John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

The girl does not like vegetables.

The girl does not like flowers.

The girl’s ears are quite warm.

The girl is not on fire.

Which one of the following could be a complete and accurate list of ways the boy could be forgiven?

The dragon egg was a gift from his grandmother. She said she’d found it in the Walmart parking lot, near the cart return. Jack used to get letters from her, but she died at the end of the first summer. Jack thinks that’s why his parents forgot to come pick him up.

When Jack and his mother first arrived, they drove past the girls’ cabins so they could say hello to one of the counselors. She was related to Jack, a first cousin, but he’d never met her before and had a hard time remembering her name. Whenever he saw her he always nodded and called her “Cuz” because that sounded like something Robert would say. She nodded back. She could never remember his name either. “Pleased to meet you, Jeremy.”

She introduced him to some of the girls in her cabin, girls who were about Jack’s age. Some of them looked as annoyed to be there as he was, which was comforting in its own way.

“They seem nice,” his mother said.

Jack’s cabin was not as nice as the girls’ cabin. The screen door was falling off its hinges and the wood smelled of damp and rot. Jack’s mom kept saying it had “character.” The bunk beds were all different heights and every surface had been written on in multicolored markers: messages from previous campers and dirty limericks and crude drawings. Jack thought the messages in the girls’ cabin were probably nicer and more intelligent, with cartoon hearts and flowers to match their comforters and Laura Ashley sheets. He was wrong. Nancy told him the girls’ cabins were just as bad-word-filled as the boys’, that’s just the way camps were.

“But our diagrams are more anatomically correct,” she said.

Jack’s counselor introduced himself, and then the other boys. Jack watched as the counselor patted each of them on the back and surreptitiously pulled back the collars of their shirts where mothers had written out names like Bob and Timothy and George in the same black permanent marker that Jack’s mom used. Jack wondered if the counselor had his name in big block letters somewhere on his clothes too. Just in case he forgot it. Maybe there was a store they all went to that sold prenamed clothing.

When his mother finally left (“Be good,” “Okay,” “Make friends,” “Okay,” “Have fun,” “Okay,” “Don’t get eaten by a bear,” “Okay”), Jack grabbed his dragon egg and went out into the woods looking for a place to hide it.

This is how I’ve Come to Marry the Princess goes:

Jack knocks on a pretend door. Nancy answers. She’s a guard.

“I’ve come to marry the princess,” Jack says.

“The princess?”

“Yes, the princess.”

“Okay. I’ll go ask her.”

The guard turns around to talk to the king. That’s Jack now.

“A knight’s at the door. He says he’s come to marry the princess.”

“The princess?” Jack says.

“Yes, the princess.”

“Okay. I’ll go ask her.”

Then the king tells this to the queen, who finally goes to ask the princess. That’s Jack again.

“There’s a knight at the door. He says he wants to marry you,” Nancy says.

“Marry me?” Jack says.

“Yes. What do you think?”

“No, no, no, a thousand times no.”

They rotate again until Jack is the knight and the guard tells him no, no, no, a thousand times no.

“Then you must die!” and the knight stabs the guard with a foam sword.

Then he knocks on the door again.

When the egg didn’t hatch that first summer, Jack wondered if it was defective. His grandmother had been certain it would hatch, and yet by September it was just as dull and solid as it could be. In the winter he asked one of the men in his cabin to take a look at it. He was a recently divorced ER doctor whose therapist said fresh air and exercise and socialization would do him good. He arrived the first day with a duffel bag full of mass-market paperbacks and refused to speak to anyone else in the cabin except Jack.

Jack asked him if he knew anything about eggs. The man asked if he meant dinosaur eggs. His son used to like dinosaurs.

“It’s not a dinosaur egg.”

“Robin?”

“No.”

“Chicken?”

“No.”

“Platypus? Snake? Ostrich?”

Jack pulled the egg out of his backpack and showed him. “Dragon. Don’t know what kind.”

The ER doctor rolled the egg around on the floor and knocked on its shell. “Looks more like a rock to me.”

The doctor suggested that he place it somewhere cool and dry, where it could get plenty of sunlight. Either it would hatch or it wouldn’t. No way to tell for sure without cracking it open to see what was actually inside.

Jack met Nancy the second summer. He went to his cousin’s cabin on the first day of camp because he knew his mother would want him to. He went early, when he knew there wouldn’t be many girls for his cousin to introduce him to. There was a freckled girl named Anna, and Nancy. Nancy didn’t talk.

“Don’t worry,” his cousin told them, “it’s his first year too. Isn’t it, Justin?”

“Sure,” he said.

His cousin told him Nancy never talked to anyone. Her parents were hoping camp would help.

“My parents thought camp would help too,” Jack said.

Nancy didn’t talk to anyone the first week, nor the second. The boys in Jack’s cabin said Nancy had escaped from juvenile prison and was hiding out. Other cabins had their own rumors.

Nancy was a Kennedy.

Nancy had her tongue ripped out by wolves.

Nancy ripped out her own tongue.

Nancy had tattoos.

Nancy had no parents.

Nancy had seventeen parents, the result of a series of divorces, kidnappings, and illegal adoptions.

Nancy was an alien.

Nancy was a witch.

Nancy didn’t exist.

Jack thought Nancy had it pretty easy. She could join any group she wanted, do anything she wanted, and no one would stop her because they didn’t know what she’d do to them. One time a girl pushed her into the dirt and Nancy got up and then shook the girl’s hand. She didn’t smile or frown; she gripped the girl’s hand in both of hers and then walked away. Later the girl broke her nose after being hit in the face with the boom of a sailboat. Nancy wasn’t there, and that’s when the witch rumor started. But when the girl with the broken nose came back from the hospital, she told everyone that Nancy was just a nice girl who didn’t talk much. And the rumor went away.

“People aren’t nearly as mean as other people think,” Nancy told him.

The boys in Jack’s cabin weren’t mean, but there were too many of them and Jack had a hard time keeping them straight. So he divided them into groups. There were the boys who had been coming to camp all their lives and already had all the friends they wanted to make. Jack called them the Jonathans. And the boys who were there for the first time but already knew how to sail or play sports or who had mothers who sent care packages every day filled with candy and MAD magazines and soda and other contraband. Those were the Roberts. They were always more popular than the Jonathans, until their newness wore off and they became Jonathans themselves.

“This your first summer?” Jonathan asked Jack. “It must be. I’d remember you. Your parents send you with anything good?”

Jack had three trunks now. Summer, winter, and in-between. The summer trunk held five bathing suits, six shorts, six T-shirts, and twenty pairs of underwear. Every time he sent his laundry out with the other campers’, more clothes came back. Sometimes they had other boys’ names written in the collars: Barnabus, Crispin, Derrek, and Pierre. Jack never wore these clothes. He was too scared of running into their original owners. Sometimes he wondered if he should take their names too, then maybe people would remember him; maybe another mother would come and pick him up.