“Fuck off, dickhole,” I said, suddenly feeling beads of sweat forming on my back.
His mouth clicked shut. The girl lowered her coffee and stared at me.
I rubbed my eyes with one hand. “Sorry,” I said reflexively.
I realized I was grouping the Buddies and the campers into Us and Them. Mouth Buddy was a Them, just like Bryce, just like the ones that had shot Lump’s pictures or torn them up. Just like the ones Charlie and I were always railing against.
They edged past me, not saying anything, but clearly making mental notes about avoiding the weird new guy.
* * *
“In your defense,” Faisal said, “that guy is a dickwad. Like a big, squishy fistful of dicks.”
Faisal and I were in charge of carving; Matty and Michael were on design and crowd control.
The kids were all sitting at child-size tables covered in clear plastic, the same as the tiny table Faisal and I had to sit at because all the adult tables had been set up in the mess hall. My knees rose up six inches over the lip of the table, but not over the backlog of grapefruit-sized pumpkins arranged in a pyramid on my right. Faisal’s pumpkamid was on his left.
“Dickhole,” I said.
“You say hole, I say wad. Guy’s the king of dick nouns. Speaking of which, I think this one is supposed to be balls,” he said, showcasing a small pumpkin. “I think this kid wants me to carve balls into his pumpkin.” There were two very distinct ball-like circles on the pumpkin.
“I’m pretty sure this one wants me to carve him stomping on a school. Or an orphanage. I can’t really tell.” The picture on the pumpkin showed a stick figure stomping on a small building that was erupting into flames while even smaller stick figures flooded out. I stabbed the top of the pumpkin for the thousandth time, poking slits into the tough orange skin.
“What’s up with jack-o’-lanterns, man?”
“It’s probably cabin fever,” I said, still stabbing the top of the pumpkin.
Every time I readjusted my feet they’d bang against the table and threaten to send the pumpkins rolling off the table. It was impossible to get comfortable without toppling them.
“No, not these ones in particular. I mean in general. Like, why did someone think, ‘Hey, I should carve a face into this gourd and then put some fire in it’? You’re the brains: what’s up with pumpkin carving?”
“I don’t know.”18
Just past a table full of girls, Matty and Michael were doing the best they could to manage Bryce and his amazing, charming, diplomatic friends.
“I’m surprised they’re holding it together around Bryce,” I said, pointing with my chin toward Matty and Michael.
“When it comes down to it, they’re clutch. They’re good, non-murdering folk.”
“They remind me of some people,” I said out loud, instead of just thinking it like I meant to. I saw him nod in my peripheral vision. “Like a different, healthier version.”
“They’re good together. Oh hey, by the way, I got a text from Matty earlier. Said she mentioned her mom to you.” He said it not quite looking at me, his lips not quite smiling.
“Uh, yeah, offhandedly. Said she died.” I didn’t know why he was looking at me like that.
He nodded, his smile defining itself just a little more. “She doesn’t talk about her mom. Pretty much ever, at all, to anybody. If she mentioned her to you, then you’re doing something right.”
“I imagine that’s a pretty tough subject,” I said, thinking about Charlie’s parents. About Jordan. Thinking about how Charlie and I are the skeletons in their closets. How we probably don’t come up in their conversations, and if we do, it’s major.
“Especially for someone like her. Listen, what I’m about to tell you, you’d find out anyway. And I already asked her if I could talk to you about it. But her mom died pretty suddenly; Matty was eleven.” Unlike the story about the house in the woods he’d told around the campfire that first night, this time he treaded lightly, searching for solid footing in each sentence and syllable like he wasn’t used to telling this story and didn’t know where to start. “She was having—Matty, I mean—was having a birthday party at this place called Duncan’s World of Water. And we were there all day, running around, going down the slides, making up names for the flips off the boards—just, you know, kid stuff. And we’re getting ready to go and they’re clearing the pool out, and Matty gets this look in her eye after seeing that everyone’s mostly out of the pool and says ‘hang on,’ and goes running back toward the diving board. But her feet gave and the only two people that saw her go down were me and her mom, but everybody heard her head hit the tiles before she fell in.”
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit is right. So her mom goes tearing though us and jumps in the pool and pulls her out of this little red cloud she’s floating in. And they give her CPR even though she was only in the water for a few seconds, and an ambulance comes, Matty has a mid-sized concussion, and that’s…” He trailed off and watched his friends. “That’s where it should’ve ended. Except Matty’s mom cut her arm, just, I mean, the smallest bit, like just a scrape, on something in the pool—probably a piece of metal under the diving board or one of the water filters, something. Up near her armpit. And it got infected and got in her blood. She died about a week later. One of those one-in-a-million things, you know?” He breathed out through his nose and I put my hand down when I realized I was rubbing the front of my throat.
“I don’t really know what to say,” I said, honestly. And I didn’t. Here was somebody who’d been through one of the most awful tragedies, the worst possible types of defining moments, and yet you’d never know it from talking to her. It was the kind of situation where you could convince yourself that it was your fault and let that guilt eat you from the inside out, but Matty was solid. At least as far as somebody on the outside could tell. “I know it was a long time ago, but that seems like the kind of thing that would change a pretty fundamental part of you.”
Faisal leaned toward me, just a little, his eyes on the floor between us and his hands rotating the small, uncarved pumpkin in his hands. “It was a long time ago, but she dealt with it. And, I guess, still is dealing with it. But she’s doing good. Better. Anyway. Thought you should know.”
Nothing about her seemed to be pretending though.
Trevor waded through the small tables, past Matty and Michael, his pumpkin held close to his chest. Trevor’s nails were clean and clear after Matty had sat down with him and a bottle of nail polish remover.
“What’s a blow job?” Trevor asked, looking at both of us and setting the pumpkin down.
“Um,” I said. Having never dealt with children, I decided to let the seasoned expert handle this one.
“Bryce was talking about them but he didn’t seem to really know either,” Trevor added.
“It’s a … joke,” Faisal said. “Just a joke.”
“Like a gag?”
Faisal opened his mouth to say something but just nodded for a second before saying, “That’s definitely one way of looking at it, yes.”
“I heard a pretty good blow job earlier,” Trevor said.
Faisal’s face changed into the look of a man who had just eaten something poisonous. “Trev,” he said and held out his hands with his index fingers pointed up. “I know I just said one thing, but listen to this new thing: don’t ever say that again.”
“But y—”
“I know. Just,” he said, and shook his head. “Got a pumpkin?”
Trevor looked at the small pumpkin that looked bigger than it really was in his small, slender-pudgy hands. There were no testicles on it, there were no giants crushing cities; there was one half-inch-thick continuous line running in a spiral and tapering off at the top.
“Can you carve this?”
“You don’t want to make a face? Or something?” I asked.
“Not really. I like the spiral.”
Faisal twisted the pumpkin in his hands, examin
ing the line before saying, “I think we can handle this. We won’t be able to cut the line all the way through at certain points.” He looked at me.
“For load-bearing purposes,” Trevor said. “Can you do the bottom too? So it can rotate?”
Faisal nodded. “Yeah, Trev, we can do that.”
For the next twenty or thirty minutes we worked on the pumpkin, carving deep enough into it at certain points so light could get out and only carving the skin away at other points to keep the structure sound. When the spiral was done, we rounded the bottom.
I twisted in my seat to check the clock on the wall, and when I turned around Bryce was standing at the table. I squinted at him and his stupid pumpkin.
“Here’s my pumpkin for you to carve,” he said like a shithead. He had written “FAGGIT” in huge letters and the smirk on his face wasn’t because he’d spelled the word wrong like an asshole.
“Are you smiling because you’re an asshole?” I said, just to make sure that wasn’t why.
Faisal rubbed his face in his hands and, before the ten-year-old could respond to me calling him an asshole, said, “We’re not carving that.”
“Why not? That one has balls on it,” he said and slapped the testicle-pumpkin off the table. Goblin Joe’s head popped up from two tables away, scanning the situation before disappearing again.
“It looks like an infinity sign to me,” Trevor said.
“Shut up, Trevor,” Bryce said. “Why does Trevor get to draw a faggy line on his but I can’t use a word?”
It takes a unique combination of angst, caffeine, and months of being told I’m a criminal or a sinner or both, but I am fully capable of deciding I want to smack the shit out of a child who is barely four feet tall.
He slapped another pumpkin off the table. When it hit the ground the stem broke off.19 Trevor pulled his pumpkin close to his chest.
“Why are you so angry?” Faisal asked Bryce.
“I’m not angry,” he shouted. He cocked his arm back like he was going to throw the pumpkin. Trevor shut his eyes and shielded his pumpkin; Faisal raised his finger and started to say something; I dropped my hands and exposed my chest and neck, hoping it would hit me and I’d have an excuse to go berserk on the little son of a bitch; and Goblin Joe sprang up and put him in a full nelson.
Bryce’s pumpkin went spinning out behind him and shattered on the floor, spilling its orange guts everywhere.
“Let go of me!” he said. We couldn’t see his face but the words sounded wet, like he was crying or about to be crying. Goblin Joe looked up at Faisal, scared.
“Let—let him go, Joe. Let him go.”
Goblin Joe’s hands shot toward the ceiling like he was getting arrested, and Bryce swung back up, staring at us, his face burning red. His eyes were shining when he swiped Joe out of the way and walked out of the room, throwing the connecting door open and heading for the empty half of the rec hall. Before the door had a chance to swing shut, I saw Matty and Michael look over at the angry child and follow him into the other room.
“Way to be on crowd control, Joe,” I said and put my hand out for a high five that he immediately and awkwardly fist-bumped.
“I’ll go get him,” Faisal said. “Make sure he’s all right.”
“No, hey, I’ll do it,” I said, standing up fast. I thought about all of the shit Bryce and his friends had said to Lump and Trevor, all of the shit they’d keep saying for years and years, and I realized I had an opportunity to do something about it.
I heard Charlie’s familiar voice in my head, egging me on.
“You just called him an asshole.”
“No, I know—I should apologize anyway. I’ll go bring him back.”
“Faisal?” Trevor said. “Do you still have playing cards?”
I wanted to hug Trevor. Not just because he was all of the little kids that would spend the rest of their lives fighting off the Bryces of the world, and not just because kids like him need to celebrate the fucking novelty of coming out with their pumpkins intact, but for the purely selfish reason that he’d distracted Faisal. Because I needed Faisal to be preoccupied with doing good by him and Joe and the rest of them, while I went and dealt with Bryce.
I turned as I walked away and said, “Need some more coffee?”
Faisal was opening the deck of cards he’d pulled out when he said, “I’m good, thanks.”
And I was in the clear.
TWENTY-FIVE: WWCD
MATTY AND MICHAEL WERE TALKING to Bryce when I walked in. He was standing between them, staring straight ahead into the middle distance with eyes that were angry white holes in the red expanse of his face.
Matty was crouched in front of him, and as I walked up Michael saw me and tried to smile. Matty looked up and tried the same.
“I’ll handle it, guys,” I said. “Gotta get Bryce here a new pumpkin, that’s all.” Bryce still hadn’t said anything. “You guys want to go see how Faisal’s doing? See if he needs any backup?”
Michael didn’t think about it. He just nodded and said, “Yeah, all right. Thanks.”
“Let me know if you need any help in here,” Matty said, locking her eyes on mine.
“I will,” I said, smiling until the door closed behind them. I waited to make sure they didn’t come back through. “All right, gotta get you a new pumpkin, huh?”
Bryce didn’t say anything back. His jaw was clenched at an angle and his eyes were still focused on whatever he was seeing a million miles between us.
“Look. I’m sorry I called you an asshole. I shouldn’t have done that. Just been a long day. Let’s just get you a pumpkin and we’ll carve it up, yeah?” If I’d said it any friendlier, he might have figured that something was up.
“I don’t want to.”
This time, when I smiled, it was real. Because he was dropping his horseshit act and talking to me.
“Come on. It’s okay. We’ll carve whatever you want into it.”
He looked at me.
“Whatever I want?”
“Mostly whatever you want.”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Fine, let’s carve the stupid pumpkins.”
“My man. All right, go get one.”
“What?”
“Just through there,” I said, pointing at the staff-only room Lump and I had found.
“What about the ones in there?” he said, pointing back to the room filled with kids.
“What ones in there? Those are all taken. Yours got busted so you need to get another from the staff pile. Means I won’t get to carve one, but that’s the job, right?”
The dramatic color had gone out of his face, but he was still looking at me like I was lying to him.20
“It’s staff only.”
“So?”
“So you’re probably going to tell on me.”
I breathed out heavily, only half-faking being frustrated. “Why would I tell on you? I just told you to do it. Pumpkins are down there next to the confiscation box at the end of the tunnel. Just be quick.” I opened the door that nobody had bothered re-locking and hit the light switch.
The only two bulbs that worked buzzed on as I let the keywords work their way into his head, slowly but steadily convincing him that A) it was a good idea to do what I said because B) it was an independent act of free will that would put him somewhere he wasn’t allowed to be and C) in the direct vicinity of a whole box of contraband while also D) depriving me of a pumpkin. He edged up to the doorway and looked down the stairs.
“It’s dark in there,” he said.
I answered him even though he was more than likely just thinking out loud. “So?”
There was enough sarcasm in that one word to shift his tone one hundred and eighty degrees.
“So nothing. I’ll be right back.”
And the little fucker steeled himself and stepped into the darkness, jolting and grabbing the railing when the first stair creaked under his weight. He paused for a tenth of a second at
the first light’s horizon, not looking back at me or dramatically shuddering, but pausing all the same.
He forded the darkness, one arm clutched close and the other reached out, his feet moving six inches at a time.
I waited until he broke into the light to step down. Under the second lightbulb, he was far enough away that he didn’t hear the stair creak under my feet.
Beneath the lights, he was the Bryce we all knew: obnoxious, loud, and shitty. I reached up for the light nearest the stairs, the bulb that completed and ended the bridge of darkness in the long tunnel, and twisted.
He didn’t notice; bent over with his face buried in the boxes, he didn’t see the light nearest the stairs go out. But he would. He would turn around and he would realize that there was nothing for him in that tunnel except one small island-puddle of light in a cold, soundless, and otherwise pitch-black void.
He would hear me walk back up the stairs, one creaking step at a time.
He would hear the door close.
He wouldn’t leave the dim light. Not when it was the only light he could see.
And eventually someone would notice he was missing and they’d eventually hear him screaming and crying and they’d open the door and find him, the pale-faced and whimpering little bastard who finally got what he deserved.
Charlie taught me a lot of things, not the least of which was the price and payoff of being a bastard. That there could be a reason to play the villain.
The bulb in my hand hadn’t had a chance to get hot, to reach its full temperature, but it wasn’t cold. Not yet. It had started to heat up even though it had only been on for thirty seconds.
Bryce stood up, scratched at his back, and said, “I don’t see it.” He went to turn around—to see all there wasn’t to see—when he leaned back over to rummage through another box he had no business rummaging through.
The lightbulb was going cold in my hand.
I pictured staring up at Test through all of the thin ice I’d let myself fall through.
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