John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

“No, no, no, a thousand times no,” she says.

The knight kills the princess, sees what he has done, and says, “Now I must die!” And he does.

Before the audience has a chance to react, Jack and Nancy get up and repeat the skit, but faster.

Then they do it a third time where the knight kills anyone who answers the door.

They practiced it a dozen times, then two dozen. Sometimes they got mixed up and the king was wearing the princess’s wig when he told the knight no. Sometimes both Jack and Nancy were the princess, saying no to each other. Sometimes they were both the knight thrusting swords into each other’s bellies.

The skit wasn’t original. Robert and his friends performed it in the mountains; that’s how Jack knows about it. Even though he’s never seen it at his camp, Jack fears another cabin will do the skit before they have a chance.

Nancy says it doesn’t matter if theirs is the first, last, or thousandth I’ve Come to Marry the Princess. Theirs will be the best.

It is given that an average camp theater stage is 20 feet wide and 14 feet deep.

It is given that Jack suffers from a recurring nightmare in which he forgets to stab Nancy in the stomach and kisses her instead.

Quantity A: The speed Jack can run behind the curtain to vomit in a bucket placed there for just this purpose.

Quantity B: (x - 2y)(x + 2y) = 4.

D. The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

Every Sunday night at summer camp, they have devotions. The counselor reads a passage from something inspirational: the Bible, Chicken Soup for the Soul, a favorite novel. It depends a lot on the counselor. Nancy said her counselor liked to read the embarrassing stories from Seventeen magazine so all the girls would know that it wasn’t just them who passed gas in front of boys or got their first period while wearing white jeans.

“The stories are obviously made up,” Nancy said. “They have to be. Each Sunday we’ve been writing our own entries. Our counselor collects them and mails them off. We’re going to see which of us can be the first to get in.”

This was Nancy’s, published a year after the end of camp:

One time I fell flat on my face at the talent show. One second I was holding the microphone in one hand and a foam sword in the other, trying to think of a joke to tell, and when the spotlight hit my face, my knees locked, and I fell. As I lay there I could hear a girl in the front row whisper, Is she dead? And I said into the microphone, Not yet. Everyone clapped and I got up and walked offstage.

Jack looked forward to devotions every week and tried to keep it up the rest of the year. The band counselor played violin and lectured on music theory. In standardized-test camp they read admission essays that “made the difference.” In math and science camp they went stargazing.

Adult camp had no counselor, so Jack improvised.

“This is what we do: we each tell a story. It has to be a true story. If you don’t have one, maybe just tell us about why you’re here. I’ll start. I’m here because my parents forgot to pick me up.”

“I’m here because my house is being tented for termites.”

“I was too cheap to go to Bermuda.”

“I went to Bermuda. It’s overrated.”

“I cut a kid’s chest open when he came into the ER. He had bullet holes in his chest, up near the neck. He was practically dead. So I cut his chest open. When the surgeon got there, she looked at me and said, ‘What did you do and why did you do it?’ I cut his chest open, through the breastplate. I used a saw. ‘What did you do?’ the surgeon said. Couldn’t she see I didn’t know? The kid was dying. I’m a doctor. It’s what I do. She said he’d had a heartbeat. She wasn’t there. She didn’t know. ‘It’s on the chart,’ she said. She wouldn’t operate. ‘You did this,’ she said. We scared the nurses. The hospital sent us both to anger management. Later, we got divorced. My therapist thought camp would help.”

The doctor left camp the next day. He left Jack his duffel bag full of books. “Sometimes when my wife got called into the ER to do a central line, it wouldn’t take too long and she’d be sent home. Only it was too late to go back to sleep and too early to go to the office, so she told me she’d go to Walmart and wander the aisles. She said the nice thing about Walmart was it was always open and no one would talk to you. After the divorce I would drive by the parking lot looking for her car. I figure when I finally know what to say to her, she’ll be there.”

“What if she isn’t?”

“Then I’ll say it to somebody else. Hope that egg of yours hatches, Jack.”

The morning after the talent show, Jack stole a dozen fish fillets the cook was saving for the end-of-camp banquet. He wrapped them in a dishcloth and brought them out to the woods. He thought they’d help him train Pencil.

“Sit,” Jack said. His dragon did nothing.

“Sit,” Jack said. And the dragon did nothing.

“Come,” Jack said. And the dragon did nothing.

Jack figured that one day he and his dragon would develop telepathy of some sort. He didn’t know when that would be.

“Maybe I’ll bring you Nancy. You could eat her instead.” The dragon bit him.

“You’re right, that’s not very nice.”

When he got back to the cabin, the other boys said Nancy had stopped by to tell him that she’d never forgive him and she hoped he died.

“Your girlfriend was pissed,” they said.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Jack said.

“Damn straight,” they said.

By lunch everyone was talking about their breakup. About how she’d dumped him. About how she’d thrown bug juice in his face. And how he had cried.

Jack still hadn’t seen Nancy. He pictured her throwing bug juice in someone else’s face. A pretend Jack: a prop from the theater hut done up in Jack clothes and Jack makeup. He imagined the pretend Jack taking it on the chin. Pretend Jack listened to Nancy’s complaints, accepted responsibility, and apologized. Pretend Jack wouldn’t have missed the talent show in the first place. He would’ve left the egg all alone in the woods while he pretended to run a foam sword into Nancy’s belly and Nancy pretended to run a foam sword into his. The other campers would remember Pretend Jack the next summer.

“That was a hell of a skit you did last year, Jack,” they’d say. “I almost believed you both died up there. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

The dragon grew a little every hour. By dinner it was the size of a large dog. By breakfast the next morning it was the size of a pony. Jack moved the dragon into the theater hut. It was always empty the last week of camp, and Jack didn’t want Pencil getting lost in the woods. Jack still didn’t know what it ate. He brought it scraps from the mess—spaghetti, meatloaf, scrambled eggs—but Pencil wasn’t interested. Maybe dragons didn’t need to eat.

Nancy and Jack tried revising I’ve Come to Marry the Princess to make it their own. They spent every afternoon in the theater hut. Nancy said it was her favorite place at camp. Jack agreed because it was the only building with air conditioning.

In one of Jack and Nancy’s made-up versions, the princess said yes. The knight said “Great!” and they proceeded to spend forty-five minutes making wedding preparations, passing messages through the guard, king, and queen. The climax of the story was when the guard misheard “lilies” for “daffodils” and it turned out the knight was allergic and he died from anaphylactic shock. The princess died from grief. Nancy said it was very important that they both die in the skit, otherwise people wouldn’t know it was supposed to be funny. If only one of them kicked the bucket, then it’d be a different kind of story entirely.