Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“I'm eleven,” Joyce said.

“Yeah, well I'm twelve,” BJ said.

“Huh,” Joyce said. In the dark, one of them rolled over and then kicked hard at his sheets.

“What about you?” BJ asked.

“I'm twelve too,” I said.

“You are not,” BJ scoffed.

“I don't have time for this,” I said.

“He is not,” he said to Joyce.

“He says he is,” Joyce said back.

“Fuckin' liar,” BJ said, and rattled something in a box. I could hear him eating.

I was crying, which was the very last thing I wanted to be doing, and trying not to make any noise at all. I was pushing on my eyeballs with my fingertips and I was worried I was going to drive them through my skull. They hurt enough that I stopped. My father had said, “You don't want to go to camp? You don't want to do any thing. Times're tough all over. Go up there and force yourself to have a good time. We'll stay down here and deal with your brother.” When I tried to bring it up again later on, he told me, “Believe me, you got the better deal.”

“I got a boner like an iron bar,” BJ said. He made a noise on his bed like he was hauling it around.

This is only the first night , I kept thinking. And that only made me cry harder, until I stopped.

“What was that?” Joyce asked, and he and BJ stopped moving to listen. But then there was nothing else to hear.

At breakfast everybody seemed to know everybody but me. “I got you,” BJ called to a kid at another table. “I got you later on. You're mine.”

“You know him from back home?” I asked.

“I met him when you did,” BJ said. He sawed his fork into some waffles.

I looked at the kid. “When did I meet him?” I asked. Nobody answered.

The fat kid and I collided on the way out of the dining hall. He spilled something but I didn't see what. BJ high-fived me on the way down the front steps.

“It's not a crime to help somebody,” my mother told me once. She was talking about my little brother.

My little brother was going crazy. That was the big worry. I was wound pretty tight and had some issues, which was how my father put it, but my little brother worried everybody. I couldn't tell who was more scared about it, my mother or father. They started going over it one night after school got out for the summer, when they thought we were asleep, and after I listened for a while I sat up in bed and realized he was standing there in the hall in the dark.

“C'mon in here,” I told him. He came in and sat on the covers. He was only nine and it felt like he'd been crying since Easter. He had bed head and thick hair and it stuck up like a wing. Even in the dark he seemed sad.

“Waynik, Keough, what's his name, they're all the same,” my father said. He was rinsing something at the sink.

“They're trying everything they can think of,” my mother told him. “Waynik says to give it some time.”

“Waynik sees him one hour a week,” my father told her. “Friday afternoon to boot. He's got his clubs by the door. He's ready to hit the first tee.”

“You wanna try someone else, we'll try someone else,” my mother said.

“We tried someone else,” he said. “That's how we got here.”

My brother had been going along okay until he hit fourth grade. Then it was like everything was fine until it was too hard for him. He'd be shooting baskets and miss three in a row and just go off, tearing down branches and throwing the ball as hard as he could into the street. He broke a new tree my dad planted in half. He pulled his jaw down so hard with his hand he had to go to the emergency room. I caught him hitting himself one night because I heard the wet sound of the blood from his mouth. We were supposed to do our homework at the same time, and I'd hear him stop halfway through and tear it up and then move his arms so spastically that he'd knock over whatever else was on his desk.

That night after they went over things my mother and father were quiet, down in the kitchen. It was pretty bad to think about them down there just looking at each other.

“They think I'm mental,” my brother finally said.

“They're worried about you,” I told him.

“You think I'm mental?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“So why do I do mental things?” he wanted to know.

“I do mental things,” I reminded him.

“Not like me,” he said.

And I could have told him that I did. I could have told him how weird I was. I could've given him a hundred examples. Instead I just sat there with him.

“You're a good brother,” he told me before he went back to his room.

“I wish,” I told him.

“Are you guys still up?” my father called from downstairs.

Because I was up all night, I got to the sign-up board late and all the good things were taken. All that was left was Trail Policing and the Craft Hut.

“What's Trail Policing?” I asked the kid whose shoulder I was looking over. He didn't answer. He took the pencil hanging on the string and wrote his name under Craft Hut and left.

“What's Trail Policing?” I asked the fat kid. He was sitting in the dirt of the truck turnaround, trying to get something out of the bottom of his foot. The area behind the main dining hall was messed up from all the traffic.

“Picking up garbage,” he said.

I wrote my name under Craft Hut. “You know where the Craft Hut is?” I asked him.

“You any good at getting splinters out?” he asked back.

It turned out that the fat kid was there for the entire summer. BJ told us at lunch. It was the talk of the camp. We were there for two weeks, most of us, one kid for three. But this kid was there for the whole summer. His parents were in Europe or Paris or something and had dumped him there. He'd told his tentmates. He'd even had to get there a day early and sleep on the Camp Director's couch.

His parents were probably like, Oh, I'm sure he'll like it okay. Once he makes some friends …

It ended up that he was in the Craft Hut too. There was one other kid in there who wore an eye patch under his glasses. The kid who'd signed up in front of me wasn't even there. Maybe he was dead.

“You're in my light,” the kid with the eye patch said when I sat down.

“Aye-aye,” I told him, but I don't think he got it.

He was making an ashtray with clay. The fat kid spent the time scraping at the bottom of his foot with his fingernail. I made one of those lanyards for a keychain.

The other subject at lunch was how much fun everybody else had had. Swimming off the float, doing cannonballs, playing Killer Handbreaker Tetherball.

“I made a lanyard,” I told them. People talked about the signups for the Mile Swim. Joyce put his hands on the outside of his arms, like he was already cold. BJ said that he heard that the counselors did a Bunk Attack with the fat kid even though he'd been trying to get up in time. Joyce said he'd heard the same thing. It turned out that Bunk Attack was when they came into your tent and pitched you off the bed so that you fell between the edge of the platform and the canvas wall. “It's so gross in there, too,” someone said.

My brother's name was Georgie and one of the things he really hated was when I called him Puddin' n' Pie. We'd be riding in the backseat and out of nowhere I'd say it so only he could hear it and he'd go Stop it! and scare the shit out of my father and then get yelled at. I hated it as much as he did but I couldn't stop. Don't do it , I'd say to myself when it came to pushing him. And then I'd do it. It was like when I did stuff like that at least I had the satisfaction of seeing myself like I really was. He always got mad but he never told them what I was doing.