My eyes flicked open wide. “Do we? That’s weird,” I said.
“Like mouthwash and skunky plants.”
“So why ‘Lump,’ Lump?” Faisal asked quickly. He nodded at me as discreetly as possible, as if to indicate that he had thrown her off the figurative and literal scent.
“What?”
“Why do you go by ‘Lump’?” he repeated.
“I wasn’t very good at walking until I was four. I used to fall into things a lot,” she said, looking at her feet like they’d been traitors until only very recently. “People at school started calling me it, and now it’s just my name.”
“Do you like that name?” I asked.
“Not really. I’m planning on getting a new one. But Mom said that if I didn’t like what the other kids were calling me and if telling them I didn’t like it only made them call me it more, then we would repurpose it,” she said.
We were between worlds: one hundred yards into the dark between fire and civilization. Somewhere off in the woods, something made a cracking noise. Lump skidded to a stop and stared into the dark.
I said, “It’s okay, it’s pr—”
“Shh!” she said, cutting me off and running to the edge of the trees. She pulled some branches out of the way and listened more closely, still looking into the black of the woods.
“Did you hear anything?” I asked Faisal under my breath.
“Yes. But I’m still kind of high. This is terrifying.”
“Shit,” Lump said, walking back to us.
“Hey,” Faisal said, trying to commit to his role as a responsible Camp Buddy. “Language.”
Her face was still pale but her eyes were less worried than before. “I thought it might be bears. My mom said that I don’t need to worry about bears, but we’re out in the woods and bears live in the woods.”
“If you’re worried about bears, why is your first instinct to go to the bear noises?” I asked as we walked in the darkness.
“My mom is worried about bears and told me that I didn’t need to worry about bears, but only because she worries too much about things like bears. Did you know that I had an Uncle Thomas who used to fly planes?”
It was safe to say that we did not know about her plane-flying Uncle Thomas.
“I never met him, not even when I was a baby, but sometimes my parents talk about him when they worry about me liking bears. Also he wasn’t really my uncle. He was my grandma’s brother and I’ve seen pictures of him standing next to big planes and when I ask Grandma when the picture was taken she says Korea, which isn’t a time. It’s a country. But, like, also two countries.”
Faisal looked at me with eyes that said, “I am high and this child is freaking me out.”
“But so my not-uncle Thomas used to drink alcohol and so when Mom was my age Uncle Thomas got sad and tried to drive his farm-plane—the kind that drops water and stuff—into space, but farm-planes don’t have nearly enough to gas to get to space, so he crashed but no one ever found him or saw him again. Grandma says he was trying to get to the moon and sometimes Dad says he was already there and then Mom hits him in the shoulder but they laugh. She doesn’t actually hit him. My mother doesn’t abuse my father,” she said, looking up from me to Faisal.
In the middle distance behind us, Test was trying to get the kids to sing along to a campfire song that I couldn’t quite make out. All I could hear between Lump and the wind and the woods was the not-remotely-tuned guitar playing the same two alternating notes. Lump’s hand was pressed against her head like a DJ listening to one headphone.
* * *
She scrunched her face up and breathed short blasts of air through her nose as I dabbed her head with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol. Faisal was making a ton of noise banging around in the cabinets looking for bandages while Lump sat cross-legged on the counter. The hard-plastic medical kit above the sink had only contained cotton balls and a yellowed plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol with a label that was cracking because it had, apparently, been purchased during the Reagan administration.
“I think they got this stuff in the Reagan administration,” I said to her.
Her mouth formed like she was going to say something, then stopped. She squinted. “Ray gun administration?” With her big hat removed, her hair stuck up in every direction like an explosion made out of bed-head.
“No, like Ronal—never mind. Your version’s cooler. But don’t worry, isopropyl alcohol lasts forever.10 Sorry this stings.”
“It’s okay. I don’t even feel it.” Her left eye kept twitching and her jaw clenched every time the cotton ball dabbed the side of her head. “Is it still bleeding?”
“Just a tiny bit, but it’s okay.”
“Do you think I need stitches?” she asked. “And where’s my hat?”
“I don’t think you’ll need stitches. Plus. You know. If we had to, we could use super glue.”
She lit up before I had a chance to try to hold her in suspense.
“Because they used to use glue to keep people’s guts in!” she said. “I saw a documentary on the Internet about how, in a war, soldiers would get their guts blown out and then the field doctors would use glue to put them back together! Are we going to use super glue? My hat!” she said, looking over my shoulder.
Faisal was rounding the corner with an armful of bandages and a box of Band-Aids in his mouth. Lump’s hat was pulled snug onto his head and, as he spit the box of Band-Aids onto the counter, he said, “We’re going to have to amputate.”
“Also, you smell like farm poop,” she said to me, ignoring Faisal.
“I think you should be more concerned about your impending limb removal. Impending limb removals are a lot more important than what I do or do not smell like.”
“You do smell like cow shit,” Faisal said, unwinding an arm’s length of white bandage before doing a double-take at Lump, who was trying not to smile. “Poop. You do smell like cow poop is what I meant.”
I sniffed at my coat. Cow shit was definitely one of the smells layered into its fibers.
“It’s from working the petting zoo earlier. I had to pitchfork shi—manure all morning.”
“Right, Mike was saying you guys were working out there, playing with tiny pigs. Give me a hand, Lumps,” he said, placing her hand over the square of cotton pressed against her ear. He ignored her as she corrected her name, and spooled the bandage around her head.
“Yeah, one of the deer busted loose.11 Went tearing out past a broken-down fence.”
“A deer is loose?” she said, trying to twist toward me.
He straightened her head and pressed her shoulders down. “Shh. Mummies can’t speak,” he said, and wrapped the bandage down under her ear and over her mouth.
“Ith id a babvy deer?” Lump asked over the cotton, her eyes locked on mine.
“Yeah, but I’m sure they’ll fin—”
She clawed the bandage from her mouth. “What about its mom? The baby is out there? In the woods?”
“Deer love the woods,” Faisal said, nodding from me to Lump. “Remember Bambi? Bambi was all about the woods.”
“Not a baby deer without a mom!” she said, loudly, throwing her hands out and almost knocking the ancient bottle of rubbing alcohol to the floor.
“Bambi didn’t have a mom!” Faisal said, entirely invested in the argument.
“Bambi did too have a mom! And also especially because the baby deer is domes—doomes—destic—” She bunched up her eyebrows as her mind tried frantically to articulate the word.
“Domesticated?” I asked.
“Domesticated!” she said.
“I thought you were on my side,” Faisal said to me.
“For your argument with the eight-year-old?” I said, egging him on even though I’d known him for less than a day.
“I’m eight and a half.”
“For your argument with the eight-and-a-half-year-old?”
“I’m not the one who let the adorable little deer escape into the vast an
d unforgiving wilderness.”
“I was holding teacup pigs.”
“Did any of the pigs run away?” Lump asked, like she was making a checklist in her head.
“Great,” Faisal said. “You were like Hitler’s next-door neighbor. ‘No, honey, it’s fine—all the little neighbor boys goose-step around their backyards, barking at the Goldsteins.’” She looked up at him like she didn’t understand what he was talking about. “I’m saying it’s his fault because he could have prevented a disaster. Like how if Little Hitler’s neighbors had just … you know…” he made his hand into shooty fingers. “Never mind.”
“No, the pigs are fine,” I said. “Is that your criminal origin story for Hitler? That he barked at the Jewish neighbors and his neighbors should have assassinated him? Does Little Hitler have the mustache too?”
“Of course not—children can’t grow mustaches. But he drew one on, yes.” He kept wrapping Lump’s head in white bandage as we talked back and forth. Any traces of panic or fear from the bean-bomb had long since fallen away. Instead, I could see that there was a plan forming in her head. It was a look I recognized.
“But what about freezing to death?” Lump asked.
“All the better. No World War II.”
“No, the deer!”
“Deer are good at not freezing to death,” Faisal said. He put her hat back on her head and her shoulders relaxed a little.
“I think I need to help the deer,” Lump said definitively. The way she said it made it seem like she wasn’t talking to us anymore. Like she was back in her own head.
Like she was seeing a way out of her name.
“I think you missed a spot,” I said, pointing at her head, which was almost completely covered in bandages.
“Got it,” he said, covering a small patch of hair in the back before covering her mouth and chin in bandage.
Nobody said anything for a few seconds.
“You know she’s going to ask again,” he said.
“I think she can hear you through the bandages,” I said.
“Matty. About your life story. She thinks you’re real interesting. Wouldn’t stop talking about you earlier.”
I looked out the window to see if Test was nearby, hoping he would come in and force the subject to change, but the only thing I could see in the black glass was my reflection.
The glass was probably just warped, but where my reflection should have been all the unremarkable inches of my face, everything looked distorted. My eyes looked sunken, my face looked off-kilter and wrong.
“Yeah, I still can’t believe anybody watched the Olympiad,” I said to the window.
“Except she didn’t ask about the Olympiad, she asked your life story,” Faisal said. He picked up the pinkish-white cotton balls off of the counter and tossed them in the trash one at a time. I stared at him. “Look: you don’t want to talk about … whatever it is, that’s fine. But she’s going to ask again. I’d have an answer ready, is all.”
I was very aware of my hands and my tongue feeling funny, and the weed-paranoia had the suspicious feeling of being legitimate paranoia. “What don’t I want to talk about?”
“Dyoovveapenthil?” Lump asked us. “Ahndpaypuh?”
I pulled the bandage down.
“I need a pencil and paper.”
I put the bandage back over her mouth.
“I’ll see what I can find. Here, take this,” I said, and pulled the green Sakura marker out of my pocket. Even after Charlie, the habit of carrying that goddamned marker around was hard to break.
“I don’t know what you don’t want to talk about. But I’ve been coming to this camp long enough to know that it’s partnered with community outreach programs.” Faisal said. “Either way, I saw the way your face changed when she asked. And I think you look familiar too, but trust me: I didn’t watch any fancy science-Olympics. I’m not trying to bust your bal—” He looked at Lump, stifled a pseudo-cough into his fist, and said: “—your chops or anything. Really, I’m not. I’m just saying.”
Test came whipping through the door like a man who’s used to sneaking up to doors and blasting into rooms. “Is she okay—why is her whole head covered in bandages?”
The small mummy with the aviator hat had to turn with her shoulders to face him.
“Thrvvadrrobaloov!” she said from behind her Claude Rains bandages. I reached over and pulled down three or four layers. “There’s a deer on the loose!” she said again.
Test’s face softened. “Are you all right, little lady?”
“I’m fine, but there’s a deer on the loose! It escaped! Hours ago!” She said it like she was in a room full of assholes preventing her from doing her job.
“I know it, and so do the Buddies and the groundskeepers.” He walked over, his eyes on us. “We’ll find the little guy in no time.” He bent over and pulled the bandages down, tucking them under her chin. “How’s the head?”
She took an exasperated breath. “I said it’s fine. I need paper. I need to make flyers about the deer. What if a hunter sees her and shoots her?”
Test’s eyebrows raised and he thought about it. “How about this: you go see the nurse—get an official all-clear—and we’ll get you all the paper you want. I think we even have some wanted posters somewhere—”
“No wanted posters! We don’t want to give the wrong idea, especially to hunters.” She was already pulling her coat on.
“Deal: no wanted posters.” He looked at Faisal and said, “Shelly’s in the rec hall. You remember Shelly, right, Mr. Al-Aziz?”
“Nurse Shelly.” The words sounded like they’d been learned the hard way.
“Right.”
“The one who I talked to after the arrow thing.”
“Right again.”
We all turned to leave.
“Not you,” Test said to my back.
Right there: the two words that summed me up. Two goddamn words that never failed to remind me that I wasn’t just a teenager dealing with normal teenager problems.
“All right.”
And I knew, basically, what he was going to say before he said it:
“We have to talk about that cracking noise you keep hearing. The one under your feet.”
Under other circumstances, it would have sounded like he was asking if I was all right. Asking if I needed to talk, asking if I was still holding all of my pieces together. But it was never going to be that. Not then, not with Test.
I looked at Faisal, who looked at the ground. He put an arm around Lump’s shoulders and ushered her toward the door. “Come on, Lumps. Amputation time.”
The door opened, the door closed, and it was just Test and me. I was ten-months-tired, and ten-months-tired is too tired to tell yourself to unclench your jaw before your teeth shatter from the pressure.
“Follow me.”
“This one of those thin-ice talks?” I asked as we headed down the corridor. There were pictures on the wall of campers and Buddies and counselors, and as we walked the length of the hall the pictures time-warped, going older and older, the crisp, time-stamped digitals changing to fading film with fading, deteriorating color.
He didn’t answer.
Test unlocked the door to his office and said, “Sit,” gesturing to the chair in front of his desk. I did. He walked over to an old humming fridge on the other side of the small room, pulled the door open, and took out a paper plate covered in blue Saran wrap before sitting down across from me in a large swivel chair. The kind of chair you imagine a judge using.
The only light in the room, up until that point, was the yellow slice thrown in from the hallway and, briefly, the glow from the fridge. When he clicked his desk lamp on, the room appeared, and it was everything you’d expect a camp administrator to have: poster-sized prints of nature scenes and state animals and plants, photos of different Buddies throughout the years participating in all of the staple activities, framed leaves, sports gear, survival equipment, and ponchos.
Direc
tly under the lamp, though, was a tiny clear plastic box with a little brown shape in the middle.
When Test saw me looking at it, he said, “Mexican jumping bean. My nephew loves them.”
He pulled the blue plastic wrap neatly off of the sandwich on his desk and set it aside. The sandwich in the middle of the plate was packed with meat and vegetables.
I nodded.
“Why are we sitting here?” he asked me as he removed the top slice of bread from his sandwich. He picked a strip of crust off and ate it. Under the lamp, the little brown bean jumped with a tick! sound. A second later, the bean moved again with the same horrible noise.
I didn’t say, “Because you told me to follow you here,” but I didn’t answer fast enough either, because you could see the blood going to his face even though he was trying to play it cool.
“Allow me to rephrase: do you know what my job is here?” He tore off another piece of his bread.
Tick! I flinched.
“Your job is to keep the kids safe and happy. Especially around court-ordered Buddies like me,” I said, making myself look at him instead of the dying larva stuck in place.
What I didn’t expect was for him to laugh. It wasn’t exactly a good-natured laugh. “Please. You’re more than smart enough to know that you wouldn’t be allowed to even set foot on the grounds if anyone thought those kids weren’t completely safe around you.”
Tick! Tick tick!
His eyes looked huge under his glasses and the magnification was apparently so strong that it sniper-scoped his vision past the smudge of soot on the corner of the right lens.
“Okay,” I said, like an intelligent and articulate individual.
My phone buzzed against my leg, a small burst of vibrations overlapping each other since Test’s office was apparently one of the few places at camp where I got service. I slid out my phone and took a sidelong glance at it; there was a text from an unknown number, a notification about a system update, and a text from my dad. I put it back in my pocket.
“To answer your question, yes, this is one of those thin-ice talks. I get the impression you think being here is a punishment. Allow me to clear that up: it’s not. You’re here to do something positive, not make up for something negative. But if you keep insisting on playing the tough guy, I can’t help you. You’ll crack through the ice all on your own. It’s the ‘and then…’ you need to worry about here, Mr. Hill.”
Unstoppable Moses Page 7
