Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“That wouldn’t make it any more fair,” Elena said, and Jemma wondered aloud if the turtles were having a reunion party.

“Maybe it would,” Calvin said. He started walking again, using the end of his stick to push himself up when he made the big step out of the trap and onto the green. “We could have rushed the stands, both teams. Then we could have taken over.”

“My daddy said he’s going to sue the referee.”

“Sue him good,” Jemma said. “Sue off his pants.” Calvin was quiet then, and the two girls were quiet too as they walked the final blocks down to the river beach. Calvin was smiling every time Jemma looked over at him, thinking secret thoughts. Jemma closed her eyes and tried to think what he was thinking. It took a little while, but then, just as they got down to the water, she thought she saw it, an army of nine-year-olds riding lions out of the field and into the stands, biting off the heads of every adult and then tossing them back and forth with their lacrosse sticks. Jemma came behind them on an elephant named Justice. She held on with one hand to a thick red ribbon around his neck while he reared and stomped, encouraging him with cruel words in a language she didn’t even understand until a green lady in a ruined toga came crawling toward them. Justice lifted both his front legs high and let out a blast that broke windows all over the Forest. Jemma held him there, suspended over her mother.

The corn roast was supposed to be an occasion of fellowship and good feeling, when all the day’s competition was profitably reflected on, and victories savored but not gloated over. But that year a pall of resentment hung heavy over the feast. Jemma did not notice it at first. It was the usual corn roast, filled with the usual enjoyments. It had always been her favorite part of the holiday, when the hot afternoon faded into the warm evening and night, and the hoarded rockets of the day were spent in fits that anticipated in a very small way the fireworks to come.

Jemma and Rachel Rauschenburg hung their heads and arms over the pier, watching the half-matured sea nettles drifting up against the net that kept them out of the swimming area, and then sat with their legs dangling over the water, both of them trying to mix the fire from their sparklers — the Roman candles were prettier and more fun but they were in too partisan a mood to use them. They ran, up and down the dock, back and forth across the beach, around the picnic tables, stopping now and then to gnaw on a piece of corn, or suck the meat from a crab claw, or swill a soda so fast they got headaches from the cold of it. When they were good and sweaty they’d wade into the river and splash each other until they were refreshed.

Wandering, Jemma caught bits of conversation. At her parents’ big table, which should have held the best and happiest people of either team, only the Spartan elite were feasting. Jemma watched her father lifting crabs into one of the big steam pots, his fancy pants falling down on his hips and his beard slung backward around his neck. “It’s a fucking travesty,” he was saying. Her mother, fixing sparklers to her crown with the help of three attendants, agreed. Jemma lipped under the table with Rachel to trade between them a single piece of hot corn that each would butter again after every bite.

“Can you be any more blind and not have empty sockets in your head?”

“Not blind, oh no. Corrupt. Corrupt as Nero, and just as Roman.”

“You have to wonder how they live with themselves.”

“It’s a wonder they don’t feel like fakes. I’d feel like a fake.”

“You are a fake. Nothing real about you, honey.”

“Fuck off, Bob.”

“How can they eat? Doesn’t it make them sick? It makes me sick. I don’t think I can eat any more.”

“Darling, the lobster is coming. Don’t tell me…”

“Well maybe I could eat a little. But I won’t enjoy it.”

“Ruined. The whole day is ruined. I agree completely. Corruption has spoiled this day. Corruption is spoiling our country.”

“Something should be done about it.”

“Oh, something will be done about it. It’s not so long till November.”

“I meant tonight.

“I’m formulating a suit, but not tonight.”

“I for one will have to be a lot drunker before I do anything about it.”

“That can be arranged,” Jemma’s father said, handing a beer to Mr. Nottingham just as she and Rachel came up from the table. “Hey, sneaky girls,” he said. “Want some corn?”

“We had some,” Jemma said, and they ran off to hide under other tables and eat other people’s corn and shrimp. Underneath a Roman table they ate a whole lobster together, Jemma doing much of the dismembering because Rachel was squeamish, but Rachel devouring most of the rubbery tail meat. They went searching for Calvin because they wanted to pinch him with one of the big red claws. He was on the pier with a mixed group of boys, in the process of seeing how many magic snakes they could ignite at the same time. They had eighty of them set up in a circle of two layers. Jemma forgot to pinch him, too excited to remember when she heard about the plan. Four boys lit snakes at compass points on the circle, while Calvin leaned over and lit a few in the center. In a moment they were smoking and uncoiling, each individually at first but then they seemed to grow together, until it was one giant snake, a beast that was a deeper piece of darkness sucking up the torchlight and the flare of stray rockets. As it approached and exceeded child height they began to flee from it, all but Calvin, who was calling to it, pretending it was some demon he was summoning out of a deep black hell. “Come!” he was shouting at it. “Come and take them, my precious! Come and take them all!” Mr. Cropp came up with a fire extinguisher, blasting ash into the air to blow in a mass down the pier and into the Spartan table.

The big fight almost began then. Mr. Cropp and a Spartan dad exchanged a few drunken shoves until their wives — both of whom outmassed their husbands — pulled them apart. Rachel had wandered away, and suddenly the whole party seemed to go still for Jemma, even though everyone was still talking and laughing and running. All she could see was her brother, and all she could hear was her brother. He winked at her, and said, “Do you want to see something?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Sometimes I can make anyone do anything I want.”

“I know,” she said, because when she closed her eyes she saw him knocking the rocket aside, and she really believed he could do anything.

“Everyone else wants me to go, too. Even though they don’t know what it is. They’ve been waiting and waiting, and wanting it and wanting it.”

“I know,” she said, and he laughed.

“No you don’t.” Then he turned and hurled a piece of corn at their mother, and ran off into the darkness beyond the reach of the torches. Their mother had just lit the sparklers in her crown and raised up the arms she’d kept so carefully green with repeated applications of makeup throughout the day, to call down the big fireworks. It knocked her upside the head just as she cried out, “Let there be liberty!” and the first rocket shot up, a red-white-and-blue peony.

After that the hot corn began to fly in earnest, along with raw and cooked crabs that spun like frisbees as they sailed through the air. Jemma got nicked with a passing claw as she stood on the beach, not sure if she should watch the fight or the fireworks. Those who were drunk enough thwacked or stabbed at their neighbors with corn, or struck them with lobsters as if with a purse, or punched, or kicked, like Jemma’s father, mindful, even almost too drunk to walk, of his surgeons hands. Of the children only the teenagers participated, fighting with each other but not entirely seriously, and Tiffany Cropp, who in a confused ecstasy of rage, and in the dark between explosions, bit her own father on the calf.