Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Courtesy for Beginners

Summer camp: here's how bad summer camp was. The day I arrived I opened my camp trunk and changed my shirt and just stood there alone and breathing through my mouth in the four-man platform tent, just me and the canvas smell and the daddy longlegs, and then I thought that I was the person who I least wanted to be with, and I stepped out into the cooler air. There was nowhere to unpack anything, and even I wasn't so scared that I could hang around in the tent. It was like 104. Sweat ran down the backs of my knees. The black metal stays on the tent ropes were too hot to touch.

We were in a pine forest. Everything had that baked pine needle smell. My father had just driven away. A squirrel sat up across from me, woozy with the sun. He worked over a nut and then spit it at me. Way off behind him, two kids were sitting on another kid's chest in a clearing. Down the hill to my right, someone was ringing a bell.

I headed down the path toward the noise. I think I was affecting a saunter. I sauntered down to the lean-to where a few kids and some counselors were hanging out. A sign on top said counselors lean-to. The counselors were two blond guys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, the kind of guys who seem like nice boys to moms. A fat kid who'd already taken off his shirt was bugging them about something. The fat kid had my glasses. Which was too bad for the fat kid. They were even fixed with electrical tape on the same side that mine were. There was a whine in his voice that I could hear from up where I was, and he kept at it. You fucking idiot, I thought the whole time I was walking down to them. I was talking about me. I was always wanting myself to die whenever I found myself in a stupid situation. When I got to the front of the lean-to, I nodded at whoever caught my eye. Nobody nodded back.

“I told you I don't know,” one of the blond guys said, watching me fold my arms and stand there. He seemed to be talking to the fat kid. He had both hands on the two-by-four that was the top edge of the lean-to and he was swinging his body a little, keeping his feet in place. He looked dangerously bored. The fat kid said something else. The blond guy ignored him. The fat kid said something after that. The blond guy swung with everything he had and brought his feet up together and caught the fat kid under the chin and up along his face.

The fat kid left the ground a foot and a half and landed on his back. The sound was like when I whacked the sheet on our line with my wiffle bat. We all just stared like now we knew what we were in for, for the next however many weeks. I felt this rush, like I was the blond guy and the fat kid all at once. One of the other kids bent over and found where the glasses had landed.

“How are you?” the guy who'd kicked the fat kid asked me.

“I'm okay,” I told him. I didn't know what else to say.

“C'mon. Talk to me. Tell me. What's wrong?” my mother said when she got me alone the day before I left. I told her I didn't want to go to camp and she said, besides the camp. I told her I guessed I felt bad about my brother and she said, besides your brother.

She was asking because she saw what I was like during the day and after school and she wanted to help. She was worried that it would get even worse now that school was over. She said that everyone was worried that everything was taking too much of a toll.

My grades had gone downhill. My friends had stopped coming around. Even the Venus flytrap in my room had died.

She'd also found my list of the World's Deadliest Poisons. I was always ranking them and changing the rankings. I had a notebook with that title written inside on the first page that I kept in my desk. I looked in the encyclopedia and in the library and also under our sink. If it had a skull and crossbones on it, I checked it out.

The blond guys turned out to be Chris and Caleb. Chris was the meaner one and he looked like a guy on TV. Once we all got assembled he started a speech and Caleb finished it. It was a welcome to the camp speech. The fat kid held a dirty hand towel up to his nose while he listened. The bleeding had stopped but his lip and nose were swollen and the kids who'd gotten there late were all clearly wondering about it. He sniffled and kept shooting them looks even though he kept his head down. Chris had found him the towel and told him to suck it up when he handed it over. When he went looking for it, Caleb had helped the fat kid to his feet and had straightened out his glasses and stood next to him with his hands on his thighs, telling him it was all right while the kid got ahold of himself.

There were more counselors than just them, they told us, but the campers were divided into Beaver, Moose, and Fox troops, and they were in charge of Beaver. We were in Beaver.

“You see that?” my new tentmate asked when we were headed up to our tents. It was a stupid question because we'd both been standing there when it happened. The fat kid had landed more or less between us.

I shook my head, a little dazed, as in: Man: the things I've seen.

“They can't get away with that shit,” my new tentmate said. He sounded like he was worried that they could. He was wearing what looked like his little brother's plain white T-shirt and it was soaked through. I thought I was scrawny but he was so bad you could pass a Dixie cup through his armpit when his hands were at his sides.

Our other new tentmate told us he was horny, first thing. The three of us had our butts on the beds and feet on the floor and were leaning back on our hands. It was still really hot but they'd told us to go to our tents so that's what we'd done. We had some quiet time until the dinner horn, which was apparently going to be a real guy blowing a horn. Somebody had eaten some Hostess somethings and had left the wrappers all over the other bed. Maybe the fourth kid wasn't coming.

The scrawny kid said he was Joyce from upstate. He said “upstate” like that filled in all the gaps, as far as information about him went.

“Joyce?” the other kid said. “Hey, there. I'm Wanda.”

“You are not,” Joyce said. “What's your name?”

“Lulu Belle,” the other kid said.

Joyce turned to me. “What's your name?” he asked.

I told him.

“Nice to meet you,” Joyce said.

“What happened to the fat kid?” the other kid said.

“Oh, man,” Joyce said. “You won't believe it.” He told the story. He said, “We were both standing right there.”

“That is so fucked up,” the other kid said, like he'd just come downstairs on Christmas morning.

“So what is your name?” Joyce asked once we were back from dinner. Dinner had sucked. A little piece of metal or something had been in my Salisbury steak, and a kid in line behind me when we were bussing our trays had made fun of my shorts.

“BJ,” the other kid said. Now we had more time to piss away before the big Opening Night Campfire.

“What's that short for?” Joyce asked.

“BJ,” BJ said.

All through the first part of the campfire my gum was still bleeding from the thing in my food. I could taste it. I kept doing this thing with my face to make it feel better. “What're you, retarded?” BJ asked. I guessed he could see it even though it was getting pretty dark.

I was pressing my hands together really hard. I couldn't keep my feet still. It was interesting, though: being here wasn't any worse than being home, or being anywhere.

There was a big pyramid of wood in front of us. It was like six feet tall. A wire ran from the middle of it to a stepladder set up behind us. Every kid sitting on the grass was thinking bonfire and hoping it would maybe get out of control and the state would burn down.

We all had our flashlights with us for the trip back to the tents, though at this point they were supposed to be turned off. Chris pulled three kids from the audience and sat them in front and told them to turn their flashlights on him when he got up onstage. The stage was a plywood sheet on four metal milk crates. One of the kids was still shaking when Chris climbed up there. You could see the light beam jittering. He'd probably been thinking they were going to start things off by kicking three kids in the face.

Instead Chris said hi to us all and then said “I can't hear you” four times at what we said back. Finally even I screamed hi. He introduced the Camp Director, who had a beer in his hand. The Camp Director handed him the beer when he climbed up onto the stage. The plywood almost tipped and the Camp Director held his hands out on both sides of him and said, “Whoa, Old Paint.” He seemed to think that that should get a laugh.

He told us that Pautapaug was an old Nipmuc Indian name that meant “swampy land.” He told us that the camp got started by the Bridgeport Rotary Club in 1919. He said that we were 175 acres from the nearest town. He gave us the schedule: Reveille; Bunk Attack, for kids who slept through Reveille; the Call for Waiters; Breakfast; Sign-Up Events; the Call for Waiters; Lunch; Siesta; Sign-Up Events; Call for Waiters; Dinner; Water Polo or Capture the Flag; Campfire and Taps. He gave it to us again. Then he taught us the camp song.

“Pautapaug, carefree land, Pautapaug, helping hand,” the kid next to me sang.

The Camp Director got down and Chris got back up there. The Camp Director took his beer back. The other counselors were all doing something behind us.

“Fire god of Pautapaug, send down your fire!” Chris screamed.

A coffee can filled with some kind of fire slid down the wire to the pyramid. It bounced when it hit the wood and then sat against it for a minute before the whole thing went up. It must have been totally soaked with gas or something. That was a big hit with the campers.

The kids in the front row had to move back. The toe of one kid's sneaker started to melt.

There was more singing. Then the counselors all went somewhere. We sat there in the dark, looking at the fire.

Was I really going to make it to eighth grade? Did I even want to make it to eighth grade? Nothing about the year coming up seemed like anything I wanted to go through.

“So is that it?” BJ said, before the fire was even out.

The counselors came back. They shoved each other around and got each other in headlocks. Campers were dismissed by troops, Beaver first. One kid tripped when we got up to leave and burned his hand. On the way back to the tents everybody had sword fights with the flashlight beams until the counselors told us to cut it out.

Nobody said anything in the tent. I climbed under the covers, already too hot. Mosquitoes buzzed in one ear and then went over to the other one.

They called lights out. We switched off our flashlights. “So, do you beat off?” BJ asked, as soon as they went out.

For some reason I got all teary and rolled my face into the pillow. It already smelled like the bottom of a laundry bag.

“How old are you?” he asked. A light went by outside and I could see his silhouette.

“Who you talkin' to?” Joyce finally asked back.

“You,” BJ said. “Anyone.”

“I'm eleven,” Joyce said.

“Yeah, well I'm twelve,” BJ said.

“Huh,” Joyce said. In the dark, one of them rolled over and then kicked hard at his sheets.

“What about you?” BJ asked.

“I'm twelve too,” I said.

“You are not,” BJ scoffed.

“I don't have time for this,” I said.

“He is not,” he said to Joyce.

“He says he is,” Joyce said back.

“Fuckin' liar,” BJ said, and rattled something in a box. I could hear him eating.

I was crying, which was the very last thing I wanted to be doing, and trying not to make any noise at all. I was pushing on my eyeballs with my fingertips and I was worried I was going to drive them through my skull. They hurt enough that I stopped. My father had said, “You don't want to go to camp? You don't want to do any thing. Times're tough all over. Go up there and force yourself to have a good time. We'll stay down here and deal with your brother.” When I tried to bring it up again later on, he told me, “Believe me, you got the better deal.”

“I got a boner like an iron bar,” BJ said. He made a noise on his bed like he was hauling it around.

This is only the first night, I kept thinking. And that only made me cry harder, until I stopped.

“What was that?” Joyce asked, and he and BJ stopped moving to listen. But then there was nothing else to hear.

At breakfast everybody seemed to know everybody but me. “I got you,” BJ called to a kid at another table. “I got you later on. You're mine.”

“You know him from back home?” I asked.

“I met him when you did,” BJ said. He sawed his fork into some waffles.

I looked at the kid. “When did I meet him?” I asked. Nobody answered.

The fat kid and I collided on the way out of the dining hall. He spilled something but I didn't see what. BJ high-fived me on the way down the front steps.

“It's not a crime to help somebody,” my mother told me once. She was talking about my little brother.

My little brother was going crazy. That was the big worry. I was wound pretty tight and had some issues, which was how my father put it, but my little brother worried everybody. I couldn't tell who was more scared about it, my mother or father. They started going over it one night after school got out for the summer, when they thought we were asleep, and after I listened for a while I sat up in bed and realized he was standing there in the hall in the dark.

“C'mon in here,” I told him. He came in and sat on the covers. He was only nine and it felt like he'd been crying since Easter. He had bed head and thick hair and it stuck up like a wing. Even in the dark he seemed sad.

“Waynik, Keough, what's his name, they're all the same,” my father said. He was rinsing something at the sink.

“They're trying everything they can think of,” my mother told him. “Waynik says to give it some time.”

“Waynik sees him one hour a week,” my father told her. “Friday afternoon to boot. He's got his clubs by the door. He's ready to hit the first tee.”

“You wanna try someone else, we'll try someone else,” my mother said.

“We tried someone else,” he said. “That's how we got here.”

My brother had been going along okay until he hit fourth grade. Then it was like everything was fine until it was too hard for him. He'd be shooting baskets and miss three in a row and just go off, tearing down branches and throwing the ball as hard as he could into the street. He broke a new tree my dad planted in half. He pulled his jaw down so hard with his hand he had to go to the emergency room. I caught him hitting himself one night because I heard the wet sound of the blood from his mouth. We were supposed to do our homework at the same time, and I'd hear him stop halfway through and tear it up and then move his arms so spastically that he'd knock over whatever else was on his desk.

That night after they went over things my mother and father were quiet, down in the kitchen. It was pretty bad to think about them down there just looking at each other.

“They think I'm mental,” my brother finally said.

“They're worried about you,” I told him.

“You think I'm mental?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“So why do I do mental things?” he wanted to know.

“I do mental things,” I reminded him.

“Not like me,” he said.

And I could have told him that I did. I could have told him how weird I was. I could've given him a hundred examples. Instead I just sat there with him.

“You're a good brother,” he told me before he went back to his room.

“I wish,” I told him.

“Are you guys still up?” my father called from downstairs.

Because I was up all night, I got to the sign-up board late and all the good things were taken. All that was left was Trail Policing and the Craft Hut.

“What's Trail Policing?” I asked the kid whose shoulder I was looking over. He didn't answer. He took the pencil hanging on the string and wrote his name under Craft Hut and left.

“What's Trail Policing?” I asked the fat kid. He was sitting in the dirt of the truck turnaround, trying to get something out of the bottom of his foot. The area behind the main dining hall was messed up from all the traffic.

“Picking up garbage,” he said.

I wrote my name under Craft Hut. “You know where the Craft Hut is?” I asked him.

“You any good at getting splinters out?” he asked back.

It turned out that the fat kid was there for the entire summer. BJ told us at lunch. It was the talk of the camp. We were there for two weeks, most of us, one kid for three. But this kid was there for the whole summer. His parents were in Europe or Paris or something and had dumped him there. He'd told his tentmates. He'd even had to get there a day early and sleep on the Camp Director's couch.

His parents were probably like, Oh, I'm sure he'll like it okay. Once he makes some friends …

It ended up that he was in the Craft Hut too. There was one other kid in there who wore an eye patch under his glasses. The kid who'd signed up in front of me wasn't even there. Maybe he was dead.

“You're in my light,” the kid with the eye patch said when I sat down.

“Aye-aye,” I told him, but I don't think he got it.

He was making an ashtray with clay. The fat kid spent the time scraping at the bottom of his foot with his fingernail. I made one of those lanyards for a keychain.

The other subject at lunch was how much fun everybody else had had. Swimming off the float, doing cannonballs, playing Killer Handbreaker Tetherball.

“I made a lanyard,” I told them. People talked about the signups for the Mile Swim. Joyce put his hands on the outside of his arms, like he was already cold. BJ said that he heard that the counselors did a Bunk Attack with the fat kid even though he'd been trying to get up in time. Joyce said he'd heard the same thing. It turned out that Bunk Attack was when they came into your tent and pitched you off the bed so that you fell between the edge of the platform and the canvas wall. “It's so gross in there, too,” someone said.

My brother's name was Georgie and one of the things he really hated was when I called him Puddin' n' Pie. We'd be riding in the backseat and out of nowhere I'd say it so only he could hear it and he'd go Stop it! and scare the shit out of my father and then get yelled at. I hated it as much as he did but I couldn't stop. Don't do it, I'd say to myself when it came to pushing him. And then I'd do it. It was like when I did stuff like that at least I had the satisfaction of seeing myself like I really was. He always got mad but he never told them what I was doing.

“How come you never tell on me?” I used to ask him. He told me to stop asking him that.

“You tease your brother?” my mother asked me once. It was after my brother and I had had a huge fight. I'd thrown his record player against his headboard. We'd all gotten calmed down at like midnight. My brother was still making noise in his room. My father had closed all the windows.

I don't know, I said. Sometimes I teased him a little, I thought.

More than that I didn't let him play my record collection. It was the thing he liked to do most but he always scratched everything. We took the bus into Bridgeport with my mother when she went to the bank so we could go to Korvette's afterwards for 45s. We listened to WICC and WMCA. We always asked if we could get two of everything so he could have his own copy and she always said we were lucky to get one. And he'd always like what I got better than what he got. So he'd sit in my room when I was trying to do something and go, “Can we play ‘Elusive Butterfly’?” And I'd go, “No.” And he'd sit there and hum the music while I tried to keep doing what I was doing. And I'd go, “I'm still not gonna play it.” And he'd shrug and keep humming, like that would have to do. Sometimes if he went out in the yard I'd play the song. Before I left for camp he got “98.6” by Keith and I got “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. He got a new record player but he wasn't supposed to touch any of my records until I got back. I hid them in the storage space before I left.

“Can I play your records when you're gone?” he asked the morning I was leaving. It was still almost dark but he'd gotten up to see me go.

“I don't care,” I told him.

“That was nice of you,” my father said in the car on the drive up.

If they called and asked where I'd hid them when I was up there, I'd probably tell them.

I got to the sign-up board earlier the next morning but still too late for the beach. Me and two other kids and the fat kid ended up at Archery. The archery range was a field with three bales of hay and a fiberglass bow. The fat kid said somebody lost the arrows the year before.

“You were here last year?” I asked him.

“I been here three years in a row,” he said.

The other two kids had the bow. They were taking turns throwing it at one of the bales.

“Don't your parents know you hate it here?” I asked him.

“Don't yours?” he said.

BJ told us on the hike that afternoon that the fat kid had told on Chris.

“Did he get him in trouble?” Joyce asked. We were spread out along the Widowmaker Trail waiting for lunch. A counselor was on a rock cutting Spam out of the can into fattish cylinders with his Swiss army knife and another one was handing out bread slices. The drink they'd passed around at the beginning had already ruined my canteen. Everybody who had kept their water was being asked by everybody else for a drink.

The fat kid was in the middle of the trail behind us and Chris was kicking and scuffing at his butt like he was trying to get gum off the sidewalk. “Who are you throwing rocks at?” Chris said. He'd noticed me pinging pebbles down the trail.

“Both of you,” I said.

“Well cut it out,” he said.

Before dinner when we got back the fat kid signed out one of the little sailboats and was just getting going when Chris waded out and tipped the boat over with him in it, and then waded back to shore.

“Cut it out,” the fat kid screamed once he surfaced. “You cut it out too,” he said when he saw me throwing more little rocks from the shore. They plunked in the water around him.

“Phone call,” some kid said to me when we were back in the tents. There was only one phone the campers could use, and it was in the Camp Director's office.

“What's that noise?” I asked my father after he said hello.

“That's your brother,” he said.

“What's wrong with him?” I asked.

“He wants to go see the Association in New Haven,” my father said.

“The band the Association? They're playing in New Haven?” I asked.

“What do you think: he wants to visit their house? Yes, they're playing in New Haven,” he said.

“How'd he find out about it?” I asked.

“How do I know?” my father said. “He listens to the radio.”

“I'm goin',” I heard my brother tell him. You re not goin, my father said back. My mother shouted in her two cents from wherever she was.

“Does he want you to go with him?” I said.

“He's nine years old. He's not going to a rock concert,” he told me.

My brother shouted something I couldn't make out. “Hey,” my father shouted back. “How'd you like to not leave your room for a few weeks?”

My brother said something else I couldn't hear.

“I told him he could play some of your records instead,” he said.

“You talking to me?” I asked him. “My records?”

“No, I'm talking to your mother,” he said. “He wants to play our Perry Como. That's why I called you.”

“I don't want him playing my records,” I said.

“Now don't you start too,” he said.

“I'm not starting anything,” I said.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said. “I'm gonna take all these fucking records and pitch them out the window.”

“Fine,” I said. “I don't care what he does. I hope he breaks them all.”

“I hope so too,” my father said.

“Lend me your flashlight,” Chris said to me when I was on my way back to my tent. He'd come from behind me.

“How will I get home?” I asked him.

“Lend me your flashlight,” he said. I handed it over and he veered into the woods and disappeared. I didn't even see it go on.

“Chris has my flashlight,” I told my tentmates when I got back. I said it like Godzilla was loose in the city.

It was my father's good one. When we'd been packing he'd been deciding between the crappy plastic one he let us play with and his. My brother had taken his once and had lost it. Even my mother had had to start looking for it. It had been this huge thing. I didn't care which one I had, but his had a better beam. I'd told him I wouldn't lose it and he'd said okay. And now Chris had it and when I tried to get it back he'd beat me to death with it.

As usual I couldn't sleep. I got up when it was still dark and signed up for the beach. I went by the counselors' lean-to but nobody was moving. A raccoon was rooting around in somebody's knapsack in the dirt.

Maybe it was good that I lost it, I thought on the way back to the tent. Maybe when they found out, my parents would be like, But he knew how much we wanted him to keep an eye on it.

But I also wanted to be the kid who stayed up when everybody else went under.

The fat kid showed up at the beach too. He said the Camp Director was trying to make it up to him about the Chris stuff.

I cut my hand on the sharp edge of a broken garbage can.

I was worried about the flashlight. The fat kid sat next to me. We were the only ones not in the water. It was so humid you couldn't tell we hadn't been in.

Some kids were having races from the steel dock to the pontoon raft. A few sailboats were crisscrossing, the occasional sail collapsing. One rowboat sat a ways out, trailing a Mile Swimmer. The water over the sand by the reeds where we were was the color of cream soda.

Kids were throwing other kids off the pontoon raft into the lake. There was a lot of shouting, and my hand was still bleeding. I was going to need a better Band-Aid.

“You think BJ stands for Blow Job?” the fat kid said.

I looked at him. I hadn't thought of that.

“Has he asked you yet?” he said.

“Asked me what?” I said.

“He asked me” he said. “I told him I would.” He looked at my face like he'd gotten the reaction he wanted.

“Why would you say that?” I said, though it was none of my business.

He shrugged, his shoulders up on both sides of his ears.

Someone whacked me on the head with a life preserver. “Camp Director wants you,” Chris said when I turned around.

“You finished with my flashlight?” I asked.

He looked at me, trying to figure out who I was. “I don't have your flashlight,” he said.

I closed my eyes and when I opened them he hadn't changed his expression. I told him I was the kid who lent him the flashlight.

“I got my own flashlight,” he said. “Why would I borrow yours?”

Last night, I told him. On the trail.

“Give him his flashlight,” the fat kid told him.

“What'd you say to me?” Chris asked.

Then he repeated that I had a call and gave my shoulder a shove while he was still looking at the fat kid. As in Get going.

When I looked back, he was standing there over him, the fat kid just looking out over the water like he was alone.

“Where the Christ are the records?” my father asked on the phone. When I told him he hung up.

When I got back the fat kid was standing in the water up to his waist, watching the kids on the pontoon raft, and Chris was gone. I got in as far as my knees and the air horn sounded for the end of sign-up events.

“You think BJ stands for Blow Job?” I asked Joyce at lunch.

“Duh,” he said. He had a quarter-sized strawberry on his forehead, like he'd been dragged facedown across a rug.

“So you think it does,” I said.

“It is all he ever talks about,” he said.

We had our trays and were looking for places to sit. “I haven't heard him say it once,” I said.

It turned out that Chris wasn't the only one who was beating on the fat kid. The fat kid's tentmates were too. The night before two of them held him down and one peed all over his face. And his bed. He told me at the Nature Center before dinner. The Nature Center was a two-room cabin that had a stuffed fox on a log and some turtle shells in a glass case. The best things in it were the spiders in the ceiling corners that weren't part of the exhibit. The fat kid said he didn't know where he'd go. He didn't want to sleep with those kids anymore. He didn't want to sleep anywhere anymore.

“I know that feeling,” I said. But he looked at me like I was just trying to cheer him up.

When I saw him later that night I thanked him for backing me up with Chris.

“You don't have your flashlight, do you?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“So what good did I do?” he said.

We were on our way back from the campfire. “Where're you two going?” BJ asked when he saw us walking together. But he sounded worried.

The fat kid ignored me for a while and then he finally said, “I would've left me here too.” He was looking down the trail like he could see Paris.

“Your parents go away every summer?” I asked him. That sounded worse than my life.

“I don't have to be this fat, you know,” he said. “I eat like all the time.”

“Well, stop eating,” I told him. “Get some celery sticks.”

“That's what I'm gonna do,” he said.

We took a wrong turn in the dark and had to double back. He asked me not to say anything about what he said about BJ. “You're not supposed to know,” he said. “He asked about ten kids. I think I'm the only one who said yes.”

“Don't some kids want to kick his ass when he says something like that?” I asked him.

“Well, yeah,” he said. Like: Hel-lo. “What do you care?” he said when I asked if he was really going to do it. “Guys like it. In case you were wondering. Guys like it when you do it.”

We finally found his tent and there was this feeling down inside me like now I'd never sleep. “If you were normal you'd know that,” he said.

It was dark and his elbow kept bumping me. One of the kids from inside his tent stuck his head out. “Who're you? His girlfriend? You walk him home?”

“Yeah, I'm his girlfriend,” I said. “I walked him home.” They all made big noises about that.

“How's your special friend?” BJ said when I got back to our tent.

“Shouldn't you be jerking off?” I told him. And then we both got into our sleeping bags and lay there touching ourselves and trying to think of what to say next. I was still awake when he finally sat up and listened to see if we were asleep and pulled on his shorts and left. I could hear his flip-flops slapping as he went down the trail.

When the first birds started making noise I could see the canvas over my head again. I could feel a breeze and smell something fresh. My eyes were so tired they burned. There were noises in the underbrush up the hill.

I saw Chris three times before lunch and asked him each time about the flashlight. He seemed distracted. “I don't have your flashlight,” he said the last time, like he was finally able to focus. I didn't see the fat kid or BJ. For a while nobody knew where they were and then somebody said they were in the Health Center. The nurse who sat in the little front room there said they were both resting and I should come back after lunch. She had a little wooden rack of pamphlets on her desk: Your Gums and You, Proper Foot Hygiene, Courtesy for Beginners.

At lunch someone said they both got beaten up, or beat each other up.

There was no one at the desk when I came back so I walked in. They pretended to still be asleep. The fat kid had his hands bandaged with big ice bags on them and had a bandage on his ear too. BJ had two black eyes and an ice bag wrapped in a towel on his head. His cheek was swollen.

Outside, Chris was sitting on the steps of the Health Center with his head in his hands. His knuckles were scabby with dried blood. Two of the other counselors were trying to cheer him up. He was saying he was 1-A and his lottery number was five. Unless he took off for Canada he was going over. His brother didn't have a deferment either. He was over there already.

“That's the least of your worries at this point,” the Camp Director said. “Come with me.” And he got Chris up and they went to the Camp Director's office.

“What're you lookin' at?” one of the counselors said when he saw me.

I stuck my head in the Health Center's back window. BJ closed his eyes when he saw me, but the fat kid looked back, like he finally had something he could tell his parents.

I spent the rest of the day in bed. Daddy longlegs and flies came and went. Joyce looked in and then left. The next morning I missed breakfast but somebody got me out of bed because there was another phone call. When I got to the phone both my mother and father said hello. They were both on the line. I guessed somebody was upstairs and somebody was downstairs. “We had another episode with your brother,” my father said. I was just listening. My mother said he was going to have to go away. She started crying. She said that Doctor Waynik told them he was a danger to himself.

“Because he couldn't play my records?” I said.

That seemed to surprise them. “He has your records. It's not your records,” my father said.

I stood there holding the phone. He was nine. The year before he'd been playing with his toy trucks.

“Can I talk to him?” I said.

“I got some more 45s,” he said when he got on the line. “Dad took me.”

“What'd you get?” I asked. He told me. I raked my fingernails across my neck. “Those're good,” I told him.

“You like them?” he said.

I told him I did. Especially the MacArthur Park one.

He seemed happy about that. “You can play them when you get back,” he said.

“You all right?” the Camp Director asked me. He'd come out of his inner office, where he had Chris. He looked at my neck. He didn't leave until I nodded.

I was holding the dial part of the phone in front of me. I'd lifted it off the desk but there wasn't much reach on the cord. “You there?” my brother said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You gonna be okay?”

He started crying. “They're gonna put me somewhere,” he said. “I'm scared.”

“Oh, Georgie,” I said.

And what I could have said then was: I'll come home and we'll talk and you'll feel like somebody understands and you won't have to hit yourself or throw everything you have around the room. Or you can come up and see me, come up and visit, come up and be a part of the worst camp anybody's ever seen. Or let's keep our records together. Let's keep them in your room. Let's make a list of all the ones we've got. Or I'm sorry I make it harder and I have trouble too and maybe if we take walks or get a hobby we can figure out how to get through this. Or put Daddy on, you can't go away, you have to stay, we have to stay together. But what I did was the kind of thing you'd do and the kind of thing you've done: I felt bad for him and for myself and I went on with my week and then with my summer and I started telling my story to whoever would listen. And my story was: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked.