How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  The masks were removed. I spotted Christopher and Rumil near the front by the platform. The two of them were huddled close and appeared to be speaking to Dixie Cups. The drag queen rubbed Rumil’s earlobe and eased through the press of people, her body more liquid than not. When she passed me, her hand gracefully tipped back my mask—I’d forgotten to take it off like everyone else had—and then she kept on moving to the bar, never glancing behind her to see the face she had uncovered. My skin felt raw. I imagined my greasy face sparkling like a melted Christmas ornament. I could think of nothing more awkward than standing here, like I was, in the middle of the dance floor, when no one was dancing and everyone was rushing around me for drinks. I trudged to the side of the room and tried to get Christopher and Rumil’s attention by waving. But it was no use. They were having one of those intense conversations couples have, the kind where all distractions were pushed into the background. Christopher’s long arms were wrapped around Rumil’s chest, holding Rumil as if his little body would float off should he let him go. I slid the mask back over my wrecked face. Like this, I watched them comfort each other until the movie started up again.

  —

  In the second half, Greg’s girlfriend awoke. She was the next character to willfully leave her cabin to investigate. Once outside, using her cell phone to light her way, she called out her now-dead cabinmate’s name. Her curiosity eventually led her to the shed, where her adulterous boyfriend and her cabinmate had been slaughtered. But the bodies had been moved. The only evidence of wrongdoing was the smear of blood on the ground. A path of red—too neat, too obvious—trailed out of the shed into the woods. Seeing this, she was unsettled. The woman, rather intelligently, then tried to use her cell: first, to call her boyfriend (no answer) and then the authorities (no service now). Panicked, she rushed back to the cabins and woke the others. Her pounding on their doors and her screaming confused them (two guys, both of whom I’d never be able to differentiate in a lineup, and a heavyset girl born to die in situations like these). It took a while for them to understand her ravings.

  They followed her to the shed. Filmed from faraway angles, the movie seemed to be suggesting the characters were no more important than their surroundings, than the trees or the mud or the weeds. The movie had paid very little attention, in fact, to these people until this moment. After discovering the blood, no one suggested they get in the cars and drive away—no, instead, one of the guys came up with the idea of following the carnage. “Someone must be hurt,” he said, and no one rolled their eyes at his announcing the obvious. The heavyset girl seconded the plan. Traipsing into the woods, they were as loud as possible, screaming the names of the missing into the dark. It became easy to hate them. Dear God, I thought, I want them to die. Usually, audiences rooted for the killer in an especially bad scary movie because, among other things, the characters were so poorly developed and behaved stupidly in moments of crisis. You begrudged them their lives. Here, though, the movie seemed intentionally pitting us against them.

  The trail of blood ended at the edge of the dried-out lake bed. “This is it,” one of them said. “Where they took the boys.” And it was too dark to tell who was speaking to whom. A dull moaning came from the spot where Blond Fred had been taken down. Someone flashed cell-phone light in the general direction, revealing a pale hand exposed in the dirt, clawing. What happened next came fast: All of them tumbled into the lake bed to dig, using their hands to unbury the person from underneath the muddy silt. Once again, the camera shifted to the killer’s point of view, and we watched the clamor from the edge of the lake bed, shrouded in the darkness. After they’d finished retrieving Blond Fred from the ground, the killer blasted on a high-powered spotlight, blinding them. After this, the killing was almost too easy. The two men who were toting Blond Fred out of the lake bed stepped into a pit and fell several feet to (we assumed) their deaths. The two women spread out, running for their lives in opposite directions. The heavyset one went back the way she’d come, and her leg was snagged by a spring-loaded bear trap. The other one—Greg’s girlfriend—climbed out the other side of the lake bed in one piece.

  The point of view switched, once more, to focus on her, the last one, the final girl. Shots from above tracked her erratic movement through the trees. The night sky was softening as morning approached; her figure became more and more visible in the hazy light. In her random scurrying, she found her way—somehow, someway—to a clearing in a little valley. Amid the brush, there’s a door in the ground. A metal door with a handle. She opened it to find a staircase leading down, deep under the earth. Preferring hiding to running, she went inside and fumbled with the latch to lock herself in. She pulled on a string dangling in her face, cutting on a low-wattage lightbulb. Yellow light spilled over the steps to reveal a small underground room. A tornado shelter repurposed into a bedroom complete with an army cot. A scattering of trash on the floor. Obviously, the killer’s hideout. A place to shut out the whole awful world. Lying on the mattress was a hand mirror. She picked it up, glared at her own reflection. Remembering something, she dropped it and fingered her phone: still no service. She threw the phone against the wall. It shattered like glass. She screamed.

  From above, a rustling—like footsteps. The door shook. A pause. Then it shook again. “Rooster,” the woman cried, and sank to the floor. She rested her face on the cool concrete ground. “Oh, Rooster.” Under the bed, she spied something that looked like another cell phone, but no. What is it? A square box with buttons and what appeared to be a speaker. She inspected it, fumbling with the switches. A walkie-talkie? She hit the tabs on the side, and there was static. She put her mouth up close to the speaker, and whispered, “Hello?” The rattling at the door continued, the kicking and hitting. The slender lock wouldn’t, she knew, hold long. “Hello?” she said again, into the device. CB radio? She clicked more buttons. As if answering her, music played from it: symphonic beats, then the husky voice of a woman: “I’m a new pair of eyes, every time I am born.” She dropped the device, a cassette tape player, and backed away from it as if it had turned radioactive, as if it were more dangerous than the anger raging outside the door behind her. For the last time, the movie returned to the killer’s point of view just as he popped open the door. (I almost cried out but was able to stifle myself in time.) The woman turned to face Rooster, her mouth a perfect O as he fell upon her.

  —

  Once the movie had faded to black, and it was clear the thing was over, I heard someone ask, “That it?” Then another, his voice muffled by the princess mask, said, “What the fine fuck.” The murmuring grew. Words flattened into boos. Into long, ugly sounds. Another drag queen, clad in a silver bodysuit, took to the stage to entertain us—a postmovie cabaret performance. Her appearance only inspired more shouts and moans of derision from those around me. Undeterred, she began to lip-sync Gloria Estefan’s cover of “Turn the Beat Around.” But the crowd proved too loud. She had trouble keeping time with the lyrics, her lips moving a millisecond slower than Estefan’s speedy delivery. A few queers up front took off their masks and threw them at the performer. Now I saw how Zeus’s altercation might have happened. All this anger throbbing in one place. The crowd was upset over a bad movie and needed someone to blame. Instead of turning on one another, causing a mild riot in the Joan Crawford, they were focusing their hate on the poor creature miming disco in front of us. And yet the drag queen persevered, her show becoming too painful to witness. The club was emptying, and I gratefully followed the wave of people outside onto the street. I searched around for Christopher and Rumil. When I didn’t find them, I fought the current of moving bodies to get back inside.

  I reached the front door and bumped into Rumil coming out. He carried a wad of paper towels and a small bottle of water. “Rumil! Hey!” I said, and he paused, not recognizing me at first. “Christopher—he . . .” Rumil waved for me to follow. We slipped around people, going sideways, and went behind the Joan Crawford to a li
ttle alleyway. It was semidark and grassy. Christopher was crouched on his knees, heaving, and Rumil rushed over to him. After he unscrewed the water bottle and dampened the paper towels, he used them to pat his boyfriend’s neck. The alleyway was about five feet wide, separating the Joan Crawford from another building that looked more residential, with deep-red brick and dormer windows. A row of boxy central-air units crowded that side of the alleyway. Dixie Cups sat on the one closest to the Dumpster. She was smoking. She flicked ashes into her palm, and said, to the vomiting Christopher, “Let it out, honey. I told you it was gonna be a show, didn’t I?”

  Back on the street, a large crowd had formed. People from the Joan Crawford were mixing with other rowdy clubgoers just beginning their night of revelry. They were singing and shouting and cursing. A mix of joy and rage. Cars honked at them as they passed. Dixie told us the night before had been quieter. “Still got mad at the end, though.” She sighed. “Always the end.”

  I said I didn’t mind the ending, but nobody paid attention.

  Christopher managed to make it to his feet. When Rumil tried to wipe his boyfriend’s mouth, he swatted him away. “I’m all right now—it’s over.” He took a step and stumbled, then clutched the side of the Dumpster to steady himself. “If people hate it,” he said to Dixie, swallowing hard between each word, “then why do you show it?”

  Dixie laughed. “Why do you think, honey?” She rubbed her fingers together. “Money—you try getting a gaggle of queers out on the weekend when most of them would probably have preferred to stay in and watch the movie on their computer.” She flicked her cigarette into the Dumpster and stood. “It’s an event. And events that draw people out have become few and far between. Terrorism, premium cable—people have more than enough excuses to stay home and make a country inside their four walls.” She patted the shoulder of Christopher’s gaudy shirt. “You all look like hell, by the way, and no movie did that.” When Christopher slapped her hand away, Dixie Cups laughed again, more gleefully this time. “Did you become gay last week or something? Don’t you know to never insult the host?” She would have probably said more, but blue lights flashed from the street, followed by the short wail of a police siren. Her eyes were diverted to the goings-on in the front of her club. A cop car was nosing into the crowd. Before leaving us, she sauntered over to me. She said I needed to learn when to wear the party masks—“You look spooky just standing there,” she said—and jerked the princess face (which I had forgotten I was wearing) from my own face, the plastic band popping behind my ears. She shoved the mask into the top of my Daisy Dukes. “Now you bitches play nice, hear?”

  —

  On the cab ride back to their place, I learned that Christopher was a Tina Turner fan and hearing one of her songs in the movie had been too much for him. “I’m surprised you don’t remember him talking about her at camp,” Rumil said. He and I were sitting in the backseat while Christopher sat up front with the driver, a wall of Plexiglas separating us. Rumil spoke candidly. “It upset him that Sparse used parts of us in the movie—little things. His love of Tina Turner. Your nickname.” He kept his eyes trained on the back of Christopher’s head as if he expected him to turn around and shush us. So I doubted he noticed my own mild shock at his remembering what my father used to call me. But then I supposed it shouldn’t have. Mother Maude had forced us to reveal so much about ourselves to one another. We talked and talked and talked until words were reduced to incoherent sounds we made with our mouths. I was impressed that, years later, Rumil was handy with the details.

  “How do you remember those things?” I asked him.

  He gave me the same surprised look he’d given me earlier in the day by the river. “How can you not?”

  I changed the subject and asked what Sparse had used about him. He pointed to the mask hanging out of my jeans. I pulled it out and flattened the face over my knee. “Of course,” I said, the memory flooding back once I went looking for it. As a boy, Rumil had stolen a similar one from a Fred’s Pharmacy during Halloween and was caught by the store manager. When his parents asked him why, he said he wanted to be a white girl like his sisters. “And that’s when the therapy started,” Rumil reminded me now. “Camp Levi was the end of a series of failed programs—I was a teenager and they said if the treatment didn’t stick this time, they’d send me away to a military school.”

  I asked Rumil why he thought Sparse had been so keen to include little bits of us in the movie, and he said that he’d not spoken to Sparse in nearly five years: “Like you, he was hard to keep up with.” Then he speculated that maybe Sparse had put our shit in there as an homage. “It’s not very subtle: the killer possessing some part of each of us, but then I guess Sparse wasn’t interested in subtlety, was he? Or art.” He glanced out the window.

  The cab pulled up to the curb in front of their large home with its pitched roof and expansive front porch. An uneasiness came over me, something undefinable in the pit of my stomach. About the way they lived. I had this notion that their newfound money was connected to the camp, but I didn’t know how it all worked. I had suspicions. Every now and then, a lawyer—having stumbled across our story somehow—would e-mail me about pursuing a civil rights lawsuit. It never came to anything because, I always suspected, there was no money to be had. But I didn’t know much about legal matters and so maybe Christopher and Rumil had found another way. While Christopher fumbled with his wallet to pay the driver, I asked Rumil if he’d spoken to anyone else from that summer.

  “Like who?”

  And suddenly I didn’t want to know—let them have their secrets—so I shrugged and slid out.

  —

  In the kitchen, Christopher handed out Zoloft, and we downed the pills with sparkling water. He said it would help us sleep. His skin was still pale from puking. The lipstick had faded from his lips, the ghost of it still staining his teeth pink, as Dixie Cups had pointed out in the alleyway. While they got ready for bed, I went downstairs to fetch my clothes. All my toiletries were in Doll, which was still parked in the garage by Rainbow Ice, but Rumil had said they had extra toothbrushes and not to worry about it, so I didn’t, only now I did. When I went back upstairs, they were arguing in the living room. Rumil had rolled out an old record player—a wooden piece of furniture I’d mistaken for an armoire—and wanted to put on Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. As a result, Christopher was throwing a fit. “I don’t want to hear it,” Christopher was saying. “You’ve lost your fucking mind.”

  Rumil shook the record sleeve at him. “She still belongs to you, baby—don’t be ridiculous.”

  If my face hadn’t been smattered in grit and glitter, I wouldn’t have bothered them. I would have found the guest room on my own and quietly gone to sleep. “I think I need to take a shower,” I announced, and Christopher rolled his eyes. “And?” Rumil, in a tone not much kinder than Christopher’s, said, “The bathroom’s upstairs—you can find everything in the cabinet under the sink.” They stared at each other, a stalemate, waiting until I left. When I didn’t move right away, Rumil added, “Second door on the left,” to send me off. It worked; I left. They continued the squabble by whispering. Christopher must have won because I didn’t hear any music.

  The shower had strong water pressure. I stuck my face directly under the stream to wash off the grime. When I finished, I changed back into my own shirt and shorts, and padded down the hallway, my bare feet leaving steam prints on the tongue-and-groove hardwood floor. I counted two guest bedrooms. When I tried the doors, they were locked. Like the forbidden rooms in the mansions of gothic novels. Downstairs in the living room, the record player was still pushed out, but the couple had retreated elsewhere. The record sleeve was left on the sofa, 1980s Tina Turner in a deep-cut top staring up at me, her legs kicked out below her in a kind of half squat. I removed the record from the turntable and slid it back inside the sleeve. I put it on the coffee table next to a miniature gong. The trinkets in th
e room astonished me. Rumil and Christopher had lived the same number of years on this planet as I had, and in that time somehow, the two had accrued more belongings, more knickknacks from foreign countries, and more antiques from flea markets. I didn’t know if these were evidence of their having become more grown-up or simply more affluent. Either way, it bothered me. The same way the nice neighborhood and the art studio and the big house and the successful snow-cone business and the locked doors all bothered me. I was jealous, sure, but also suspicious, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

  From the other side of the house, I heard a thump. Then another. “I was just going to bed,” I called out. No one answered. The house had gone quiet except for more thuds. “The rooms upstairs are locked,” I said, over the sound of furniture moving. I walked into the dining room, the walls papered scarlet, and then moved into the little hall where light from the room at the end bisected a green throw rug. They had left the door ajar. Like most of the others in the house, the walls inside the master bedroom were crammed with mirrors. But there were no mirrors on the one wall that the pencil-post bed frame thwacked against. I was not surprised to find what I did: Christopher pinning Rumil against the mattress. Nevertheless, I felt like a child walking in on his parents, confused by what he saw the adults doing. Maybe that was the Zoloft. A slate-colored duvet had been tossed to the floor along with their clothes. Christopher held both of Rumil’s hands over his head by the wrists. And he pressed his forehead into Rumil’s cheekbone and was swearing quietly: “You fuck, you fuck, you fuck,” he said, as if he were speaking a secret language only the two of them understood. When Christopher lifted his face, Rumil spat in it. Christopher popped him across the mouth with an open hand. Almost immediately afterward, they were laughing and looked over at me.