Gifted (7 page)

I turned around and got right in his face.

“She was
never
my girlfriend!” I said quietly. “And we're not friends anymore.” I cast a surreptitious glance over my shoulder, but it was okay. Anita had left.

“Just checking,” Drew laughed, and for some reason apparent only to him, he reached down, picked up a handful of sand, and threw it hard into the fire. I guess he liked seeing all the sparks fly out. Or maybe he just liked making the kids in front yelp and jump back. At any rate, he was quite the comedian.

I passed the rest of the evening this way, watching the hilarious high jinks of my new friends, which consisted of pushing, shoving, laughing, spitting, and the occasional wedgie-ing, but somehow I couldn't fully enjoy them. I was preoccupied. Thinking of
her
you see, and it was driving me crazy. I kept searching for that distinctive head of hair among the huddled masses, but it was useless. I saw not a single sign of Allison Picone. A major disappointment. I brooded about it for a long time, until I thought of a bigger problem to replace it.

The shower situation. I was still way too self-conscious to consider baring myself in public, but I knew that parading around the boys' shower in my swimming trunks would look even worse. Luckily, all was solved when I found myself first at the showers, and as the result of some rapid thinking, I saw that all I really needed to do was get my hair wet
fast
and then get the heck out of there, which was what I did, and nobody was the wiser.

Afterward, as we readied for bed, Mr. Zimmerman made good on his threat to read us the Rules of the Cabin, and amazingly enough, not one of us heckled him. I think we'd decided to let the man hang on to whatever little dignity he possessed before the shaving cream would forever foam it away.

And as I climbed up to my bunk to await zero hour, I felt the tension in the air. I have to confess I was more than a little nervous. I sent skyward my last heartfelt prayer of the day, as any soldier might before the ensuing battle. I prayed that the smearing would go off without a hitch of any kind and that none of us would suffer the consequences of his actions.

Particularly not
me
.

It was unnaturally quiet for a room filled with eighth grade boys, and I was surprised Mr. Z didn't smell a rat, considering that he was bunking with about six of them. It took a while, but eventually high-pitched snores hit the airwaves above his bed, and a minute later I heard the rustle of someone getting out of his bunk followed by the faint sound of a can being shaken. Then a hand tugged my sleeve and Jason Barton's face appeared.

“George,” he whispered. “Go ahead.”

I went ahead. I climbed down from my bunk with my heart thumping loudly in my chest and a loaded condiment in my hand. A single turn of the no-drip spout and,
click
, the safety was off.

And I have to tell you that once I got started, I just couldn't stop! It was
tremendous
. I was defacing school property, so to speak, and for the first time in my life I could appreciate how the other half lived. I heard a whispered “Go, George, go!” and, thus encouraged, began
squirting my Gulden's Spicy Brown Mustard in random designs and concentric circles all over my target, concentrating mainly on the pillow area since my bottle was only half full. And when I stood back to admire my artwork in the faint moonlight, I knew for certain that this act, and this act alone, would forever cement my status as a Bruise Brother. Nothing would ever be the same for me. I had made it! I was on the team!

I was one of Them!

And then the overhead lights came on.

Somebody had flipped the switch, obviously, but I never found out who, because I just stood there staring down at Mr. Z with the empty Gulden's bottle poised in midair. All I could see were swirls of spicy brown mustard on the crisp white sheet and the crisp white pillowcase and the bulging whites of Mr. Z's eyes glaring up at me. There didn't seem to be
any
shaving cream at all, only tons and tons of mustard, way more than I'd had in my bottle. A loud bleat of torment issued from Mr. Z's lips. I looked around; the others appeared to be sleeping.

The Music Man and I remained motionless in our respective positions for what seemed like minutes until he got up to rip the covers from his cot. They were covered in mustard from bow to stern, and as my eyes began watering freely, I suddenly realized where Sam and Jason had snuck off to during the movie, to raid the kitchen for spicy brown mustard!

I stood there like a fool and let him slap the soiled bedding into my arms. I followed him out of the cabin like a fool to the boys' latrine. He spoke not a word to me the entire time, content with making strangled animal cries in the back of his throat. He planted himself behind me at the sink while I rinsed out the sheets, and when I'd finished
and followed him to the cabin, I noticed that he was wearing dried mustard on each ear. The rats in the room were still feigning sleep. Mr. Z motioned me with an angry jerk of his thumb to get up to my bunk, and when I'd done so and shuffled into my sleeping bag, he growled directly into my face, “I don't care
whose
son you are! Tomorrow morning …
you're mine
.”

I nodded at him, horrified at the concept, and when I heard the springs of his cot groan, I slid my CD player out of my backpack, slipped on the headphones, and shut my eyes. The mysteries of the day had finally unraveled. I had been lulled into a false sense of security. They had set me up, and They had gotten me. They had used my feelings of goodwill and my readiness to forgive and forget past wrongs,
and They had gotten me
. I didn't know what lay ahead of me now. If I were to be sent home for this, my father would have me put into psychiatric treatment, given the nature of the crime, or, at the very least, ground me for the rest of my life. Or, even more ghastly, make me do community service work of some kind. I shuddered. I would have to find a way to get the Music Man to give me a punishment here at camp. No doubt something would occur to me by morning.

And I would find a way to get back at Them. A way so brutally thorough and so thorough in its brutality that it would make Their ugly heads spin. Because as far as I was concerned, this meant only one thing.

This meant war
.

At dawn I awoke with what seemed like the breath of an idea …
for revenge
. The radio had given it to me. I'd left my headphones on all night, and the station I'd been listening to kept interrupting its broadcast to give me news bulletins on Tropical Storm Judith, which had stalled off the coast of North Carolina. The people there were being advised to batten down their hatches and start barricading themselves in. For some reason this put the word “bunker” into my brain.

As I mentioned before, way back in its heyday Cape Rose served as a U.S. Army coastal fort, and not only did it have its very own watchtower, it had a bunker, a concrete stronghold submerged within the cape's biggest sand dune. According to the film at orientation, it was located to the left of camp, where the forest met the beach. And the idea I had was really more a visual in my mind. I pictured Them, the five baboons, trapped inside that bunker after I'd locked Them in. Surely a humbling experience, especially after They'd found Themselves prey to
every flesh-biting species of vermin the Delaware Bay had to offer. I mean, the bunker stood out there unused year after year. Who knew what might be living in it? The insect possibilities were limitless.

Now, how I would pull this off remained to be seen. I lay quietly on my bunk hoping for another idea to start breathing, and believe it or not, when I opened my eyes, I saw the hideous face of Jason Barton infecting my airspace.

“George, you okay?”

I locked eyes with him and kept my gaze steady, but didn't give him an answer.

“Sorry about last night. We don't know who turned on the lights. We didn't know what to do.”

I continued staring at him. Then I decided to play along with his little charade. “What happened to the shaving cream?”

“We bagged that idea. We liked your idea better. Did Zimmerman say what he's gonna do to you yet?”

“Not quite yet.”

“Well, hang in there, buddy. I mean, it's not like he can really do anything to Mr. Clark's son, right?” He gave me a nasty little wink before disappearing, and I thought over his parting words.

Buddy
? Ha! I no longer liked the sound of that. What did he take me for anyway? Then I got another idea. I would play along with Them. I would pretend to believe Them and thereby draw
Them
into a false sense of security. It would make exacting my revenge a whole lot easier and a whole lot sweeter.

Satisfied with myself, I turned on my side and jumped. The Music Man's face, red with wrath and clashing more
than a little with his pink cashmere sweater, was hovering within inches of my own.

“Get up and get dressed,” he snarled. “You're in for a very long day.”

I hopped out of bed to get dressed as quickly as I could, hoping that swift obedience might soften him up a little, but I was filled with a rock-hard sense of impending doom that made both the hopping and the hoping a little difficult. I noticed the occasional sympathetic glance shot my way by an apelike face, and each time forced myself to answer it with an equally pathetic look of my own rather than let loose the daggers that burned behind my eyes and give the show away. It all hinged on Mr. Zimmerman keeping me here at camp. Then They'd see George at his best. Or worst, depending on how you looked at it.

The Music Man kept me by his side as the boys of Cabin F trooped to the mess hall for breakfast. He pushed me through the line pretty efficiently, and I noticed that our eating habits were not all that dissimilar. We both grabbed a wedge of the same variety of melon and reached for the same species of Frosted Pop-Tart, and we both avoided the more leathery, curdled, and congealed food groups. I found myself hoping that
that
was where our similarities would end. The table he chose was in a far corner of the room and therefore pretty isolated, and instead of sitting on the bench directly opposite me as anyone else would have, the big jerk dropped his tray right next to mine, and I had to slide over quickly before our hips touched. It was like having a conjoined twin. He explained himself by saying, matter-of-factly,
“If I had to look at your face the whole time, I'd lose my appetite.”

A little abrasive
, I thought, but I could see the justice of the remark. Having to look at his face would have put me off my feed indefinitely. But after a while I decided to risk it. I had to find out what I was in for before the suspense killed me. So I turned to look at him, and was just wondering how I might broach the subject, when I immediately became mesmerized by watching the man eat. He took the tiniest of bites and then chewed each one about fifty times, and with his skinny mustache twitching up and down as if battery operated, I was suddenly transported back to the fourth grade, peering into the tank of Nippy the Hamster. The resemblance was uncanny, and it took a full minute to shake off the memory and get my mind back on business matters. But eventually I did.

“Are you going to send me home?” I asked, blinking at him engagingly. He didn't look at me.

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?” he sneered. “No, you don't get off that easy, George. You're staying right here with me.”

Hallelujah!
I thought. “What do I have to do?”

“Hard work,” he said, sneering at his melon. “I'll bet you've never done that before, and I've always felt that you were long overdue.”

This gave me a sinking feeling, but at least I was staying at camp, which was the main thing.

“You know, George,” he said, chewing thoughtfully, “you surprised me last night. I didn't think you had it in you.”

“
Thanks
,” I said. It sounded like a compliment.

“You've proved you're pretty good at making a mess.
Now I'm wondering just how good you are at cleaning one up.”

I gulped, and a sizable chunk of Frosted Pop-Tart got wedged in my throat. Mr. Zimmerman smacked me on the back sadistically while I choked it down, and I noticed quite a few pairs of curious eyes taking in our little drama.

“Feeling better?” he asked in an insincere way.

I nodded, feeling anything but better. My eyes fell on Anita sitting maybe twenty feet away. She was probably the only one in the room not looking at me, and I wondered how she could have forgotten me so easily.

“Finish up, George,” Mr. Zimmerman said, standing up to take his tray back. “Daylight is wasting.”

Daylight is hardly wasting
, I thought.
It just got started
. But I kept my mouth shut, squared my shoulders, and rose to follow his example. Today I would concentrate on being as humble and contrite as was humanly possible to impress him with the new and improved George R. Clark. Then when the opportunity presented itself, I would find a way to get those apes into that bunker …

I looked over at Them, at Their buzzed meatheads and Their phony sympathetic expressions. Sam signaled me with his thumb and forefinger, forming the okay sign, and I did it back to him, thinking,
Okay to you, my fine, hairless friend. Vengeance will soon be mine. Retribution is getting all set to rear its ugly head and make yours
spin.

Then I turned to follow my new life-partner out of the mess hall and into the Compound, little knowing that he was leading me to a fate worse than death.

The girls' latrine
. Mr. Zimmerman knocked on the door, and when nothing but silence answered him, he pulled it open and made it stay that way with a convenient nearby garbage can.

“Why are we stopping here?” I asked.