Like You'd Understand, Anyway

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.