Authors: Diana Spechler
It was Kimmy who broke open like a piñata, who scattered her friends’ secrets like hard candy. It happened on a rainy afternoon in the gym during an all-camp game of dodgeball. I was watching Pudge, who was wearing a baseball cap that said
PHAT CAMP
in red embroidery and white sneakers that Lewis had bought him, the leather so new it hadn’t yet creased. Pudge wasn’t exactly running, but he was throwing and catching, walking to half court, bending down to pick up balls. His wheelchair was a relic from another era.
Lewis often said, loudly, that Pudge was a charity case, that he lived in the ghetto, that he binged daily on Doritos and ice cream to soothe himself because he feared for his life, for his mother’s life, when he heard gunshots out the window of his trailer. Were there trailer parks in the ghetto? The story sounded suspicious. But Pudge undoubtedly had survival skills—he knew that as long as he hailed Lewis as king, Lewis would treat him like a prince.
Whenever I spoke with Pudge, my tongue felt heavy and slow, in part because his southern accent was almost incomprehensibly thick, but also because his wide, sad eyes made me hope that he would like me, made me wish that I could save him. He could make a person feel that if she saved him, she would get to be on
60 Minutes
and also go to heaven. Lewis took him shopping. Nurse hosted him for long hours in her air-conditioned office. Together, Nurse and Pudge watched television long after Lights Out.
I saw him throw the ball that glanced off Kimmy’s shoulder. It was just a red rubber ball, partially deflated, but when it hit her, she crumpled to the floor, curled up like a snail, covered her head with her arms, and began to moan.
It took everyone a few seconds to make sense of what was happening. Bennett blew his whistle and jogged across the gym to Kimmy, where the kids had begun to gather. KJ, who during fair weather stood sentinel at the pool, started waving his arms like a referee calling for a time-out. “Give her air!” he shouted uselessly. “Give her air!”
I hung back and watched Bennett crouch beside her. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
With her arms covering her head, she wailed, “I can’t take this anymore!”
Bennett looked up at Nurse, who had made her way over with Lewis and was bent at the waist, peering at Kimmy, her hands on her thighs.
“Kimmy?” Lewis said. “Do you want to go to Nurse’s office? Maybe you need an ice pack.”
“I’m not hurt!” Kimmy shrieked.
“An aspirin? You might need a glass of water.”
“I just . . . can’t
take
this anymore!”
“Take what?” Bennett asked.
Sheena poked through the crowd. “Kimmy,” she said, getting down on her knees. “Why don’t you come with me? Come on. Let’s go talk.” She looked at Bennett, then up at Lewis and Nurse. “I think she’s just a little homesick. She’s been homesick lately. I can handle it.”
“Just a sec,” Nurse said. “Sheena, just hold your pretty horses. Kimmy? You’ve got to sit up and talk to us. No one can help you if you don’t sit up and talk. Sit up. Let the blood circulate. Take deep breaths.” She drew a deep breath to demonstrate.
“I’ll talk to her,” Sheena said. She pulled Kimmy’s arm. “Get up, Kimmy. We’re going for a walk now. Just the two of us. Okay? Get up. Come on, babe.”
Kimmy pulled away from Sheena and sat up. Her freckles had expanded beneath her tears. “I have to talk to Lewis,” she said, her bottom lip quivering. “Alone.”
After Kimmy and Lewis left the gym, Bennett tried to keep the dodgeball game going, but no one was interested in pretend conflict, now that there was a real conflict. Sheena, Whitney, and Miss stood huddled together, whispering. Eden watched them for a while, and then started whispering to Harriet, who didn’t know how to engage in friend-whispering, and kept stepping backward, as if the whispers were blowing her away. Some of the boys decided to play H-O-R-S-E, but no one wanted to shoot first. Finally, they started throwing balls at the wall and catching them.
A few minutes passed before Lewis returned to the gym and called Bennett and Nurse out. A few minutes after that, Nurse came back in and called Sheena, Whitney, and Miss out.
My group was reduced to Eden and Harriet. I suggested we head back to the dorm. As we walked, Eden asked me, “Do you know what’s going on?”
“Not really. Do you?”
Eden glanced at Harriet. Neither of them spoke. But for the first time, I didn’t care to excavate Eden’s secrets. After a month and a half of dieting, I was thinner than I’d ever been. “Have some self-confidence,” I could hear my father saying. And now I did. It seemed absurd that I had ever eaten two packages of Chips Ahoy! cookies in one sitting. Who was that person?
She was a person who hadn’t met Bennett. And a person who found comfort in the certainty of death, rather than in possible solutions to her problems.
I would tell Eden about our father, eventually, because it was the right thing to do, but not because my life depended on it.
Harriet turned to me and said, “I’m di—” but then she closed her mouth and kept walking.
“Dizzy?” I asked.
She didn’t answer immediately. We walked on, gravel crunching under our shoes. “I was going to say that,” she said. “That I was dizzy.”
“But you’re not.”
“No,” she said.
“I’m glad,” I said.
At dinnertime, Lewis came to the cafeteria and asked to speak with me outside. We sat on the steps and he told me the story: Every night after Lights Out, Sheena had been herding Whitney, Miss, and Kimmy out of the dorm and into her car, and driving them to McDonald’s in Melrose for a nightly fast-food binge. Once the weigh-ins showed that the girls had gained weight, Sheena had taught them how to make themselves vomit. Whitney and Miss had taken to it. Kimmy just wanted to go home, where perhaps she was fat, but at least no one was pressuring her to stick her head in a toilet and her finger down her throat.
“You had no idea?” Lewis studied my face. “Tell me you had no idea.”
“I told you Whitney and Miss were making themselves throw up.”
“No, no, you didn’t. If you did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“All right,” I said. “Well. I had no idea they were going to McDonald’s.”
“Good. Because, Gray, I’ve always thought you and I were on the same side. Like a team. You remind me of women I knew in the seventies.”
“I do?”
“Women who did drugs. Really fun, tremendous women. I think you and I will be friends for life. We’re on the same wavelength.” He poked my forehead with his finger. “I’m just sorry you didn’t catch Sheena. But you were asleep. Doing what you were supposed to be doing.”
I saw myself then, running through the dark to Bennett.
“I do so much for everyone,” Lewis said. “It never ceases to amaze me, how willing people are to just screw you over when you’re the nicest guy in the world. I told the girls, ‘Lewis Teller is the nicest guy in the world. But when you take advantage of Lewis Teller, you’d better be prepared to pay the price.’ ”
We stared together at the drab smile of the loop, the green trees that swayed dreamily to silent music.
“I don’t know why anyone would risk getting kicked out of camp,” I said. “It’s wonderful here.”
“It is.”
“I feel so clean here. Even though I’m sweating all the time. It’s like I’m sweating my whole past out. I feel new.”
“You are new. That’s the thing about my camp.”
“Are you going to send the girls home?”
“I should,” Lewis said, rubbing his knees.
“Maybe Kimmy should stay? Since she’s the one who spoke up?”
He didn’t respond. “Sheena’s out of here,” he said. “She has until eight o’clock to pack her things and get the hell out. You think I care? I don’t care. I’ll fire anyone. I could run this whole place myself. You’ll see major changes in Whitney, Miss, and Kimmy. Just watch. They were sobbing their eyes out when they thought I was going to send them home. For two hours I let them think they were done here. And then I told them, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a second chance.’ I told them, ‘But!’ ” He shook his finger. “ ‘But,’ I told them, ‘no more of this little clique of yours. You have to start being real participants in the Camp Carolina community.’ I told them, ‘You’re going to have to work your butts off the rest of the summer.’ I told them I won’t tolerate bad attitudes. They were practically kissing my feet.” I looked at his feet. They were white with blue veins, hairy, housed in enormous imitation Tevas. “It was like I had just spared their lives.” He chuckled. Then he grew serious again. “You know why I didn’t send them home?”
I did know. Campers were worth eleven thousand dollars apiece. He didn’t want to tell their parents that under his supervision, their children had eaten McDonald’s and were now toying with new eating disorders. He didn’t want to explain to them how loosely he had screened candidates during the hiring process. He didn’t want to lose campers when, compared with other weight-loss camps, he already had so few. He didn’t want to deal with angry parents asking for refunds or writing on weight-loss camp websites about how incompetent Lewis Teller was, how his brand-new revolutionary weight-loss camp for children was nothing but a joke.
“I didn’t send them home because I believe in every child. Some just need more help than others.”
“So they’re going to get help? Are you bringing in a shrink or something?”
“There’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Aren’t eating disorders . . . um . . . serious?”
“They don’t have eating disorders.”
“They eat and throw up their food.”
“They’ll stop now.”
“How do you know?”
“I told them they better cut the shit.”
“So you don’t think—”
“Some kids just need more help with their self-esteem. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why my camp will succeed when all other camps have failed: I’m committed to the children. People will know me as Lewis Teller, the man who really cares about the kids.”
At Lewis’s request, Bennett stood outside Sheena’s room while she packed, to prevent her from pulling a gun from under her bed and moving through the dorms on a shooting rampage. Every female camper and counselor had gathered in our hall. Kimmy hung back on the edges of the crowd with one of her counselors, sucking her thumb, her puffy eyes wide. Among the Sheena supporters, several campers were weeping with their whole bodies, shouting that Sheena had been framed.
Eden was leaning against the closed door of her room, a solitary tear dribbling down her cheek (“Here comes Brenda Preston!” I could hear my father saying).
“It wasn’t Sheena’s fault!” Whitney shrieked. She had slid down the wall and was sitting on the floor, her knees tucked to her chin. “She’s the best counselor in the whole camp!”
Whitney’s words felt, not like a punch or a stab, nothing that drastic, but at least like a jostle—like someone had knocked into me in a crowd, not bothering to turn around and apologize. I wasn’t delusional; I knew
I
wasn’t the best counselor at Camp Carolina. But Sheena? Really? I looked around at the tear-streaked cheeks, the kids standing in supportive clusters, arms snaked around one another’s shoulders, and I saw that it was true: Sheena had made an impact, forged a closeness with the kids, made camp more fun. What had I done? I had experimented with green eye shadow and glitter. I had meditated diligently on blow jobs. I had done Kegels. I had found an aesthetician in Melrose to wax my pubic hair into a heart.
“Nobody cares about us!” Whitney said. “Sheena’s the only one who ever cared.” She climbed to her feet. “We’re all going to have to go back to being invisible now. We’ll just be the fat kids everyone pretends not to see.” She raised her arms and tipped her face toward the ceiling, as if to invoke lightning. “Sheena saw us!” she shouted.
Eden used the knuckle of each of her thumbs to wipe dramatically beneath her eyes. Miss, who was sitting and weeping at Whitney’s feet, wailed, “This camp is gay!”
This was not the picture Lewis had painted of Whitney and Miss and their repentance. These were not girls who seemed sorry.
When Sheena finished packing, she stood on the threshold and looked out on the chaos. The crowd went quiet, as if she were controlling the volume with a dial.
“Let’s go,” Bennett said, slipping into her room. “Let’s get your stuff to your car.” He loaded his arms with her things.
Sheena ignored him. “Y’all,” she said, “don’t worry.” She looked at me then, her face serene. “You’ll see me again.” And with that, she lifted a duffel bag in each hand, squared her shoulders, and strode toward the stairwell, Bennett trailing her.
We all followed, a crowd that should have been carrying votive candles and humming something sad and strong.
“We love you, Sheena!” the kids shrieked. “Don’t leave us here!”
Even a couple of the counselors cried quietly, walking with their heads bowed, as if toward Sheena’s crucifixion.
Lewis and Nurse were waiting in the parking lot by Sheena’s silver Camry. The boys were clustered nearby, some of the young ones perched on the shoulders of their counselors. Sheena and Bennett loaded the trunk and the backseat. And then Sheena opened the driver’s side door, bent into the car to start the ignition, and stood again to address the masses. She wore a flowing white sundress that fell to her ankles, delicate leather sandals adorned with turquoise beads. Her hair was crimped and loose and full of fire, a flame blowing in an unlikely wind. I had never seen her more beautiful. A cloud or a stage should have appeared beneath the soles of her shoes.
Everyone went quiet, awaiting a speech.
“Y’all know how to reach me,” she said. She held her cell phone aloft like a sword. “I know how fucked up this place is. You know I do.”
“That’s enough,” Lewis said, stepping toward her. “You’re finished here.”
Sheena looked at him, her eyes smoldering like cigarette burns in the smooth white plane of her face. She lowered her arm to her side. And then she smiled two smiles—with her lips and with her scar—and said something cryptic: “Child molester.” She balled her fist, the cell phone inside it, wound up, and punched Lewis squarely in the gut. For a second, her hand disappeared up to the wrist.
The crowd sucked in a collective breath. Lewis whimpered in one warbling note and doubled over, his knee jerking up to his chest. When he righted himself and tried to speak, Sheena lifted her skirt above her ankles, picked up one leg, and launched a powerful kick at Lewis’s crotch.
“Stop that!” Bennett said, reaching for her. “Sheena! What in—”
Sheena hopped into her car and backed it out of the parking lot with a screech. The tires crunched over gravel. The silver paint glistened and winked in the sunshine. She honked her horn twice. She straightened the car. And then she was gone.
The second casualty.