“The first time he joined the Bright, he lit up fast,” Allie said. “Some people get it right away and some people don’t. In Harold’s case, it maybe came over him too quickly. He fell into the Bright so fast and hard it scared him. He screamed and dropped to the floor and rolled around like he was burning. Later he said he didn’t like how it felt, having other people in his head. Which doesn’t really happen. It isn’t telepathy. No one gets inside your head. It’s just a good feeling, coming off the people around you. It’s like being held. Like the perfect hug. After that first time, Harold just about never lit up. He kept himself at a distance from the rest of us. He wasn’t participating—he was just watching us.”
“Yuh. That’s right,” Don agreed. “Then, one day, after he’d been in camp about two weeks, he stood up at the end of services and said he’d like to address the room. Kinda dumbstruck everyone. As a rule, if there’s any talkin’ to do in chapel, Father Storey or Carol are the ones to do it. It was like watchin’ a TV show and suddenly one a the extras decides to deliver a speech ain’t in the script.”
“Father Storey,” Renée added, “God love that man, he just poked his thinking rock in his mouth and sat down to listen, like a student settling in for a lecture on his favorite subject.”
Allie rasped a hand over the bristly curve of her head. “Harold told us we had a moral obligation to let the world know about our ‘discovery.’ He said we didn’t belong in hiding. He said we ought to be on cable news, that we ought to go public about what we could do. He said our process of subduing the Dragonscale was of scientific interest and there were lots of people who wanted to know more about us. Aunt Carol said, ‘Harold, darling, what do you mean, lots of people want to know about us?’ And Harold said he had been texting with a doctor in Berkeley who thought our community might represent a real breakthrough. There was another doctor in Argentina who wanted Harold to take blood samples of people when they were in The Bright. Harold said all this like it was no big deal. He didn’t seem to have any idea what he had done.”
“Oh, Harper, it was bad,” Renée said. “That was a bad night.”
“Mr. Patchett jumped up and asked how many people he’d been texting with and if he’d been texting from inside camp. Mr. Patchett said tracing the location of a smartphone was the easiest thing in the world and for all Harold knew he was drawing a big X on a map for the local Quarantine Patrols. People started crying, grabbing their kids. We were like people on an airplane who have just heard from the pilot that there’s a terrorist in the cockpit.” Allie’s gaze came unfocused. She wasn’t seeing Harper anymore, but was looking back into a summer night of alarm and commotion. “Mr. Patchett made him give up his cell. He spent three minutes scrolling through Harold’s texts. It turned out he had been in contact with thirty different people, all over the country. All over the world! Sending them photos, too, stuff that would make it easy to identify where we were hiding.”
“Harold wanted the camp to have a vote,” Don Lewiston put in. “Well. He got one all right. Ben led a vote to confiscate every cell phone in camp, had Allie ’n’ Mikey collect ’em all in a great trash bag.”
“I didn’t like what happened to Harold after that,” Renée said. “If we ever did him wrong, it was then.”
Allie nodded. “After the phones got taken away, it was like Harold was a poisonous bug, and the whole camp wanted to keep him under a jar, where he couldn’t sting anyone. Little kids started calling him Horrid instead of Harold. No one would sit with him in the cafeteria, except for Granddad, who can get along with anyone. Then, one day, one of the girls chucked a Frisbee right in Harold’s face and smashed his glasses. She pretended it was an accident, like she meant for him to catch it, but it was really shitty, and I told her it was shitty. I felt like someone had to try and stick up for him. I felt like it was bad for all of us, not to care about him. So I helped fix his glasses and I started sitting with him and Granddad at lunch. I signed up for chores with him, so he wouldn’t have to work alone. I had this whole idea I was going to unearth the real Harold. Only I did and it was as nasty as the rest of him. We were doing dishes together for Mrs. Heald in the cafeteria one day, and all of a sudden he stuck his hand down my shorts. When I asked him what the fuck he was doing, he said there was no reason for me to be picky about who I screwed, since the whole human race was going down the toilet anyway. I shoved him so hard his glasses fell off and broke again. So that was Harold.”
Nick was looking from face to face with great, fascinated eyes. His cocoa was mostly gone, and there was a smear of chocolate around his mouth, and he was the most Norman Rockwell thing Harper had ever seen. He showed Allie something he had written on his place mat. She borrowed his pencil to reply. Nick nodded, then bent, wrote something more, and pushed it across to Harper.
I tried to warn Allie she couldn’t trust him. He used to make his nastiest butt-smoke whenever he was around her. Deaf people can smell things most peeple can’t, and I could smell the evil in it.
Harper turned the place mat so Renée could read it. Renée looked at it and looked up at Harper and the two of them erupted into laughter. Harper quaked, surprised at the force of her own jollity; she felt unaccountably close to tears. Nick watched them with bewilderment.
She had a swallow from her mug to calm herself down, then felt a bubble of hilarity rising in her again, and almost coughed coffee up her nostrils. Renée pounded her on the back until her choking fit had passed.
Don read what Nick had written and one corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “Funny, that. I never smelt evil on him. But I smelt somethin’ else on him, once . . . and in a way, that was the first domino in the chain that led to him gettin’ kilt. Harold took a job workin’ under my direction, diggin’ up bloodworms for bait. It was funny, him volunteerin’ for a physical job. Kinda like the queen offerin’ to scrub out toilets. No one else wanted him, though, so I took him on my crew. He tolt me he knew a spot south of camp, a marshy flat where the bloodworms were easy to find. He knowed what he was talking about, too. Lots of days he’d come back with more bait than any of the other boys I sent out diggin’. But then other days he’d show up with maybe two worms in his bucket and just shrug and say his luck was bad. Well, I figured on those days he was goin’ off to nap somewheres, and didn’t worry myself too much about it. Till one day, middle a August, he shows up with nothin’, and as he’s puttin’ down his empty pail, he lets a burp slip, and goddamn if I don’t smell pizza on his fackin’ breath. That didn’t sit easy with me. You may have noticed, pizza ain’t on the menu here in Camp Wyndham. I slept an uneasy sleep, and the next day, I decided I had to pass a word along to Ben Patchett. Ben wasn’t no more happy about it than I was. He got real stiff and pale and sat rubbin’ his mouth awhile, and finally said he was glad I spoke up. Then he asked me if I’d mind making Michael a part of my bait team for a week. I knew what Mikey was goin’ to be diggin’ for, and it wasn’t worms, but we had to find out what Cross was up to, so I said ayuh. Well, Mikey took to trailin’ him at a distance. The first few days, the worst thing he seen Harold do was take a dump and use the pages from one of the camp library books for toilet paper.”
Renée winced. “It turned out to be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Our only copy. If I had known what he was going to do with it, I would’ve given him a copy of Atlas Shrugged.”