A quiet settled over us, but then people started to get up, as if Rights’s exit signaled the end of the event.
“Where is everyone going?” Ashley said. “Pika made brownies! They’re not dirt brownies!”
I was screwed.
Waking up in total darkness by a strip of duct tape savagely adhered to my mouth—that was the initial shock. But I couldn’t say that I was surprised that they’d chosen to kidnap me in the middle of the night. It was three of them, all in black, and that was all I saw before they put a pillowcase over my head and hauled me out of the cabin. Two of them held me by my armpits, and the other one had my legs. It was a bumpy ride through the camp grounds with only the sound of my muted yells and their heavy breathing and occasional giggling.
The reason they’d chosen me was obvious. My three assailants said as much as they threw me sideways into the lake. “That’s for being a bigot!”
I should also mention that they stripped me completely naked before throwing me in.
The water was icy, but only for a moment. There was too much else going on to really think about it anyway. Thankfully, the pillowcase had slipped off before I’d hit the water, but my duct tape was still on. I tore it off when I broke through the surface. It stung.
They were gone. The last of them disappeared through the woods carrying all of my clothes in their arms.
“Hey!” I shouted. Though that wasn’t going to do any good. They weren’t going to return my clothes just because I shouted at them.
I swallowed, treading water, and tried to focus my mind and figure out what to do. “I’m naked,” I said to myself, stating the only relevant fact that I could think of. I couldn’t worry about who’d done this to me or the fact that I was in the lake. All I knew was that I didn’t have any clothing anywhere. I couldn’t leave the lake naked. If I did—with my luck—someone would see me, and then I would forever be known as the camp’s bigoted streaker.
“Hello?”
I stopped moving. A dangerous decision to make in a lake, considering that not moving would lead to certain drowning. But drowning didn’t sound so bad right now.
“Gregor Maravilla?”
It couldn’t be …
“Is that you?” Ashley Woodstone said. She was in the water, swimming right toward me from the other side of the dock, where I hadn’t been able to see her.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. I only had my hands, but they would have to be enough to cover myself up, though I was sure she couldn’t see down there. Just kicking underwater would have to keep me afloat. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you doing here?”
“Swimming.”
“Swimming?”
“Swimming.”
This was just like getting kidnapped—seeing her was the initial shock, but once that passed, I wasn’t surprised. Because of course Ashley Woodstone would be here right now. Where else would she be?
“Why is it always you?” I said. “You’re constantly there with a front-row seat to all of my humiliations.” Ashley was an exclamation point. I may have been the joke, but she was always the punch line. I could just imagine my brother, Anton, telling it: “Gregor got thrown into the lake naked. But here’s the kicker: Ashley Woodstone was there to see it!”
“Humiliations?” Ashley said, swimming languidly before me. “Some people would kill to be where you are right now. Skinny-dipping with Ashley Woodstone.”
“You’re … naked?” In this darkness the water was black, and with Ashley’s hair wet and heavy over her shoulders I couldn’t tell that she wasn’t wearing anything.
“Bathing suits are so constricting. I like to feel the water on my skin. Natural. Nothing in between.”
I held on to myself tighter, reminding myself to keep kicking because I was starting to sink.
“But swimming without bathing suits isn’t socially acceptable in this part of the world,” she said in the sort of mocking tone of voice that sounded like she’d been reprimanded for this before. “So I have to do it when no one is around.”
She was swimming so close to me, circling me. Her hair was plastered down her back whenever she surfaced, and swayed like coral behind her when she was submerged.
“I’m sorry about what happened earlier at my campfire. I can’t believe Rights said those things about you.”
“They aren’t true.”
“Of course they aren’t. Who would ever try to find a girlfriend using a how-to book?” She smiled at me, and I could’ve sworn she winked just before dunking into the water. I waited for her to come back up before I continued.
“Do you think I’m a bigot now too?”
“You mean because you’re a cis white kid trying to save the children of Latin America?”
“I’m half Latino,” I muttered. “And I want to help all children.” I lolled in place, letting the lower part of my face dip into the water. I opened my mouth and took some in, spitting it back out before I said what I was about to say. “I think I might be … offensive.”
“What are you talking about?”
I shrugged. “I always thought I was pretty good at telling when something was offensive. Or at calling people out when they were being offensive. But I never stopped to consider the fact that … maybe I’m actually totally offensive.”
“That’s crazy.”
“The word ‘crazy’ is offensive to those suffering from mental health issues.” I always felt responsible to point something like that out. More often than not, people would roll their eyes in response. But I also felt that it was important to talk about this stuff and make people more aware of the things they were saying. Ashley didn’t make me feel weird for saying it, though. She actually looked like she was considering never using the word “crazy” again.
“Maybe I do have a savior complex,” I said. “And maybe Rights is right that it’s offensive for me to try to be a hero for a whole group of people. But maybe me feeling sorry for myself right now is offensive too. It’s like, who am I to feel bad if the people I’m offending feel even worse, you know?”
“Not really,” Ashley said. “You might be totally right, but you also might not be making any sense. It’s very hard to say.” She disappeared under the water and then broke through the surface with such enthusiasm that I thought she’d come up with the perfect thing to say. Really, she just needed to breathe.
“I’m just tired of other people telling me who they think I am,” I said. This was a heavy conversation. Probably too heavy to be having naked in a lake. But Ashley was a good listener, so it felt nice talking to her. She circled slowly around me still. “Sometimes I just feel like people look at me and make assumptions and snap judgments about who I am or who I’m not. People look at me but they don’t really see me.”
Ashley stopped swimming to paddle in front me. She looked at me with such wide-eyed intensity that for a moment what I’d just said felt like a lie. It didn’t feel like she was looking at me, it felt like she was looking into me. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said.
She was so close to me that if I were to let go of myself and reach out I could touch her. Skin on skin. Natural. Nothing in between. I was definitely starting to sink. And I let myself. I went under but when I opened my eyes everything was dark. When I came back up, Ashley had already started swimming away again, moving around me so that I had to keep turning in place to see her.
“There’s a lot for you to think about here,” she said. “But here’s what I know: You are Gregor Maravilla. You love Superman. And you want to do good. You’re not offensive.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!” Ashley said. “And even if you are, we’re all a little problematic sometimes. Trust me, I live under a microscope. Anytime I say the wrong thing—which happens a lot—I don’t hear the end of it for weeks. All we can do is listen and learn and hope to be better. The Prize and the pranks and all the sabotage just have people on edge, making them say all sorts of weird things.”
She conti
nued to swim and I continued to kick, awkwardly holding myself. I thought about what Anton said, about experiencing firsts. Skinny-dipping with a girl was definitely a first for me, however arbitrarily it had happened. But this was definitely not what Anton had in mind. I didn’t think I could stay afloat much longer without using my arms. “A lot of people would kill to be where I am right now, and yet, I gotta be honest, Ashley, all I want to do is get out.”
Ashley laughed—actually laughed—and splashed me. “See! That right there is what I love about you, Gregor Maravilla! You don’t care about me.”
When she put it that way it sounded strange. “That’s what you love about me?” It was preposterous and at the same time overwhelmingly sad. “Do you still want me to help you? With your Superman script?”
She stopped before me, treading in place. “Really?”
“No one else at this camp seems too fond of me at the moment.” I shrugged. “You might be the only person left willing to hang out with me.”
It was true, but a bigger part of why I was agreeing to help her was because of what she’d said. That I didn’t care who she was. That that was a good thing. It sounded so … lonely.
“Yes!” Ashley said. More laughing. More splashing.
“Okay, alright, I’ll do it if you get me some clothes.”
“Pika, get Gregor some clothes, please!”
There were a few hours left until daybreak, but I slammed into Cabin 8 loud enough to wake everyone in there up.
“What’s going on?” Win said, sitting instantly and wiping the sleep from his eyes.
Rights was slower to wake but he eventually did. I think it was his own laughter that got him fully alert, like a dog who wakes himself up with his own farts. “What the hell are you wearing, Superman?”
Pika got me Camp Save the World sweatpants and an orange girls’ Camp Save the World crop top. I stood over Rights’s bed in a T-shirt that barely came down low enough to skim the bottom of my ribs. According to Ashley, those were the only clothes Pika could find. I wasn’t sure I believed her.
“I know it was you, Rights.”
“Man, it’s four in the morning; what the hell are you going on about?”
“You threw me in the lake.”
“You got thrown in the lake?” Win said. ILP’s eyebrows shot up as though he understood too. Rights’s laughter started up again. “Congrats, Superman! I know how exclusive a membership to the lake-throwings club is.”
I didn’t do violence. It was my firm belief that all conflict could be resolved with cooler heads. But something deep broke inside of me and came out as a roar. I jumped him, and Rights responded by rolling both of us off the bed and slamming me to the floor. Even before I jumped on Rights I knew this would be a losing fight. My biggest advantage had probably been the element of surprise, but now the tables had turned significantly, his knee bearing down on the back of my neck. Somewhere in my peripheral vision Win was trying to pull Rights off of me. But the guy was carved out of stone. I did everything I could to try to squirm away, but it was like a statue had fallen on top of me.
“You’re an asshole!” I rasped between breaths. “The whole camp thinks I’m a bigot because of you!”
“Stop being such a bigot, then.”
“I’m not a bigot!”
“Says the white boy who just jumped a Latino minding his own business.”
“I’M HALF LATINO!”
“Shut the fuck up and feed some children, you stupid dick.” Amazingly, Rights was able to pin me down and still sprinkle crumpled bills onto my head. How the hell had he gotten money in the middle of our fight?!
“You’re going to kill him,” Win said, his voice far too calm to convey those words. “You should probably get off of him.”
“Not until he apologizes for ruining my beauty sleep.”
“Never!” I shouted.
* * *
In the end it was ILP who ran to the counselors’ house to wake Jimmy up. And now Men’s Rights and I sat in the office as Jimmy slumped behind his desk, still half-asleep. “Fighting? Come on, guys. I thought you were better than that.”
“Fighting?” Rights said. “I was giving Gregor a hug.”
“I’m going to have to dock both of you two points.”
“You can’t dock me points,” I said. “I don’t have any points.”
* * *
“And that’s how I finally ended up on the scoreboard. With negative two points.”
Ashley frowned. Though it wasn’t really a frown—more like a frownie face. She was incapable of looking sad, apparently, but I appreciated the sentiment.
“I can’t believe you got in a fight. There’s a big welt on your cheekbone. Are you sure you’re okay? How many fingers am I holding up? Who holds the record for most Golden Globe nominations?”
“I don’t know, Ashley.”
“Oh gosh, it’s Meryl Streep!” Ashley said. “Should I get help?”
I stopped her before she got too worked up and ran for Nurse Patrosian. I looked back down to the open script in my lap, trying to focus again on the task at hand.
The two of us sat on the ground. We were in the clearing in the woods where I first found Ashley doing her moon dance. I’d told her I’d come meet her here after the day’s activities to help her on the Superman sequel. But I only agreed to come under one condition: Pika could not be here. I’d had enough of constantly standing in the shade of his massive shadow while his eyes bore down on me, not so subtly telecasting the fact that he wanted to kill me. I wondered where Ashley’s bodyguard went and what he did when he had an hour to himself. But no matter where I pictured him—fishing in the lake, buying snacks, running through a field of wildflowers—he was always scowling. And very possibly breaking a baby bird with his bare hands.
Unless he was hiding up in a tree somewhere, Pika wasn’t here, and I could finally relax around Ashley. Unfortunately, the Superman 2 script was—no surprise here—truly awful. It was so soul-crushingly wrong and terrible that I kept getting distracted, not that I knew exactly what I was doing here anyway. Ashley said she needed help learning her lines, so I played Superman and she did her part as Lois Lane. She said that my knowledge of the Superman canon could help inform her acting choices. But I couldn’t exactly do much to help when there were lines like “Save me, Superman! I don’t think I can hold on much longer!”
Ashley still threw herself into every scene, though, and her dedication was rubbing off on me. I figured if I was going to do this thing I better commit. I skimmed the page, trying to find my place again. “Don’t die on me, Lois. Don’t let go.” I stopped, sighed. “Why did Lois fall out of the window?”
“She tripped.”
I took my pen out of my pocket. “Can I change this?”
“Go for it.”
Lois Lane does not trip, I wrote in the margin of the page. She falls out of the window trying to save a baby from a vulture. She is a national hero.
Ashley had been kind enough to let me rewrite the story in the margins of the pages. It was a good thing there was so much white space in scripts, because every page we’d rehearsed together was now a giant scribble of our handwriting. I knew this didn’t change things, that when Ashley flew back to LA at the end of summer to begin shooting this thing, someone would probably take this script from her, burn it, and hand her a new one. But it felt good reimagining a Superman story.
We’d also renamed the movie Superman 2: Lois Lane Is a National Hero.
I continued to read the script. “We are tight on Superman’s CHEST. He flexes his PECS before FLYING out of the window to rescue Lois.” I tossed the script aside and lay back, staring up at the trees.
“You seem distracted,” Ashley said. “Still thinking about the points?”
“Thinking about that, and getting thrown into the lake. I know it was Rights who did it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he hates me. And just physically, he’s strong enough to car
ry me from my cabin to the lake. He probably masterminded the destruction of ILP’s mural too.”
“If only you could find out who really destroyed ILP’s mural. Maybe Jimmy would reward you by getting you back up to zero points.”
I sat up with a start. “And Rights would get in trouble.”
“What?”
I was almost bouncing in place as the idea formed, coming quicker than I could put words to it. “I could kill a bunch of birds with one stone: help ILP by finding out who was behind his attack, get points for solving the biggest mystery at camp, and get Rights in trouble. It was obviously him who destroyed the mural. If I have evidence of that, maybe he’ll even get kicked out.”
“You really don’t like Rights.”
“You know he leaves me money under my pillow every night? He’s like the douchebag tooth fairy.”
“Okay, but how are you going to prove that he was responsible for what happened to I Like Paint?”
“The security cameras. I’ll just do what none of the other counselors did: I’ll watch the footage from that day.”
“You’re going to sneak into the counselors’ office!” Ashley said, gleeful, giddy. “How exciting!”
I hadn’t thought this plan all the way through, and the idea of sneaking into the office already had me worried. I’d never done anything like that before. It could all backfire. I could be the one to get kicked out instead of Rights.
“I’ve never snuck in anywhere before.”
“I could help you!” Ashley said. “I know a lot about sneaking into places. I once broke into a pet store to rescue a baby chick on an episode of Smarty Pants. We could assemble a team, like Clark Kent does with Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane. Oooh, we can live out the script and have a real adventure! Say yes, Gregor.”
“Great morning workout, guys!” Jimmy said, catching his breath. It was another morning of calisthenics. Jimmy led us in extremely easy exercises that continued to challenge my lanky, flailing limbs. Win continued to execute all the motions in perfect form. Ashley’s bodyguard continued to work out for her as she sat on the grass, making friends with a caterpillar. Men’s Rights ignored the calisthenics altogether and was instead personally training Diabetes in some complicated-looking CrossFit workout or something. Rights wasn’t doing anything particularly diabolical at the moment, but anytime I looked at him I was filled with an irrational hatred. No, not irrational, I had to remind myself. He’d thrown me in the lake and ruined ILP’s mural. I just had to prove it.
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