by McSweeney's
The first thing that Terence pulled up out of the mud wasn’t the Simpson twin’s shoe. It was long and round and knobby. When Terence knocked it against the ground, some of the mud slid off.
“Hey. Wow,” James Lorbick said. “That looks like a bone.”
Everybody stood in the rain and looked at the bone.
“What is that?”
“Is it human?”
“Maybe it’s a dinosaur,” James Lorbick said. “Like a fossil.”
“Probably a cow bone,” Terence said. He poked the bone back in the mud and fished around until it got stuck in something that turned out to be the lost shoe. The Simpson twin took the shoe as if he didn’t really want it back. He turned it upside down and mud oozed out like lonely, melting soft-squeeze ice cream.
Half of Terence was now covered in mud, although at least, thanks to Bryan Jones, he didn’t have water in his ear. He held the dubious bone as if he was going to toss it off in the bushes, but then he stopped and looked at it again. He put it in the pocket of his rain jacket instead. Half of it stuck out. It didn’t look like a cow bone.
By the time they got to Honor Lookout, the rain had stopped. “See?” Terence said. “I told you.” He said it as if now they were fine. Now everything would be fine. Water plopped off the needles of the pitiful pine trees that leaned eternally away from the campground on Honor Lookout.
Bungalow 6 gathered wood that would be too wet to use for a fire. They unpacked their tents and tent poles, and tent pegs, which descended into the sucking mud and disappeared forever. They laid out their tents on top of ground cloths on top of the sucking, quivering, nearly animate mud. It was like putting a tent up over chocolate pudding. The floor of the tents sank below the level of the mud when they crawled inside. It was hard to imagine sleeping in the tents. You might just keep on sinking.
“Hey,” Bryan Jones said, “look out! Snowball fight!” He lobbed a brown mudball which hit James Lorbick just under the chin and splashed up on James’s glasses. Then everyone was throwing mudballs, even Terence. James Lorbick even threw one. There was nothing else to do.
When they got hungry, they ate cold hot dogs for lunch while the mud dried and cracked and fell off their arms and legs and faces. They ate graham crackers with marshmallows and chocolate squares and Terence even toasted the marshmal-lows with a cigarette lighter for anyone who wanted. Since they couldn’t make a fire, they made mud sculptures instead. Terence sculpted an elephant and a girl on top. The elephant even looked like an elephant. But then one of the Simpson twins sculpted an atom bomb and dropped it on Terence’s elephant and Terence’s girlfriend.
“That’s okay,” Terence said. “That’s cool.” But it wasn’t cool. He went and sat on a muddy rock and looked at his bone.
The twins had made a whole stockpile of atom bombs out of mud. They decided to make a whole city with walls and buildings and everything. Some of the other kids from Bungalow 6 helped with the city so that the twins could bomb the city before it got too dark.
Bryan Jones had put mud in his hair and twisted it up in muddy spikes. There was mud in his eyebrows. He looked like an idiot, but that didn’t matter, because he was Bryan Jones and anything that Bryan Jones did wasn’t stupid. It was cool. “Hey man,” he said to James. “Come and see what I stole off the clothes line at camp.”
James Lorbick was muddy and tired and maybe his feet did smell bad, but he was smarter than most of the kids in Bungalow 6. “Why?” he asked.
“Just come on,” Bryan said. “I don’t want anyone else to see this yet.”
“Okay,” James said.
It was a dress. It had big blue flowers on it and James Lorbick got a bad feeling.
“Why did you steal a dress?” he said.
Bryan shrugged. He was smiling as if the whole idea of a dress made him happy. It was big, happy, contagious smile, but James Lorbick didn’t smile back. “Because it will be funny,” Bryan said. “Put it on and we’ll go show everybody.”
“No way,” James said. He folded his muddy arms over his muddy chest to show he was serious.
“I dare you,” Bryan said. “Come on, James, before everybody comes over here and sees it. Everybody will laugh.”
“I know they will,” James said. “No.”
“Look, I’d put it on, I swear, but it wouldn’t fit me. No way would it fit. So you’ve got to do it. Just do it, James.”
“No,” James said.
* * *
James Lorbick wasn’t sure why his parents had sent him off to a camp in North Carolina. He hadn’t wanted to go. It wasn’t as if there weren’t trees in Chicago. It wasn’t as if James didn’t have friends in Chicago. Camp just seemed to be one of those things parents could make you do, like violin lessons, or karate, except that camp lasted a whole month. Plus, he was supposed to be thankful about it, like his parents had done him a big favor. Camp cost money.
So he made leather wallets in arts and crafts, and went swimming every other day, even though the lake smelled funny and the swim instructor was kind of weird and liked to make the campers stand on the high diving board with their eyes closed. Then he’d creep up and push them into the water. Not that you didn’t know he was creeping up. You could feel the board wobbling.
He didn’t make friends. But that wasn’t true, exactly. He was friendly, but nobody in Bungalow 6 was friendly back. Sometimes right after Terence turned out the lights, someone would say, “James, oh, James, your hair looked really excellent today” or “James, James Lorbick, I wish I were as good at archery as you” or “James, will you let me borrow your water canteen tomorrow?” and then everyone would laugh while James pretended to be asleep, until Terence would flick on the lights and say, “Leave James alone—go to sleep or I’ll give everyone five demerits.”
James Lorbick knew it could have been worse. He could have been in Bungalow 4 instead of Bungalow 6.
* * *
At least the dress wasn’t muddy. Bryan let him keep his jeans and T-shirt on. “Let me do your hair,” Bryan said. He picked up a handful of mud and pushed it around on James’s head until James had sticky mud hair just like Bryan’s.
“Come on,” Bryan said.
“Why do I have to do this?” James ask. He held his hands out to the side so that he wouldn’t have to touch the dress. He looked ridiculous. He felt worse than ridiculous. He felt terrible. He felt so terrible that he didn’t even care anymore that he was wearing a dress.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Bryan said. He sounded like he thought it was a big joke, which it was. “I didn’t make you do it, James.”
One of the Simpson twins was running around, dropping atom bombs on the sagging, wrinkled tents. He skidded to a stop in front of Bryan and James. “Why are you wearing a dress?” the Simpson twin said. “Hey, James is wearing a dress!”
Bryan gave James a shove. Not hard, but he left a muddy handprint on the dress. “Come on,” he said. “Pretend that you’re a zombie. Like you’re a kitchen girl zombie who’s come back to eat the brains of everybody from Bungalow 6, because you’re still angry about that time we had the rice pudding fight with Bungalow 4 out on the porch of the dining room. Like you just crawled out of the mud. I’ll be a zombie too. Let’s go chase people.”
“Okay,” James Lorbick said. The terrible feeling went away at the thought of being a zombie and suddenly the flowered dress seemed magical to him. It gave him the strength of a zombie, only faster. He staggered with Bryan along toward the rest of Bungalow 6, holding out his arms. Kids said things like, “Hey, look at James! James is wearing a DRESS!” as if they were making fun of him, but then they got the idea. They realized that James and Bryan were zombies and they ran away. Even Terence.
After a while, everybody had become a zombie. So they went for a swim. Everybody except for James Lorbick, because when he started to take off the dress, Bryan Jones stopped him. Bryan said, “No, wait. Keep it on. I dare you to wear that dress until we get back to camp tomorrow. I dare
you. We’ll show up at breakfast and say that we saw a monster and it’s chasing us, and then you come in the dining room and it will be awesome. You look completely spooky with that dress and all the mud.”
“I’ll get my sleeping bag all muddy,” James said. “I don’t want to sleep in a dress. It’s dumb.”
Everybody in the lake began to yell things.
“Come on, James, wear the dress, okay?”
“Keep the dress on! Do it, James!”
“I dare you,” said Bryan.
“I dare you,” James said.
“What?” Bryan said. “What do you dare me to do?”
James thought for a moment. Nothing came to him. “I don’t know.”
Terence was floating on his back. He lifted his head. “You tell him, James. Don’t let Bryan talk you into anything you don’t want to do.”
“Come on,” Bryan said. “It will be so cool. Come on.”
So everybody in Bungalow 6 went swimming except for James Lorbick. They splashed around and washed off all the mud and came out of the pond and James Lorbick was the only kid in Bungalow 6 who was still covered in crusty mud. James Lorbick was the only one who still had mud spikes in his hair. James Lorbick was the only one wearing a dress.
The sun was going down. They sat on the ground around the campfire that wouldn’t catch. They ate the rest of the hot dogs and the peanut butter sandwiches that the kitchen girls always made up when bungalows went on overnight hikes. They talked about how cool it would be in the morning, when James Lorbick came running into the dining room back at camp, pretending to be a monster.
It got darker. They talked about the monster.
“Maybe it’s a werewolf.”
“Or a were-skunk.”
“Maybe it’s from outer space.”
“Maybe it’s just really lonely,” James Lorbick said. He was sitting between Bryan Jones and one of the Simpson twins, and he felt really good, like he was really part of Bungalow 6 at last, and also kind of itchy, because of the mud.
“So how come nobody’s ever seen it before?”
“Maybe some people have, but they died and so they couldn’t tell anybody.”
“No way. They wouldn’t let us camp here if somebody died.”
“Maybe the camp doesn’t want anybody to know about the monster, so they don’t say anything.”
“You’re so paranoid. The monster didn’t do anything to Bungalow 4. Besides, Bungalow 4 is a bunch of liars.”
“Wait a minute, do you hear that?”
They were quiet, listening. Bryan Jones farted. It was a sinister, brassy fart.
“Oh, man. That’s disgusting, Bryan.”
“What? It wasn’t me.”
“If the monster comes, we’ll just aim Bryan at it.”
“Wait, what’s that?”
Something was ringing. “No way,” Terence said. “That’s my cell phone. No way does it get reception out here. Hello? Hey, Darlene. What’s up?” He turned on his flashlight and shone it at Bungalow 6. “Guys. I’ve gotta go down the hill for a sec. She sounds upset. Something about her car and a chihuahua.”
“That’s cool.”
“Be careful. Don’t let the monster sneak up on you.”
“Tell Darlene she’s too good for you.”
They watched Terence pick his way down the muddy path in a little circle of light. The light got smaller and smaller, farther and farther away, until they couldn’t see it any more.
“What if it isn’t really Darlene?” a kid named Timothy Ferber said.
“What?”
“Like what if it’s the monster?”
“No way. That’s stupid. How would the monster know Terence’s cell phone number?”
“Are there any marshmallows left?”
“No. Just graham crackers.”
They ate the graham crackers. Terence didn’t come back. They couldn’t even hear his voice. They told ghost stories.
“And she puts her hand down and her dog licks it and she thinks everything is okay. Except that then, in the morning, when she looks in the bathtub, her dog is in there and he’s dead and there’s lots of blood and somebody has written ‘HA HA I REALLY FOOLED YOU’ with the blood.”
“One time my sister was babysitting and this weird guy called and wanted to know if Satan was there and she got really freaked out.”
“One time my grandfather was riding on a train and he saw a naked woman standing out in a field.”
“Was she a ghost?”
“I don’t know. He used to like to tell that story a lot.”
“Were there cows in the field?”
“I don’t know, how should I know if there were cows?”
“Do you think Terence is going to come back soon?”
“Why? Are you scared?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s not even 10:30. Maybe we could try lighting the fire again.”
“It’s still too wet. It’s not going to catch. Besides, if there was a monster and if the monster was out there and we got the fire lit, then the monster could see us.”
“We don’t have any marshmallows anyway.”
“Wait, I think I know how to get it started. Like Bungalow 4 did with the bat. If I spray it with insecticide, and then—”
Bungalow 6 fell reverently silent.
“Wow. That’s awesome, Bryan. They should have a special merit badge for that.”
“Yeah, to go with the badge for toxic farts.”
“It smells funny,” James Lorbick said. But it was nice to have a fire going. It made the darkness seem less dark. Which is what fires are supposed to do, of course.
“You look really weird in the firelight, James. That dress and all the mud. It’s kind of funny and kind of creepy.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, James Lorbick should always wear dresses. He’s so hot.”
“James Lorbick, I think you are so hot. Not.”
“Leave James alone,” Bryan Jones said.
“I had this weird dream last year,” Danny Anderson said. Danny Anderson was from Terre Haute, Indiana. He was taller than anyone else in Bungalow 6 except for Terence. “I dreamed that I came home from school one day and nobody was there except this man. He was sitting in the living room watching TV and so I said, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ And he looked up and smiled this creepy smile at me and he said, ‘Hey, Danny, I’m Angelina Jolie. I’m your new dad.’”
“No way. You dreamed your dad was Angelina Jolie?”
“No,” Danny Anderson said. “Shut up. My parents aren’t divorced or anything. My dad’s got the same name as me. This guy said he was my new dad. He said he was Angelina Jolie. But he was just some guy.”
“That’s a dumb dream.”
“I know it is,” Danny Anderson said. “But I kept having it, like, every night. This guy is always hanging out in the kitchen and talking to me about what we’re going to do now that I’m his kid. He’s really creepy. And the thing is, I just got a phone call from my mom, and she says that she and my dad are getting divorced and I think maybe she’s got a new boyfriend.”
“Hey, man. That’s tough.”
Danny Anderson looked as if he might be about to cry. He said, “So what if this boyfriend turns out to be my new dad? Like in the dream?”
“My stepdad’s pretty cool. Sometimes I get along with him better than I get along with my mom.”
“One time I had a dream James Lorbick was wearing a dress.”
“What’s that noise?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Terence has been gone a long time.”
“Maybe he went back to camp. Maybe he left us out here.”
“The fire smells really bad.”
“It reeks.”
“Isn’t insect stuff poisonous?”
“Of course not. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell it. Because you put it on your skin. They wouldn’t let you put poison on your skin.”
&
nbsp; “Hey, look up. I think I saw a shooting star.”
“Maybe it was a spaceship.”
They all looked up at the sky. The sky was black and clear and full of bright stars. It was like that for a moment and then they noticed how clouds were racing across the blackness, spilling across the sky. The stars disappeared. Maybe if they hadn’t looked, the sky would have stayed clear. But they did look. Then snow started to fall, lightly at first, just dusting the muddy ground and the campfire and Bungalow 6 and then there was more snow falling. It fell quietly and thickly. It was going to be the tenth of July tomorrow, the next-to-last day of camp, the day that James Lorbick wearing a dress and a lot of mud was going to show up and scare everyone in the dining room.
The snow was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to Bungalow 6.
One of the Simpson twins said, “Hey, it’s snowing!”
Bryan Jones started laughing. “This is awesome,” he said. “Awesome!”
James Lorbick looked up at the sky, which had been so clear a minute ago. Fat snowflakes fell on his upturned face. He wrapped his crumbly mud-covered arms around himself. “It’s kind of beautiful,” he said.
“Terence! Hey, Terence! It’s snowing!”
“Nobody is going to believe us.”
“Maybe we should go get in our sleeping bags.”
“We could build a snow fort.”
“No, seriously. What if it gets really cold and we freeze to death? All I brought is my windbreaker.”
“No way. It’s going to melt right away. It’s summer. This is just some kind of weather event. We should take a picture so we can show everybody.”
So far they had taken pictures of mud, of people pretending to be mud-covered zombies, of James Lorbick pretending to be a mud-haired, dress-wearing monster. Terence had taken a picture of the bone that wasn’t a cow bone. One of the Simpson twins had put a dozen marshmallows in his mouth and someone took a picture of that. Someone had a digital photo of Bryan Jones’s big naked butt.
