Andrew Smith - The Alex Crow

Mrs Nussbaum smiled broadly. “But of course I remember you now, Max!”

And then Cobie Petersen asked Mrs Nussbaum, “How does it feel having the only vagina here in this entire camp?”

Mrs Nussbaum reddened.

She stuttered, “I . . . I . . .”

When she regained her composure, Mrs Nussbaum reminded the boys of Jupiter that this session was not about her, but if we felt like we wanted to talk about vaginas, she thought that it could be a healthy thing for boys our age.

I glanced over at Larry when Mrs Nussbaum mentioned a possible vagina-talk. He looked sick.

Then Mrs Nussbaum patted Robin Sexton on the knee and said, “Robin? I have a cousin named Robin. His parents named him after the little boy in Winnie the Pooh . How about you? Perhaps you’d like to begin by telling us how you feel about being here, or maybe you could say something about home, since the other boys seem to want to shut this experience out. You know, build walls around themselves.”

When she said build walls , Mrs Nussbaum pressed her flattened palms in the air in front of her face, as though she were acting out a street mime’s performance of “Man Trapped in an Invisible Box.”

And Robin said, “Huh?”

“He keeps shit in his ears, ma’am,” Cobie Petersen pointed out.

“Oh,” Mrs Nussbaum said.

Then Mrs Nussbaum asked us if we felt guilty or sad about what happened to Bucky Littlejohn that day on the archery field.

We all shook our heads, and Cobie said, “He pissed in his bed last night, and Larry made us all clean it up. He was bound to get shot sooner or later.”

Mrs Nussbaum looked approvingly at Larry and told us, “You boys are off to a great start, I can tell! That’s a very nice way to build a team.”

I suppose team-building in America depends on getting someone else’s pee on your hands.

That day, Mrs Nussbaum passed out blank index cards and gave us pencils. The pencils were the small kind you’d get inside box games, like Yahtzee. The Burgesses played Yahtzee every Saturday night. Max hated the game. He told me it was the only game he knew of where it was impossible to cheat, plus you had to do math. Both of these features made the whole thing not fun to Max.

The pencils Mrs Nussbaum gave us had no erasers, which implied to me a prohibition on making mistakes. I noticed how Cobie Petersen rubbed the pad of his thumb on his pencil’s point. I was reasonably certain he was estimating things like sharpness and stabbing potential.

My pencil had teeth marks in it.

And Mrs Nussbaum instructed: “I want each of you to write on your cards. I want you to write about where you would most rather be , if you couldn’t be here right now at Camp Merrie-Seymour with your friends.”

We all looked around at our cabin mates.

Friends?

“Come on, boys! You can do it!” Mrs Nussbaum prodded, raising the pitch of her voice about one-half octave above “drunkenly enthusiastic,” and just below the sound baby dolphins make.

“Do we put our names on them?” Max asked.

“Oh, heavens no! These are only for you. They are personal .”

“Do we have to write in complete sentences?” Max said.

Mrs Nussbaum frowned and shook her head.

When we finished (and I had no idea what any of the other boys wrote), Mrs Nussbaum told us to fold our cards in half and tuck them under our pillows. Of course, when we did that, it sounded like a beer-can-crushing party. She told us we could revise our answers anytime we wanted to over the next six weeks, and that maybe we would all be able to see changes in ourselves by the time we had to go back home.

I didn’t get what Mrs Nussbaum meant by revising our answers. No matter what I did for the next six weeks, if I unfolded my index card and looked at it again, it was still going to say the same thing. Who didn’t know that?

And Bucky Littlejohn saw plenty of change in himself in his less-than-twenty-four hours at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. He saw a hole through his left foot, and at that moment was undergoing surgery somewhere.

This is what I wrote on my index card:

INSIDE A REFRIGERATOR

It was not a very productive first group-therapy session, I think.

After Mrs Nussbaum left, we all stood and attempted to make our way out of the cabin, but Larry stopped us. While Mrs Nussbaum was relatively controllable as far as the manipulative and uncooperative puppies of Jupiter were concerned, Larry was another challenge altogether.

I’m pretty sure all of us were afraid of him.

“You’re not going anywhere, fuckheads.” He said, “Now sit down.”

So each of us sat at the foot of his bed, and faced across the cabin at Larry.

“Let’s get something straight right now,” he said, “I’m in charge of you guys for the next six weeks. You haven’t even been here one day, and already one of you dickwads almost died. If I lose my job because of shit like this, they’ll send me home and my dad will kick me out of the house, or make me get a real job and pay rent and shit.”

Cobie Petersen raised his hand, like a kid in a classroom.

Larry was clearly irritated. “What?”

Cobie said, “How old are you, Larry?”

Larry glared at Cobie. I realized then that Cobie Petersen was very good at testing people’s resilience.

“Twenty-two. Why?”

Cobie shrugged. “Just wondering. Maybe you should get a real job.”

Larry clenched his teeth and inhaled deeply.

“Six weeks. Is that too much to ask? Come on, guys; give me a break. Then you can all go back home to your internet porn and video games while I get a new batch of losers who will never touch real girls in their lives.”

Cobie raised his hand again. “You must get lonely here, Larry.”

“Don’t fuck with me, kid.”

Then Larry pointed at Max and said, “You. Arsonist. No more shit about burning down the cabin. Okay?”

Max nodded. “I was only joking. Besides, if Jupiter does burn down, they’ll probably stick us in Uranus.”

Everyone except Larry laughed. Even Robin Sexton, who obviously had a selective filter for the things he’d allow to pass beyond his toilet-paper gates.

Larry’s finger aimed at Robin. “And you. Jerkoff. There’s no wanking allowed in this cabin. You think I didn’t hear you last night?”

Robin twitched his fingers and said, “Huh?”

Then Larry pointed at me, “And you. Marcel Marceau.”

Well, at least I wasn’t first. But I did look down at my bare knees to confirm I was wearing short pants, and not the Pierrot costume, which may have saved my life in another time.

I waited, but Larry didn’t have any warning for me. All he said was this: “You just keep shutting up and we’ll be totally okay with each other, dude, as long as you don’t kill yourself.”

Then Larry stood up and looked at his wristwatch.

“Now get outside and look at that big yellow thing in the sky. It’s called the sun . You have thirty minutes till lunch.”

And that was our first cabin meeting.

One of the inventions my American father came up with—this was years before I arrived in America—was a device that helped him sleep better at night.

The problem with Jake Burgess’s sleep patterns had nothing to do with him. My mother, Natalie, snores terribly. I sleep downstairs from them, and even with my door closed I can hear her nightly snores. I can imagine a similar sound being produced by a giant tree stump being dragged by a tractor down a rough asphalt roadway.

When Max was only two years old, Jake Burgess went to work on what he called a snore wall . The device was rather small—about the size of a deck of playing cards—so it could stay on the mattress between Jake and Natalie. When activated, the snore wall emitted a pulse of electric-charged microwaves that rigidly locked the molecules in the air above it in a perfect line, so they could not be agitated by sound waves.