Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

de Selby Frosh!

there are no Limits!

Harriet’s throat constricted. Suddenly she realized she’d made a terrible mistake.

“Now, Nathan Bedford Forrest was not from the wealthiest or most cultivated family in the world, but he was the greatest general of the war!” Edie was saying. “Yes, ma'am! ‘Fustest with the Mostest’! That was Forrest!”

“Edie,” said Harriet in a small fast voice, “I don’t want to stay here. Let’s go home.”

“Home?” Edie sounded amused—not even surprised. “Nonsense! You’re going to have the time of your life.”

“No, please . I hate it here.”

“Then why’d you want to come?”

Harriet had no answer for this. Rounding the old familiar corner, at the bottom of the hill, a gallery of forgotten horrors opened before her. The patchy grass, the dust-dulled pines, the particular yellowy-red color of the gravel which was like uncooked chicken livers—how could she have forgotten how much she loathed this place, how miserable she’d been every single minute? Up ahead, on the left, the pass gate; beyond, the head counselor’s cabin, sunk in threatening shade. Above the door was a homemade cloth banner with a dove on it that read, in fat, hippie letters: REJOICE!

“Edie please,” said Harriet, quickly, “I changed my mind. Let’s go.”

Edie, gripping the steering wheel, swung around and glared at her—light-colored eyes, predatory and cold, eyes that Chester called “sure-shot” because they seemed made to look down the barrel of a gun. Harriet’s eyes (“Little sure-shot,” Chester sometimes called her) were just as light, and chilling; but, for Edie, it was not pleasant to meet her own stare so fixedly and in miniature. She was unaware of any sorrow or anxiety in her grand-child’s rigid expression; which struck her only as insolence, and aggressive insolence at that.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, callously, and glanced back at the road—just in time to keep from running off into a ditch. “You’ll love it here. In a week you’ll be screaming and carrying on because you don’t want to come home.”

Harriet stared at her in amazement.

“Edie,” she said, “you wouldn’t like it here yourself. You wouldn’t stay with these people for a million dollars.”

“‘Oh, Edie!’” Meanly, in falsetto, Edie mimicked Harriet’s voice. “‘ Take me back! Take me back to camp! ’ That’s what you’ll be saying when it’s time to go.”

Harriet was so stung that she couldn’t speak. “I won’t,” she managed to say at last. “I won’t.”

“Yes you will!” sang Edie, chin high, in the smug, merry voice that Harriet detested; and “Yes you will!”—even louder, without looking at her.

Suddenly a clarinet honked, a shuddering note which was partly barnyard bray and partly country howdy: Dr. Vance, with clarinet, heralding their arrival. Dr. Vance was not a real doctor—a medical doctor—only a sort of a glorified Christian band director; he was a Yankee, with thick bushy eyebrows, and big teeth like a mule. He was a big wheel on the Baptist youth circuit, and it was Adelaide who had pointed out—correctly—that he was a dead ringer for the famous Tenniel drawing of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland .

“Welcome, ladies,” he crowed, leaning into Edie’s rolled-down window. “Praise the Lard!”

“Hear hear,” replied Edie, who did not care for the more evangelical tone which sometimes crept into Dr. Vance’s conversation. “Here’s our little camper. I guess we’ll get her checked in and then I’ll be going.”

Dr. Vance—tucking his chin down—leaned in the window to grin at Harriet. His face was a rough, stony red. Coldly, Harriet noted the hair in his nostrils, the stains between his large, square teeth.

Dr. Vance drew back theatrically, as if singed by Harriet’s expression. “Whew!” He raised an arm; he sniffed his armpit, then looked at Edie. “Thought maybe I forgot to put my deodorant on this morning.”

Harriet stared at her knees. Even if I have to be here , she told herself, I don’t have to pretend I like it . Dr. Vance wanted his campers to be loud, outgoing, boisterous, and those who didn’t rise naturally enough into the camp spirit he heckled and teased and tried to pry open by force. What’s wrong, can't-cha take a joke? Don't-cha know how to laugh at yourself?! If a kid was too quiet—for any reason—Dr. Vance would make sure they got doused with the water balloon, that they had to dance in front of everybody like a chicken or chase a greased pig in a mud pit or wear a funny hat.

“Harriet!” said Edie, after an awkward pause. No matter what Edie said otherwise, Dr. Vance made her uncomfortable too, and Harriet knew it.

Dr. Vance blew a sour note on the clarinet, and—when this too failed to get Harriet’s attention—put his head in at the window and stuck his tongue out at her.

I am among the enemy , Harriet told herself. She would have to hold fast, and remember why she was here. For as much as she hated Camp de Selby it was the safest place to be at the moment.

Dr. Vance whistled: a derisive note, insulting. Harriet, grudgingly, glanced at him (there was no use resisting; he would just keep hammering at her) and he dropped his eyebrows like a sad clown and stuck out his bottom lip. “A pity party isn’t much of a party,” he said. “Know why? Hmm? Because there’s only room for one .”

Harriet—face aflame—sneaked a glance past him, out the window. Gangly pines. A line of girls in swimsuits tiptoed past, gingerly, their legs and feet splashed with red mud. The power of the highland chiefs is broken , she told herself. I have fled my country and gone to the heather .

“… problems at home? ” she heard Dr. Vance inquire, rather sanctimoniously.

“Certainly not. She’s just—Harriet is a bit big for her britches,” said Edie, in a clear and carrying voice.

A sharp ugly memory rose in Harriet’s mind: Dr. Vance pushing her onstage in the Hula Hoop contest, the camp roaring with laughter at her dismay.

“Well—” Dr. Vance chuckled—”big britches is one condition we certainly know how to cure around here!”

“Do you hear that, Harriet? Harriet . I don’t,” said Edie, with a little sigh, “I don’t know what’s got into her.”

“Oh, one or two skit nights, and a hot potato race or two, and we’ll get her warmed up.”

The skit nights! Confused memories rose in a clamor: stolen underpants, water poured in her bunk ( look, Harriet wets the bed! ), a girl’s voice crying: You can’t sit here!

Look, here comes Miss Book Scholar!

“Well hay!” This was Dr. Vance’s wife, her voice high-pitched and countrified, swaying amiably toward them in her polyester shorts set. Mrs. Vance (or “Miss Patsy” as she liked the campers to call her) was in charge of the girls’ side of the camp, and she was as bad as Dr. Vance, but in a different way: touchy-feely, intrusive, asking too many personal questions (about boyfriends, bodily functions and the like). Though Miss Patsy was her official nickname, the girls called her “The Nurse.”

“Hay, Hun!” In through the car window she reached and pinched Harriet on the upper arm. “How you doing, girl!” Twist, twist. “Lookit you!”

“Well hello, Mrs. Vance,” said Edie, “how do you do?” Edie—perversely—liked people like Mrs. Vance because they gave her the space to be especially lofty and grand.

“Well come on, y'all! Let’s head up to the office!” Everything Mrs. Vance said, she said with unnatural pep, like the women in the Miss Mississippi pageant or on The Lawrence Welk Show . “ Gosh , you’re all grown up, girl!” she said to Harriet. “I know you’re not going to get in any more fist-fights this time, are you?”