“What now?” Kelly asked. She would allow Zhao a little wiggle room. He was measured, rational, and she was a bundle of nerves, not thinking straight. She would let him make a few decisions, and then she’d manage the execution of his decisions herself. This illusion of control would make him feel important, and it would help them both get things done.
Zhao, clutching his stomach, turned to her, his eyes radiating pure panic. “What do you mean?”
“You said you told the counselors there was a fight. I thought you had a plan.”
Zhao shook his head. “No. I mean, you’re the boss, right?”
Kelly shut her eyes and rubbed her temples. “Okay, um, how about we wait until the others are all in the cafeteria to sneak these two guys over into the storage room. That will get them out of the way and give us more time to think this through. We’ll keep Nine unconscious for now, to keep him quiet, but we’ll obviously need him later to testify that Fourteen’s death was an accident.” She fingered the ends of her hair. “Yeah, we can work together; carry one body at a time. They may be fat, but they’re only children. They can’t possibly be that heavy.”
Zhao nodded. “Good thinking. And then if we need to bide more time, I’ll call the cook, tell him to get the stash out of my office and start distributing.”
She glared at him. Give a little bit of freedom and get a whole truckload of idiocy back. “We ate the stash,” she said coldly. “Where have you been?”
“There’s more,” said Zhao. “The entire filing cabinet.”
Kelly shook her head; the sneak had been holding out on her. Casting her annoyance aside, she pulled her iPhone from her pocket to check the time; just five minutes until dinner.
In sync, they both took a few deep yogic breaths, and then Kelly stretched out her hand for a high five, which Zhao responded to more quickly than before—he was learning. Becoming increasingly aware again of her physical self, she noticed that the backs of her pants were quite wet despite their moisture-wicking properties, and that when she stood up the water reached nearly to the tops of her Nikes. She glimpsed over at the drain, which had become clogged with brains. She fixed her stare on Zhao, who was simultaneously coming to the same realization—and not just about the drain. She shoved her hand into her mouth.
Zhao hopped up and rushed over to Camper Nine. During the course of their discussion, he had somehow regained consciousness, flipped onto his belly, and attempted to wriggle from one side of the shower room to the other, tried to escape.
Not moving, not breathing.
Together, Zhao and Kelly struggled to flip the body over.
Face: blue. Skin: cold.
“Somehow I don’t think anyone is going to believe that this one was an accident,” Zhao muttered. A cold, invisible finger traced a line down Kelly’s back.
There was a knock on the door.
“Showers are closed!” Zhao cried. He excelled under pressure, she had to admit. A natural.
They listened to the dimming footsteps. They exhaled. Zhao placed a quick call to the cook, telling him about the stash. Just as he hung up, a bell rang. There was a collective shout, “Dinner!” and the floor quaked. This time, they did not seek refuge, did not run for a doorway, did not squeeze shut their eyes or jab their fingers in their ears. Kelly and Zhao stood in the center of the room in a literal flood, barely balancing themselves, with only each other to hold on to until the shaking stopped.
HERE IS WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE SEEN…
INSIDE THE CAFETERIA, GELATINOUS BLOB WAS DOLED, VEGETABLES were plopped, and campers chowed down.
If any one of those campers had looked up from his or her tray and out the murky windows, he or she would have seen, in broad but waning daylight, the figures of Zhao, their dear administrator, and Kelly, their dear underwriter, struggling to roll the corpse of one of their dear fellow campers, Camper Nine, toward a storage closet, where his body would be hidden away to protect the futures and aspirations of the aforementioned administrator and underwriter.
Yes, if any one of these campers had looked up, he or she would have watched on in horror as Kelly and Zhao successfully stuffed Nine away in the storage closet and then returned to the boys’ dormitory building, where they emerged mere minutes later dragging the corpse of another of their fellow campers, Camper Fourteen, and then rolling him too across the courtyard where his body would meet the same fate…
But all of this is not mere speculation. At this exact moment, a few campers, who had finished gobbling up their dinners, did sluggishly drag their gazes away from their plates. And at this exact moment too, the cook, bless his soul, came to the rescue at Zhao’s phone-barked orders, tossing bags of contraband high into the air. The enthused campers leaped and bounded, tackled and wrestled, punched and kicked, performed all of these calorie-burning motions in order to acquire bags of Bashful Goose Coconut Meat Treats, cans of pizza-flavored Pringles, boxes of chocolate-filled Hello Panda Bites, and on and on.
It was by far, one of the counselors quietly noted between dainty nibbles of gelatinous blob, the most exercise any of the kids had gotten since the camp had begun.
AND STILL THERE SHONE A GLIMMER OF HOPE
OUTSIDE, KELLY AND ZHAO SUCCESSFULLY DUMPED FOURTEEN’S BODY beside Nine’s in the shed, wiped the sweat from their brows, clutched their burning bellies, and trudged across the courtyard to the cafeteria where they expected one of two scenarios.
Scenario One: The campers would be shoveling down their practically inedible dinners, utterly oblivious to the tragedy that had occurred.
Scenario Two: The cook would be doling out contraband using the method Zhao suggested, which involved a friendly competition/game with junk food prizes awarded to the winners. The campers, delighted and drooling with anticipation, would remain utterly oblivious to the tragedy that had occurred.
What they did not expect was what they found: overturned tables, smashed plates, splattered blood. A war zone—a silent, eerie, human-less war zone.
Kelly’s eyes bulged. She turned to Zhao. “What the hell?” she muttered to herself, to him, to no one.
She took a slow, stunned lap around the room, pausing to assess individual pieces of damage: a fork stuck in the wall at a ninety-degree angle, a tray cracked into a dozen jigsaw-like pieces on the floor, a large clump of hair trapped beneath a table leg. What the hell had happened indeed. An image of Papa Hui laughing played on infinite loop in her head, with that bashful goose honking in victory as the sound track, overlaid with gritty footage of herself serving time in a gulag. She began to sweat. She squeezed her hands into fists, jabbing herself in the palms with her own fingernails, resulting in a sharp pain that did, she was pleased to note, take some of the edge off.
“Where are the kids?” she heard Zhao ask, but his voice did little to shake her from her spell.
“Don’t even want to speculate,” she heard herself reply.
Rustling from the kitchen—a sign of life. They both rushed over and through the door. Inside, the cook paced behind the prep table, humming a frantic tune under his breath.
“What’s happened?” Zhao asked.
Sweat poured from the top of the cook’s shaved head, rolling in beads down his shiny face. He pointed at the floor, where beside the prep table lay two fat bodies, their clothes blackened with footprints. Zhao nudged a limp arm with the inner edge of his own shoe.
“Trampled,” the cook said, still pacing. His words fell out quickly, one on top of the next: “I was just doing what you said, trying to give out the food in an orderly way, but then as soon as they caught sight of it, they went mental, all of them lunging at me at once, and I don’t know what the hell happened, I was just—”
“All right,” said Kelly. Surely it wasn’t too late; surely they could still make it out with their reputations unscathed. There had to be a way. There was always a way. There was hope yet. “Now let’s not panic.”
The cook looked between them with crazy eyes. He didn’t shove his hand in
to his mouth. He just perspired more and more profusely, a fountain of a man. “What do you mean?”
“Just stay calm, we can handle this.” Kelly nudged Zhao, who nodded in agreement. They were in this together now. “Okay, where are the others?”
“I had the counselors take them outside. They’re running relay races.”
“They shouldn’t be running right after eating,” Kelly spat. “That’s a surefire recipe for vomit. Where did they find these people anyway? Did any of them even pass basic PE?”
As if on cue, a counselor barged through the door. “We need someone out on the track now,” she announced shrilly. “We have an emergency!”
Zhao told her they’d be out shortly and handed her his club. “For protection,” he said. She took it and departed, the door swinging shut behind her. Kelly knelt down beside one of the trampled bodies and felt for a pulse. Nothing—but she wasn’t a trained medical professional and thus her reading probably wasn’t accurate. This girl couldn’t be dead. Kelly stood up, squared her shoulders, raised her chin, tousled her hair. She had to act like she knew what she was doing. Best of the best. “Put them in the freezer for now.”
“Even the live one?”
“What?” Kelly and Zhao coughed out simultaneously.
The cook pointed to the kitchen’s back corner, where a fat child sat crouched next to a melting industrial-sized tub of sugar-free ice cream, alternating between taking greedy bites of the ice cream from a bowl and sucking his thumb.
Kelly placed her hands on her hips. “Why’s he here and not out running relay races?”
“Saw me drag the bodies in and started asking questions.”
Another lightbulb. She couldn’t suppress a giddy grin. “Wait, so no one else noticed these trampled ones?”
The cook shook his head.
Kelly exhaled deeply; there really was still hope. “Keep giving him ice cream. Keep him quiet. We’ll be back in a minute.”
The cook nodded, and Kelly and Zhao darted from the kitchen, through the wrecked cafeteria, and to the track around the basketball court, which was strewn with a number of freshly dead bodies, along with the remnants of all that “hope.”
From what Zhao and Kelly were able to piece together, Camper Thirty-Two had suffered a heat stroke during one particularly grueling leg of the relay races. His best friend, Camper Three, a boy from Nanjing with shifty eyes, tripped over Thirty-Two’s unconscious body, fell at an odd angle, and broke his arm. This fractured ulna prompted Three to emit a cacophony of screams, cries, and shouts, which the counselors agreed sounded subhuman, satanic, and terrifying, and which one of the counselors may have accidentally permanently silenced with the use of Zhao’s “protection” club. This violent act set off a few other screamers, whom the counselors may have treated with similar, irreversible vocal cord relief. That, they determined, was how it must have happened.
But what happened next?
The remaining living campers stood huddled and petrified at the edge of the field surrounded by counselors, who appeared oddly at ease with everything. No one said a word. Kelly thought she recognized one of the counselors from somewhere—he reminded her of a famous artist who’d long ago been arrested. Not that it mattered.
All eyes settled upon the fair-skinned heiress and the beastly administrator.
Zhao took a brave step forward, and then Kelly stepped up beside him, nudged him with her elbow. Train your people well, and then trust your people. Zhao cleared his throat.
“We shall…” he announced. The children waited with bated breath, and Kelly too; they awaited a speech, a plan, something to save the situation, something to deliver them from this evil. “… take them to the infirmary!” he concluded grandly.
Kelly spoke out the side of her mouth: “There is no infirmary, is there?”
Zhao shook his head ever so slightly. He whispered back, “To be fair, I did ask about it. The officials told me it was an unnecessary expense.” A whiff of his rank breath shot into her open mouth, and her stomach seized up in response. He raised his voice and continued his announcement: “When I count to three, everyone will run to the other side of the courtyard where your dear leader, Ms. Kelly, will deliver a speech that will rival that of the greats. And afterward, you will all be given the opportunity to answer listening comprehension questions. Those who answer the questions correctly will be rewarded with contraband!”
There was an excited buzz among the campers.
Kelly’s jaw dropped. She opened her mouth to ask what the hell she was supposed to talk about and why the hell he volunteered her for that, but before she got a chance to speak, he hissed, “I need to go and figure things out. Distract them.” He quietly ordered one of the counselors to his office to pick up the remaining contraband.
He cleared his throat, and his voice rose again. “One. Two,” and on three, there was a small earthquake as the campers shot up and barreled toward their destination.
AN EXCERPT FROM KELLY HUI’S ADDRESS TO THE DISTRESSED CAMPERS
DEAREST CAMPERS, I WANT TO ADD THAT I UNDERSTAND THOROUGHLY the struggle you have faced and continue to face. Dear campers, when your parents say, “You’re fat and you must lose weight, you’re not good enough the way you are”… when they rip that hamburger out of your hands… when they refuse to let you add even the tiniest bit of peanut sauce to your hotpot meat… don’t you think, May heaven strike you down?!
I want to reassure you that it’s only human to think that way. It’s natural.
After all, these are the people who can give us what we want, but that means too that they intrinsically possess the ability to take it away. They hold in their greedy hands all the power in the world and they tease us with the possibility of handing it over, but they never do, do they? They hold it above our heads, turning it over and over again in new lights, eternally finding fresh ways to use it against us. So have there been times, dear campers, times when I wished my own parents dead? Sure, but who among us hasn’t felt that way?
ONCE UPON A TIME IN GREATER LOS ANGELES…
A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD KELLY STROLLED LEISURELY DOWN THE SIDEWALK, past vintage stores and cafés, past other young people who apparently lacked a productive way to spend a sunny Tuesday afternoon—no jobs, classes, or hobbies aside from shopping and eating for this bunch. She clutched a cup of gelato, banana pudding flavored, that she’d convinced the out-of-work actor/apron-wearer who worked there to give her for free. She wasn’t supposed to be strolling or eating semi-stolen gelato. She was supposed to be in a psychiatrist’s office. She’d set up an appointment with the guy, Dr. Shapiro, from the backseat of a taxi in the immediate aftermath of an ER visit a few days before. The nurses there had assured her that she was not having a heart attack but a panic attack, and some joke of a doctor looked at her for, like, ten seconds, reaffirmed the nurses’ diagnosis, and prescribed her enough Valium to tide her over until she could sort things out with a therapist. Clearly, this ER doctor was one of those dunderheads who believed everything could be solved with expensive pharmaceuticals and a few heart-to-heart conversations, and after the metaphorical smoke cleared and she was back home feeling quite relaxed indeed, Kelly decided that she wanted no part in telling her so-called issues to some shithead therapist, who—if movies had any basis in reality—would probably just wind up raping and/or killing her anyhow.
And anyway, she knew enough about herself to know that her anxiety as of late had been caused by the looming end of high school and by the total lack of response from the universities to which she’d applied. Her grades weren’t great, and Papa Hui refused to pay her way into a school, insisting that she “get by on her own merit.” Unfortunately, her subsequent revenge-motivated attempt at donating a large sum of her father’s money to Stanford failed when one of his accountants noticed a discrepancy and alerted him before the transaction was finalized. With everything now uncertain and completely out of her hands, the idea of college, of working hard and reaping the benefits, became
vividly and startlingly real to her. High school was stupid, obviously. But college could make or break her. There, she’d at last get to focus on business and management and psychology, and all the things she actually felt interested in, and all the things that might lead her somewhere worth going.
She licked the final melted remnants of gelato from her spoon, tossed the plastic cup into a recycling bin, and then stepped into a vintage store, where she killed a good hour browsing, trying on, and finally buying a few dresses. As the shop’s door rattled shut behind her, Kelly, who was no longer thinking of the “future” so much as how Ghost World and amazing her new dresses were, looked down and noticed a very thin girl with sandy dreadlocks sitting on the sidewalk, her back against the store’s brick wall. Beside the girl sat a well-worn backpack and a Starbucks cup—a receptacle for what would clearly become drug money.
A tingle shot up from Kelly’s toes. She’d developed an interest in striking up conversations with homeless people and weirdos, and it was a hobby she admittedly enjoyed in part for its perceived riskiness. Anyone with any authority or sense would deem it “unsafe” for a young girl to just mosey around chatting up creeps, but Kelly enjoyed the mostly fucked-up and sometimes funny things these “creeps” had to say, and it was also a trip to play up being the more sane, powerful, and wealthy person in the relationship.
Vying for a high on this otherwise boring afternoon, Kelly squatted beside the girl. The sun beat down on the pavement, warming it pleasantly. She lunged at the girl’s Starbucks cup, snatched it, and caught a quick peek inside. Probably less than a dollar in change. The girl scowled at Kelly and yanked the cup from her hands, slamming it back down on the sidewalk. The coins jangled.
“Get fuckin’ lost,” the girl said, her hand wrapped possessively around the cup. Kelly didn’t budge. The girl stared straight ahead. A hip young couple in tight jeans walked past, their hands in each other’s back pockets, probably all clammy and gross.
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