Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

What are you writing, Peter says, coming into the cabin. He throws himself onto my bunk. The sun is shining, he says. We should be outside.

Outside, we head into the woods to find a birch tree to ride. My mother’s cousins taught me birch riding. You take a tree and bend it slowly until it touches the ground. You tie it so you can climb on and then you cut the rope. The rope we took from the cabin, and the knife, Peter brought: a child-sized deer knife. In the woods, it doesn’t take long to find a tree for us. You first, he says. We wind the rope around the tree and then under the edge of a stone for leverage and the tree lowers. I sit down across the papery trunk, dry against my thighs.

Cut, I say. And the tree swings me up harder than I expect. I go up and then as I come down, the tree bobbles and I fall. I hit the ground hard. I put my left hand out to stop the fall and when I pull it up the forearm is crooked, like a tree branch, and they hear my scream across the camp.

On the phone later, my mother is circumspect. Honey, these things happen. You always were a troublemaker and this is what comes of it. But I hear the arm is well set.

It is, I say. The camp phone is located in the mudroom of the rehearsal building. I stretch out flat on my back, my new cast a solid weight on my side.

Terrible thing, about Ralph, she says.

Yep.

But you know, this is why we always insisted you kids be good swimmers.

What?

So you could swim to shore. So in case the boat you were on was going down, you could swim to shore.

*

The lake has a monster.

How do you know, I ask.

I can feel it. It watches me.

My arm cast glows in the moonlight here on the dock. Under the plaster, the doctor said the arm would lose its hair and skin, that for a little while after the cast’s removal, it might even be smaller. Peter sits beside me, wet from a night swim. The night air feels as thick as the cast. Even the crickets sound tired.

Why didn’t it take Ralph, I ask.

Nobody wanted Ralph, Peter says, after a long quiet.

11

As my voice may change soon, I have finally been given a solo, in an a cappella song.

Well, that’s one way of keeping you out of trouble, Zach says.

What do you mean by that? I ask Zach. We have gone out of sight of the camp, and we stand now, naked, in the lake, pressed against each other lightly, face to face. I hold my cast just above the water, resting it against his back.

He laughs and looks up. Extra rehearsal time. Less time for D&D. Plus more time spent with him. He co-opts you. A very smart tactical move.

We aren’t at war, I say.

Sure. If you can’t see that, I can. I can see that easy. He wants Peter.

The trees lean out over the lakeshore above us, a green scrim hung across heaven’s summer face. The birch trees are a pale fire running slow through the summer woods and there isn’t a thing wrong. Kissing Zach now spins me, makes me feel like I want to run myself all the way through him. I understand, why people like this.

I have to go back, I say then. I have to go ride bikes with Peter.

*

Where are we.

We took a bad turn there. We need to think about going back, I guess.

Above, thunder clouds. Peter and I are on bikes the camp lets us use, having ridden down dirt roads that line the forested countryside. Above the firs that toss the air around them I can see boiling clouds, dark like duck wings and glossy from carrying their rain. The air fills with dust, pollen, twigs, and torn leaves as the winds conduct playful raids. I can smell my sweat, which alarms me. I consider that my odor has caught up to me, now that we are stopped.

How many turns, Peter asks. How many did we take. Seven, right?

I run through my memory. I have a serial memory, I remember sequences, patterns, numbers. I am finding it applies equally to sentences and mathematics, spelling words or building numbers. Seven turns, I say. A left, two rights, two lefts, two more rights.

Peter climbs up on his bike, rising out of the seat. Because of my arm cast, I lag behind, sweating until wet spots slick my shirt; a dull ache radiates from under the cast. We are now shadowed completely by clouds. Peter seems about to lift up like the pieces of the road and field lifting around him. And then he comes down again. He says, We shouldn’t ride until the storm is over. You aren’t supposed to get your cast wet.

I think of all the sweat on it. Huh. But we aren’t supposed to stay under trees during storms. Lightning.

Peter hoists himself up again. To the field then, he says, and he bobs up and down through the grass that almost covers him. I push my bike, following his new trail, my nose itching already from the grass broken by his passing.

We sit down in the middle of a field under a roof we make from our bikes and windbreakers. I guess that we are at least a mile and a half from the camp. Heat lightning passes from cloud to cloud without visible impact. The trees roll their branches around and around as the wind passes through them like a running line to some giant, lost sail. Until now, it had been a clear if sticky day.

Are you psyched, Peter says. You have a solo.

Yeah, I say. Our two coats, tied together, burp up, a wind having snuck underneath. We hold the bikes. I want this wind to continue, for us to lift into the sky, holding on. To go far away, just me and Peter.

Did you ever tell anyone, Peter asks.

I didn’t. Guys like Eric can be dangerous, for one. And then my parents would have to know, which I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t.

Dangerous how.

Violent. I read about it in the paper.

I had actually gone to the library and looked up everything I could find on pedophilia and homosexuality. I knew that Eric was a pedophile. I remember sitting in the aisle with the book, sure the librarian would find me. There in the card catalog were two neatly printed, plain-faced titles: Greek Homosexuality, Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. And then one day I opened the paper to a news feature that told of how sometimes, a pedophile, fearing discovery, will turn to murder. Little girls and boys turned into silent, bloody bits.

The grass around us rises and falls, rippling like waves coming in off an ocean that won’t move, won’t spray, and the coats pop up and down.

I want him dead, Peter says. I want it to end.

And then I feel the beginning of rain, raindrops pulverized by winds near the ground. I imagine the drops coming behind them taking the pieces in, welcoming these pieces as they make themselves heavier to speed their passage to the earth.

Don’t tell anyone, Peter, I say. Please.

He watches me as I say this. His mouth a hard flat line, he says, Okay. For now.

The field flattens in the rain, but I know by tomorrow the grass might be even three inches taller. Things grow so fast, it is amazing we don’t all lie awake at night, listening to it all happen.

Eric’s demeanor is nearing normal again, now that Ralph has been properly buried at a service in Lewiston. He is now intent on resuming the camp’s routine. And so after dinner, after dark, it is another naked story hour in Cabin 1.

Eric В., in the bunk beneath me, asks, Do you ever want to be down there?

Sometimes, I say.

Me too. Sometimes. I mean I like those guys. But I don’t get it.

Mm. I slide off to the floor and pad softly to the door. I am tempted to go right in and sit down. Now that I have a solo. When Eric passed out the sheet music today, I looked over the notes and lines. The solo began each section of the four sections with a complete phrase alone, and then the choir joined him: the sopranos for the next first two stanzas and then the full choir. The choir echoed him and answered him. You had to hit your notes quickly and surely and get off them to the next ones or get tangled in the verses of the others. The song was from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set to music by Ralphe Vaughn Williams, and arranged by Big Eric to create a solo for me. The song frightens me. Still, I like the way it fits my voice like a sleeve of words.