Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Janice’s country accent was laughable, her looks homely, her jumpy acrobatics embarrassing to behold. Arnetta and Octavia volleyed amused, arrogant smiles whenever Janice opened her mouth, but Janice never caught the hint, spoke whenever she wanted, fluttered around Arnetta and Octavia futilely offering her opinions to their departing backs. Whenever Arnetta and Octavia shooed her away, Janice loitered until the two would finally sigh, “What is it, Miss Caucasoid? What do you want?”

“Oh shut up, Janice,” Octavia said, letting a fingered loop of hair fall to her waist as though just the sound of Janice’s voice had ruined the fun of her hair twisting.

“All right,” Arnetta said, standing up. “We’re going to have a secret meeting and talk about what we’re going to do.”

The word “secret” had a built-in importance. Everyone gravely nodded her head. The modifier form of the word had more clout than the noun. A secret meant nothing; it was like gossip: just a bit of unpleasant knowledge about someone who happened to be someone other than yourself. A secret meeting , or a secret club , was entirely different.

That was when Arnetta turned to me, as though she knew doing so was both a compliment and a charity.

“Snot, you’re not going to be a bitch and tell Mrs. Margolin, are you?”

I had been called “Snot” ever since first grade, when I’d sneezed in class and two long ropes of mucus had splattered a nearby girl.

“Hey,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t hear them right — I mean—”

“Are you gonna tell on us or not?” was all Arnetta wanted to know, and by the time the question was asked, the rest of our Brownie troop looked at me as though they’d already decided their course of action, me being the only impediment. As though it were all a simple matter of patriotism.

Camp Crescendo used to double as a high school band and field hockey camp until an arching field hockey ball landed on the clasp of a girl’s metal barrette, knifing a skull nerve, paralyzing the right side of her body. The camp closed down for a few years, and the girl’s teammates built a memorial, filling the spot on which the girl fell with hockey balls, upon which they had painted — all in nail polish — get-well tidings, flowers, and hearts. The balls were still stacked there, like a shrine of ostrich eggs embedded in the ground.

On the second day of camp, Troop 909 was dancing around the mound of nail polish — decorated hockey balls, their limbs jangling awkwardly, their cries like the constant summer squeal of an amusement park. There was a stream that bordered the field hockey lawn, and the girls from my troop settled next to it, scarfing down the last of lunch: sandwiches made from salami and slices of tomato that had gotten waterlogged from the melting ice in the cooler. From the stream bank, Arnetta eyed the Troop 909 girls, scrutinizing their movements to glean inspiration for battle.

“Man,” Arnetta said, “we could bum-rush them right now if that damn lady would leave .”

The 909 troop leader was a white woman with the severe pageboy hairdo of an ancient Egyptian. She lay sprawled on a picnic blanket, Sphinxlike, eating a banana, sometimes holding it out in front of her like a microphone. Beside her sat a girl slowly flapping one hand like a bird with a broken wing. Occasionally, the leader would call out the names of girls who’d attempted leapfrogs and flips, or of girls who yelled too loudly or strayed far from the circle.

“I’m just glad Big Fat Mama’s not following us here,” Octavia said. “At least we don’t have to worry about her.” Mrs. Margolin, Octavia assured us, was having her Afternoon Devotional, shrouded in mosquito netting, in a clearing she’d found. Mrs. Hedy was cleaning mud from her espadrilles in the cabin.

“I handled them.” Arnetta sucked on her teeth and proudly grinned. “I told her we was going to gather leaves.”

“Gather leaves,” Octavia said, nodding respectfully. “That’s a good one. They’re so mad-crazy about this camping thing.” She looked from ground to sky, sky to ground. Her hair hung down her back in two braids like a squaw’s. “I mean, I really don’t know why it’s even called camping —all we ever do with Nature is find some twigs and say something like, ‘Wow, this fell from a tree.’” She then studied her sandwich. With two disdainful fingers, she picked out a slice of dripping tomato, the sections congealed with red slime. She pitched it into the stream embrowned with dead leaves and the murky effigies of other dead things, but in the opaque water a group of small silver-brown fish appeared. They surrounded the tomato and nibbled.

“Look!” Janice cried. “Fishes! Fishes!” As she scrambled to the edge of the stream to watch, a covey of insects threw up tantrums from the wheatgrass and nettle, a throng of tiny electric machines, all going at once. Octavia snuck up behind Janice as if to push her in. Daphne and I exchanged terrified looks. It seemed as though only we knew that Octavia was close enough — and bold enough — to actually push Janice into the stream. Janice turned around quickly, but Octavia was already staring serenely into the still water as though she were gathering some sort of courage from it. “What’s so funny?” Janice said, eyeing them all suspiciously.

Elise began humming the tune to “Karma Chameleon,” all the girls joining in, their hums light and facile. Janice began to hum, against everyone else, the high-octane opening chords of “Beat It.”

“I love me some Michael Jackson,” Janice said when she’d finished humming, smacking her lips as though Michael Jackson were a favorite meal. “I will marry Michael Jackson.”

Before anyone had a chance to impress upon Janice the impossibility of this, Arnetta suddenly rose, made a sun visor of her hand, and watched Troop 909 leave the field hockey lawn.

“Dammit!” she said. “We’ve got to get them alone .”

“They won’t ever be alone,” I said. All the rest of the girls looked at me. If I spoke even a word, I could count on someone calling me Snot, but everyone seemed to think that we could beat up these girls; no one entertained the thought that they might fight back . “The only time they’ll be unsupervised is in the bathroom.”

“Oh shut up, Snot,” Octavia said.

But Arnetta slowly nodded her head. “The bathroom,” she said. “The bathroom,” she said, again and again. “The bathroom! The bathroom!” She cheered so blissfully that I thought for a moment she was joking.

According to Octavia’s watch, it took us five minutes to hike to the restrooms, which were midway between our cabin and Troop 909’s. Inside, the mirrors above the sinks returned only the vaguest of reflections, as though someone had taken a scouring pad to their surfaces to obscure the shine. Pine needles, leaves, and dirty flattened wads of chewing gum covered the floor like a mosaic. Webs of hair matted the drain in the middle of the floor. Above the sinks and below the mirrors, stacks of folded white paper towels lay on a long metal counter. Shaggy white balls of paper towels sat on the sink tops in a line like corsages on display. A thread of floss snaked from a wad of tissues dotted with the faint red-pink of blood. One of those white girls, I thought, had just lost a tooth.

The restroom looked almost the same as it had the night before, but it somehow seemed stranger now. We had never noticed the wooden rafters before, coming together in great V’s. We were, it seemed, inside a whale, viewing the ribs of the roof of its mouth.

“Wow. It’s a mess,” Elise said.

“You can say that again.”

Arnetta leaned against the doorjamb of a restroom stall. “This is where they’ll be again,” she said. Just seeing the place, just having a plan, seemed to satisfy her. “We’ll go in and talk to them. You know, ‘How you doing? How long will you be here?’ that sort of thing. Then Octavia and I are gonna tell them what happens when they call any one of us a nigger.”