the World of the Other Normals.
Because it’s the only thing I’m excited about. I left that path in the woods for a reason. I’ll suffer through tonight, and maybe tomorrow, but as soon as I can, I’m going back to the place where people talk to me even if they’re trying to kill me.
51
CAMP WASHISKA LAKE DOESN’T HAVE A lot of facilities; the best place the camp organizers could think to hold the Hideaway Village–Oasis Villa square dance is the dining hall, with its generous square footage and roof. After our powwow, we’re given time to change; in the yurt, I stand over my trunk, which was brought over by a very bitter Ken while I was indisposed, and watch my fellow campers transform from outdoorsy boys into nightlife-primed young men in dark jeans, collared shirts, cuff links, dress shoes, and cologne. I can’t believe it: they took my C&C books but left people cologne. I look grievingly at my own options: corduroys, cargo pants, and T-shirts that either my brother gave me after vomiting on or my dad picked up at trade shows.
“Clothing crisis?” Sam asks.
I don’t look at him. “Are you sure it’s okay to talk? I’m not hurting you socially?”
“Don’t be that way.” He pulls a striped collared shirt out of his own trunk. I’ve never seen him wear anything like it. “I don’t hate you. But man, you show up and start a fight, and it’s like, I know these people. From way back. You—”
“I’m just some guy you play RPGs with.”
“Don’t say that. You know I want to keep that under wraps.”
Counselor Ken maintains order as our yurtmates try on outfits, show off dance moves that I’ve never seen or considered the horror of performing, and talk about girls—what they’re going to be like this year, which ones will be hot, who will give it up, who will have big breasts. They’re distracted enough that Sam and I speak without them noticing.
“Did you sneak in any books?” I ask. “Can we play?”
“No, they confiscate that here. They think it’s like gambling.”
“They’ve got bigger thi
ngs to—forget it.” I catch myself.
“What?”
“Nothing. I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“You know how you tell me not to be nosy? Now you don’t be nosy.”
“Fine. Just keep it to yourself. That’s healthy. Here.” Sam hands me black jeans and a black T-shirt. “When you don’t know what to do with clothes, wear black, get it? Makes you seem badass.”
“These are too big for me.”
“That’s the baggy look, don’t question.”
I change into Sam’s outfit, wrapping myself in a towel to remove the pants I’m wearing so that no one will see my underwear.
“I know you’re wearing tighty-whities too. You need boxers.”
“Understood.”
52
THE SUN IS SETTING AS WE LEAVE THE yurt for the dance. My heart thunders in my chest. We travel as one: a mini army of teen boys, most clustered in groups, reassuring one another how awesome this night is going to be; some walking next to counselors, giving them an opportunity to be men. I move alone, picking up sticks, breaking them apart, wishing I were somewhere else. I watch Sam from a distance—he walks with Jaxson, Kolby, and JB. We have a tacit pact, I now understand: when he’s with his friends, I am to stay back and not interfere; when we’re alone, or something like it, he can be the kind of friend he is on the fire stairs at school. He’s a shape-shifter.
We hear the girls long before we reach them. I thought I was scared when I first heard the male Washiska Lake campers outside the dining hall. This is worse: the girls are excited, and their excitement comes through in tweeting sonic bursts. I know that most people—normal people—would hear a group of teenage girls laughing and chatting in a parking lot and think, That sounds like a good time, but in its own way it’s as scary as Officer Tendrile. The sound of women is the sound of challenge and the unknown.
I grit my teeth and pat my heart under Sam’s oversize T-shirt. I have to remember that I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing it for the princess—whose beautiful silver face I can still recall perfectly, winking at me (but of course that was just a trick of the light)—and for Mortin, and for Ada.
53
ACROSS THE ENTRANCE TO THE DINING hall is a banner: WELCOME TO CAMP WASHISKA LAKE! Dale Blaswell stops under it and turns to face us as I blink at the girls of Oasis Villa. I can only imagine the zany machinations they went through to get into the outfits they now sport. I see hoop earrings and dresses and glitter and tube tops and tank tops. Some of the girls are opening their bags (they have bags) and pulling out shoes that they couldn’t wear on the journey over. Dancing shoes, I think. We are expected to go inside this building and dance with these women in a way that affirms our status as healthy young Americans without getting too sexual.
I look at my own dancing shoes: beat-up sneakers. I’d rather be barefoot.
“Men of Hideaway Village!” Dale announces. “Here are the lovely ladies of Oasis Villa, who have traveled all the way across the lake to be here tonight! Let’s show proper respect like we discussed!”
He bows. I can’t believe it, but the boys of Hideaway Village bow too, smiling, and I bow with them. The girls laugh, curtsy, and blow kisses. An invisible line runs across the parking lot, keeping the sexes separated; Dale stands in the middle of it.
“I’d like to introduce you to Miss K, Oasis Villa head counselor,” Dale continues. A middle-aged human of indeterminate gender stands next to him. “We’re going to watch you very carefully tonight! Now let’s go inside and have the best square dance ever!”
Everyone cheers. Even people who are reluctant to cheer, like me, cheer once we see people cheering around us. I look for Anna among the girls but can’t see her. I also can’t see anyone who is lithe and pale with blue hair and sparkling toenails.
We enter the dining hall under the WELCOME TO CAMP WASHISKA LAKE! banner. The letters are all in different colors with excited stars and lightning bolts around them. The girls must have made it. Fifteen-year-old boys would never make something like that. We would just rearrange the letters into A Wassle Kaka Chimp and walk away.
Inside the hall, circular tables have been folded up and stacked against the wall along with phalanxes of plastic chairs. Purple and silver streamers hang from the rafters. A disco ball dangles, spinning slowly and reflecting a spotlight set up in a corner. A DJ booth stands by a door I assume leads to the kitchen. An old man holds court in the DJ booth, grinning in a ten-gallon hat.
“Everyone, meet DJ Cowboy Pete!” Dale calls. The old man tips his hat and hits a button. Speakers mounted in each corner of the two-hundred-person-capacity room (according to the fire sign) blast a famous dance tune. The crowd whoops and splits into two groups: the ones who migrate to the center of the floor and the ones who stay back, petrified by light, noise, and shame.
“Isn’t this supposed to be a square dance?” I ask counselor Ken, since none of my fellow campers will speak to me.
“They get to the square part later. If they don’t play some jams at first, all the kids go crazy.”
In the middle of the room, girls and boys move in self-segregated clusters. The girls face one another and dance at each other, shaking their bodies and throwing their shoulders up in instant fashion-snapshot poses. The boys don’t face one another; they form loose lines and circle the girls like an enemy army, moving their arms and hips but not dancing, not really, just waving back and forth in a cool way that makes it seem like they might start dancing.
DJ Cowboy Pete grabs the mic. “How many of y’all are excited for summer?” The girls shriek. The boys cheer. I back away from Ken—literally, my arms reaching behind me to feel for a solid surface—until I hit a wall. The wall is home base. The wall won’t move. If I stand at the wall, I won’t be expected to move. This is what it means to be a wallflower. Now I understand.
I’m not the only person not dancing; some boys and a few girls stand clustered at other walls, although each lonely girl only lasts until an enterprising Hideaway Village lad pulls her onto the dance floor. In the back, by the DJ booth, is a table set up with punch. I can make it to the punch. I have picked a lock in prison and escaped from a man with an octopus posterior; I can get to the punch.
I start across the floor. I can’t take the most direct route because it will put me right in the middle of the bodies. Don’t these people realize how dumb they look? Curling back at weird angles, pretending to raise the roof, jutting their lips out and posing for breaks in the music … they look like idiots, until I glimpse my own feet and see that I’m the real idiot, walking across a dance floor like a waiter, unable even to shake my hips.
“Screw this,” I say. I stop. I listen. The music is simple: bumping noises and a high-pitched voice above. I move my pelvis to the left and right on each bumping noise. Someday someone is going to find this pelvis sexy or I’ll never have children. I test my feet, bringing one out and then back, moving one to the side and returning it. I control my body. Hips, legs, feet, arms. I can do incredible things with this body. I can do this.
I’m between a cluster of boys and girls. I keep my eyes straight ahead so I won’t make eye contact with anyone and ruin the moment. I dance—I really do. I put my neck into it. I whirl my head around, feeling my hair hit my forehead. The song says something about “1999” and I realize this is Prince, the person Mortin Enaw mentioned! He makes it easy. I dip down, pushing out my knees in what I think is a bitchin’ dance move—
“Perry!” Sam hisses. He’s with a few people from our yurt, doing the boy-group dance. “What are you doing?”
“Dancing?”
“No, no, hold up. Relax. You’re embarrassing us!” He nods ahead and I see who I’m embarrassing him in front of: six members of Oasis Villa dancing in a circle, looking at me like I’m a large warm-blooded grasshopper. “Just move your hips.”
“I started with my hips!”
“Stick with them! Don’t be throwing your arms around—you look like
you’re being electrocuted!”
I stand up straight and let my hips sway to the downbeats. I nod at the girls, but none of them nod back. I migrate, in what I think is a subtle way but is probably obvious, closer to Sam and his friends.
“Nuh-uh,” JB says. “You’re not staying here. I don’t need a spastic white boy messing up my game.”
I don’t say anything. Heat rises in my chest. I start to move away, but Sam tugs me back. “It’s okay,” he tells JB. “Perry’s not so bad.”
“Look at the fags,” Ryu says. He steps in front of us with his henchmen. He doesn’t dance; he manages to look better not dancing. “You two want to be gay for each other, do it on your own time.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Sam asks.
“Don’t make me mess you up—”
“Really? I’d like to—”
“Sam!” I grab him. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna dance across the room and get some punch, okay?”
“No, you can stay here. I don’t—”
“Sam. You see who’s at the punch?”
He turns. She’s striding up to the punch bowl in a black dress—not a bad match for me, all things considered.
“Anna? You know her?”
“She’s who I dressed up for. Don’t worry. I talked to her before. I’m gonna nail it this time.”
54
I BRIEFLY CONSIDER TELLING ANNA EVERYthing—that she corresponds to the princess in the World of the Other Normals, that her relationship with me is a matter of universal importance. As I get closer, though, her breasts prevent me from using words with multiple syllables.
I know, from watching talk shows, that some women get breast-reduction surgery. This is bewildering to many men, but the women speak of how their breasts are ponderous and hassling; they cause too much trouble, just being out there all the time. Seeing Anna, I believe it. Outside the nurse’s office she wasn’t so imposing, but she was wearing a sweater then, and knitting mittens, so perhaps she knitted the sweater too, and constructed it so as not to emphasize the powerful forms that loom before me now. She sips her punch. At the head of the table, gender-inscrutable Miss K eyes us.
