Jacked Up

by Erica Sage

  My churchboys tried to warn me

  That Book you got makes me so holy—

  They rapped on.

  Later, I would think about the sheer number of secrets dropped into that locked box.

  But at that moment, a counselor took my cell phone, and everyone else’s, exchanging them for Bibles.

  My soul died a little.

  Please forgive them, Sir Mix-A-Lot. They know not what they’ve done.

  “Behold Eden Springs, Nick,” Matthew said as we walked through the gate to the pool. “I know Eve was totally nude in Eden, but this is a close second.”

  He tossed his beach towel on a deck chair. He surveyed the sea of half-naked campers like a captain taking stock of his ship. Meanwhile, I kept my eye out for Jesus and the PC Box.

  “Asstastic,” Matthew said, more to himself than me. “Everywhere, fine, fine ass.” He yanked his eyes away from the fine, fine ass. “I know that’s what you’re thinking. I can see you making your assessments.”

  I’d actually been pondering how much money I could pay Jesus to let me pull my paper out of the box. And wondering where I could stash my Harry Potter towel to avoid further scrutiny. But I said, “I was thinking titillating. Literally titillating.”

  “Yes! I love me some SAT vocab!” Matthew shouted. “This dude’s going Ivy League!”

  I laughed and folded my towel into an inside-out bundle so that no one could see the boy wizard.

  Matthew shoved me. “Quit doing your laundry and see the sights!”

  They didn’t tell you on the “What to Pack” list not to bring a Harry Potter towel. They also didn’t tell you not to bring your tarot cards, your crystal balls, your voodoo dolls, or your statues of Aphrodite. They didn’t tell you not to bring alcohol or cigarettes or cyanide tablets or LSD or knives or guns either.

  And they didn’t tell you not to pack bikinis.

  Apparently not all temptation is equal.

  “Titillating!” Matthew repeated, beaming at me. “Nick’s a boob guy.”

  I wasn’t a boob guy. I wasn’t an anything guy, really. I mean a hot girl is a hot girl. But even Diana used to give me a hard time about my lack of romantic experience. You should be able to diagram the female anatomy at least as well as a sentence, buddy, she used to say. And not because of health class worksheets.

  And of course Jack was chagrined by my lack of sins of the f lesh. I imagined him sitting in a tree with binoculars, pedophile-like, staring down at all those leggy ladies.

  Next to me, Matthew’s voice took on the Martin Luther King Jr. boom. “I have a dream, Nick. I have a dream that one day, in the sweltering heat of Eden Springs … well”—he went back to his own voice—“I don’t know how the speech goes. But pretty much there’re two girls to every guy, so that’s my dream.”

  As he stood there in his swim trunks with his tennis player–lean physique, I was sure that there were more than two ladies for every Matthew. More like thirty-two girls for every Matthew, and negative eleven girls for every Nick. After adjusting for those numbers, I needed Homeschool Charles to figure out how the odds played out for the rest of the guys.

  I continued Matthew’s rendition of “I Have a Dream” scandalously, at least as far as my memory would serve. “Let freedom ring … from the mountainsides.”

  “And prodigious hillsides.”

  “And curvaceous slopes.”

  Clearly, MLK had been a boob guy.

  And Eden Springs was worried about my Harry Potter towel.

  Matthew hollered out to the swimmers and sliders, “I love you, Eden Springs!” He threw his arms into the air and whooped. The counselors, the campers, everyone looked over at him. “Fist pumps for Christ!” He yelled once more. A couple kids pumped their fists. “Hells to the yes.”

  A girl with a book—she was too far away for me to make out her face—looked over and gave a slight wave. There was only one girl with a book. Natalie. I waved. Then I remembered that I was standing next to Matthew.

  “Is that how they do it at Valley Christian? MLK-turned-porn?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t just thought prettycute girl was waving at me.

  “Hells to the no, Nick. My parents pay for me to go there so that I can be ‘positively inf luenced’ by all these blessed lovers of Jesus. And then the private-school girls take their clothes off for one week at Eden Springs, and it’s all worth it.”

  Natalie was in a bikini, just like most of the other girls, but it wasn’t the bikini. It was the way the light shimmered off the pool and winked from her sunglasses. It was the way her painted toenails bounced to the pop song blasting from the speakers. It was the way the navy blue of her bikini bottom lay against her pale thigh. Frankly, it was the way she read—or wrote in!—a book by the pool, while everyone else played volleyball and chicken and Marco Polo. “I get it,” I said to Matthew, just to say something.

  “Oh no, young Nicolas, I don’t think you do. My life lacks the titillating pleasures of your public school experience.”

  “There’s nothing titillating about my experience, personally.” My only experiences with girls were awkward things you needed to apologize for.

  “Ah, but Nick, there’s at least the possibility …” His voice fell away in reverence. “My experience is pent-up and buttoned underneath starchy blouses.” He grabbed my arm, and I stopped pretending not to stare at Natalie. “Speaking of asstastic and titillating both …”

  It was hard not to see who he was talking about. Long golden legs, long dark hair. White bikini. Red lips. “Ho-Lo.”

  It was the superhot girl from the bus. “Ho-Lo?” I asked.

  “Her name’s Holly. Ho … well, that’s obvious. Lo, as in like J-Lo.”

  “Jennifer Lopez? She’s our mom’s age.”

  “Don’t overthink it. We couldn’t figure out how to combine her name and Kylie Jenner’s,” Matthew said, watching Holly saunter to a deck chair.

  Watching Holly was like watching one of those slow-motion shampoo commercials. Slo-Mo-Ho-Lo.

  Matthew interrupted his own reverie: “Speaking of fast girls.” He led me to the waterslides. “The Jezebel,” he said, pointing to the slide’s name.

  I laughed. At the top, kids lay on their bellies on mats and readied themselves for a race straight down the yellow slide to the water below.

  “Head first, that’s how she likes it,” Matthew quipped. “Right, Holly?” he called over to her.

  Holly looked up. Matthew waved innocently. Holly just looked away.

  “The line is long,” he said to me, “but it’s worth it.”

  I laughed because he was funny—supersmart funny.

  “I mean, I’m sure Payton thought the wait was worth it, but he clearly got sick of the long line of male suitors she entertained,” he continued.

  I didn’t really know this girl Holly—though to hear Matthew chatter on and on, others seemed to know her quite well. Just like Charlotte.

  I didn’t want to think about my oldest sister. I loathed how she had treated Diana after coming back from Eden Springs. I despised that this camp, with its list of rights and wrongs, had snipped the threads that tethered my sisters to each other. I detested that nothing on this earth could tie them back together—not even regret after Diana died, if Charlotte felt that at all.

  “Yeah, this line’s too long,” I said. “Let’s catch this one later.”

  We headed over to the Belly of the Whale slide. Along with a couple other kids, we f lipped in loops and circles through the dark tunnels on the extra-large tube. Over and over, I raced down that slide, and I refused to think about Charlotte, and I refused to think about my confession.

  Matthew and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the pool, mostly going down the seven waterslides. We jumped off the ten-foot platform-cliff into the deep end of the pool. And when we’d had our fill of snacks and ogling and water sports, we walked back to the chairs to grab our towels and head to the showers.

  Except, my Harry Potter towel was go
ne.

  Matthew rubbed his hair dry with his towel while I searched the pool deck. It had cleared out a bit as people left to get ready for dinner. Goth was lying out in a pool chair next to Nick Sampson—my Donkey Lottery nemesis—and the wheelchair girl. Charles was talking to a group of bikini-clad girls. I headed over to him, sure he’d swiped my towel. Maybe burned it. Like the Joan of Arc of beach towels.

  Then a hand on fell on my shoulder and spun me around. Jesus. I immediately panicked. Had he read what I’d dropped in the PC Box? They’d all assured us that nobody read them. And I’d seen the size of that padlock but … what if?

  “You the kid with the towel?” he asked, his voice lacking the God-boom one might expect.

  I nodded. There could be only one towel of import.

  He handed me a brand-new—really, there was a Polo-brand price tag on it—yellow towel.

  “I already wrote about this and put it in the PC Box,” he said.

  “About the Harry Potter towel?”

  He nodded. “A prayer,” he said and waved me away. “No need to thank me, man.”

  The evening service in the sanctuary, where I’d expected venomous snakes and raising of hands and healing of the crippled, was oddly normal. The speaker from the morning, the guy who had welcomed us into camp, turned out to be the pastor, Pastor Kyle.

  He looked nothing like any pastor I’d ever seen. Though, in truth, the only ones I’d ever seen were featured on the nightly news. The ones accused of child rape. All pornstache and thick glasses.

  But Pastor Kyle looked like Adonis. Like Paul Walker (may he rest in peace). After seeing the plastic-perfect kids modeling on the cover of the camp brochure, I was prepared for his tanned body and white teeth, and yet I found the pastor’s beauty—yes, that’s what I said, beauty!—unearthly. I’m sure he led a lot of campers to God; girls would follow this guy anywhere. And boys? Well, they’d just follow the girls. I mean, everyone knows the Adam and Eve story.

  “I know the Silent Three was an amazing time for you. I know the Lord was with you in your time of ref lection and prayer. All those sins and secrets, friends.” He talked about sin, as they all do, but without the hellfire and brimstone I was anticipating. We would have another chance with the PC Box tonight, he told us, gesturing to an older woman on stage, who shuff led off in her too-short shorts—presumably to retrieve it. Then Pastor Perfect told us a story from his own childhood where he did something wrong. “But that’s a mute point,” he said, “because Jesus saves!”

  For God’s sake, Jesus needed to save him from his grammar.

  “Moot,” I said to Matthew, who sat next to me, rapt. I nudged him. “He meant it was a moot point.”

  He shrugged me off, apparently not interested in the irony of a point in a speech, which you say so that people can hear you, being mute.

  I felt like the pastor’s grammar failings had to be a sign that the universe was balancing itself, though. Like, Pastor Kyle couldn’t have it all. To have those bright teeth, he needed to sacrifice his understanding of the English language.

  I had the latter, thus my need for braces and a tan.

  While everyone jotted down some scripture that f lashed on the screen, I took out my little composition book, turned past the Jack Kerouac tally sheet, and started a list: MUTE—MOOT, I wrote on the next page.

  The older woman scuttled back onto the stage, interrupting Pastor Kyle’s massacre of vital grammatical rules. She stood on her tiptoes, gesticulating and whispering something into the pastor’s ear. The pastor leaned down, pushing the mic as far away from her as possible. Then she hurried away, nearly tripping down the stairs.

  “Okay, my Champions,” he said, but it lacked his Lord-lovin’ fervor of moments before. “Now, there is no need to panic.” Which is a sure way to incite panic. Immediately there were whispers, murmurs, oh god, oh god, oh god. “There’s been an incident.”

  Eyes darted. Faces paled.

  Was it a terrorist attack?

  Another 9/11, on West Coast soil?

  A president assassinated? (Actually, that one might warrant a celebration—at least, for the eleven Democrats in the crowd.)

  “We’re hoping someone will come forward immediately.” Pause. “We’ll get to the bottom of this atrocity.” Pause. “Happiness will happen here, despite this grave situation.” He was getting his evangelical groove back.

  He cleared his throat.

  There was a collective intake of breath.

  “Someone has stolen the PC Box.”

  You know those movies where the plane f lies over unsuspecting civilians (often in rags and farming rice paddies or shepherding goats, because people in rags are worth more emotionally in film and worth less in wartime economics … at least to the people pulling the trigger)? The propellers beating against the sky, loud and violent. Then the whistle of the falling bomb and the explosion as it hits the earth.

  And then the vacuum of all sound. The silence, complete and irrevocable and soul sucking.

  Pastor Kyle’s words dropped down on me. And then the heat. My nerves f lashed fire through my arms and face and left me tingling, then numb.

  Someone was going to read my confession. My brain scrambled for the words I’d scrawled on that paper. What did I write? What did I say? I mean, exactly. Could I explain it away? Could I make it a joke?

  The campers were silent. Blank eyes. Clenching jaws. They were in their heads. What did we write? Exactly? Oh no. But did we write the name? Did we say our names? Her name? His name? Their names?

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  And then the f lush of shame as we realized what we wrote. Exactly.

  The sound filtered back into our brains, our faces blanching, our eyes searching those around us for sympathy.

  I looked for Jack. Not because he had stolen the box. But because this was his fault regardless. I shouldn’t even have to care. I wouldn’t care, if it hadn’t been for his constant blathering.

  The one time I really wanted him, and he’d vanished.

  Who the hell stole the box? Suddenly, I wasn’t seeing potential sympathizers in the crowd around me. I was seeing culprits. We were all seeing culprits. Our shame had faded to fury, our eyes narrowing. Who the holy hell stole that box? Our confessions, our secrets, the things we refused to say aloud to people, not even in the dark.

  I looked at Matthew, but he stared at the carpet, unblinking. Passively terrified. I don’t know what he’d written on his paper, but no way he’d stolen the box. That, or he was a fantastic actor. Was he in drama at his private school? Did he say that? No, tennis.

  Payton’s face had turned rage red.

  Holly’s mascara was running.

  Charles watched me, nose f laring.

  He’d picked me as the culprit, clearly.

  Eyes f lashed from face to face. We searched for the offender now, not the sympathizers.

  “It’s okay, I didn’t write my name on either of mine,” a girl in pink shorts said to her friend behind me.

  I turned.

  “Neither did I,” her friend said back, and then her mouth fell open. “But I wrote his. I wrote his. Oh, my God.” She slid back down into her seat and hid her face in her hands.

  Murmurs, condolences, rumors washed through the crowd.

  I saw Natalie then, just behind pink-shorts girl and her friend. She scanned the back of the room, mouth slightly open—searching for something, maybe. Or someone. She was agitated, but not crying like most of the girls. She brushed her hair back and pushed through the aisle. I watched her turn around once more. She took us all in, scanned the whole room, then she walked out the door.

  I told Matthew I needed to go to the bathroom and then excused myself down the row of campers. Most of them were out of their seats, standing with their arms around someone else who thought they had it worse than the next person. Groups had formed up the aisles and in front of the stage. The hugging, the tears.

  I stepped out into the night, the door closing slowl
y behind me, trapping the chatter and prayer and sobs in the sanctuary. I stood in relative silence. The wind whispered its own secrets through the leaves of small trees. I listened for footsteps. I peered into the shadows cast by light posts surrounding the field. Natalie was nowhere.

  No. Natalie was somewhere, and I wanted to find her. Maybe it was worry. Maybe it was curiosity. Or maybe it was suspicion. Maybe it was all three.

  I walked the path through the middle of camp, scanning the field, the empty porches rolling out from each building. There was no one. Every camper, counselor, pastor, worker was in the sanctuary dealing with the fallout of the PC Box theft.

  I turned to face the cabins. Maybe Natalie had snuck out to be alone, to figure out her own mess without the crying and condolences, without the it’s so much worse for me though sentiments that (accidentally?) slipped out or emanated from superficial hugs.

  I didn’t know which cabin was hers. Light poured through the curtains of some windows; others were dark. I knocked on the first cabin door, waited. No answer. I skipped steps up to the second f loor and knocked. No answer.

  When I turned around to head back down the stairs, a silhouette of someone walking toward the hillside caught my eye. I couldn’t tell if it was her. I couldn’t even tell if it was a girl or boy. But I hurried down the stairs and jogged across the field anyway.

  The hill turned out to be more like a cliff. It was dry, rocky, sagebrush–covered terrain, clearly not maintained by the crew who kept Eden Springs green and fresh. Unauthentically perfect, just like humans prefer. Nothing’s perfect—but it can at least look that way, right? Facebook, Snapchat, friendships, marriages, dinners, family vacations, gardens, houses, kids. I thought about my own family. Façade after façade.

  There was no sign of a trail, or of the person who’d been walking up it. No sign of anyone else outside, either. They were all still locked away with their sorrows, it seemed.

  I walked along the hillside and toward the barns, and realized there was an old, barbed wire fence surrounding the camp. The terrain, the cliff, the fence. Clearly I wasn’t supposed to leave, even if I found the trail. And neither was the person on the cliff. But there must have been way to get up there.