The Alex Crow Read online

  It was true.

  And despite the fact that fourteen-year-old Trent Mendibles from Ohio was giraffe-sized compared to the rest of us, he looked scared to be standing at the epicenter of all Jupiter’s attention, which made me feel kind of sorry for him. I think he had the same look on his face that I must have had the day I crawled out of my refrigerator: He was nervous and pale, and had dark circles around his glassy eyes. I imagined he’d probably been awake all night on the drive out here from Ohio, pleading with his parents to turn around and bring him home so he could log back on to the insomniac online gamers’ community from which they had kidnapped him.

  Mrs. Nussbaum continued, “And Trent, dear, this is Larry, your resident counselor. And these are your cabin mates: Here is Cobie—he’s sixteen, from West Virginia—and our two fifteen-year-old brothers, also from West Virginia, Ariel and . . . oh my! . . . Uh . . . Max.”

  Suddenly aware that Max was standing at the foot of his bed wearing nothing but briefs, Mrs. Nussbaum, who’d mispronounced my name again, reddened and turned away.

  “And . . . um . . . Where is Robin this morning?” Mrs. Nussbaum looked around the messy cabin and then turned toward Larry, as though she may have been wondering if yet another boy from Jupiter had done something terrible to himself in order to get out of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

  I didn’t think Robin Sexton had the guts to do anything remotely comparable to Bucky Littlejohn’s archery performance.

  But, indeed, Robin Sexton’s bed was empty, although everyone could see it had been slept in.

  Max offered, “Maybe he had to go throw out some photocopies,” and then Max made the loose-fist sign language gesture that all boys understand, which he got away with because Mrs. Nussbaum, who was obviously trying to figure out why Jupiter cabin at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys would have a photocopier in the first place, was straining to keep her eyes away from my mostly naked fifteen-year-old brother.

  I watched Trent Mendibles. He nodded knowingly.

  And Max shook his head and said, “I don’t know how the heck I’m ever going to make it through six weeks without a few sessions in the copy room myself.”

  Then Cobie Petersen raised his hand and said, “Um. Mrs. Nussbaum? The kid—Robin—told us he sleepwalks. Also, the hairy giant new guy gets that bed.”

  Cobie pointed at the bed on the end of the row—the one Bucky Littlejohn peed in on our first night.

  Mrs. Nussbaum looked concerned and perplexed. “He sleepwalks?”

  Cobie Petersen nodded. “That’s what he said to us.”

  Larry reached below his quiet, non-plastic bed and pulled up an alarm clock. “It’s five forty-five. Really? We get a new camper at five forty-five in the morning?”

  Mrs. Nussbaum accidentally glanced at Max again—I saw her—then she nervously looked away.

  “I apologize, Larry, but he’s just gotten here from Ohio!”

  She made Ohio sound exotic and remote, as opposed to about four hundred miles away from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, which is how far it was. The poor kid—Trent Mendibles—looked sad and unwanted, and he shifted nervously from foot to foot, still hefting his duffel bag.

  Larry sighed. “Okay. Let the kids and me get dressed. The new guy—what’s his name?—gets that bed on the end. We’ll find that Robin dude before breakfast. I’m sure he’s just in the showers or something.”

  “Or maybe he’s working out with the swim team,” Max offered.

  Mrs. Nussbaum looked at Max, turned brilliant red, then fixed her eyes on Jupiter’s screen door.

  “We have a swim team?” she asked.

  - - -

  Despite the fact that it was relatively dark in the George Washington National Forest at six in the morning, it only took us about twenty minutes to find Robin Sexton. He was in the woods about thirty feet away from Jupiter, standing up while rocking side to side in a patch of ferns, completely asleep in his underwear.

  Cobie Petersen nudged Robin’s butt with the toe of his sneaker to try and get the kid to open his eyes. He was out cold.

  “People always say you’re not supposed to wake up sleepwalkers,” Max said.

  “Why not?” Cobie asked.

  The new guy—Trent Mendibles—had come with us on our hunt-for-the-weird-kid expedition. Larry left us on our own once again so he could take advantage of the counselors’ luxurious facilities, or whatever else Larry liked to do away from the responsibilities of his actual job.

  Max shrugged. “I don’t know why. I just heard you’re not supposed to do it. If waking him up accidentally kills him, Mrs. Nussbaum is going to get really mad at all of us, but mostly probably at Larry.”

  “Eh. Whatever.”

  Cobie kicked Robin Sexton’s butt again. Harder.

  “Hey, dork face.”

  Robin grunted and slowly cracked his eyelids. He had a strangely horrified and drained expression on his face.

  Then Cobie Petersen stepped around the ferns, positioned himself directly in front of Robin Sexton, and horned his pointed index fingers up from the top of his forehead.

  He snarled, “Wake up, boy, I’m the Dumpling Man.”

  I think Cobie Petersen most likely picked the wrong thing to say to awaken our ninety-four-pound sleepwalker, Robin Sexton. Maybe Robin Sexton had been having a nightmare about the Dumpling Man, or maybe it was just that Cobie Petersen’s story the night before had made some kind of impression that permeated the toilet paper barriers that were still wedged inside the kid’s ears. Whatever it was, when Robin Sexton’s eyes came into focus, the kid shrieked like a madman and launched himself out of the bushes, swinging and flailing a barrage of fists, and pale, bony knees and elbows at Cobie Petersen.

  And Max, my brother, took a step back and said, “This is probably why you don’t wake up sleepwalkers.”

  I glanced at Trent Mendibles, just to see how the new kid was enjoying his first few minutes in Jupiter, and he said to me, “What the fuck is this place? A home for insane kids?”

  I really wanted to answer him, but I didn’t.

  What I wanted to tell him was this: I’ve been wondering the same thing for the past two days.

  And we had a full six weeks to go.

  Even though he obviously possessed wolverine-like qualities, Robin Sexton was no match for a raccoon-hunting mountain boy like Cobie Petersen. Robin did manage to clip a good punch into Cobie’s nose, but in less than three seconds, Cobie Petersen had the smaller boy pinned to his back in the dirt while Cobie leaned over him, clenching Robin’s bony wrists, and trying to get the kid to wake up and calm down.

  I was surprised at how gentle Cobie Petersen could be with Robin, because after the punch he’d landed, most boys I’d met since coming to America would have beaten the life out of the kid.

  “Calm down, kid,” Cobie soothed.

  It was probably hard for Robin Sexton to calm down, though, because Cobie Petersen’s nose gushed blood all over the scrawny boy’s face and chest. It looked like some kind of horror movie, there was so much blood on the boys.

  “Dude. Come on. Relax. You were sleepwalking,” Cobie said, as he dripped and dripped and dripped a steady stream of blood all over the skinny thirteen-year-old twitching kid from Pennsylvania.

  And Robin Sexton gurgled and spit.

  “Gah! Get off me, you son of a bitch!”

  And as soon as Cobie Petersen loosened up on Robin, the kid began swinging punches and spitting all over again.

  It was a gory mess.

  Trent Mendibles shook his head. “I really wish I could upload this shit on video. I’d get a million hits. This is just like level four in Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners, except for the little dude in his underwear, and being in the woods instead of in Stalingrad during World War Five in 2311, and shit.”

  - - -

  Larry was very mad at u
s when he came back to Jupiter and saw what Cobie Petersen and Robin Sexton looked like, which was murder victims or something. I couldn’t blame him. We were attempting to make our beds, trying to clean up, but couldn’t manage to finish before Larry walked in on us.

  Robin Sexton, who looked especially scrawny because he was still in just his underwear, was covered in blood. So was Cobie Petersen, but he never really looked very scrawny at all.

  “What did I tell you?” Larry shouted, “What did I fucking tell you fuckheads yesterday? Am I going to have to follow all five of you around twenty-four hours a day so you don’t fucking kill yourselves? I am NOT going to do that.”

  Cobie Petersen raised his hand. “Um. Larry? It’s all okay. It was just an accident. The kid got scared when I woke him up, is all. We didn’t even fight or nothing. Trust me. He’d actually be dead right now if I hit him.”

  “That’s it.” Larry said, “All five of you. I want you out of here and in the showers right now before the rest of the cabins wake up and someone sees you like this. I’ve fucking had it with this shit. You’re straightening your shit up or I’m going to start kicking your asses. Boot camp begins today for you pieces of shit.”

  Cobie raised his hand again. “Larry? Big Chief? I’m really sorry. Do you want a hug or something? Would you like me to read you a story?”

  It was remarkable to me that Larry didn’t completely snap at that exact moment.

  But that was that. Larry, gritting his teeth, marched us in a line, like a leg-ironed chain gang carrying toothbrushes, towels, and clean changes of our name-labeled clothes, out to the communal, spider-infested inmate showers just before the sun cracked the top of the trees in the east.

  Nobody wanted to get into those showers, but nobody wanted to fight with Larry, either. He was clearly at his breaking point.

  Living with the Burgesses, I had seen a lot of very strange things. None of them particularly frightened me, but I have always been acutely afraid of spiders. When the counselors walked us all through the shower room during our orientation two days before, I couldn’t help but notice the massive webs up in the black tar-paper corners of the unlit ceiling, and the hanging white tufts of egg masses that looked as big as tennis balls.

  None of the boys of Jupiter had taken a shower since we’d arrived at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, which was actually kind of gross.

  So I kept my eyes fixed over my head, waiting for something predatory to drop down, while the five of us stood beneath trickles of freezing water, naked and shivering in the hell of the spider cave. And Larry kept ordering Robin and Cobie to be sure and get all the blood off their skin and out of their hair, because he didn’t want to lose his job on account of a fight between two shitheads like us.

  Cobie Petersen stood under the corroded spigot next to me, and rubbed water into his face.

  “Hey. Noisy dude. Did I get all the blood off?” he said.

  I nodded.

  Cobie Petersen laughed. “That little kid looked pretty much like a walking scab, I guess.”

  I glanced back up at the ceiling.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Spiders.”

  “Oh. Well, I always heard spiders don’t like water.”

  “And you never heard about how you shouldn’t wake up sleepwalkers?”

  “Shit. This fucking water is too cold for spiders.”

  “Maybe they’ll go after Larry, then,” I said.

  “Hey. You can talk,” Cobie Petersen said.

  I couldn’t help but look at the gashing scar on Cobie Petersen’s shoulder. It looked like three streaks of melted pink wax.

  Three boys from Mars came in to piss and brush their teeth. They laughed at us and made fun of us and called us fags because we were all naked in the showers, but Larry told them to shut up or he’d throw their asses in there with us. Nobody wanted that. It was bad enough showering with the kids from Jupiter. The Mars boys were monsters.

  Cobie Petersen turned and faced the boys from Mars squarely and flipped middle fingers with both hands. He stared them down until they looked away.

  Outside, someone clanged and clanged on the coffee-can breakfast bell.

  And after breakfast, when we all went back to Jupiter to prepare for the day’s interplanetary contests, we watched with mild disgust as the new kid with the extremely hairy legs put a set of sheets on the bed that Bucky Littlejohn peed in. It was probably dumb, I thought, because I was certain that every single plastic-coated bed in Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had inevitably been peed in—or worse.

  SOCK PUPPET JESUS

  By the middle of our second week at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Larry had softened his opinion regarding the five boys of Jupiter, most likely because none of us had tried killing himself and no blood had been spilled since the morning we caught Robin Sexton sleepwalking. The kid still kept paper plugs stuffed in his ears constantly, and usually pretended not to hear anything we said to him. He’d even managed to sculpt his fake earbuds from toilet paper he chewed on—like a wasp—and then he craftily attached kite string to them so it really looked like he had an iPod or something inside his T-shirt. He got the string from the Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys kite-making competition, which Jupiter won because I made a kite with Jesus on it.

  Two of the boys from Mars beat up Robin Sexton one day because they thought he really had an iPod, and they wanted to steal it. Then they beat him up more when they realized his iPod was made from masticated toilet paper and pilfered kite twine.

  And Robin Sexton continued to sleepwalk just about every night or so.

  Trent Mendibles talked incessantly about his prowess at Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners, an online game that was like a massive networked cult to the majority of the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

  Cobie, Max, and I had never seen the game before, although we knew plenty of kids at William E. Shuck High School who were similarly addicted to it.

  Trent Mendibles’s parents committed him to the camp after finding him unconscious and dehydrated in front of his computer monitor. He was having some type of seizure, he bragged proudly. He said there was even foam coming out of his mouth and nose. Trent Mendibles told us that he had been playing the game nonstop for eighty-three hours, according to his log-in records. He had to be taken to a hospital and hooked up to an IV, and he told us a very scary story: At the hospital, an orderly had to insert a catheter tube inside Trent Mendibles’s penis, which, he said, hurt more than anything he’d ever felt in his life. His story made us all cringe, even Robin Sexton, who was clearly paying attention to Trent Mendibles’s story about the tube that got shoved inside his penis.

  But Trent swore his plan to play BQTNP for more than eighty-three straight hours as soon as he got back home to Ohio, catheter or not.

  Trent Mendibles missed Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners so desperately he sobbed for three consecutive nights after coming to Jupiter, until Cobie Petersen told him this: “I will choke you to death with my bare hands if you don’t shut the hell up.”

  Three days was enough to cry over any video game, Trent Mendibles must have decided after that. And Max had said, “You should choke him, anyway.”

  Nobody in the entire solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was daring enough to mess with Cobie Petersen.

  Who would ever be dumb enough to screw with a kid who’d survived being pooed on and clawed by the Dumpling Man?

  Larry had installed a bell on Jupiter’s door, which really wasn’t a bell—it was a Mountain Dew can with a pebble inside it, tied to the top of the door by a string—and each night at bedtime one of us would be assigned the task of following Robin Sexton if he sleepwalked again, just to make sure he didn’t get eaten by wild animals or wind up drowned in the canoe lake. Except for Cobie Petersen, we were all afraid of waking him up. When it was Cobie’s turn to babysit the kid, he just took Robi
n Sexton firmly by the wrist before he got five feet away from Jupiter and pulled him gently back to his crumpling bed.

  He said, “I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t rather get in another fistfight with that son-of-a-bitch jerkoff than lose a couple hours of sleep following his scrawny ass out into the woods.”

  And Cobie Petersen begged Larry to let us tie the kid down to his bed every night, but Larry, for whatever reasons, thought that was too weird and could probably get him in trouble if someone came into Jupiter and found one of us boys tied up to his bed.

  “What if we forgot him like that for a few days?” Larry had said.

  And Cobie Petersen said, “Do you really think anyone would care, Larry?”

  Robin Sexton pretended not to notice that Jupiter was having a conversation about tying him to his bed.

  Another reason Larry found himself with a kinder attitude toward us was that Jupiter had pulled into the lead after a week and a half of interplanetary contests at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. I think that the biggest factor in securing our lead over the other planets was that three of the five boys of Jupiter were relatively sane. The other cabins, filled with boys like our own Robin Sexton and Trent Mendibles, just couldn’t seem to function in the real world much beyond giving us dirty looks, calling us names, and mouthing predictable threats about us being queers, or about our asses, and how they wanted to kick them.

  The interplanetary competition that Thursday afternoon was arbitrarily judged and as nonlethal as any contest could be: The planets of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys all had to make puppets and then use them to put on shows for the other cabins. We had to make the puppets out of pairs of our own socks.

  I didn’t like the idea of sacrificing my ink-marker-initialed socks for a contest, much less for the entertainment of the other planets. We had a very limited wardrobe as it was, and it was getting near to laundry day for the five boys of Jupiter. We were all down to our last relatively clean changes of clothing.