By late September, I’d heard all about the fall camping trip. Along with the director of the boys’ ranch forty miles away, Mr. Cleve, the girls’ ranch director, organized it every year and used it as a carrot for good behavior. Every girl wanted to go—every girl did her chores, kept up her grades, and refused to sneak out of Sunday school in order to be allowed to go. We in the brown brick house were no exception.
Every house from the ranch except the baby house went. We all packed tents and sleeping bags the church had donated and drove up in white vans to a public campground in north Georgia. Amicalola Falls. A wildly beautiful place, Mr. Cleve announced at Vespers, with a set of creaky stairs that scaled the rocky face of the waterfall.
Even Omega admitted it was the prettiest place she’d ever seen.
The festivities would kick off at one of the park’s picnic pavilions. The director, Cleve, would lead prayer, then everybody from the boys’ and girls’ ranches would eat lunch. After that there would be a time of what Mrs. Bobbie called “fellowship,” which consisted of a bunch of super-lame (according to Omega) team-building games while the older boys and girls did the important work of scoping each other out and figuring out who was going to meet up later that night. The ranches would split up then. Mr. Al and Mr. Barry would take the girls hiking up the mountain one way, and the boys’ leaders would head in the opposite direction.
Separate campsites would keep us in “the pure zone,” Mrs. Bobbie said, although, from what Omega and the other Super Tramps told me, a couple of girls had once been intercepted on their way out of camp after curfew. Also, one boy had gotten lost on his way to meet up with a girl. Deep in the woods, he’d run smack into a black-bear cub and its mama and gotten so scared he’d started screaming at the top of his lungs. The next morning, before anyone woke up, that boy’s housefather marched him down the mountain and drove him all the way back to the ranch.
“Those ranch boys may sneak out, but it’s not because they’re getting any of this.” Omega leaned forward and shimmied, and her boobs practically fell out of her shirt.
“Hey!” Mrs. Bobbie snapped, banging her fork on the table. Mr. Al said nothing.
“Most of them guys are as gay as my Aunt Fannie. They don’t need to sneak out, long as they get a cute tentmate.” She had a sly expression on her face. Mrs. Bobbie looked like she was about to burst into righteous flames.
Two weeks before the camping trip, Chantal and I were in the tiny, mildewy laundry room off the garage, doing the weekly load for the house. Chantal held up a pair of rainbow-striped cotton panties and danced them in my face.
“Hi! I’m Omega and I shake my smelly ass in front of all the boys because I think they all want to have sexy-wexy with me!”
I kept shoveling clothes from the basket into the washer. She reached around me again, extracting another pair of underpants. These were plain white cotton—mine. She inspected them coolly, then grinned at me.
“Just what I thought. Skid marks.” She pinched her nose. “What’s the matter, Daffy Duck, you can’t hold in your poop at school?” She started a jig around the room, waving the threadbare cotton, and my face burned. “Hey, look at me,” she crowed. “I’m Daffy Duck, and I shit my pants. I’m just a fat fuck baby who poops her little-girl panties.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look close enough to see if she was telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. The thought of Chantal telling everyone at school was mortifying enough. I swiped at the underwear and tossed it in the washer with the rest of the clothes. Chantal dumped in an overflowing scoop of soap powder.
“Hey,” I said. “That’s way too much. You’re gonna get us in trouble.”
Her other arm lashed out so fast I didn’t see it coming, but the backhand sent me reeling into the set of wire shelves where Mrs. Bobbie kept her cleaning supplies. A wire protruding from one shelf dug into my skin, and a thin stream of blood spiraled down my arm and dripped onto my favorite olive-green capris.
“Whoops,” Chantal said, then widened her buggy multicolored eyes at me. She yanked open the dryer door, grabbed a dry shirt, and started dabbing it on my arm.
“Hey, stop!” I said and backed away. “That’s my shirt.” And it was, my favorite pink sleeveless baby-doll top that I’d found in the castoff closet. But the damage was already done. She threw the shirt into the washer with the rest of the clothes and banged the lid shut. I stood there, the scratch on my arm throbbing.
“Blood comes out, you doofus.” She twisted the dial and pulled it out, and I heard water gush into the machine. “Quit being such a baby.”
Back in our room, I tried not to cry. I only had three good shirts, and one of them was too short and showed my stomach if I had to reach up for something. Now my favorite top had a bloodstain on it. Great, just great. Not that any of the ranch girls had fabulous wardrobes to begin with, but I dreaded the necessary trip to the clothes closet in the main office. Those clothes smelled funny and looked like they’d come from a thrift shop in the 1970s. To keep myself from crying, I cursed Chantal in my head, using every evil word I could think of.
Pizza Face, Fat Fuck, Egg Salad.
Jackrabbit.
Devil Eyes.
Nobody.
When I returned to the laundry room, she had folded the clean clothes neatly, stacked them, and told me she would take care of the remaining load. I stood there, unsure of what to say, waiting for I didn’t know what—another insult, a good reason for me to fly at her and slap her. But she only smiled and handed over my stack of warm clothes, which made me positive, beyond a shadow of a doubt, things weren’t over between us.
Chapter Sixteen
I woke sometime later in the night, overheated and drooling. My neck was twisted in such a way that I knew, instinctively, that I was going to feel it for days. We might be catching up on our sleep in this creepy old house—enjoying the respite from Heath’s nightmares—but I didn’t feel any more rested.
I just felt uneasy. About the nine extra cameras that were watching us at all times. And the creepy Sinatra music playing in the McAdams’ room.
Heath was sitting in one of the chairs by the fireplace. He wasn’t doing anything in particular, just staring into the middle distance. A feeling of disquiet—a premonition, maybe, of something to come—stole over me. I wanted to reach out to him, to comfort him. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I sat up, clutching the bedcovers to my chest.
Heath shifted in the chair. “I’m sorry I woke you.” His voice was so gentle, so soft, that the fear in my heart was almost quelled.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“What did you do this afternoon?”
I kept my voice light. “You’re looking at it. Nothing much. You?”
He just shook his head.
“Heath. What’s going on?”
He was running his finger along the arm of the chair. Watching the movement, fascinated by the journey of his own hand. Or maybe he just didn’t want to talk to me. I didn’t know whether to feel relief or concern. It seemed like everything that happened here divided me.
His finger stopped on the curve of the chair arm, and his back bent. It looked like he’d suddenly been struck with a pain in his stomach. He stayed there a moment, hunched and still, and then I heard a sound. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening, but when I did, I almost couldn’t believe it. He was crying.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I go to him? Try and comfort him in some way or just hang back and let him alone? I clenched the covers in my fists and did nothing.
He was really weeping now. Convulsing heaves punctuated by pathetic wails. I resisted the tears that rose to my own eyes.
“Heath,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t look at me, didn’t even seem to notice I’d spoken. But at the sound of my voice, his sobs lessened some. Eventually, they wound down to sniffs and then there was complete quiet. He finally faced me. Leaned forward, lacing his fingers together.
“I’m not who you think I am,” he said.