Andrew Smith - The Alex Crow

They counted everything.

Max’s bed was closest to the door.

On our first night at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Max joked that he would be the lone survivor from Jupiter if our cabin burned down in the next six weeks, to which Larry, our counselor, warned, “Don’t get any ideas, fuckheads.”

And then Larry proceeded to strip-search all five of us. We even had to turn our socks inside out.

This may have pushed Bucky Littlejohn over the edge.

So we five boys of Jupiter, who would be four the following night, stood there in our underwear while Larry emptied the contents of our duffel bags and tore the covers and bedding from our cots, just to make certain none of us had smuggled in a cigarette lighter.

During the commotion, boys spilled out from the Saturn, Mercury, Mars, Neptune, and Pluto cabins. They taunted us from outside our screen windows. As long as the lights—kerosene lanterns, which were closely guarded by the counselors—were on in our solar system, everyone could see everything that happened in Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

The other planets chanted and clapped at us.

“Strip search! Strip search! Strip search!”

Larry left the place a complete mess, and we had to clean it up—in our underwear—while the planets outside observed (after all, it wasn’t as though they could divert themselves with television or video games) and our counselor watched suspiciously from his bed, which sat uncrowded and isolated on the opposite side of the cabin.

“Hurry up and straighten out your shit,” Larry said. “I want lights out in five minutes, and you’re all getting up at sunrise tomorrow morning. You’re going to have fun , fuckheads.”

I was fascinated by the word. One more of those American things that made no sense to me whatsoever, I thought. If they’d allowed me to bring my notebook along to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, I would have written a reminder to eventually research the etymology of fuckhead .

Still, I had no idea what to expect from Larry’s concept of “fun.” It had seemed to me that in just a few hours we had been through enough torment already. At dinner, they fed us something called “Beanie Weenie.” I had never heard of it before, but it was better than sauerkraut, so I ate it.

It made no sense.

Jupiter, an exact replica of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys’ other eight cabins (three of which were abandoned), was a strange and primitive design. To me, it most closely resembled an insect cage. The walls, which stood only about three feet high, were built with horizontal redwood slats. The entire upper two-thirds of them were nothing more than mesh screen all the way around, which is why the boys of the other cabins could watch us losers from Jupiter enact our dramatic failure in our underwear for their entertainment. Unless you were a counselor, who got to sleep in actual pajamas and had his own lighted-by-electricity toilet and shower facilities, there was no privacy anywhere in the camp. And we would eventually find out, too, just how miserable and damp it could be during a summer downpour.

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had a motto, which was carved in a sort of rustic hewn-log font on the crossbar over the entry gate. It said this:

Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys

Where Boys Rediscover The Fun of Boyhood!

It almost made me nauseous—not just the word rediscover , which is a ridiculous word—all the boy, boy, boy on that sign. You could practically smell balls just by reading it. To be honest, the camp always did smell like balls, anyway.

Someone—no doubt a Merrie-Seymour success story who’d endured the camp before Max and I arrived—had taken the time to vandalize the crossbar by etching in two additional words: OR DIE.

Apparently, the internees at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had been encouraged to carve. This was something that we’d never be allowed to do. After Bucky Littlejohn’s archery performance, the counselors removed everything sharp from Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

There were all sorts of things carved into the walls around our cots. Two pieces in particular fascinated me. First, there was a kind of religious depiction of an Xbox controller that was nailed to a cross floating in the clouds, while tangles of skeleton-thin boys looked up at it from the apparent hell of Jupiter cabin. The second thing I admired was a short inscription—a mathematical equation for our cabin—that said LARRY = SATAN.

And there were plenty of names, too, and dates. The name nearest my pillow said ELI 1994. Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had been there for decades.

It was almost like sleeping in a graveyard.

So as I lay there that first night, trapped between the twitching kid with toilet-paper earplugs from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Cobie Petersen—and while I listened to Bucky Littlejohn’s pathetic sobbing—I imagined what 1994 Eli was doing right at that moment.

Probably Facebooking, I thought.

Larry extinguished the lantern. There was no electricity in the cabins, naturally.

Our audience disbanded and journeyed back to their respective planets.

The mattresses on our cots were covered with thick plastic. It made sense, I suppose, but whenever any of the boys moved or shifted, our beds made sounds like someone was crumpling a soda can. After about five minutes, Cobie Petersen said to no one in particular, “I can’t take this shit.”

Larry said, “Shut up and go to sleep.”

Larry had a non-plastic mattress. Apparently, Larry could be counted on to not pee his bed, or do the other things some of the campers at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys inevitably did.

Max rolled onto his side— crumple crumple! —and put his pillow over his head.

Then Cobie shot up in bed and yelled, “What the fuck! The crying kid’s pissing!”

And we all heard the dribble of Bucky Littlejohn’s urine as it trickled down between the cots and puddled on the floor below us.

Larry said, “Jesus Christ!”

The lantern came back on.

And Larry ordered Bucky Littlejohn, who was steaming and stained in his drooping, piss-soaked underwear, and the rest of us, the four insomniacs with dry underwear, to go to the lavatory—a dark and scary combination toilet, insect sanctuary, and shower facility for the campers—and fetch a mop and pail.

On the way there, Cobie said, “If you weren’t covered in piss, kid, I’d kick the shit out of you.”

I wondered if Cobie Petersen really meant that, because if he actually did kick the shit out of Bucky Littlejohn, it would really be a mess we’d have to clean up.

It was a very long night.

It was hot and stuffy insidethe walk-in refrigerator where I hid the day of the slaughter at the schoolhouse.

It may be difficult for you to believe, Max, but electricity only came to the village once or twice per week, so the refrigerator had never performed its duties as far as I could recall. Maybe it did function as something other than a clown’s hideout at some point in time. Maybe there were legends passed down from the elders of the village about an era when the refrigerator was cold, and also contained food.

Despite the fact that there was nothing edible inside the refrigerator, I could not bring myself to pee there when I needed to.

Nobody pees inside refrigerators, even ones with no food in them. I would be in trouble if anyone ever found out I’d peed inside our school’s refrigerator.

But, as desperate as my urge to pee was, I was too afraid to go outside.

I thought about things. I wondered who was safe in the village, and if my cousins, my uncle, and aunt had been looking for me—or if they assumed I’d gone off with the other boys to become a rebel with the FDJA.