by Andrew Smith
“Boys! Boys! Hello! It’s me, Mrs. Nussbaum, coming to pay my final visit!”
I looked from Max, to Cobie, and back to Max again.
We were now, officially, all terrified of Mrs. Nussbaum. After all, there were more than enough reasons why: She seemed to know everything about us; she wanted to eradicate males—something we all happened to be—from the human species; and, most frighteningly, she knew that I’d read her book.
The screen door swung open.
“Are you all dressed?” she crooned.
The cat had landed on the planet of mice.
Here, kitty-kitty.
Cobie Petersen raised his hand. “Mrs. Nussbaum? It’s a good thing you didn’t come in five minutes later. Trent there was about to get into a fistfight with Max, and I just about had Larry talked into letting us carve our names in the walls.”
“You mean have it out means he really wants to fight me?” Max said.
“Oh my!” Mrs. Nussbaum said, “Well, I think carving your names would be a lovely thing for you boys to do. But what’s this about fighting? We can’t have that! No fighting allowed! You boys are supposed to be friends!”
Trent Mendibles rolled over on his bed—crumple!—and faced the wall.
Mrs. Nussbaum looked at each of us, frowning slightly. Robin Sexton ignored it all. He just stared at the ceiling and mouthed inaudible lyrics.
Mrs. Nussbaum cleared her throat. “Larry, would you mind leaving me alone with our boys for a bit?”
“You can have ’em till Saturday, for all I care.”
Larry stood up from his bed, a bit woozy and red eyed, and made his way out of Jupiter.
Mrs. Nussbaum sat down on the foot of Larry’s bed, facing us.
“Sit down, boys! Let’s chat, shall we? Max? Cobie? Ahh-riel?”
We sat on our beds.
Cobie Petersen raised his hand.
“Mrs. Nussbaum? What about those two?”
He pointed at the oblivious Robin Sexton and sulking Trent Mendibles.
“Yoo-hoo! Robin! Trent! Yoo-hoo!” Mrs. Nussbaum squealed.
“Please make it stop,” Max whispered.
Trent Mendibles crumple-rolled over on his bed so he could see our therapist. Robin Sexton removed his toilet paper earplugs and sat up.
And Mrs. Nussbaum told them this: “You two boys can run along. Why don’t you go outside and play? I would like to spend today’s time concentrating on Cobie, Max, and Ahh-riel! I feel they need me more, at this point in their lives.”
And when she said the word lives, I truly felt terrified.
“What are we supposed to play?” Trent Mendibles asked.
“Oh my! Why not just go outside and have a chat about Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners?” Mrs. Nussbaum said.
Trent and Robin looked at each other.
Trent Mendibles shrugged. “Sure. That sounds fun. Do you play, kid?”
Robin Sexton nodded.
And as they walked out, Trent Mendibles asked the twitching kid from Hershey, Pennsylvania, “What’s your user name? I’ll look for you when we get home.”
And that was that.
We were alone with Martha K. Nussbaum, MD, PhD.
“I wrote some more stuff on my index card, ma’am,” Cobie Petersen, laying on his West Virginia–boy accent, said.
“I filled up a whole side of my second one,” Max added.
I’d never revisited my choice about where I’d rather be than at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys since our first session with Mrs. Nussbaum.
“That’s fine! That’s fine! But, honestly, boys, I’d rather talk about something else today. Would that be all right with you?”
Mrs. Nussbaum smiled and made eye contact with each of us. I glanced away as soon as her eyes met mine.
“What would you like to talk about today, Mrs. Nussbaum, ma’am?” Cobie Petersen asked.
“Oh, Ariel! Is something bothering you? You seem nervous,” Mrs. Nussbaum said.
I didn’t answer her. I was too afraid. I shook my head.
Mrs. Nussbaum cleared her throat and smoothed her white doctor’s skirt past her porcelain knees.
“Tell me—what did you think about my book, Ariel?”
I felt the blood drain from my head. I was suddenly so cold.
I didn’t know what to do, so I just shook my head again and shrugged.
Mrs. Nussbaum was not pleased.
She said, “So it seems our Ariel has reverted back to his nonspeaking behavior. That’s a shame, poor boy. I’ll bet you’ve plenty of stories to tell, don’t you? About where you came from? Or perhaps the sad things that happened to you in the refugee camp, you know, before you met Major Knott?”
I felt dizzy. I also felt Cobie Petersen and Max looking at me, but I didn’t raise my eyes from the floor. She was playing a game, and she was about to make me cry, too, and I suddenly hated her.
“Tell me,” Mrs. Nussbaum said, “you boys don’t truly belong here, do you?”
“I’ve been saying that for six weeks,” Max said.
“And why do you suppose your parents sent you here, then?” Mrs. Nussbaum asked us.
Max said, “Because it’s free.”
Mrs. Nussbaum smiled and shook her head.
“No, no, no . . .”
Then Cobie Petersen raised his hand and said, “Ma’am? I think I know why, Mrs. Nussbaum, ma’am.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Nussbaum’s voice returned to her usual delighted squeal.
Cobie Petersen looked Mrs. Nussbaum directly in the eye and said, “Because I think at least one of us is chipped, and I reckon Alex Division is kind of scared of you, ma’am, if you’ll excuse me for saying so.”
Mrs. Nussbaum continued smiling, looking at each of us. She said, “Well! I suppose they’d never get away with something so predictable as sending me a six-toed cat! And you boys make such handsome biodrones.”
Then Mrs. Nussbaum leaned forward and put her face directly in front of each of us, as though we were all living television cameras. She said, “Tell me—Jake, Colton? Would you really do that to your own children? Your very own sons? You would, wouldn’t you?”
And that’s when I threw up, all over my shoes and socks, and the dirty pine floor of Jupiter.
FOX IN THE SNOW
Alex, our pet crow, attempted suicide one time by trying to drink a bottle of our dad’s gin.
He did not succeed. Alex the crow ended up knocking the bottle down from the bar rack, causing it to shatter and dump its contents all over our living room floor.
Natalie cleaned it up.
“Oh, Alex,” Natalie said, as though the two words could adequately sum up all the emptiness inside her.
And from his perch in the corner, Alex said, “Leave me alone. I’m working out a long division problem.”
My brother Max was a powerful influence.
I don’t know why anyone would want to keep a suicidal pet in the first place—where’s the fun in it? You always have to be so careful around them. But so many of the creatures Jake Burgess brought home from his de-extinction lab were bent on offing themselves. I’m still not certain if that made no sense, or if it made perfect sense. When you’re extinct, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do—a sort of biological imperative, a drive, like reproduction. When someone stops you from being extinct, I could easily understand why the drive to return to where you came from might be a strong motivator to self-destruction.
In carrying all these stories, I can’t help but feel this powerful connection between them: the desire to save others; cruelty and choice; selfishness, control, and the loss of will.
Poor Alex. He’s such a sad bird.
I hope you don’t feel bad because I gave you my story about what happened to me in the city of tents, Max. There’s nothing anyone ca
n do about these things now. And you needn’t feel guilty about hating me when I came here, either. There’s only so much a person should be expected to put up with, and Jake and Natalie make you—us—put up with quite a lot, I think.
I learned to survive in the city of tents. I became something of a fox—a shadow that moved so quietly and could disappear so quickly. During the first two weeks I lived in the orphans’ tent, I hardly slept at all. I was always terrified that Isaak, Abel, and those other boys would come back for me again, especially at night.
One morning, during my third week there, Isaak told me after the beds were stacked that I would have to get a bucket and wash the floor of the tent from one end to the other. I didn’t mind working; they’d assigned me plenty of chores since my first days, and for the most part I never spoke to them or argued one time about the things they told me to do, whether it was sweeping up, washing some of the littlest boys’ faces and hands, and even doing their laundry sometimes. But on the day I was told to wash the floor of the tent, it was very warm and all the boys had to go outside so I could do the work.
And when I was nearly finished, Isaak and the other three older boys came back for me. Isaak and Abel stood in one of the doorways to the tent; Paul and Jovan stood in the other. I pretended to ignore them, despite my being trapped.
Isaak said, “Ariel, it looks like you’re almost finished here.”
I kept my head down.
“Almost,” I said.
“That’s good enough. You can be finished now,” Abel told me. He and Isaak stepped inside the tent. Then they shut the door flap and tied it closed behind them.
“We have something we want you to do. Remember, Ariel?” Abel said.
I felt sick.
And I knew I wasn’t prepared to use my knife on one of the boys. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Paul and Jovan came inside and loosened the flap door so they could tie it shut.
I dropped my rag in the bucket and ran at the doorway as fast as I could.
This surprised Jovan and Paul. Maybe they were not used to the boys in our tent resisting them. Even I could calculate the odds well enough to know it was a stupid thing to attempt. I tried forcing my way between Jovan and Paul so I could get out through the open tent flap. I knocked Paul down, but Jovan clipped me in the lips with his elbow. I felt and tasted blood in my mouth, and then I fell against Jovan as he wrapped his arms around my chest.
I was not going to let them hold me down again. Before Abel and Isaak were halfway across the floor, I spun around and broke free of Jovan’s grasp. I saw how I’d smeared some of my blood onto the boy’s face and undershirt, and I was happy for it.
I tore through the flap doorway and ran.
They chased me for a while, but I did not look back, so who can say? It felt like they chased me. I was certain the older boys were there. And I knew that in the crowds and between the tents, my smaller size gave me the advantage. I had learned to find my way through the city of tents, and there was no way Isaak and the others would ever catch me again.
This is how it was in the city of tents. By staying careful, and always watching, I managed to stay out of the filthy hands of Isaak and his sergeants. And I kept to myself, not talking to the other orphans unless it couldn’t be avoided. Because there was always the possibility of having to carry someone else’s terrible story, of feeling compelled to save someone, and I didn’t want to think about who among the other boys were targets for Isaak and Abel and their friends.
But I continued to steal for them. I had to, Max. It was a means by which we came to some difficult mutual accord. I would never trust them, though, and felt certain Isaak and his sergeants were merely waiting for an opportunity to do what they wanted to me again. So I learned how to make it so those opportunities never happened. Like I said, Max, I became a fox, a shadow.
I felt guilty about stealing things, but it had to be done. Eventually, I learned to make excuses for taking the most pointless items—a small bag of clothespins, a book about Greece, a colander. Sometimes Isaak would get angry and tell me he was going to make me pay, but he and the other older boys never did their dirty things in front of anyone else. I think they were too afraid the rest of us might realize we outnumbered them. They were a hunting pack, and their strategy was based on isolating individual prey out from the group.
I had them figured out.
- - -
At the end of my eighth month, the city of tents found itself in the grip of a terrible winter. But I was about to be born, Max.
Snow fell on us for three consecutive days. It was the bitterest cold I’d ever felt. Even with the heater running and our tent closed up, it was impossible to keep warm. The circle of beds on the floor of our tent constricted like a fist around our little heater.
Until that winter, I had only seen snow in photographs. So you can imagine how wonderful it was at first, and how terribly cruel it became very soon after that. Everything was frozen hard—the ground was crusted in white, and there was even ice at the edge of the floor along the wall inside the orphans’ tent.
Some of the boys didn’t have shoes. They suffered tremendously.
And there was never enough food to keep us satisfied, Max. The relief workers didn’t like to come out in the cold, either. Who could blame them? So on the third day of the snowfall, our lunch had been served very late, which caused us all to question whether or not there would even be a dinner.
I sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder among the other boys, hugging my knees to my chest with my feet and face pointed at the heater. I always sat away from Isaak and his boys, 180 degrees separating us, and I’d try to keep my face positioned so our heater would block Isaak from looking at me. I saw Jovan stand up. He walked to the rear wall and grabbed one of our water buckets. I could tell by the way Abel looked at him that they were planning something.
The water pipes had frozen the day before, so the only way for us to get drinking water was to fill our buckets with snow and bring it inside to melt by the heater. The deepest, cleanest snow was on a small hillside at the outer perimeter of the tent city, just inside the chain-link fence.
“Give it to him.” Abel pointed to a new boy named Étan, who was sitting near me.
Étan wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve. He was small, maybe twelve years old, with dirty straw-colored hair and a coat that was too big for him.
“Come on,” Jovan told the boy. “You need to learn how to bring the water.”
I think everyone knew what was happening except for that new boy.
Jovan and the kid went out into the cold.
Maybe a minute passed, and then Isaak, Abel, and Paul got up from their post near the heater and followed Jovan and the new boy outside.
What could anyone do?
I looked around at the other boys sitting on their mats. There were nine of us left inside the tent, and I was the oldest. If that meant anything, I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t as though the others looked to me with the expectation I’d do anything to change the way things were. Like I told you, I never spoke to anyone in the orphans’ tent, anyway. But I thought about my last birthday—the day I’d hidden inside a refrigerator. And my fifteenth birthday was coming up, too, Max, but it was impossible to think about the future, or God, or what warm air felt like pushed along by the winds of summer.
Nobody had the will to intervene.
I heard a boy whisper something to his friend, and the other only lowered his chin and shook his head.
Sick and afraid, without saying anything, I stood up and slipped out the flap door into the icy afternoon.
Nobody was outside in the cold. I could see Isaak and the others far down the row of tents, making their way to the hill by the fence. I cut across to a parallel row so I could catch up to them faster without being seen.
When I came to the end of the row, I turned along
the fence and saw the boys out on the hill. They didn’t notice me.
You know what I thought? It was funny how I knew I couldn’t injure anyone to stop him from hurting me, but at the same time realized that I could not stay in the doubtful warmth of the orphans’ tent and knowingly let Isaak and his boys harm someone else. This doesn’t make me heroic, Max. Heroes make choices. I had no choice.
Étan’s coat lay spread out on the snow. Abel was on his knees, choking the smaller boy and pinning him down on top of the coat, with Étan’s shirt pulled up and twisted around the boy’s struggling arms, while Jovan and Paul tugged at Étan’s clothing. And Isaak stood at the boy’s feet, unbuttoning his pants and laughing, telling Paul and Jovan to hold the kid’s legs still.
Max, I held the knife I’d stolen on my first day. I’d wrapped the handle of it with the rag because I didn’t want it to slip in my hand.
The boy was putting up a good fight. I thought he must have been braver than me.
Isaak was angry. Abel punched the smaller boy in the back of his head, and Paul and Jovan wrestled with Étan’s kicking legs.
They were struggling so much they didn’t see me as I walked right up to Isaak.
BOYS IN THE WOODS
Throwing up all over the place has a way of ending therapy sessions.
Larry was not pleased. He was sitting outside Jupiter when Max, Cobie, and I—covered from my knees down in vomit—came through the cabin’s screen door and made our way across the grounds toward the spider cave. My feet sloshed in hot acid puke.
Mrs. Nussbaum, fanning the air in front of her nose, followed.
“What the hell?” Larry said.
Cobie Petersen shook his head grimly. “Puke. A bad one.”
“Puke volcano,” Max added.
Then, because I thought about puke volcanoes and smelled the hot stench vapors rising in the humid afternoon from my shoes and socks, I threw up again on the grass beside the dining pavilion.