Three tables over sits Danny Miller, the oncology nurse’s son.
The healthy looking boy with the black hair, soccer build, and unibrow is wolfing down bacon, sausage and a pile of eggs. When he’s done he picks up his plate and goes to the kitchen for seconds.
“Damn normy,” Tommy whispers under his breath. He looks to his left and sees Noddy across the cafeteria bobbing and weaving, trying to get a spoonful of eggs into his mouth. For a moment, their eyes connect and Noddy grins before clamping down on the little, yellow pile of mush.
Tommy leans over and pukes on his own shoes.
Later that day, anyone who can dip their big toe in the lake without getting some sort of benign parasite resulting in their skin sloughing off participates in a swim meet. Danny Miller shows up in a speedo and little else. He has hair on his chest, which makes Tommy shrivel inside. Any hair he’s had on his own body is long gone.
Every girl camper with a libido not ravaged by illness sighs and flutters as the athletic boy expertly dives into the water, strokes across the lake, and returns well before any of the other participants.
Hatred burns in Tommy’s gut, along with a companion pain that he has come to realize is disease slowly eating him from the inside out. Meanwhile Danny Miller sits with a pretty, blond girl who looks perfectly fine but is in a wheelchair anyway.
“You’re dead meat,” Tommy hisses under his breath as he imagines sticking Noddy’s little knife in Danny Miller’s gut and watching him bleed all over the pretty girl’s lap.
The disturbing thought gives his some sort of momentary comfort.
Before dinner and after more medications, Tommy and Noddy hear from a reliable source, Tommy Carenzo, that Danny Miller got caught feeling up the wheelchair girl behind the arts and crafts cabin after the swim meet. He’s now been banished to the isolation cabin for two days to reflect on his misconduct.
“The isolation cabin?” snipes Tommy to Noddy. “I wish I was in the isolation cabin.”
“It’s boring there,” says Noddy.
“Yeah, but I don’t have to stare at any of you sick cancer freaks in the isolation cabin.”
“You’re one of us sick cancer freaks,” says Noddy. “Besides, the normy’s now alone.” Noddy gets a vicious look on his face. “Let’s mess him up.”
“Fine,” says Tommy, his insides starting to feel like they are disintegrating.
“Awesome,” says Noddy. “Meet me at the flagpole after Taps tonight.”
Shortly before midnight, and after a piss-poor trumpeter says goodbye to the day over Camp Crossroads’ PA system, Tommy Burton slips out of his bunk to meet Noddy Epstein for the purposes of murdering a recently outed pervert who doesn’t have a lick of cancer in his entire body. Both boys aren’t high. They’re as lucid as can be, if what they are about to do can even be called lucid.
Noddy clutches his little jack knife. Tommy holds a butter knife in his fist that he stole from the cafeteria at dinner. Silently, the two head off to the isolation cabin, past the baseball diamond, and into the woods. The isolation cabin is situated away from the rest of the camp and away from anyone who can hear Danny Miller’s pathetic normy screams. As the two boys slowly creep down the quarter-of-a-mile path, lit up by the full moon above, Tommy stops and picks up a rock that is roughly the size of his palm.
“What are you doing?” whispers Noddy, even though there is no need for whispering.
“He’s stronger than we are,” Tommy whispers back. “I’ll bash his head in then you stick him.”
Noddy stares at Tommy for a moment. “You’re dark, man,” he says, which isn’t even a stone’s throw away from the truth. “Really dark.”
Noddy’s words barely register to Tommy. He’s too busy relishing the idea that he’s actually going to kill a normy. It serves him right for coming to Camp Crossroads.
Fuck him for being normal.
When the two boys reach the isolation cabin, they see a flicker of light coming through the window. The normy must have a candle going inside. Slowly, the two boys walk up the steps, wincing every time the wood creaks beneath their feet. Tommy’s palms are sweaty, but he is stubbornly determined not to drop the rock or the butter knife in his hands. He’s going to use them very shortly and there will be blood.
There will be so much blood, healthy blood, he’ll want to drop to his hands and knees and swallow it up in hopes that some sort of miracle cure lies within. Somewhere inside, he knows that’s beyond wishful thinking, but he no longer cares.
The only thing that fills his mind is a single chant, over and over again.
Kill the normy.
Kill the normy.
Kill the normy.
It’s the same sort of sadistic chant that the kangaroo and the other animals drone on and on while desperately trying to murder a world clutched in Horton the Elephant’s trunk.
Boil that dust speck.
Boil that dust speck.
Boil that dust speck.
As Tommy and Noddy reach the last step, Noddy sneezes. It’s high and quick like a little girl’s sneeze.
Immediately, they here a deep grumble from inside the isolation cabin. It’s the voice of puberty come too early. It’s the sort of voice that Tommy is never going to have because Tommy is never going to fully finish running the puberty gauntlet. He’s going to be long dead before then.
‘Sorry,’ mouths Noddy to Tommy for the unfortunate sneeze, and momentarily, Tommy wants to bash Noddy’s head in, too.
However, Tommy’s murderous thoughts are interrupted by the sound of movement behind the door to the isolation cabin. They hear some sort of weird clanking like Danny Miller is banging pots together.
“What the fuck?” whispers Tommy, but doesn’t stop moving forward. Nothing can deter him, rock, and butter knife, from ending Danny Miller once and for all.
With a burst of speed that is almost more than Tommy’s cancer-ravaged body can muster, he rushes across the deck and pushes the door open to the isolation cabin, but what he finds there is a whole new level of crazy—even crazier than bringing a normy kid to cancer camp. Even crazier than murder.
Danny Miller is chained to the wall, but he’s not exactly Danny Miller anymore. His features are elongated and his ears are pointed. His clothing is in tatters because lunar artistry has given him a new body for the night, one that’s covered in hair, with huge claws for hands and extra joints in his legs so that he looks more like the animal that he’s now become.
He looks far from normy.
Noddy rushes into the isolation cabin behind Tommy and purposely pushes him from behind as hard as he can. Tommy goes spiraling across the room and right into the clutches of the monster that Danny Miller has now become.
The murderous, cancer-ravaged boy realizes so much in those next few seconds—the last moments in his sad, sickly life.
Danny Miller’s at Camp Crossroads so that his mother can watch him and make sure he doesn’t murder anything. He’s not locked in the isolation cabin for quiet reflection and he probably never even felt up the blond wheelchair girl. He’s locked in the isolation cabin so he can change into a monster far from prying eyes under the round, bloated moon.
Furthermore, Noddy Epstein is not Tommy’s friend. He’s never been his friend. He’s been a monster dog’s lapdog this whole time and Tommy has been a willing, stupid victim.
The last thing Tommy Burton hears as huge claws rip into him from all angles, tearing and shredding and culling another one of the sick from the herd, is Noddy’s far-off voice screaming, “I brought him to you, Danny. I did everything you asked. Now remember your promise. You’ll bite me when you’re done with him. You’ll make me well. You’ll make me just . . . like . . . you.”
U is for Uma
Who Laughs at a Tumble
REVENGE, IT TURNS out, can be a slow burn. Roberta Katz had known this for almost as long as she could remember.
Bobbie, as everyone called her, had plotted a revenge so insidious and pro
found since the third grade that it now represented a separate part of her brain, with a brain all its own.
That dark little chunk of gray matter living inside her squiggle of thoughts plotted, and planned, and twisted itself in knots even when Bobbie was totally consumed with something else.
It never stopped scheming while she forced herself to endure a five mile run each day before dawn.
It pondered and puzzled while she memorized whole pages in the dictionary or factored out pi to the five hundredth decimal.
It conspired while she diligently hung on every word her eighth grade teachers uttered at the Drake School where she attended.
In short, its only mission was to machinate revenge so sweet, so delicious, that pig-sniffed truffles were cheap fast food by comparison.
The embers of Bobbie’s revenge never went cold. They burned and they burned, and all because of one fated day in third grade when Uma DeNapoli said those hateful words that could never be taken back.
“Look,” Uma pointed and laughed in front of the whole class as Bobbie completed her somersault for the gym teacher, Mrs. Brown, who was rumored to have no breasts because they had been filled with lumps. “Bobbie Katz? More like ‘Blobby Fats”.
Blobby Fats.
Blobby Fats.
Blobby Fats.
That life-altering day, while she sat on the rubber mat in the middle of the gymnasium, her head still spinning from the tumble that was arguably one of the worst tumbles in the class, and with righteous guffaws erupting all around her, Bobbie’s face turned dark.
If revenge was a tangible thing, it would have crawled out from between Bobbie’s legs, a slimy umbilical cord still attached to it, only for her to scoop it up and cradle the newborn monster in her arms.
“I’ll get you Uma DeNapoli,” she hissed under her breath. “I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do.”
All the rest of that day, so many years ago, Uma DeNapoli’s awful words played over and over in Bobbie’s mind. That afternoon, when Bobbie slipped into the bathroom to stare at herself in the mirror, the blond curls and rosy cheeks that stared back told her to find something sharp and plunge it into Uma DeNapoli’s face.
“Use the construction paper scissors in your desk,” her reflection told her. “Better yet, what about the pointy end of your protractor? That’ll teach her.”
“No,” Bobbie told her reflection. “It’s got to be better than that.” To quote a phrase her father always used on her whenever she was bad, “Let the punishment fit the crime.”
Little Uma DeNapoli lived two streets over from Bobbie Katz’s home in the sleepy town of Greenfield Center, Massachusetts. That afternoon, after Uma had coined a nickname that would stay with Bobbie until every ounce of baby fat and lack of coordination was scrubbed clean of her life, Bobbie planted the initial seed of her revenge and watered it thoroughly.
School had been let out and several groups of third graders who lived in Bobbie’s part of the world trudged down long, straight Grassy Gutter Lane toward home. It was the beginning of spring and daffodils had just burst into yellow in many of the coiffed yards they passed.
Unfortunately, Bobbie’s thoughts were so deep and so dark, some of the flowers seemed to wilt as she walked by them. It was only an illusion. She didn’t have any magical death rays that shot out of her eyes. If she had, Uma DeNapoli would have already been a cinder—just a black smudge on the sidewalk.
“Hi, Uma,” Bobbie called out as she ran up behind the mean little girl with the black hair and the eyes that were tiny, feral buttons of nastiness.
“What do you want, Blobby Fats?” Uma sneered. Alissa Atkins and Sharon Craig were walking with her, their third grade primers hugged to their chests the way little girls always carry their books. They both twittered at Uma’s slur.
“I just wanted to tell you how funny you are,” Bobbie said, even though each complimentary word burned like acid coming out of her mouth. “You’re so witty.”
“Huh?” said Uma.
“I mean it,” said Bobbie. “I wish I had thought of a nickname like that. Blobby Fats? Too funny.”
Uma stared suspiciously at Bobbie. “I guess,” she said. Alissa and Sharon snickered again, but their snickering didn’t deter Bobbie one bit.
“Hey, do you want a candy bar?” Bobbie asked Uma. Although Bobbie Katz was a little chunky, her mother still packed a Hershey bar almost every day for a snack. Bobbie, however, loathed chocolate, so she had a stash of at least seven of them in a Tupperware container at the bottom of her book bag.
She stooped and unzipped her purple pack and produced the container, popping the lid with a little burp.
“Um, sure,” said Uma. Meanwhile, Alissa and Sharon stared at the chocolate with little bits of saliva dripping from their mouths. They reached their grubby, third grade hands out, too, as Uma plucked the wrapped confection out of Bobbie’s hands.
Daggers shot out of Bobbie’s eyes. “They’re not for you,” she snapped at the two little girls. “They’re for my friend, Uma.” Bobbie took one step forward. There was something polarizing about her stance, and Alissa and Sharon involuntarily took one step back.
Uma unwrapped the chocolate and greedily shoved it into her mouth. “Get lost,” she told the two girls through a mash of brown. “I’m walking home with my new best friend.”
Perfect, Bobbie thought. Her seed of revenge had germinated.
For the rest of the school year, Bobbie and Uma were inseparable. Bobbie even orchestrated a move in her desk assignment to sit closer together, telling Priest the Beast, their third grade teacher, that Jeremy Plum, with the permanent snot that dripped from the end of his nose, smelled like BM and it distracted her from her lessons.
Each day after school, Bobbie dutifully gave Uma her chocolate bar, or homemade brownies, or whatever delectable she found in the Tupperware container her mother packed in her lunch. Uma was nothing if not predictable. If Bobbie offered her one snack, she ate it. If she offered her two, she ate the second one even more readily than the first. Sometimes she didn’t even chew. The chocolate melted on her tongue and slathered sugar all over her teeth.
That summer, while Bobbie and Uma played together almost every day, mostly baking in Bobbie’s Easy Bake Oven to satisfy Uma’s mounting sweet tooth, Uma DeNapoli lost seven baby teeth, grew seven permanent ones, and promptly had them drilled because of cavities.
Fourth grade came and went and the two girls remained attached at the hip. During fifth grade, on the rare occasions when Uma DeNapoli was off somewhere else, getting more teeth drilled or shoving ice cream or Hostess Twinkies in the bottomless pit of her appetite, Bobbie practiced her tumbling to perfection. In short order, her tumbles became cartwheels and her cartwheels became backflips.
By the end of that school year, Bobbie received regional and state ribbons in gymnastics.
Uma, on the other hand, started wearing adult clothing because children’s clothing no longer wrapped around her expanding girth.
During sixth grade, the two girls both started at the Drake School, the very prestigious, private day school in town. Bobbie was stunning in her blue blazer that was the required uniform for those in attendance. Uma, on the other hand, wore a senior football player’s old jacket, tailored to her mounting size.
Bobbie’s well-planned and drawn-out revenge hit a snag that first day. School lunches were part of the exorbitant tuition her parents paid. There were no more Tupperware containers filled with goodies that she could gorge Uma with. She had to come up with something new.
It didn’t take her long. The Village Store was only a block away from the Drake School and students were allowed to walk there during free time to purchase notebook paper or the occasional bottle of pop.
Each day, Bobbie produced two dollars from her pocket and bought Uma one of the giant Hershey bars that weighed in at a cool sixteen ounces. Uma didn’t mind the size change one bit, and even though sports were a required part of Drake School life, any calori
es Uma expended as she maneuvered her mounting size around a kickball were replaced tenfold by her best friend, Bobbie.
Toward the end of sixth grade, Bobbie Katz, who no one ever again would call ‘Blobby Fats’, because she was utterly and irrevocably stunning in almost every way, started buying Vitamin E oil for Uma and helping her to slather it on the angry, red stretch marks that striped her stomach and her sides.
“They’ll go away when you lose weight,” Bobbie lied one afternoon as they hid in the girl’s bathroom and painted Uma’s skin-welts with oil.
“You promise?” Uma cried to her best friend.
“I do,” said Bobbie as she produced another enormous candy bar. “Here,” she said. “This will make you feel better.”
At the end of sixth grade, when Uma DeNapoli stopped growing at five feet and one inch but slowly crept over the 300 pound mark, her parents, who were both international finance professionals and so had very little time for their enormous daughter, decided she would be spending the summer at Kingsmount Camp for Overweight Youth up in the Massachusetts hill towns.
Uma cried and cried because she didn’t want to be separated from Bobbie. Bobbie cried and cried because fat camp and good nutrition were bound to throw a very unwelcomed wrench in her ongoing plot to totally and irrevocably make Uma DiNapoli rue the day she ever opened up her mouth in Mrs. Brown’s third grade gym class and utter those nasty, hateful words.
Blobby Fats.
Blobby Fats.
Blobby Fats.
Bobbie, however, was resourceful.
Bonnie Bray Camp for Girls was just four miles away from where Uma was supposed to be jailed for the summer, eating spaghetti served with ice tongs so that no more than ten strands hit one’s plate, and suffering through three-grape desserts garnished with cottage cheese.
Little Killer A to Z Page 16