by Erica Sage
Suddenly, I heard the scrape of rocks. A shadow moved behind the barns. I changed course again. Slinking along the wall of the building, I looked for Natalie. I looked for any shape.
And then I found it.
It was a donkey.
It shifted its weight, sending more rocks down the embankment. The donkey barely registered my presence. It was probably exhausted from carrying the lucky lotto winners to camp.
I leaned up against the barn. I had no idea what I was doing, besides looking for a curious, pretty girl.
I wondered if Natalie had left the building because she knew something about the PC Box. There was no other reason to slip out so quietly. And, unlike everyone else, she hadn’t looked traumatized. She hadn’t been crying or hugging.
What were the odds that Natalie had done it?
But then I thought, maybe Pastor Kyle was behind this. Maybe it was all a trick. I’d heard one time about a church where the pastor had arranged for gunmen to burst into the building. They’d lined up members of the congregation and asked them if they believed in God. The idea was to see who would deny Christ at gunpoint. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how many people stood their religious ground. I do know that no one got killed, but it was still some sick shit.
Maybe that’s what Pastor Kyle was doing. I mean, this camp went all-out. Maybe this was all leading up to some kind of (divine!) intervention. Maybe our parents were all going to show up, sit at tables with us, and talk us out of our drug addictions, drinking problems, and gambling issues.
But I had no idea how I’d find out if he was doing that. And for the moment, Natalie was the one who was acting suspiciously.
The donkey shifted, closed its eyes.
“Have you seen a girl? She’s about this tall …”
The donkey continued his silent treatment. Useless.
“Jack?” I asked the night. He was constantly telling me what to do. For once, I could actually use his intrusive line of reasoning. “Jack.”
He didn’t appear.
“Are you Jack?” I asked the donkey. “Because he is a total jackass, so you kind of fit the bill. No offense.”
The donkey said nothing. Clearly no offense had been taken.
“Hey.” A hand landed on my shoulder, and I spun around.
It wasn’t Jack or Natalie. It was the Jesus character.
“What’re ya doin’ out here?” He didn’t sound at all holy. He sounded like a regular man, like at the pool earlier.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“There ain’t nobody out here.” He sounded like a regular hillbilly man.
“I saw somebody come out here, so—”
“Like I said, there ain’t nobody out here.” He was like Jesus appearing on an episode of Duck Dynasty.
“Okay …” I wanted to ask him what he was doing out here. Jesus was born in a manger, and I was in fact standing next to a barn, but this dude was a wee bit bigger than an infant and had no signs of frankincense or myrrh or Bible-times diapers.
I eyed the man. As Jesus, he carried the PC Box around all day. He could very well have stolen it and hidden it out in the barn.
“Lemme walk ya back,” he said, suddenly all friendly. And, quite frankly, acting a little suspicious.
Jesus followed behind me as we walked around the barn. I craned my neck to peek into the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the box. His hand landed on my shoulders and he ushered me forward a bit more quickly.
He was an older guy, probably in his thirties. Hair pulled back in a ponytail and beard a little gray. His skin was pale, too pale for the real Jesus. And he didn’t even bother with bronzer.
“You know Jesus was from the Middle East, right?” I snarked.
He looked down at me, but kept his hand on my shoulder till we’d both stepped out onto the grassy field. “How ya know I ain’t?”
I fixed my eyes on the hillside, searching for signs of movement, and pondered how to answer. I wanted to point out the obvious, namely his hillbilly accent. But—who knows—maybe hillbilly accents were a thing in the Middle East. Maybe the goat herders of the Middle East sounded a lot like the crawfish hunters of rural America. Maybe there was a global hillbilly community. An Iraqi Duck Dynasty. Mexican Duck Dynasty. Tibetan Duck Dynasty. A dynasty of Dynasties!
Hillbilly Jesus probably wasn’t going to follow my train of thought, though, so I answered, “Because of Donald Trump and the Muslim ban.”
“Touché.” He laughed. Whoa. Hillbilly Jesus used a French word. Was he trying to impress me? Shepherd me into his f lock with his broad sense of language and culture? What’s French for gag? “How you likin’ camp?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” I said.
There was no sign of Natalie at all anymore. Not up on the hill, not down here in the field.
“Listen,” I said, “I can find my way back from here.”
He ignored me. “You on scholarship?” he asked.
“Me? No. Why?” I mean, I didn’t go to some rich private school like most of the kids at the camp, but my family was doing just fine. “Do I look like a poor kid?”
“No, but yer attitude is poor.”
Oh, jokes! Snarky bastard. “Well, clearly they don’t pay you enough here, because your Jesus accent is poor.”
Jesus laughed and laughed. “I asked about scholarship because I was wonderin’ if yer on work crew.”
“Uh, no.” I tried to walk faster, to shake this guy, but he kept at it.
“Hey, it ain’t bad. Some of yer friends over there are on my crew.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m Jesus by day, custodian by night. I was feedin’ the donkeys jus’ now. Toilets next.” He nodded toward the sanctuary. “Yer friends help out.”
“Well, I don’t need the money.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “Maybe you jus’ needda work.”
I got the feeling he was calling me an entitled ass, but I decided to go the way of a docile donkey and take no offense. “Okay, cool, thanks.”
Then he added, “An’ forget that business with the towel. Have a good time. You got yerself a new towel, donchya?”
“I never cared about the towel,” I said. I could feel nerves tugging at my insides. I was running out of time. “I care about that PC Box.”
“That’s some messed up sh—uh, business.” Jesus raised his eyebrows and swiped a hand across his forehead.
I wondered if he’d been in that barn turning too much water into wine. Maybe Jack had been in there with him. “Are they going to do something about it?” I asked, hoping I could shake him before we got to the sanctuary. I wanted to get on my detective way.
“What’re they supposed to do?”
“Search the camp? Appeal to the goodwill of kidkind? Interrogate campers, cabin by cabin, with bamboo up the fingernails? Crucify someone?” My helpless fury stirred. “I don’t know. Something.”
The camp had managed to provide me with a Polo towel in order to conquer such evil as magic, but they had no plan for the evil of stealing. And, as always, Jesus was some white dude. The hypocrisy confounded me.
“Look, it’s going to be okay.”
I shook my head, defeated. He didn’t understand, and it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere tonight without this character.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
Oh, gawd. Not that platitude. Hypocrisy and naïveté. The reason bad things happened was that people were bad.
“Besides. It ain’t so bad. John 1:9, Nick.”
Hillbilly Jesus quoting the Bible. Whoa. Actual whoa. Too bad I had no idea what he was talking about.
We were halfway across camp when the doors to the sanctuary burst open and all the campers poured out of it. Some bass pumped through the speakers and out the door, but I couldn’t tell what song was being bastardized this time. The campers were in pairs and groups, and I could hear them laughing and singing.
Maybe they’d found
the box. I quickened my step, leaving Jesus to clean up after the humans and the asses.
Matthew was nowhere to be found. Natalie was still AWOL. Everyone was forming groups and sitting in circles on the well-lit patio, Bibles and notepads open on their laps. Holly was the last person to come out of the sanctuary. She somehow didn’t look like the girl I’d seen at the pool that afternoon. She was smaller somehow, chin lower, eyes downcast. It didn’t take away from how sexy she was though.
Bold as it was to approach Red Lips, something about Matthew’s rumor report at the pool that afternoon made me feel like I could. If she’d Netf lix-and-chilled with every other guy, she could talk to me, right? “What’s going on?” I asked her.
“Nothing. How’re you?”
“No, like, what are we supposed to be doing now?”
“Oh.” She looked around. “I don’t know. I was in the bathroom.” She sounded different than she had on the bus. Different than at the pool.
That’s what it was: she sounded real. No Pampers/campers rhymes. No lipstick. She was shell-shocked, like the rest of us. The disappearance of the box had knocked us all down a peg, I guess.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I just. You know. What people could say.” She looked back at the sanctuary door. “What people do say.”
I thought of how Matthew had described her. I wondered if it annoyed her. But she had to know what it looked like, the way she dressed, those red lips.
“Maybe—I mean, probably—I need to just pray about it,” she said, and she sounded sincere.
“Where’ve you been?” someone asked from behind me.
Holly looked up, and I turned to find Payton. I remembered the way he had glared at me on the bus. Oh no.
We answered simultaneously:
“Barn.”
“Bathroom.”
“Together?” The WTF on his face made the reason for the question clear. But it was a stupid one anyway. Obviously barn and bathroom meant we were not together.
“I was looking for you,” Payton said to Holly. “We’re supposed to be in groups.”
Holly’s demeanor changed back to Red Lips from the bus. She crossed her arms and stepped a little closer to me. Double down on the Oh no.
Step away from the nerdy kid, Ho-Lo, I wanted to say. I like chess—not that I’m going to tell anyone that—but please don’t make me your pawn in this game with Payton.
Saved by the Goth. Stewart walked over. “Anyone see Natalie?”
I said nothing. I was standing in the middle of a romantic showdown of some kind between Payton and Holly, and Natalie may or may not have been scaling a dusty cliff, and I didn’t want any part of it.
Goth led the three of us to the group of kids from our bus: brother and sister (Chris and Christina, Christastic!), Wheelchair Girl, and Nose-Picker.
“We were just debriefing about what happened tonight,” Goth informed us.
“What are they going to do about it?” I jumped in.
“What do you mean, what are they going to do about it?” Goth asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
Clearly he’d misunderstood my tone. “No, I mean, I want them to do something about it. That’s what I’m saying. I’m keenly interested in their plans.”
The group eyed me.
I said, “Look, are we going to look for the box, or are we going to interview people, or what?”
“That’s what the pastor is working on. We can only control what we can control.” Goth sounded like the counselor my parents sent me to. “Let’s talk about how we’re feeling. How are we doing right now?” So, so counselor-y.
And so that’s what we did. For about thirty minutes. Chris. Christina. Nose-Picker. Goth. Holly. Payton. Everyone’s feelings, not surprisingly, could be summarized this way: super-duper-Christastically pissed and scared.
I wanted to punch a wall, sitting there. It was like counseling all over. But it was so stupid. I’d done this all before, and here’s what I knew: Talking about feelings doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change your sisters, and it doesn’t change your parents, and it doesn’t change anything that’s happened in a family. It doesn’t change the weight of your parents’ marriage on your shoulders.
But my confession, so recklessly stuffed into a box that was now missing, could change what remained of my family.
I had to find that box.
Just as I moved to get up, Goth knelt in front of Wheelchair Girl. I’d forgotten about her. I assumed she hadn’t written a confession. I hadn’t seen her write one, and I didn’t know if she could. She hadn’t spoken. From what I could tell, she communicated with her eyes. “Monica,” he said, and touched her arm. Goth asked her yes/no questions, and her eyes moved right for yes, left for no. Yes, she was having fun. No, she was not sad. No, she was not scared.
I envied this girl one thing. And it was that. She was not sad, and she was not scared.
I was both of those things. All the gawddamn time.
And then Natalie appeared, joining the group with her light step. And, of course, a book in her hand. “Sorry. I’m really sorry. I had to get out of there after that debacle. I did some praying. And I really think it’s going to be okay.” She sat next to Nose-Picker and gave her a side hug.
They all did the hug thing. I did not. I watched Natalie. I looked for signs of dust on her knees, on her shoes. I didn’t buy her story about needing to pray.
“I really do think it’s going to be okay,” she repeated. “Not just for me. For everybody here.”
“Well, praise Jesus, then, right?” And just like that, Holly turned on the super chipper voice I’d heard her use on the bus.
It seemed our debriefing was officially over. Natalie spotted Pastor Kyle and headed his way. Goth sat quietly by the girl in the wheelchair. The kid he was hanging out with by the pool earlier came over and sat by them. Payton wandered over to another group, but he kept his eye on ours. Well, on Holly.
Holly glanced at him.
“Is that your boyfriend?” I asked her.
“No.” Then, quite loudly, “He’s my ex-boyfriend.”
“Are we praising Jesus for that?” I asked. “T-G-I-J and all that?”
She kind of laughed. The smile on her face seemed honest again. She was pretty in that moment. Pretty in the way being real makes someone pretty.
She f lipped her notebook closed, and I noticed the guitar design on the front.
“Do you play the guitar?” I asked.
She considered me. Then, “Um, yes.”
“You do?”
“What, is that hard to believe?” she asked, still smiling.
“Are you, like, in a band and stuff?”
She blushed and looked away. “I wouldn’t call it a band. I play with a couple of people, yeah. If we had a drummer, we might be a band.”
“That’s so cool.” It was cool, and it made her even hotter. She had the perfect body, and she played an instrument.
She rolled her eyes, “Yeah, well,” she said, dismissively, but she was smiling. “I play mostly by myself. I actually like to write songs too,” she continued, “but I’ve never really tried to sing any of them. I don’t sing. Like, really don’t sing. But, I think—” And then she stopped.
I turned to see what she’d seen. Payton. Her eyes darkened for just a split second before she asked, “Do you want to pray with me?”
She and I hadn’t moved. We still sat cross-legged on the ground while the others milled about. I started to decline, but she grabbed my hand. “Lord, Your power is so great, so grand, and so big. So, so big.” She talked too loudly. She definitely wanted everyone (especially those with broken appendages) to hear. Her other handed rested on my thigh. “We are just so blessed. Thank you for bringing Nick to camp, Jesus. Funny Nick.” She held my hand quite tightly. The other one brushed my shorts against my leg. “Thank You for breakups and the rough roads and the hardships. All the hard, hard things.” Her hands squeezed the parts of me she touche
d. “In Your name, Amen.”
She opened her eyes, and they f lashed golden mischief. Shit. I was waxing poetic.
“A—” I croaked. Jesus. My voice hadn’t cracked since eighth grade. “Amen.”
Holly looked back at Payton, and smiled even more triumphantly. Then she stood up, brushed off her shorts, and walked off toward some other group.
I stayed where I was, abandoned to think about big and stiff and firm and hard, and her hand making it so. I could not move.
Natalie was staring at me, and her wry smile was growing. Now we’d both seen something we didn’t want the other to see. I’d seen her leave the building, and she’d seen the effect a hot girl’s hand has on a virgin grammar nerd, known as Turwaithion to his Elvish buddies.
“Do you need a book?” she said, holding one up. “You know, for your lap?”
“Where’d you go tonight?”
She narrowed her eyes, a touch of her smile remaining. “Why are you asking?”
“Because I saw you leave.”
She laughed.
I continued, “Why did you leave right after the box was stolen?”
She bent over in laughter. People were watching. “Wait, are you interrogating me?”
“No, I’m just asking.”
“Is it weird that I’m f lattered by your suspicion?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“What’s my motive?”
“I have no idea.”
“You’re a terrible detective, Nick.” She explained, “The motive is the path to reasonable suspects.”
“So what’s your motive?”
“You’re so bad at this!” She laughed some more. “I need to marginalize some Sherlock Holmes for you.”
She was right; I did need that book. Thankfully I no longer needed it to cover my lap, but I did need some crime-solving mentorship. “Look,” I said, “it’s just that I didn’t even want to put my confession in that box, and now it’s gone.”
“Then why did you do it?”
Because of you, I wanted to say. Her bright eyes. The eager way she’d called over Jesus and the box. The way she danced to the songs. The way she believed in it all. “Because everyone else was,” I said, immediately regretting it. “And yes, I jump off bridges when my friends do.”