Peashooter finally turned away from the fire pit and faced Firefly.
“Your orders were pretty clear, weren’t they?”
“Well, yeah—”
“What were they again?”
“Never let the fire die out.” Firefly’s voice wilted under the intensity of Peashooter’s glare.
“Exactly. One very simple order.”
“But…”
“But?” Peashooter leaned into Firefly’s face. “But—what?”
“It…rained.”
“Should I get somebody else to take care of my fire?”
“No!” Firefly cried. “I can do it. I swear.”
Peashooter addressed the rest. “Some of you have taken advantage of the Tribe’s kindness. Haven’t we given you your freedom? A place to call home? All the food you could ever eat? All we’ve asked for in return is allegiance—your devotion to our cause. That means preparation. Training. We need to take care of our home.”
“You mean housekeeping?” Capone muttered.
Peashooter shook his head. “Parents’ Day is only a couple days away. We need to be ready to welcome your families with open arms.”
“What’re you going to do?” I asked. “Imprison our parents?”
Peashooter grinned.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? Isn’t that what they’ve done to you all of these years? I think it’s high time we turned the tables on Mom and Dad….Wouldn’t you agree, cannibals?”
The roar of approval from the rest of the campers made me shrink back.
“He’s crazy,” I tried to implore to the others. “You all know that, right?”
“We’re all mad here,” Peashooter quoted Alice in Wonderland. “I’m mad. You’re mad….You must be…Or, you wouldn’t have come here. Isn’t that right, boys?”
The Tribe cheered even louder this time.
“Don’t worry, Rat,” Peashooter said. “We’ve got a very special surprise in store for your mom and dad.”
I gripped on to the cage and shook the bars. “If you touch them, I swear I’ll—”
“You’ll what? What could you possibly do to me?”
“I’ll…I’ll…” I had nothing. I felt completely flustered. “Why are you so bent on making everybody else’s mom and dad pay for something they haven’t done?”
“They’ve done plenty.”
“To you?”
“To all of us. Parents are the same, no matter who their children are. Now, everybody—up on your feet!”
Newly galvanized, the cannibals formed a line before Peashooter. Only Capone grumbled, but nobody paid him any attention.
Today’s military drill: marching.
“On my command,” Peashooter called out. “For-ward, march!”
His ragtag battalion of cannibals shifted their weight onto their right foot while stepping forward a full thirty inches on their left.
“Right, left, right, left, right!”
Keeping their eyes focused up front, the column marched through the amphitheater. The leg of the cannibal behind moved at the exact same time as the corresponding leg of the camper up front.
“Right, left, right, left, right!”
Sporkboy had dragged in an aluminum trash can from the mess hall. Flipping it over, he pounded out a cadence with a pair of wooden spoons.
Peashooter chanted as if he were a drill instructor—
“Mom and Dad sent me away,
They never loved me anyway.
They dropped me off at summer camp,
Now I sleep in the cold and damp.
They don’t care if I’m dead or ’live,
That’s okay, I joined the Tribe!”
I watched them march for what felt like hours. Seeing them circle around my cage all morning made me light-headed.
“Sound off,” Peashooter barked.
“One, two,” the Tribe called back.
“Sound off!”
“Three, four!”
“Halt!” Peashooter commanded.
The processional of cannibals came to a complete halt.
“About-face!”
The column spun on its heels, now standing upright, shoulder to shoulder with one another, facing their pleased leader. He walked down the line.
“By the time summer is over,” Peashooter continued, “you will all be lean, mean, head-hunting machines. You will all have something to be proud of. You will have a sense of self-worth. Of pride. Of belonging to something bigger and better than yourself! You will be a part of this family we call the Tribe!”
Peashooter stopped before Charles. “Chin up,” he instructed.
Charles lifted his chin accordingly.
“Let me hear your war cry,” he instructed.
“Yaaaaaargh!”
“You expect to scare anyone with a cry like that? Louder this time!”
Charles’s neck cricked to the side. “Yeeeaaaaaargh!”
“Louder!”
“Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!”
“Would any of you be afraid of a battle cry like that?” Peashooter asked the rest of his regiment.
“No!” they promptly responded.
“Hear that?” Peashooter shouted directly into Charles’s ear. Charles couldn’t help but wince. “You couldn’t even frighten the rug rats if you tried! Now drop to the ground and give me twenty!”
Charles plopped onto his belly and struggled through his push-ups. Peashooter placed his foot on the small of his back and leaned in, adding his heft.
“Put your back into it,” he shouted.
“I…can’t.”
“You can’t—or you won’t?”
“Can’t.”
Peashooter pressed his foot down until Charles dropped face-first into the dirt. “Stay down until I say you can get up! The rest of you—double-time, march!”
Still pinning Charles to the ground, Peashooter looked to Firefly. “That fire isn’t going to light itself, is it?”
“On it.” Firefly didn’t hesitate, quickly patting down his pockets.
His eyes widened.
Something was missing. I could tell from the panic eclipsing his features.
“Where are my matches?” He kept searching his pockets on his hoodie, digging and re-digging—but nothing.
He spun around in circles, scanning the ground.
Nothing at his feet.
“Who took them?” He lifted his head, searching through the amphitheater, until his eyes locked onto Klepto. Up came an accusing finger. “You!”
Klepto looked over his shoulder, then back at Firely. “Who? Me?”
“You stole them, didn’t you?”
Klepto shrugged. “What’re you talking about?”
“You did,” Firefly shouted. “I know you did!”
“Now hold on a sec—”
Klepto took a step back, only for a tiny blue-and-red cardboard box to fall at his feet. He picked it up quickly, but the rattle of wooden matchsticks broadcast Klepto’s guilt.
“Give them back!” Firefly let out a howl as he bolted up the amphitheater’s path and rammed his shoulder directly into Klepto’s stomach.
The two of them blurred into a flurry of fists. Their bodies knotted into one another, rolling over the ground.
Capone laughed, starting to chant—“Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Peashooter wasn’t pleased with the outbreak. “Stop! Stop this at once!”
But nobody listened. Instead, more cannibals joined in—“Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Peashooter motioned to Yardstick, who dutifully marched over and gripped Firefly by the back of his sweatshirt. With a single yank, Yardstick pulled Firefly off of Klepto—only Klepto wouldn’t let go, accidentally ripping Firefly’s hoodie i
n half.
“Fight! Fight! Fi—”
Firefly stumbled forward, his torso exposed.
From his neck to his navel, he looked like a crudely fashioned doll made from a massive stash of Silly Putty.
Burn scars.
We had all known about Firefly’s burns. But none of us had seen the full extent of them. His hoodie had hidden the vast expanse of mottled tissue from us, as if his sweatshirt had been his true skin all along.
Firefly’s face flushed into a deep beet red while his chest marbled up in a strange mixture of pink and white.
“Stop looking at me!”
Firefly grabbed the tatters of his sweatshirt and pressed them to his chest, then forced his way out of the amphitheater, pushing through his frozen comrades.
The Tribe stood there, silent. Unable to move.
None were more aghast than Peashooter.
•••
“Everybody, just…” Peashooter started to say before chasing after Firefly. “Just mind your own business.”
A hush hung over our heads. Nobody could make eye contact with one another, unsure of what to even say after what we had all just witnessed.
“This is for the birds,” Capone muttered as he shuffled off. Several others followed behind him.
Yardstick made sure everyone else had left before sneaking over to my cage with a canteen of water.
“What’s going on here?” I asked between greedy gulps. “Did you see that?”
Yardstick slipped a paperback through the bars. “Hide this, fast.”
“Another weapon?”
“Read it the right way and it might be,” Yardstick said over his shoulder, making a hasty exit. “Don’t let Peashooter catch you with it.”
“Wait—”
Too late. Yardstick was gone, abandoning me with the book.
Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau.
Never read that one before.
Opening it, I found a note written in the margins:
Being a prisoner doesn’t have to make you weak. It can make you stronger, as long as you stick to your ideals. What will you stand up for?
The She-Wolf
•••
I had to wait until nightfall before bringing the book back out, having risked paper-cutting my butt by tucking it into the waistline of my shorts just next to my copy of Animal Farm for the last five hours.
I was building up a library just under my behind. Nobody would ever think to look for a book down there.
Or want to.
I had hidden my penlight alongside the lower crosspiece of the cage. Clicking it on for a walk through Walden, I spotted an underlined passage in one of the other writings:
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
I better get cracking.
•••
Thoreau had spent two years, two months, and two days in the wilderness and chose jail over supporting a war he didn’t believe in—which, at the present moment, was something I could personally identify with.
In the margins, The She-Wolf had written:
Think Mandela. Think Gandhi. Think King. They were all prisoners at some point—but they never let the bars get in the way.
I might not be able to muscle out from my cage, but maybe I didn’t need to.
You can break my body, Peashooter, but you won’t break my mind. You can’t touch my spirit. My will to live is stronger than any cage you can cram me in—
Someone was in the trees.
Two somebodies. They had been perched right over my head. I caught a glimpse of their silhouettes just as they leapt from one branch to the next.
I hadn’t even noticed. How long had they been up there, looking down at me?
“Come back!”
A face slowly emerged from the shadows.
A girl.
But not like any girl I’d ever seen. She was older. Her cheeks were streaked with a series of red and blue stripes. Her blond hair had been braided into a pair of Celtic-looking knots around the sides of her head. She wore a New Leaf T-shirt like the rest of us, but the shoulders appeared to have been lined with white feathers.
Were those wings?
“Who are you?” I asked. “Some kind of swan maiden?”
“What do you think?” Her no-nonsense attitude threw me.
“Are you…the She-Wolf?”
That made her laugh. “No cigar, kid.”
“But you’re from the girls’ camp, aren’t you?”
“What gave me away?”
“So you guys are spying on me now?”
“In your dreams.” She turned toward the woods, about to disappear into the shadows once more.
“Wait—please!”
She stopped, impatiently looking my way.
“Take me with you.”
“Sorry, kid.” She shook her head. “No boys allowed.”
The swaying pines seemed to wrap their limbs around her agile body as she bounded from one branch to another on the neighboring tree, whisking her away.
“Happy reading,” her voice trailed out from the darkness.
DAY FOUR: 0700 HOURS
he sun rose up from the tree line.
Dawn was upon us. A new day would be here before long—and with it, the next step in Peashooter’s master plan for global takeover.
Peashooter had requested the Piranhas’ presence in the amphitheater for a little Farts and Crafts—while I, crammed in my cage, had to listen to his diatribing. He slid a bowl of water into my pen, like I was his dog and he my benevolent master.
Peashooter posed as the Piranhas painted portraits of their fearless leader.
Peashooter wearing a general’s uniform festooned with a chest of medals, head held high.
Peashooter standing valiantly atop a heap of counselors.
Peashooter crossing the Delaware River.
One Piranha worked on a portrait of Peashooter completely comprised of gummy bears, but he got hungry halfway through and ate his leader’s likeness.
Must’ve been a starving artist.
“Gather round,” Peashooter instructed the kiddie cannibals. “You are the next generation of the Tribe, our future, so I want you to take what I’m saying to heart.”
Their young Piranha minds were soft putty in Peashooter’s hands.
“Who knows? Maybe one day, you might start a tribe of your own.”
“Franchising tribes already?” I jabbed from the confines of my cage. “Next thing you know you’ll have your own chain going. Would you like that tribe super-sized, sir? Your total comes to $3.57. Drive around to the next window, please.”
Peashooter put on his best poker face and acted like he hadn’t heard me. “You need to know where you all came from. Time for a lesson in Tribal History.”
“Emphasis on HIS-story.”
Peashooter turned to me and glared. He wasn’t about to let me steal his thunder. “See him?” He pointed. “Why do you think we keep him in a cage?”
“Becauseheatesomebody,” one Piranha offered.
“I’ve been boxed up in here long enough that I probably could eat somebody,” I said. I spotted a few smirks.
“That’s what happens when you betray your Tribe,” Peashooter shot me down. “Rat is an enemy of all his kind.”
“That’s from White Fang,” I said. “As a matter of fact, you strike me as something of a Lip-lip character yourself, Peashooter.”
The Piranhas looked puzzled. “Whatisaliplip?” Their spokespiranha asked.
“Lip-lip is a dog in White Fang,” I said before Peashooter could pipe up.
“He was the leader of their pack,” he cut in.
“For a while,” I cut back. “He knows White Fang is a threat. S
o he bullies him in front of all the other dogs. He even gets them to torture him. But what Lip-lip doesn’t know is that his hounding only makes White Fang stronger. It’s his bullying that transforms White Fang from a little puppy into a fierce dog.”
Peashooter sensed I was up to something. “Just because you perused a few chapters doesn’t make you an expert. Try living in the wild, like we have.”
“Hear that?” I nodded to the Piranhas. “Peashooter thinks crashing in the counselors’ cabin is roughing it.”
“I’ve been roughing it out here a lot longer than you….”
“What nature programs do you watch on the TV in George’s room when everybody else has fallen asleep?”
The Piranhas gave each other a perplexed side-glance.
“There’s no television in George’s…”
“Do they get cable all the way out here?” I asked.
“Nobody’s watching any TV!”
“Next thing you know, Peashooter will be saying there’s no more chocodogs or gummy bears—because he’s saving them all for himself.”
“That’s not true,” he first said to me, then turned to the Piranhas. “Not true.”
“How’s the food supply holding up, Sweet Pea?”
“None of your business.”
The Piranhas volleyed their attention between us. Nobody had openly opposed Peashooter’s authority before. This had to be more fun than history.
“I’m not asking for myself, personally,” I said. “I was more looking out for the interests of the Future Cannibals of America here.”
“Why don’t you put a cork in it, Rat?”
“I’m sorry.” I cupped my hand around my ear. “I couldn’t hear you over all the grumbling stomachs.”
“Shut up.” Peashooter stumbled with his most unimaginative retort yet.
“I’d be careful if I were you, kids,” I said to the Piranhas. “Won’t be long before the older campers start eating you little ones.”
The cluster of kids started gnashing their teeth. “Notifweeatthemfirstnotifweeatthemfirstnotifweeatthemfirst!”
“Remember,” I said. “You are what you eat—so steer clear of Capone, okay?”
“Enough,” Peashooter shouted. “Nobody is eating anybody. You are all equals in the eyes of the Tribe.”
“Is that so?” I asked.
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