Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

The morning passed with the lemon-eating contest, the pogo-jousts, honeydew bowling, the Nit-toss, the Aspirant kick-ball game, and finally, the event that closed the morning games, coming well after morning tea but before the afternoon barbecue, the Great Red Rover. Every class lined up on the field, every child wore a number to be called by, since the group was too large for everyone to be known by name. It was a narrow Spartan victory, though the Cropp sisters remained an unbroken chain almost till the end. Tiffany, Alex, and Meg, they were lined up all in a row, and there was a quality to their voices as they called out your number that was almost electric and certainly disheartening. Jemma ran deliberately far to the left of them when she was called, and did nothing to help earn her team’s victory. She bounced right off the chain and landed on her back. But a big Spartan boy, Martin’s brother Jonathan, broke the Roman chain in the end. From prison Jemma saw Tiffany turn and bite herself softly on the shoulder, an expression she saved for her most furious rages.

Jemma stuffed herself with fried chicken and polished her old shoes with her greasy fingers, shared candy with some congenial Romans, lay in the grass with Rachel Rauschenburg and watched Calvin and some other boys roll the spare watermelons down the hill, and wore, briefly, her mother’s crown. At one o’clock she joined the march into the woods to liberate her turtle. Halfway there she stumbled on the mangled body of number twenty-two. He was belly down in the grass, half his shell caved-in, broken in the lines of the tiles. Jemma shielded Mr. Peepers’ eyes and walked on, knowing already, long before she saw the blood on her shoes, that deadly-kedded Tiffany had killed him for losing.

Nit, Novice, Aspirant, Myrmidon; Footpad, Freshman, Sophomore, Junior; Senior, Bronze Senior, Silver Senior, Gold Senior: every summer-camp class had their primary event, the one they trained hardest for, and the one that if won would yield the most points. The Nits had their toss, the Novices their turtle race, the Aspirants their tetherball tourney, the Myrmidons their soccer match, and the Footpads, Calvin’s class, their big lacrosse game. Jemma sat in the aluminum bleachers between her parents and watched her brother running back and forth across the field. She knew him through the obscuring helmet because his name was on his jersey and his stick was painted neon green.

She did not entirely understand the game. The carrying and throwing of the ball, the excited running about, the positions of the goals and duties of the goal keeper; these made sense, but she could not figure why it wasn’t more acceptable to beat the opposition with your stick. She wanted to see a duel, sticks swinging and blocking, boys ducking and leaping, and if two of them happened to do it balanced on a floating log in the river, it would be all the better. But all the checking was unofficial. The game paused now and then when one or the other coach decried a perceived foul, and gathered the wronged boy to him to examine and comfort him, and exhort him to vengeance and greater violence.

Calvin was good. He had been practicing all summer, in camp and evening team practice and on his own, throwing the ball against the wall of the house while Jemma sat in the driveway and watched, catching the ball again no matter how hard he threw it, sometimes without even seeming really to look at it. Twice Jemma saw him do it with his eyes closed; the third time the ball struck him in the head and knocked him on his back, so their mother, watching from the porch, made him put on his helmet even for solo practice. He scooped up a lost ball just at the Spartan goal and darted away with it. Jemma’s wrists made sympathetic cradling motions as he ran down the field. He’d tried to teach her to cradle the ball, but she failed to master it, and every time she’d tried to run with the ball it dropped out of the net and rolled away. Once she had to chase it all the way down to the Nottingham’s house.

Calvin passed the ball to Rachel’s sister Elena, the only girl on the Spartan team. She took it most of the way toward the goal, passing it briefly to Jonathan Marty when she was threatened by big Dickie, one of the two hulking Niebuhr brothers on the Roman team. Both hands on his stick, he rotated the empty end toward her head, and Jemma’s heart leapt. She ducked and rolled, taking the ball back from Jonathan just as she came to her feet. Romans converged from all over the field, a few pursuing her but most coming in from her front and her flanks. Just before she reached the crowd she made a long pass to Calvin out on the left edge of the field, who only had to dodge a couple Romans, pokey ones who had not been able to keep up with Elena’s pursuit. He brought the ball across his shoulder and slammed it into the goal.

The cheering and booing were so loud that Jemma had to cover her ears even while she shouted herself, so her screaming voice was oddly magnified, and echoed in her head. Her parents jumped up and down, making the aluminum rattle and flex, her mother waving her plastic torch and her father his red-white-and-blue sword-cane. It took a few minutes for the crowd to settle. Every event of the day was followed with care, but some, like the lacrosse game and the big Senior swim, drew special attention, and caused especially heated arguments. Exciting games were particularly divisive, and this was one of the most exciting pee-wee lacrosse games ever played on the reservoir field. Roman and Spartan points alternated in a way that would have seemed polite if not for the increasingly egregious checking, enough to sate even Jemma’s innocent bloodthirstiness. The teams were tied just as the clock was about to run out, when Calvin scooped up another dropped ball and would certainly have scored a winning goal if the Niebuhrs hadn’t ganged up on him in a way that would lead people to suspect they’d been given a specific assignment from their coach to take him down. One knocked his stick just after the other checked his belly; either blow alone he could have withstood, but the combination caused him to lose the ball. It was picked up by Ronnie Niebuhr, who made a long pass to another Roman close to the Spartan goal. The Spartan goalie, distracted by the injustice unfolding before everyone’s eyes but the blind referee’s, failed to block the shot, and the Romans won the game by a single point.

“What does it mean to wear this hat and these pants and wield this cane, if I can’t get justice for my son?” Jemma’s father asked, first of the referee, who would not call a foul, and then of the sky. Jemma participated in the bitter chants and the foot stomping, and shook a bouquet of rockets threateningly at the other side of the field, and muttered along with everyone else as the crowd broke up and people made their way down to the river for the corn roast.

Jemma walked with her brother and Elena. The two players carried their sticks over their shoulders, their gloves and jerseys slung off the end of the sticks. Jemma carried both helmets, clapping them softly together as she walked.

“The Romans are going to pay,” Elena said.

“Yeah!” said Jemma.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Calvin.

“Not really,” said Jemma.

“It was a big cheat,” said Elena.

“The worst ever,” Jemma agreed.

“It was just a game,” Calvin said. “It doesn’t matter much when you compare it to… a big lion running around and eating people.”

“Or an elephant,” said Jemma. “Who shmooshes you.”

“It’s just not fair,” Elena said, and then added, “Damn it.” It sounded weird, not like when Calvin said it. Jemma could tell she was not an experienced curser.

“Have you ever thought,” Calvin asked, stopping and standing just as they were passing through one of the sand traps protecting the second hole, “if we forgot who was a Spartan and who was a Roman, then we could just sort of turn around and take over.”