by Lily Sparks
Troy lets his hand flicker on her left wrist, gazing up at her curiously as though wondering if she’ll notice. The second he gives, her arm slips across his throat and she bows over him, her short hair nearly brushing his face, and gently swipes the marker tip from ear to ear. Then she rolls off of him, giggling uncontrollably.
Troy’s face matches the magenta stripe she’s left across his neck. “Can’t I try to get her back, Dave?” he calls, his eyes not leaving Jada’s face.
“Nope, you’re out,” Dave says. “But you can still participate in the Scavenger Hunt. Kate will give you the list of things to find down at the Arts and Crafts table. So get moving, campers!”
We all stand slowly, nervously laughing as we gauge each other’s proximity. I’m about to make my approach on Dennis when I notice Javier in my peripheral.
“What!?” Javier grins when I spring away.
“You KNOW what!” I can’t hold in my frantic laughter as I wheel away from him. Dennis has disappeared over his shoulder, Jada on his heels. So I turn and run, almost sideswiping Kate in my hurry.
“That’s the spirit!” Kate calls after me.
“You can run but you can’t hide!” Javier calls, footfalls hard behind me. I race down the hill toward the picnic table under the sycamore, the water sparkling a deep blue in the midmorning sun, and grab one weathered corner like it’s base, but this isn’t tag.
Javier catches my arm and spins me into him like we’re dancing, my back pressed against his chest, his strong arm across my collarbones, the scruff of his chin catching in my hair. I can’t pull his arm away even with both hands, but I wriggle enough that he ends up spinning in a circle to keep hold of me, the blue and green whirling in a dizzy, gold-rimmed blur. My face hurts from laughing.
“Go on. Do your worst!” I cry at last, grateful he can’t see how hard I’m blushing. The cold tip of the marker lands under my ear and makes a quick line across my throat just as Erik crests the hill. My eyes connect with Erik’s, and I swear I hear his thoughts, his deep voice as clear in my head as though he were whispering in my ear:
What a Nice Guy that Javier is.
My laughter sputters out like a spent firework and I sink to the picnic bench, a shiver snaking up my back. But is the shiver from a fake throat slash?
Or from hearing Erik’s voice in my head?
“Okay, okay, settle down, everyone in their seats for the time being,” Kate laughs. “Plenty of time for slashing throats left before dinner. Now. Today we’re going to be practicing our suture stitching.” Kate puts a green plastic strawberry container in the middle of the table. It’s full of travel sewing kits the size of a matchbook, like you get in hotels. She has us each take one, then hands out pieces of plastic the size and shape of credit cards, only they’re coated on one side with brown or beige silicone and feature two bright red ridges, one curved and one straight.
“When you’re out in the field, accidents happen. You might tangle with a target, break some glass clearing a scene, or catch your arm on barbed wire. And obviously you can’t just waltz into an emergency room. You’ll have to patch yourself up as best you can, so knowing how to stitch flesh wounds comes in handy. We’ll get some practice in today. And for our Color War …” She waves a stack of papers. “We also have the Scavenger Hunt.”
She puts a sheet in front of each of us, face down like a test, and then announces we can begin. I flip it over hopefully: if it includes forageable plants, I might still have a chance at the screen time.
Surprisingly the list is just eight items long. And each one begins with “Find the camper who …”
“Find the camper who wet the bed until they were thirteen?” Kurt reads the first one out loud. “No one’s going to come clean about that. How are we supposed to figure that out?”
Jada, across the table, is frozen in place.
“That’s the game.” Kate smiles a tight smile. “Find a way to make them tell.”
Troy is pale. For once he isn’t joking. “That’s a messed up game.”
“Which of the campers’ first kiss was with their—” I read out, then stop on the word “stepbrother.”
My eyes connect with Nobody’s, and we both look at Jada, whose head is hung down like she’s staring at her sheet, shoulders hunching forward, curling in on herself like burning paper.
“Well, that was me,” I tell the table. “You can all me put me down for that one.”
Erik’s eyebrow goes up, and I widen my eyes at him.
Troy clears his throat. “Cool, thanks, Signal. You can put me down for number seven.”
Dennis looks up from his sheet, sincerely confused. “You can’t be number seven. You don’t have third-degree burns, Troy, that’s clea—” Dennis stops talking abruptly. “Oh, okay. Sorry. Um. I’m number three then.”
Erik sighs, stands up, stretches his long arms, and walks over to the tree. He hauls himself up on his customary branch and leans back against the trunk.
“Thanks, Dennis. I’m the bedwetter,” Javier offers confidently, as a knowing chuckle goes around the table.
“Nice try, guys.” Kate puts her hands on her hips and glares at us. “Dave and I know the right answers. If you don’t turn in a sheet with the correct camper matched to each item, then you don’t get dinner tonight. Now get to work.”
Just the thought makes my stomach hurt. Hunger here is not a joke. Our days are physically exhausting, our nights are cold, and a bag lunch won’t cut it until breakfast. On top of which, the chance to search online for what Mike and Vaughn are up to might never come again.
Maybe I can just guess? The others are all still reading.
Guiltily, I scan the list:
1. Find the camper who wet the bed until they were 13.
2. Find the camper whose first kiss was with their stepbrother.
3. Find the camper who never had a visitor in prison.
4. Find the camper with the lowest Class A score.
5. Find the camper who doesn’t remember murdering someone.
6. Find the camper who grew up in a trailer park.
7. Find the camper whose parent gave them 3rd degree burns.
8. Find the camper whose Wylie-Stanton result led to the bullying and suicide of their younger sibling.
Some are obvious, most aren’t. Figuring out who goes with what for some of these would require borderline psychological torture. Ashamed of myself for even considering the list, I ball the sheet up.
The sound is deafening in the silence around the table. Heat flushes up my neck as everyone turns to look at me.
“Congratulations, Signal,” Kate snaps. “You’re the first person disqualified from the Color War. Enjoy missing dinner.”
I throw the ball in the center of the table and cross my arms in response.
And then, in the ensuing tense silence, there’s a crumple sound overhead and a second ball of paper falls from the tree.
Kate’s expression darkens, but Troy laughs and Jada claps, and the sound of crumpling paper rises around the table, except from Nobody, who folds her sheet into a paper plane and sends it shooting toward Kate’s back as she turns and heads up the hill, her walkie-talkie off her hip, radioing to Dave.
We don’t care. We’re all still laughing when there’s a yip from Jada, her hands slapping over her throat. She spins around and we all see Dennis, Sharpie uncapped, give her an apologetic grimace.
“Dennis!! Oh no, you didn’t!” she laughs, throwing her paper ball at him, and that launches the paper fight. We throw the balled-up lists at each other, pulling the sheets from each other’s hands, tearing and twisting the paper and throwing it across the field until we’ve turned each other’s darkest secrets into white confetti.
* * *
When the air horn goes off, there’s only three people left without Sharpie marks, and Erik gets Nobody on the way to the field where Dave is waiting.
“So it’s just me and Erik now?!” Javier says. He and Erik lock eyes. “Game on.
”
Erik bares his teeth in a smile, and there’s a few encouraging hoots from the twins, but they break off as our huddle gets closer to Dave.
He’s in the tall grass where we had the pop quiz that first day, so I don’t quite see what’s happening at first. From a distance it looks like he’s holding a decomposing hand.
“Where’s Signal? Where is she?” Dave says in a voice that makes me go cold. Then, seeing me, he strides over and grabs the collar of my shirt and slings me face first into a pile of mannequin limbs on the ground, so hard the knee of my jeans split on impact.
I try to get up, but he kicks behind my knee. I hit the ground, a wheeze rattling out of my chest as I collapse in the cold grass, Dave standing right over me.
“I told you, Signal,” Dave says through clenched teeth. “No more chances.”
Chapter Eleven
What’s Buried
“Was I not clear?” Dave yells. “I told you to hide the body. So what’s this, Signal?”
Something dense glances off my shoulder: a silicone hand flops in the grass in front of me. I wince away before the next body part catches the back of my head.
“What’s this, huh? And this?” he screams, pelting me with parts of the plastic corpse.
In two strides his hand is on my collar, he hauls me up and stares me down. I’m so close I can see the tiny black spaces between his too-white teeth and smell the chemical sting of his harsh soap.
“You FAILED the same test TWICE. You FELL OFF the obstacle course, you FAILED Color War. You’re a FAILURE, Signal. SAY YOU’RE SORRY FOR BEING A FAILURE!”
“Sorry, Dave,” I wheeze. But I guess it’s not sincere enough for him because he shoves me backward, hard. I wind up on my knees again, the others watching in stunned silence.
“You are sorry, a sorry excuse for a Class A! You’re a disgrace to the work we do here. Let’s see if you’ve figured it out yet: what did you come here to learn, Signal?”
He’s angry I’m not afraid of him. But how could I be? What could he do to me that’s worse than what I’ve been through? I woke up wearing the lifeblood of my best friend. I am the Girl From Hell.
“WHAT DID YOU COME HERE TO LEARN?!”
“Not to end up like you,” I spit back.
“What did you say?”
I pick up the head, pressing its cheek to my chest, and look Dave in the eyes.
“You take broken kids and make them worse. That’s not work. That’s a waste. Of all of us.”
“Oh, you’re a waste all right, Signal. No need to convince me,” Dave says, and his key fob rattles in his hand as he points it at me. Finally, he gets the fear he wants. I hold very still. “One of the bodies in front of me is going to disappear tonight. You understand?”
I manage a nod.
“Go,” he says. “Everybody else, with me.”
“She gets a buddy,” Nobody creaks. “Dog Mask—”
“Jada!” Dave orders. “Make sure Signal does her own work this time.”
The rest of them move off, leaving just Jada and me.
I gather up the burnt mannequin parts, aware of her moving around behind me. I turn to see her pulling off her large yellow sweatshirt and laying it on the ground. I figure she’s going to sit and watch me scrounge, but then instead she drops to her knees and helps me pick up the pieces.
“If we put them on the sweatshirt,” Jada says, “we can bundle it up after. Maybe we could do two bundles? That’d be easier to carry.”
“… Okay.” I take my fleece off and lay it by hers.
“Good work back there,” Jada says, not looking at me. “Telling Dave off. The face he made was really beautiful. Like his brain was constipated.”
My own laugh surprises me. She smiles almost shyly.
“Any ideas where you want to hide it this time?”
“No clue,” I sigh. “It won’t burn, it won’t sink …”
“So we bury it,” Jada says. “I know just the spot.”
We take a detour to get shovels from the shed behind the obstacle course. When she slings a sharp spade over her shoulder, I feel a twinge of misgiving.
“You don’t have to help dig,” I say uncertainly.
She tilts her head back. “What, are you like, scared of me or something?”
I grip my shovel uneasily, fighting to keep my voice calm. “Why do you think Dave had you stay? He’s hoping you’ll attack me again. He knows you hate me.”
“I never hated you, wow.” Jada rolls her eyes. “I hated how boy crazy you were when you first got here.”
“I was boy crazy?!”
“Yes. You were boy crazy,” Jada snaps. “Remember running down the field after Javier? Laughing with Erik all the time, all that ‘I’m a virgin he he he’ stuff? But then when I asked your girlfriend why she was cool with it, she said you had a hard time making friends with girls.”
Ouch. “That’s true,” I admit. “I mean, I have a hard time making friends with anyone.”
Jada nods, her eyes wary. “Yeah, well … me too.”
We walk along the forest path through the forgotten playground.
“I had a best friend,” I truly have no idea why I’m telling her this, “and then when we got to high school she sort of stopped talking to me in public.” My face burns, but Jada doesn’t laugh.
“Lucky you. I never even got a best friend,” Jada tells me. “Every time I invited a friend over, my stepbrother would mess it up. I just stopped asking people.” She smiles an angry smile. “I always thought, when I get to high school, I’ll get an amazing boyfriend! He’ll come home and kick my stepbrother’s ass! So stupid …” She laughs, shakes her head. “Like I thought everyone got some perfect boyfriend in high school. Like in a TV show.”
“Yeah!” I nod. “In middle school, I thought, like, there would be some group just waiting for me in high school.”
“Yeah.” Jada grins. “Barbie gets a Skipper! That’s how it works.”
I laugh. “Oh, I was the Skipper. A Skipper without a Barbie.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a Barbie. One of the special edition ones with the big box and sparkly dress and little brush and everything.” Jada lifts her chin, then laughs. “… No Ken though.”
“Yeah? It’s all, um, over? With you and Erik?” Why am I bringing this back up?
But Jada just shrugs, if a little too carelessly. “Eh, we were never official. He’s hot but he knows it, you know? Like he’ll never be some perfect boyfriend, he’ll never be all about one girl like that. And after what I’ve been through?” Jada sighs. “I need to be straight up adored.”
“I mean, that does sound nice.”
“Doesn’t Nobody adore you?” Jada asks.
“You know, we, um,” I hurry to cover. “We mostly sent letters in prison so we’re sort of adjusting to an in-person relationship. Now where are we looking to dig?” Smooth.
“We’re looking for a patch of skinny white trees.” Jada says.
“Like, birches?”
“Maybe? I don’t know all the names of the trees. Right there. Those.”
She points to a grove of slim white trunks ahead, their small yellow leaves turning the air around them gold, and I smile.
“Yeah, those are birches.”
“Right. The ground there’s super soft. And we need to dig the hole seriously deep because we cannot have your girl turning up again.”
* * *
When Jada finally declares the hole deep enough, it’s almost sunset. Winded, we open up our bundles and shake the limbs into the dark earth, then take a moment to rest before we have to shovel the massive pile of wet dirt back on top of the mannequin.
“What about Troy?” I ask her as we lie, collapsed, on the cold ground.
“What about Troy?”
“He likes you.” I pause. “He might even adore you.”
A smile flickers across her face. And then a distant whistle carries through the trees:
“JADA! LIGHTS OUT! LET’S GO!!!�
�� Dave calls.
She looks confused. “I’m supposed to leave you here alone …?”
“I guess Dave figures if it takes me much longer to hide this body then Dog Mask can have me.” I try to sound cavalier, rising to my feet and giving her a hand up. The birches have dimmed from white to lavender, their long shadows blurring into the darkening air.
Dave’s voice calls again, angrier.
“Well, you do have a shovel if Dog Mask turns up. And it is a full moon …” She looks doubtfully up at the sky, then back at me. “Just go fast, okay?”
“Okay.” I smile, Dave’s voice calling louder in the distance. “And thank you.”
“I’m glad we got to hang out,” Jada says, and then, her eyes sparkling: “I forgive you for being such a skank before, okay?”
“Wow, thanks. I forgive you for slashing my face.”
“So dramatic! It was a SCRAPE, Skipper.” She laughs, pushing my shoulder as she gets up, and disappears into the trees.
And then the only thing in the woods is me, and the wind, and somewhere, a man in a mask who apparently intends on killing me. But it’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine.
And then I hear a twig snap.
I hold completely still, and whatever is behind me does too. Slowly, I slide my hand down my shovel handle, gripping the wood like a baseball bat.
I swing around, raising the shovel to confront: nothing. I plant the shovel in the earth, my hands shaking.
“You’re fine, you’re fine,” I say out loud.
“No you’re not.” A mocking voice answers, and I instantly flood with relief. “You’re not even halfway done. What have you been doing out here since Jada came back? Making dirt angels?”
“Erik!” I turn and immediately wince from the glare of his flashlight. “You scared me for a second!”