No one mock-groaned this time. Instead, Harper heard nervous whispers and saw people casting worried looks back and forth. Allie, who was two tables away, turned to Michael, sitting beside her, raised a hand to cover her mouth, and began to hiss furiously into his ear.
“Anyone who draws a losing ticket will still be offered coffee or tea, and as a thank you . . . well, Norma has discovered some sugar. A large can of it. It doesn’t even have ants in it. So if you pull a bad ticket you can also have a teaspoon of sugar for whatever you’re drinking. One. Teaspoon. It’s not much, but it’s something. It’s the best we can do to show our gratitude.” Ben’s voice hardened, and he went on. “On the subject of low supplies and missing meals: someone is taking cans of condensed milk. Some of the Spam has gone missing, too, and we don’t have any to spare. That has to stop. It’s not a joke. You are literally stealing food out of the mouths of children. And if someone took Emily Waterman’s big teacup yesterday, I would be grateful if you would just put it back on her bed at some point. You don’t have to explain yourself. Just do it. It’s a very, very large teacup, about the size of a soup bowl, with stars printed in the bottom. It’s her lucky cup of stars and she’s had it since she was tiny and it means a lot to her. That’s all. Thank you.”
He waited to see if anyone would applaud for him but no one did, and finally Harper reached up and held his hot, damp hand while he climbed down. She wasn’t annoyed with him anymore. Conversation returned to the room, but it was subdued and troubled.
He sat poking his plastic fork at some smears of gravy on his plate. Renée leaned forward to look around Harper and said, “Are you all right, Ben?”
“It was bad enough being the guy who took away the cell phones,” Ben said. “Now I’m the guy who took away lunch. Aw, frick it.”
He pulled himself up off the bench, took his plate to the counter, and dumped it in a bin full of gray, soapy water.
“I don’t care if I miss lunches.” Renée watched Ben turn up his collar and exit the cafeteria without a look back. “They were pretty terrible anyway, and I was hoping to lose ten pounds. Of course, he’s got it all wrong. People weren’t angry at him when he took away the cell phones. They were glad! They were relieved someone was thinking about how to keep us all safe. They don’t hold one single thing he’s done against him. Not even what he did to Harold Cross. The only person who blames Ben Patchett for what happened to Harold is Ben Patchett.”
“Harold Cross,” Harper said. “I’ve heard that name before. Who’s Harold Cross and what did Ben do to him?”
Renée blinked, staring at Harper in surprise. “Shot him. You didn’t know that? Shot him right in the throat.”
9
There were little triangles of coconut custard pie on a graham cracker crust for dessert, the best and sweetest thing Harper had eaten since she came to camp. She closed her eyes after each spoonful, to better concentrate on the creamy taste of it. It was so good she felt a little like crying, or at least writing Norma Heald a sincere thank-you card.
Renée was gone for a bit, helping to prepare cocoa for the children, and when she returned she had two mugs of black coffee, and Don Lewiston and Allie Storey in tow. Nick Storey was there, too, trailing along in his big sister’s wake. He carried a mug of hot chocolate before him, with a kind of reverence, not unlike a child bearing the wedding rings at a marriage.
“Are you all right?” Renée asked. “You’re making a face.”
“That’s my orgasm face,” Harper said, around her last bite of pie.
“I don’t think it’s any accident that a slice of pie comes in the exact same shape as a slice of pussy,” Allie said.
“Do you girls want to talk amongst yourselves?” Don asked. “I could come back another time. This conversation is headin’ in a direction what might be upsettin’ to the ears of an innocent like myself.”
“You can sit down,” Renée said, “and tell what happened to Harold Cross. I think Harper ought to know about it, and the both of you can tell it better than I can. Don, you worked with him. Allie, you knew him better than most. And you were both there at the end.”
“I wouldn’t say I knew him all that well. It got to a point where I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with him,” Allie said.
“But you tried,” Renée said. “You made an effort. There aren’t many other people here who can say that.”
Nick perched on the bench to Allie’s left. He looked from Allie to Renée and back, then moved his hands in the air, asking something of his sister. Allie furrowed her brow and began to make minute gestures with her fingers.
“My mom was a lot better at sign,” Allie said. “I’m only really confident about my finger-spelling. He wants to know what we’re talking about. One good thing about the little guy being deaf. We don’t have to worry about him overhearing the really rotten bits and getting sad.”
“And he doesn’t read lips at all?” Harper asked.
“That’s only in movies.”
Don sipped at his coffee and grimaced. “Tell you what, nothing will cure a case of feeling good faster than a sip of this coffee. Except maybe for talkin’ about Harold Cross.” He set his mug down. “Harold was pretty much always alone. Kind of a fat kid no one liked. Too smart for his own good, y’unnerstand? Smarter than everyone else and happy to let you know it. If you were diggin’ a latrine, he’d tell you a better, more scientific way to do it . . . but he wouldn’t pick up a shovel himself. Would say his back hurt or summin’. You know the type.”
“He wore this striped T-shirt and a pair of black denim shorts and I never saw him wear anything else. He had a booger on that shirt once that was there for three days. Swear to Jesus,” Allie said.
“I remember that booger!” Don said. “He had that thing on his shirt so long he shoulda given it a name!”
Nick was still watching, and now he asked Allie something else, in a few slow, careful gestures. Allie’s reply was faster this time, and involved a knuckle screwed into her nose, miming the act of digging for boogers. Nick grinned. He dug a stub of pencil out of his jeans and wrote something on his turkey-shaped place mat. He pushed the mat across the table to Harper.
He’d get smoky sometimes, too. Not bad, but like if you throw a lot of wet moss on a campfire. Just a little nasty smoke coming out from under his shorts. Allie said it was coming from his butt-chimney.
When Harper looked back, Nick had a hand clamped over his mouth and was making a thin, quavering whistle. He might lack the power of speech, but the giggles, it seemed, remained available even to the mute.
Renée said, “He was a former med student, and when I came to camp, he was in charge of the infirmary. I’d guess he was twenty-four years old, maybe twenty-five. He went around with a little reporter’s notebook and sometimes he’d sit on a rock and start scribbling in it. I think that worried some people. You felt like he was taking notes on you.”
Allie said, “Now and then one of the girls would try to snatch his notebook away, to see what he was writing. That would get his Dragonscale acting up and he’d storm off in a haze. Literally fuming, you know?”
“From the butt-chimney,” Don Lewiston said, and this time they all laughed, except for Nick, who had lost the thread, and could only smile quizzically.