Camp Cannibal

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  “Don’t wait up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Okeydoke!”

  There was no telling how long I had before the SWAT team would swoop in, so I had to be quick. There were several miles between me and my destination.

  Luckily, I remembered the way, and the dark offered me enough cover to run without raising any suspicion. I just had to avoid streets with heavy traffic and any well-lit neighborhoods.

  Once I made it to the front steps, I rang the bell and waited for the door to open.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  “Come on, come on, come on…”

  I pounded on the door.

  Nobody answered.

  The red light on my ankle monitor was flashing frantically. Any minute now it would draw the cops right to me.

  I pressed my finger down on the bell again, holding it in place this time, the ring reverberating through the halls of the house just on the other side of the door.

  “Answer the door, answer the door, answer—”

  The door opened by just a crack. I saw nothing but black.

  “Who is it?” a voice asked.

  “Mr. Tulliver…?”

  The chain-lock stretched to its hilt, revealing a sliver of a man’s heavily bearded face peering out from the dark confines of the hallway.

  “What do you want?”

  “You, uh—you probably don’t remember me, but—”

  “You’re that boy,” he interrupted. “Sully’s friend.”

  Over my shoulder, I spotted the squad car slowly rolling down the block. The headlights reached across the street, searching for me.

  My time’s running out.

  “Mind if I come inside? Maybe we could talk….”

  “You told me not to give up on her.”

  “Please, Mr. Tulliver. I need to know if she—”

  “You said Sully wasn’t dead,” he interrupted. “That I shouldn’t give up hope.”

  Gravel crumbled as the squad car pulled into Mr. Tulliver’s driveway.

  “Has she visited you?” I asked. “Have there been any…sightings of her?”

  I heard the squad car doors open and slam shut, followed by footsteps.

  “Mr. Pendleton,” Cassidy said behind me. “We meet again.”

  I refused to look over my shoulder, focusing on Mr. Tulliver. “Have you seen her? Has she called? Anything? Please, sir…”

  His face disappeared into the darkness of the house. “I found this pinned to the front door one morning….”

  Mr. Tulliver slipped a single piece of paper through the crack in the door.

  It was a page torn out from a book. I read over it and quickly realized it was Peter Pan. At the very center of the page, there was a single sentence underlined:

  Just always be waiting for me….

  I felt the swell of hope rise up within my chest.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tulliver,” I said before handing it back and turning to face my ever-patient escorts. “Evening, officers. Lovely night for a stroll, isn’t it?”

  “This ends tonight, Pendleton,” Sellars said. “No more slaps on the wrist.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Into the car,” Cassidy said.

  “Give me a head start?”

  “No.”

  “Close your eyes and count to ten?”

  “No.”

  “Your shoe’s untied?”

  “Sorry—no.”

  I bolted. One last time. Cassidy lunged for me, tripping on his shoelace. He toppled onto Sellars while I ducked around the side of the house.

  My chest felt raw.

  I tugged on my inhaler slung around my neck. With the help of My Little Friend, I picked up the pace and ran as fast as my lungs would allow.

  The clear sky was pockmarked with stars, and the full moon was directly overhead.

  I really should get out more.

  Just for fun, for freedom, sweet freedom, I skidded to a halt in the middle of the street and howled—“Ooooowoooooooooooh!”

  That got the neighbors’ attention. Porch lights were flashing on all along the block. Window curtains were pulled back to reveal the silhouettes of people inside.

  I howled again, louder this time—“Ow-ow-owoooooooooooh!”

  Even as the flashing blue and red lights from the squad car bathed my body, I continued to bay at the moon, recalling one of Peashooter’s favorite quotes:

  “And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.”

  The Call of the Wild.

  I howled until my lungs were inflamed and sore from the cold night air—“Ow-ow-owooooooooooooh!”

  •••

  Cassidy kept his hand clamped on my shoulder as we waited for Dad to answer the door.

  When Dad did, he crossed his arms and leaned against the frame.

  “Look who’s back,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to keep him, officers?”

  “Good to see you, too, Dad.”

  “Sir.” Officer Sellars cleared his throat. “The court was pretty clear what would happen if this kind of behavior continued.”

  Dad took me by the arm and yanked me inside the house. “Don’t worry, officers. I think I’ve found just the place for him….”

  What happened to My Very Own Dad doll? This one’s off script.

  I pulled out of his grip. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I had a nice conversation with an old pal of yours from Greenfield. He told me all about this place just out of town where you can run your little heart out.”

  “Friend?” I asked. “I don’t have any friends. Especially not at Greenfield.”

  “Don’t give me that,” he said. “That kind of act might’ve worked on your mother, but I’m not falling for it.”

  “Who was it? Was it a girl?”

  “You’re not talking your way out of this one.” Dad grabbed my arm again. I pulled back, nearly falling into Sellars and Cassidy.

  “I’m not playing these games all summer long. Your mother might’ve had the patience for it, but I’m not putting up with it.”

  “Stop acting like this is Mom’s fault.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to finally take some responsibility for your actions?”

  “Why don’t you take some responsibility? Just admit you don’t know the first thing about me. Admit it!”

  Cassidy cleared his throat. “Just keep a close eye on him, sir. We’ll let you—”

  “Go ahead,” Dad kept barking. “Blame me. Somehow every mess you’ve gotten yourself into is my fault.”

  “How would you know?” I asked. “This is the most you’ve said to me in months. Months! Your parenting has been on autopilot since I got here.”

  Dad hesitated. His mouth opened, but the words weren’t there.

  I waited. So did Sellars and Cassidy, who had just snagged themselves ringside seats at our first family throw-down.

  “You don’t treat my house like a home,” Dad finally mustered. “It’s a rest stop to you. You’re here long enough to use the bathroom, and then you’re running away.”

  “It’s your house,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it’s my home.”

  “So—what? You’d rather stay with your mother?”

  “Yes! A million times more!”

  “That’s too bad. She won’t take you back. She’ll never take you back now.”

  I flinched. Sellars, too.

  “Want to know why?” Dad kept going, cutting and cutting and cutting. “Because you pushed her away. You pushed her until
she got fed up with you.”

  I backed into Sellars and Cassidy.

  “You did that, Spencer. Not me. Not your imaginary friends. Just you.”

  “Go to hell, Dad.”

  “I already got you a ticket,” he said, putting an end to the conversation. “You’re leaving in the morning.”

  •••

  The pamphlet was waiting for me on the kitchen counter. It must have arrived in the mail that afternoon. Was it too much to ask our mailbox to have chewed it up and spat it out before Dad could’ve read it?

  I picked up the brochure and opened it. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

  This does not look good, Spencer….

  WELCOME TO CAMP NEW LEAF

  An alternative summer camp experience for children in need of specialized care.

  Camp New Leaf focuses on experiential therapy as a means of building self-esteem. We are a wilderness program, not a boot camp. New Leaf blends traditional camp activities with group therapy to help boys with behavioral problems face their own personal issues and grow in character.

  Our campers include children with ADD/ADHD, learning disabilities, and emotional problems. Characteristics like lying, defiance, hostility, willfulness, oppositional attitude, and disobedience are all manageable behaviors that can be modified when given the opportunity to focus and meditate.

  Cooperative team-building activities are at the core of our therapeutic process: hiking, canoeing, high ropes course, white-water rafting—as well as daily group sessions with fellow campers and trained counselors.

  When everyone else has turned their backs on your children, let Camp New Leaf welcome them in with open arms!

  He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.

  —Jack London, The Call of the Wild

  DAY ONE: 1300 HOURS

  noticed the totem pole first. Six heads staring at me through my bus window.

  Talk about one heck of a welcoming committee….

  Each hand-carved head grimaced under the weight of those above. The one at the very bottom stuck out a tongue from between gritted teeth, and its eyes seemed to follow our bus as we pulled into the parking lot. I would have said I saw it wink at me, but maybe that was just my medication playing tricks on me.

  That totem pole might have an extra head by the time summer wrapped up.

  Mine, if I wasn’t careful.

  Just keep your head down, Spencer.

  I rubbed my ankle. No more monitor for me. Not out here in the middle of nowhere.

  I hadn’t said a word the entire bus ride. I had simply stared out the window and watched civilization disappear, one building at a time. The world had shifted from metal and glass to wood and grass in a matter of hours.

  The bus lurched to a halt, and my head slammed into the back of the seat in front of me. The kid sitting there spun around, chewing on his fingernail. He had brown hair, a thick face, and a scab on his chin.

  “Watch it,” he said, spitting a sliver of his thumbnail. The crescent moon landed in my lap. His chapped lips peeled back to reveal braces.

  “Sorry,” I said and turned my attention out my window.

  A banner hung between two trees directly outside. It had the image of a moose head—only instead of antlers, a pair of maple leaves branched out from its skull.

  TIME TO TURN OVER A NEW LEAF!

  “Welcome to Camp New Leaf,” our driver announced. “Now get out.”

  The retractable metal doors on our bus fanned open with a sigh and exhaled its adolescent passengers.

  Humidity clung to my skin like a moist sponge.

  I took in a deep breath of clean country air.

  This place didn’t seem so bad, I thought. Seems kinda nice, actually.

  Who knows? I might end up liking it here.

  Besides, it’s hard to feel homesick when you don’t have a home to feel sick about.

  SURVIVAL STRATEGY #3:

  Locate your authority figures.

  I spotted a balding man with a ponytail holding a clipboard.

  For those keeping tabs, this was George Galloway, our camp director. A strip of zinc oxide ran down his nose. He wore cutoff shorts and a T-shirt with NEW LEAF ironed across the chest, along with the image of that maple-leafed moose head. A silver whistle was wrapped around his neck, his socks yanked up to his knees.

  “All campers need to collect their cabin assignments,” he shouted. “First meeting’s in the amphitheater before dinner. Everybody hear me? Don’t be late!”

  Nobody seemed to be paying him any attention.

  “I know you guys can hear me. Don’t. Be. Late.”

  SURVIVAL STRATEGY #2:

  Pinpoint your troublemakers.

  Another bus, full of girls, pulled into the parking lot. They stared blankly back at us through their windows.

  For a split second, I thought I saw Sully banging her fists against the glass.

  I quickly pinched my eyes.

  Fight the fog, Spencer. Fight the fog fight the fog fight the fog…

  When I opened them, Sully was gone. Some girl I’d never seen before was sitting in her place, hammering her hands against the window as their bus shifted into gear and shuttled around the bend.

  Where were they heading?

  All the boys must have been stuck on one side of the lake, while the girls were sequestered on the other. No intermingling.

  Whoever came up with the idea to corral twenty teenage boys with behavioral problems into a single camp should have their head examined.

  Better yet—just lop it off and stack it on the totem pole.

  Scanning the campers, it struck me that everybody had the benchmark characteristics of a type A scallywag. Cocky attitude. Crazy eyes. Scabs and bruises.

  Talk about a motley crew. We had been here for less than thirty seconds and already a couple campers had begun to scuffle.

  That didn’t take long, I thought.

  I decided to give the boiling knot of bodies a wide berth. The kid in the midst of smashing his fist into another kid’s face noticed my sidestep. He let his punching bag go.

  “Hey,” he said, walking my way. I acted as if I hadn’t heard him. “Hey—you.”

  He grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around.

  It was the kid from the seat in front of mine.

  Mr. Brace-Face.

  “You got off at the wrong bus stop, kid,” he said. “The girl’s camp is on the other side of the lake.”

  From between his chapped lips, the glint of metal shined in the sunlight.

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said. I even managed to smile back. “I can’t help but feel like we may have gotten off on the wrong foot here. My name is—”

  He hocked a loogie right into my face.

  “You won’t last a week,” Brace-Face chuckled as he walked off, leaving me with a slender tendril of spit dangling off my nose. “Welcome to Camp New Blood.”

  SURVIVAL STRATEGY #1:

  Travel the path of least resistance no matter what.

  Cabin assignment in hand, I wandered down the footpath that connected the cabins like a centipede.

  “Counselors will be performing a mandatory bag search.” George had vanished, his voice now crackling over the camp’s PA system. “Any cell phones or portable gaming devices hidden inside your belongings will be confiscated. You’ll get them back at the end of the session. Don’t think we won’t find them!”

  The intercom was exactly like your run-of-the-mill hookups you’d find in school, except the megaphones were bolted to each cabin’s roof outside.

  I paused on the path long enough to take in the towering pines over my head. Buried farther off into the woods, I spotted a clearing that looked like an archery range. I
counted ten hay bales lined up alongside one another, a target sheet stapled to the front of each bundle of straw. I swear I saw one of the bull’s-eyes blink.

  My fellow campers ambled to their cabins while I remained standing in place, each one of them making sure to shove into my shoulder as they passed by.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Coming through.”

  “Pardon moi.”

  Keep it together, Spence, I thought. This summer is going to be different. It has to be. For Mom. For myself.

  From this point forward, I, Spencer Pendleton, hereby make the pledge to go down the straight and narrow.

  No more running away. No more trouble. No more rocking anybody’s boat.

  Or canoe, for that matter.

  Farther down the main path, in another break between trees, I could see the sun reflecting off the glass-smooth surface of a lake.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out Mr. Simms’s postcard. Holding it up, I compared the faded image with the real thing.

  They were identical. Exact match.

  Welcome to Lake Wendigo.

  DAY ONE: 1330 HOURS

  counted four cabins.

  Cabin one, the main cabin situated just a stone’s throw away from the parking lot, was the administrative office. Probably where Mr. Ponytail lived, while the junior counselors all bunked amongst us malfeasants.

  The remaining three cabins were set farther into the woods.

  Each cabin was arranged by age. Cabin two was crammed with the youngest kids, ten and under. It was a tinderbox of combustible campers with ADHD.

  Let’s call them—The Preadolescent Piranhas.

  This land-roving pack tore through the campground like they had just snorted a Pixy Stix up each nostril. They stayed in tight formation, manically racing around in near lockstep syncopation. All eight seemed to communicate in a gibberish that only they could understand.

  “Comingthroughwatchoutheadsupouttathewaygonnaeatyou…”

  I was sure that if I stepped too close, that jittery assembly of arms and legs (and teeth) would swarm around me and rip me to fleshy shreds.

  The older kids were in cabin four, buried farther off into the woods away from the rest of us.

  That left cabin three.