Every Single Secret(47)
“Go, lie down,” Cerny was saying. “We’ll talk when you feel better.”
I couldn’t hear all of Glenys’s reply, only the last few words. “. . . you’ve taken away from me . . .” But there was nothing more, and after a few minutes, I hurried back to my room. It was only after I’d slammed the door and changed into my pajamas that I remembered the bottle of Chardonnay. I’d left it in Cerny’s room.
By late September, I’d heard all about the fall camping trip. Along with the director of the boys’ ranch forty miles away, Mr. Cleve, the girls’ ranch director, organized it every year and used it as a carrot for good behavior. Every girl wanted to go—every girl did her chores, kept up her grades, and refused to sneak out of Sunday school in order to be allowed to go. We in the brown brick house were no exception.
Every house from the ranch except the baby house went. We all packed tents and sleeping bags the church had donated and drove up in white vans to a public campground in north Georgia. Amicalola Falls. A wildly beautiful place, Mr. Cleve announced at Vespers, with a set of creaky stairs that scaled the rocky face of the waterfall.
Even Omega admitted it was the prettiest place she’d ever seen.
The festivities would kick off at one of the park’s picnic pavilions. The director, Cleve, would lead prayer, then everybody from the boys’ and girls’ ranches would eat lunch. After that there would be a time of what Mrs. Bobbie called “fellowship,” which consisted of a bunch of super-lame (according to Omega) team-building games while the older boys and girls did the important work of scoping each other out and figuring out who was going to meet up later that night. The ranches would split up then. Mr. Al and Mr. Barry would take the girls hiking up the mountain one way, and the boys’ leaders would head in the opposite direction.
Separate campsites would keep us in “the pure zone,” Mrs. Bobbie said, although, from what Omega and the other Super Tramps told me, a couple of girls had once been intercepted on their way out of camp after curfew. Also, one boy had gotten lost on his way to meet up with a girl. Deep in the woods, he’d run smack into a black-bear cub and its mama and gotten so scared he’d started screaming at the top of his lungs. The next morning, before anyone woke up, that boy’s housefather marched him down the mountain and drove him all the way back to the ranch.
“Those ranch boys may sneak out, but it’s not because they’re getting any of this.” Omega leaned forward and shimmied, and her boobs practically fell out of her shirt.
“Hey!” Mrs. Bobbie snapped, banging her fork on the table. Mr. Al said nothing.
“Most of them guys are as gay as my Aunt Fannie. They don’t need to sneak out, long as they get a cute tentmate.” She had a sly expression on her face. Mrs. Bobbie looked like she was about to burst into righteous flames.
Two weeks before the camping trip, Chantal and I were in the tiny, mildewy laundry room off the garage, doing the weekly load for the house. Chantal held up a pair of rainbow-striped cotton panties and danced them in my face.
“Hi! I’m Omega and I shake my smelly ass in front of all the boys because I think they all want to have sexy-wexy with me!”
I kept shoveling clothes from the basket into the washer. She reached around me again, extracting another pair of underpants. These were plain white cotton—mine. She inspected them coolly, then grinned at me.
“Just what I thought. Skid marks.” She pinched her nose. “What’s the matter, Daffy Duck, you can’t hold in your poop at school?” She started a jig around the room, waving the threadbare cotton, and my face burned. “Hey, look at me,” she crowed. “I’m Daffy Duck, and I shit my pants. I’m just a fat fuck baby who poops her little-girl panties.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look close enough to see if she was telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. The thought of Chantal telling everyone at school was mortifying enough. I swiped at the underwear and tossed it in the washer with the rest of the clothes. Chantal dumped in an overflowing scoop of soap powder.
“Hey,” I said. “That’s way too much. You’re gonna get us in trouble.”
Her other arm lashed out so fast I didn’t see it coming, but the backhand sent me reeling into the set of wire shelves where Mrs. Bobbie kept her cleaning supplies. A wire protruding from one shelf dug into my skin, and a thin stream of blood spiraled down my arm and dripped onto my favorite olive-green capris.
“Whoops,” Chantal said, then widened her buggy multicolored eyes at me. She yanked open the dryer door, grabbed a dry shirt, and started dabbing it on my arm.
“Hey, stop!” I said and backed away. “That’s my shirt.” And it was, my favorite pink sleeveless baby-doll top that I’d found in the castoff closet. But the damage was already done. She threw the shirt into the washer with the rest of the clothes and banged the lid shut. I stood there, the scratch on my arm throbbing.
“Blood comes out, you doofus.” She twisted the dial and pulled it out, and I heard water gush into the machine. “Quit being such a baby.”
Back in our room, I tried not to cry. I only had three good shirts, and one of them was too short and showed my stomach if I had to reach up for something. Now my favorite top had a bloodstain on it. Great, just great. Not that any of the ranch girls had fabulous wardrobes to begin with, but I dreaded the necessary trip to the clothes closet in the main office. Those clothes smelled funny and looked like they’d come from a thrift shop in the 1970s. To keep myself from crying, I cursed Chantal in my head, using every evil word I could think of.