by Steve Berman
It doesn’t hurt, like it did in the real world. In fact, Cody feels nothing, aside from the cold wetness of Harris’s tongue, and curls of water vapor rising into his clothing and hair.
After a moment, Harris draws back. “You shouldn’t be afraid,” he says. It’s a dream voice, bouncing joyfully between Cody’s ears.
“The monster isn’t real.”
“I’m not talking about the monster,” Harris says, but that doesn’t matter, because a shape has unfurled out of the water behind him. He does not seem to notice, although the water running off the animal’s muzzle showers down onto his hair.
Cody wants to run, take off down the old fishing pier, back to Blue Bear Cabin, where he can fall asleep listening to the long sleep-breaths of the children in the next room. He gains the courage to test his legs, feels his calves tighten in preparation, but Harris’s grip on his arms does not falter.
Harris kisses him again. This time it is soft and brief, and over before Cody has a chance to react. The monster tilts its head down to watch, but makes no other motion.
“Don’t be afraid,” Harris says again.
Cody, for a moment, believes him.
*
Cody hears the steady tone of the generators in the distance, and a series of intermittent thumps that are too loud to come from the raccoons that come to steal sequins and glitter glue from the storage cabins.
He has been lying in bed, staring at an empty patch of sky through the window. Cody hooks his fingers over the window ledge and pulls himself up. Outside in silhouette is the hunched figure of Harris, dragging behind him the rowboat that had recently been placed into storage.
Cody indulges in a long moment of hesitation. There is no reason to try to stop him, he figures, even though he is already searching beneath his bed for a pair of flip-flops.
There is nothing in the lake, he knows, though an hour of every evening has been spent staring at a grainy photograph on his cell phone screen. Harris will ride around all night, and maybe that will finally quell his obsession with the monster, and life around Oxwater can return to normal.
“I hate you so much,” Cody whispers, shutting the cabin door behind him.
Harris doesn’t notice him until he is pulling the boat up to the edge of the lake.
“Hello,” he says, unexcited, as if he’d known Cody would be there all along.
“Hello,” Cody says. Harris’s skin is ruddy from too much sun, but the whites of his eyes are like beacons in the darkness. “I thought you might need help.”
“I don’t.” Harris lifts a cord that’s been dangling from his neck. On the other end is the rusted key that Cody knows opens the lock to the storage shed where the boat is kept. “I’ve been doing this every night, all summer.”
Cody helps him to push the boat out regardless. Harris settles into his seat, pulling a paperback book from the waistband of his jeans. It’s too dark to read the title, but Cody recognizes the cover. It’s A Wrinkle in Time—Cody read it in elementary school, but he can’t remember anything about it.
Harris makes Cody row, of course, and remains silent until they travel far into the lake. He reaches down, flounders about along the boat’s bottom, and emerges with a can of anchovies. Cody watches him drop them one by one into the lake. The cradle of mountains around them amplifies the sound they make as they hit the water.
Cody doesn’t bother to ask. He knows he can’t grapple with Harris’s logic.
“Aren’t you my friend anymore?” Harris asks, propping his head against the palm of his hand.
“Of course I am. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Harris is silent for a long time, staring out at the water’s surface. “I was glad about the monster. I thought it would give me an excuse to talk to you again.”
“You don’t need an excuse.”
“Yes, I do,” Harris says, with such authority that Cody doesn’t bother to question him.
He leans back into the boat and feels it rock as he shifts his weight. He wants to tell Harris to move his foot, to turn the boat around, to crack a genuine smile for the first time all summer, but he can’t, physically can’t. He feels like he’s swallowed a mouthful of lake water and now there is algae coating his throat and lungs, and if he tries to speak, it’ll just pitter out of his mouth ineffectually.
“Cody,” Harris says and leans forward. Cody feels his body respond involuntarily before realizing that Harris’s eyes are not fixed on him but on a spot just over his left shoulder. Harris attempts to repeat his name, but it comes out as a mess of vowels.
Cody has the feeling that he shouldn’t turn around. He has the feeling that if he turns around, that will be the end of everything he thought he knew about Camp Oxwater and the world, and he’s not ready for that.
Across the boat, Harris is grappling with the oar. Cody reaches out for his own, but his grip falters when the boat rises and tips to the side. It takes him a moment to steady himself, and give the boat one powerful heave, but by that time, the water has stilled.
It doesn’t matter. They row until the boat lurches against the banks of Lake Oxwater, and then they keep rowing until they realize they’ve hit the shore, and stumble out of the boat, holding each other by the elbows. Their run is directionless until one of them locks onto a faint sodium light in the distance, and they tumble toward it together, finally collapsing into the grass, muscles spasming in odd syncopation.
“I didn’t actually see it,” Cody says, once he’s evened his breathing. His leg is still wedged beneath Harris’s, and he can feel the other boy’s calves tense. The sound in his ears reminds him of driving too fast with the windows down.
“I didn’t see anything.”
For a long time, Harris does not speak. His skin looks sallow in the yellow light, and there is a moth sifting through his hair. Cody wants to take back what he’s said, wants to erase the look of betrayal from Harris’s eyes, but he’s been hurtling down this path for so long, he’d not sure he can turn around.
Harris never replies. Instead, he stands, brushes the dirt from his jeans, and disappears into the unearthly darkness of the camp.
The fear—which he has lived with for so long now, that is seems powerful and alive—crawls back to settle in Cody’s throat.
*
The following morning, Kimberly Stout goes missing.
She is a ten-year-old from Green Goose. Cody can’t recall her face—by their second week at Oxwater, every kid resembles the same greasy, devastatingly sunburned creature—but he knows she kept her hair in a braid. She wore pink shoelaces and refused to use a fork.
Peter Bentley is her cabin leader. Cody finds Peter lingering in front of the mess hall, holding a lit flashlight, despite the fact that the sun has fully risen. He looks like he’s just witnessed a car accident.
“One of the other girls said she saw Kimberly heading for the lake. You don’t think—?” he begins, but interrupts himself to listen to a twig snapping in the distance. Cody knows Darcy Webb led a search party into the woods three hours ago, but the counselors have been ordered to stay at the camp and watch over the children.
“No,” Cody says. “That’s impossible.”
He is lying, but as it turns out, he’s right.
Kimberly Stout strolls into the mess hall that evening, interrupting a solemn dinner shared by the campers, parents, and volunteer rescue workers from the town below. She is soaking wet, barefoot, and there is a mint green tendril of duckweed in her bangs. Her skin is faintly blue, but she is smiling.
“That was awesome!” she says, oblivious to the dumbfounded stares of everyone around her. Cody finds Harris’s face in the crowd, and sees that he has hooked his index finger over his bottom lip and is also grinningly wildly.
The girl is not given the chance to speak again, because her parents descend on her at that moment. They are weary and smell of liquor and the cheap detergent they use on airline blankets. Cody has met them before. Kimberly’s father is in politics. Her moth
er writes religious novels. Cody does not think they are going to be very happy that their daughter was kidnapped by a monster.
“I saw—” Kimberly begins, but her mother clamps a hand over her mouth.
“Not until we speak to a lawyer,” she says, picking a mayfly out of Kimberly’s ear. “When we enrolled our daughter into this camp, no one felt the need to mention there was a creature living in the lake.”
The entire Webb family is visibly rattled, except for Harris. The threat of legal action has done nothing to smother the delight in his eyes. He is staring at Kimberly with what Cody might misinterpret as romantic love if he did not know Harris so well.
“Kimberly,” Harris calls as her parents begin to usher her out of the cafeteria.
“It was amazing!” she yells back.
Cody does not understand, but Harris obviously does.
He turns to Cody and raises a fist in victory.
*
At night, there are noises.
Or wails, more properly.
Oxwater has always had its fair share of strange sounds, but none like this—long and deep and lonely, like a voice from a dream in the moment before waking.
*
Cody has one of those moments we have all had. It goes like this:
Something bad happens and you move on, because you don’t have a choice but to keep on waking up and brushing your teeth and walking out into the sunlight with your hand pulled over your eyes. Something bad happens, and you think you’ll feel something, but you don’t.
Then one day, you’re standing beneath the showerhead, and you feel as though your heart is struggling to restart after years of deep stillness, but by now, the period in which you had to react has come and gone. It’s too late to scream and cry and beg, so you just stand there with the water heavy on your hair and shoulders, unable to move.
Somehow, you step out of the shower and into the bathroom. Somehow, you wipe away the steam on the mirror and comb your hair, and then put on a shirt, pants, and a matching pair of shoes. You stumble out into the world, and life proceeds as usual.
But you’re not the same, and you can’t say why or how.
You might not even be there at all.
As Cody reaches for the doorknob of Red Rabbit Cabin, he is unsure as to whether or not his palm will actually grip the metal or if it will pass through it, useless and intangible. But it’s cool and firm beneath his hand.
Cody turns the knob and pushes.
The room seems empty. Cody knows the campers are out on horseback riding lesson, but Harris is not immediately visible. Cody catches the other boy’s reflection first, shirtless and barefoot, hair damp from the shower. His spine looks knobby and prehistoric beneath his skin.
“Hey,” Cody says before Harris turns around. He knows Harris may be thin, but he’s strong. “I think we should go out on the water again,” Cody goes on, when Harris refuses to fill the silence. “I want to look for the monster. I lied. I did take a picture of it.”
Harris moves out of the bathroom, silently gathering his shirt and shoes. There is an open book on the nightstand, facedown and pressed flat, tension across the wear on the spine. It’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which Cody has never read.
“Are you even listening to me?”
Harris bends down to tie his shoes, his hair brushing against Cody’s shin.
“I’m confused.”
“So am I,” Cody mutters, because Harris’s forehead is resting on the side of his knee, and neither one of them seems to be making an attempt to move.
Harris stands, his body freckled with rusty water. Cody stares at the mosquitoes trapped in the window screen.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps, suddenly forgetting why he came. This is stupid, but Harris’s breath is audible and comforting, like rain sliding down an aluminum roof. Cody wonders what it’d be like to press his ear against Harris’s chest—wonders if he would hear Harris’s heart bellowing against his ear like the monster does in the night, deep and filled with strange longing.
“S’okay,” Harris mutters, tugging self-consciously at the towel on his waist. Above them, the cabin’s ceiling fan spins on high and Harris’s arms are covered in gooseflesh.
“I just wanted to tell you that we should look for the monster again.”
Harris takes another step forward. He is close enough to touch Cody’s face, and so he does. His eyes remain flat, as if his hand has acted autonomously and his brain has not had the chance to react. Cody imagines he can still feel the scar on Harris’s finger, a slice of sunken skin that will stay with him forever.
He’s unsure whether he’s about to start sobbing or laughing, so instead he leans forward and presses his mouth against Harris’s. It is not a kiss, not really. They remain close-mouthed and awkward, but he can feel Harris’s pulse against his bottom lip.
“I thought,” Harris begins, without moving. It’s good to feel Harris speak against his mouth. He tastes like mint toothpaste.
“Yeah,” Cody says.
“So?”
“So.”
Harris kisses him properly. Or at least, he attempts to.
“Not so hard.”
“Sorry.” Harris pulls away.
Cody is left standing with his mouth open, listening to insects slapping against the windowpane.
Harris is still sunburned. There is a strip of skin on his nose, curling back like a white snail, and for a moment, Cody is afraid that this is rejection. That he will never get the satisfaction of peeling away the dried skin from Harris’s shoulders.
But Harris’s eyes are warm, like they were the first time Cody met him. Back when they’d just been campers and Cody had spent the first week homesick and terrified of the nighttime bear rumbles from the forest. Harris slept on the top bunk, and at night he would let his upper body dangle down and tell Cody that bears mostly ate plants anyway, and there were no monsters out there.
At least, there hadn’t been at the time.
“Why now?” Harris mutters.
“I don’t know,” Cody says, which is the truth. “It’s the monster, maybe. Possibly. I want to go look for it again, and we might both get eaten.”
“Not eaten. Drowned, potentially and accidentally,” Harris clarifies.
Cody kisses him. This time, it feels good.
Harris’s chest is damp and bony, and Cody presses his palms flat against it, feeling Harris’s heart flit against his skin like a wounded sparrow. He is vaguely aware that Harris’s penis is half-hard beneath his towel, but his brain is not entirely certain what to do with this information. It’s one thing to kiss another boy, but he hasn’t thought beyond that.
He’s fooled around with girls before. Sorta. In theory, this should be easier, but he can’t seem to make his hands slide any lower. Harris is still kissing him, sloppy and enthusiastic, but his shoulders are stiff and Cody can practically feel the muscles in his back, locked and rigid against his spine.
He hadn’t expected Harris to be the reticent one, but now it seems obvious. Of course Harris would force him to take the next step. Harris is a bastard, but Cody is tired of being afraid.
He reaches down to cup Harris’s erection in his palm.
“Ah,” Harris gasps and jumps back, which was not exactly the reaction Cody had been hoping for. The towel has slipped low on his waist, and Cody’s brain settles uselessly on the muscles of Harris’s too-narrow hips.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Cody says, as he watches a swell of terror rise in Harris’s face. His stance is hunched and unassertive, water dripping from his bangs to his eyebrows. Cody struggles with a moment of ground-tilting vertigo.
“Let’s, uh, let’s plan for tonight,” Harris says.
Cody feels the world around him creak and moan, sagging under pressure.
*
Heather Cromley appears an hour later, beating on the door of Red Rabbit cabin with a pink fist. Cody curses into Harris’s shoulder because he’s finally coaxed the other boy ont
o the sheets with him, and they’re studying a map of Lake Oxwater with their heads leaning against the same bedpost, the smell of oak rubbing off on their hair.
Heather Cromley stumbles into the room and folds over, hands balanced on her knees. Her breath sounds like a door being ripped from its hinges, and her jeans are covered with stinkweed. Heather Cromley’s mother sends her to Oxwater with expensive madras shorts and white sunglasses, but by the second week, she’s always managed to compile a closet full of clothing borrowed from the boys in the next cabin.
“Mr. Cody,” she says, “We’ve been looking for—did you hear? It’s here!”
“What’s here?” Cody says, hoping an eight-year-old can’t interpret the pink streak across his cheeks and nose. Thankfully, Harris has dressed, but his lips are bruised like he’s been eating grape Popsicles.
“The monster! It’s here, it’s dead, and it’s here!”
The muscles in Cody’s thighs give out, but he scrambles after Harris, barefoot and blinded by the sunlight.
*
Cody smells the monster before he sees it.
It is not what he expects, a mixture of brine and rubbery fat, but rather a bitter smell like a blood orange and not entirely unpleasant. By the time he finally catches up to Harris, Cody is scratched and bleeding from the overgrown hedges on the path to Oxwater Lake, and the bottoms of his feet ache from the burning soil.
Harris looks worse for wear. There are grass shavings in his toenails, and he is blinking down at them, rubbing two fingers along his left brow. He does not look up as Cody approaches and drops a hand on his shoulder, which he does more to steady himself than to comfort Harris.
“It’s dead,” Harris mutters, but Cody can already see that.
The creature alternately heaves and shrivels. There must be bacteria multiplying in its stomach. It is massive and purple, neck spiraled counter-clockwise against its back. Cody does not want to look into its exposed eye; it is circular and lidless, the color of watered-down lemonade.