Kate nods quickly. “Okay, Nobody it is! Everybody’s down at Arts and Crafts.”
Kate doesn’t have a holster or taser or nightstick, or any of the usual fun accessories correctional officers carry. Just a silver whistle around her neck, like a gym teacher’s, and a small key fob dangling from her wrist. In her sweatshirt, jeans, and worn-in hiking boots, she could pass for a real camp counselor. She and Dave speak companionably. I can’t make out what they say, but they walk with their backs to us. Like they’re not afraid of us at all.
“Okay. After dinner, then.” Dave breaks off their conversation and announces, “Kate will take it from here. See you guys in a few!” as he jogs back up the path.
“You guys had a long drive, huh?” Kate peers at Nobody’s blood-stained jumpsuit.
“Yeah,” I answer after a long cold silence from Nobody. The lake fills the horizon completely, a golden haze coming off the water and silhouetting a graceful sycamore in the middle of the field below. Under its branches is a picnic table.
Around the table four kids sit, lazily coloring with markers on yellowed construction paper. Their voices float up to us, laughing and teasing, three guys and one girl. As we get closer the voices drop away, and all four faces turn to stare.
I would never have guessed they were Class As, not in a million years. They look totally normal, except their clothes are weirdly out of style and a bit too bright, like the kids in a foreign language textbook, the ones who are endlessly talking about who will bring cassettes to the party.
The shortest of the guys, a scrawny black kid with huge aviator glasses, wears a bright green T-shirt with a giant yellow smiley face on it. Next to him are two twins, one in red and one in baby blue, who’re almost as tall as Nobody. Both have dark crew cuts and big, toothy smiles that flash at the same time as we approach.
“Oooh, more ladies!” one of the twins says approvingly, and the only girl at the table rolls her large dark eyes. She has short curly black hair framing a heart-shaped face. Her T-shirt, neon pink, reads in lavender glitter letters: Secretly a Mermaid.
“Where’s Javier? And Erik?” Kate frowns.
“Kitchen. Tree.” The boy with glasses answers, staring straight down and continuing to color.
Kate smiles. “Oh, that’s right! I told Javier to get dinner started.”
She let a Class A into a kitchen? With all the knives and things? Alone?
And then she forgot?
“How you doing up there, Erik?” Kate calls skyward, to a guy in the tree. His face is hidden by floppy, dark-blond hair, but his rolled-up shirt sleeves reveal alarmingly defined muscles. His shoulders bow slightly forward, tensed in a posture that makes me expect a sulky reply, but instead he calls down, “I’m exploring nature.”
His voice is deep and confident, and dripping with sarcasm.
“All right! Well. I should head to the kitchen, then. Signal, Nobody, this is the rest of Camp Naramauke: Erik’s up there—” she points to the tree. “This is Dennis in the smiley face shirt, Kurt and Troy are our twins, and last but not least we have Jada. Grab a crayon and jump right in!” She throws us a cheery wave and sallies right back up the hill.
I haven’t even been able to go to the bathroom without a guard watching me for the last twelve months. Now here we are, in the middle of a field ringed by forest, under the open sky, seven verified Class As … coloring?
I follow Nobody to the table, and we both awkwardly take sheets of the yellowed construction paper and sit at the empty spots left at the picnic table benches, directly across from each other. Her hands are still stained with dried blood, but no one remarks on it. There’s just the gentle squeak of markers.
I look back at the lake. Kate’s out of sight. The water is so close. I could run to the edge, kick off my shoes, dive in, and be halfway to the far shore before she comes back. We all could. I glance around the table: so why don’t they?
Just because I can’t see a fence doesn’t mean there isn’t something keeping us here. Maybe there’s an electric current in the water. Or drone surveillance, or snipers on the far shore.
I don’t want to find out the hard way.
“So like … are there cameras all around the camp or something?” I whisper to the table.
The scrawny black guy with the giant glasses continues to stare straight down as he talks: “No cameras. No electricity, either, except in the main cabin.” His voice is a complete monotone. “No internet, no Wi-Fi, no cell phones …”
“We find other ways to stay busy.” One twin grins suggestively, revealing a small overlap between his two front teeth.
“Troy, you are so gross,” Jada groans. “But hey, new girls: how many, huh?”
“Getting straight to it I see,” Dennis says, still not looking up from his paper.
“Dennis’s number, obviously, is zero.” Jada looks from me to Nobody again. “Come on, ladies. We all know each other’s numbers already. How many?”
“How many what?” I stall.
“She’s asking how many people you’ve killed,” the deep voice from the tree says. Only it’s not in the tree anymore, it’s right behind me. He’s crept down so silently I didn’t hear him over the wind rustling the leaves.
There’s a throb in my chest as my heart rate surges. I can feel him hovering so I don’t turn around. I pick up a yellow crayon and start drawing a line of stars across my paper, using all my focus to keep my hand from shaking. Of course. Of course that’s the first question here. They’re killers. Underneath the bright shirts and construction paper, that’s all we have in common. We’re convicted murderers.
Nobody uncaps a green scented marker and holds the tip in front of where her nose must be, sniffing like it’s perfume. Then she says in a rusty voice, “Six.”
One of the twins laughs, impressed. “Whoa, for serious? Second only to Erik!” His thick black eyebrows jump up as he continues chummily, “Me and Kurt got three between us—”
The prolonged scream of an air horn tears across the field. Everyone at the table freezes. Then the twins leap up and start running. The guy from the tree—Erik, I guess—climbs up, onto, and over the table, his long sneaker landing right on my paper as he launches himself off and runs up the hill. My stars are torn in half.
“What’s that sound?” I ask Dennis, who is lining up his paper carefully, matching the corners exactly before folding it in fourths.
“It’s the air horn. It means we’re going to have a drill.” The same monotone, though his expression seems annoyed. “We’ve got to drop whatever we’re doing and run to the east lawn.” He heads toward the hill the other boys have just disappeared over, and Nobody rises to her feet and walks after him without a backward glance.
Jada, however, waits a few feet from the table, her forearm shielding her face from the sun and me. Is this some overture of friendship? Jada has been the only girl here for a while, and of the two girls that have just arrived I am, for the first time in my life, the normal one. As I approach she reaches a small hand out to me, and smiles.
But when we connect her grip is vicelike, her little pink-polished nails biting into my arm. She twists my skin, hard, and her smile deepens as I wince.