The Troop

Newton picked a few and put them in his pack. “When we get back to camp, we can boil them. Make a tea. Then Kent can drink it. Clear him right out.”

“You think?”

“You got a better idea?”

Max smiled. “You know what? You’re a real fun guy.”

“What?”

“It’s a joke Mr. Lowery told in science class. What did one mushroom say to the other? You’re a real fungi.”

A slow smile broke over Newton’s face. “Oh, I get it. Fungi. Fun guy. That’s funny. That’s really, really funny.”

Max frowned, and Newton immediately felt bad. It was just like him to suck all the funny out of a joke. He was a humor vampire. He thought about his Facebook persona, Alex Markson. Cool, handsome, suave Alex Markson. What Would Alex Markson Do—WWAMD? Not what Newton had just done, that’s for sure.

Max said: “Mr. Walters told another joke that he got in trouble for.”

“What?”

“How do you make a hormone?”

“How?”

“You refuse to pay her.”

Newton cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. But Shelley repeated it to his mother. That got Mr. Walters in some deep shit for a few days.”

Max squinted at an area about ten yards past the tree stump. A trail was tamped through the grass.

“Animal trail,” he said.

Only a foot wide, maybe less, so it couldn’t have been made by a very big animal. A fox or a marten or a porcupine.

“How did animals even get on this island?” Max wondered aloud. “You figure someone built an ark?”

“The Department of Game and Wildlife might have dropped them off,” Newton said. “They would have surveyed the land and, y’know, figured out what species would live best.”

“How’s it feel carrying around that big-ass brain of yours all day?”

Newton’s eyes darkened. “Don’t make fun of me, Max. Not now.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were. You were starting up on it, anyway. Just quit it, okay?”

Newton huffed back snot and raked the back of his hand over his nose. Was he about to cry? Max had never seen Newton cry. Not even after the most merciless teasing sessions. Not after an endless round of “Keepaway” with his Scout beret—a game that often ended out of pure apathy: someone would simply drop Newton’s beret and the jeering circle would dissolve, leaving Newton to grope pink-faced in the dirt for his hat.

“Don’t be an asshole, Max.” Newton’s eyes blazed from the reddened flesh of his sockets. “Not now.”

Max took a step back as if Newton had physically struck him. He held his hands out in a penitent and pleading gesture.

“Really, Newt, I wasn’t—”

The following words came out of Newton in a hot rush, like a bottle of soda that had been shaken so hard and for so long that the cap had finally blown off.

“I like weird stuff, okay? So what? And I’m fat. I know that, obviously. I wish I wasn’t but it’s not like I eat like a pig. I mean, yeah, I like ice cream but so do lots of guys. Mom says it’s glandular. A slow metabolism. She even ordered me a pack of Deal-A-Meal cards from that guy on TV who wears those glittery short-shorts.”

Max was stunned. Newton had never spoken this way to him—to anyone, as far as he knew.

“You know what’s hilarious?” Newt said. “I was skinny as a baby. Like, I-could’ve-died skinny. I couldn’t put on weight. A total shrimp. I slipped four percentiles, Mom said. The pediatrician told her to feed me butter—pure warm butter.”

Max wanted to apologize. To say, more than anything, that it wasn’t really Newton’s fault. Max and the other boys didn’t pick on him because they despised him… it was more a case of boys needing someone to single out. A fatted calf to sacrifice. They had to turn someone into that bottom rung on the ladder if only so they didn’t have to occupy it themselves. Boys weren’t very inventive, either. The simplest flaw would do. A lisp. An overbite. Dental braces. Being fat. Add to it a few glaring idiosyncrasies—such as being a know-it-all bookworm who was fascinated with mushrooms—and presto! One made-to-order sacrificial lamb.

Max gave Newt a look of cautious empathy. “Sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to, like, be a shithead or anything.”

Newton set his jaw off-kilter and touched his lip to his nose. “Okay. Forget it. It was nothing.”

THE TRAP proved a lot harder to build than they had figured.

Newton had found a diagram for a “sapling spring snare” in his field book. He claimed to have built one in his backyard—Scoutmaster Tim had come over and certified it, awarding Newton his Bushcraft badge.

But the saplings in his backyard were limber. The trees edging the game trail were old or dead: they snapped as soon as the boys bent them. When they finally found one that might do and tried to bow it down—the “spring” part of the trap—the natural tension of the wood was simply too much.

“This might make an okay wolf trap,” Newton said with a shake of his head. “But a small animal would get catapulted into the sky.”

They retired to the bluffs overlooking the game run. They sat with their feet dangling over the bluffs. The air smelled of creosote. The clouds lowered like a gray curtain coming down.