“One day the Zimzee was getting real hungry. From far off, he heard some kids’ voices. It was these twins, Matt and Mirabel…”
None of us slept that night. Clearly I remember the sound of the crickets shifting each time a cloud passed over the moon (darkening the roof of our tent), as if their laments were tied to the sky. I peed inside our empty water bottle because I was afraid of outside, of the dark. After that first story, trying to scare each other with the Zimzee became our tradition, and when we got older, we didn’t really tell stories anymore, but we’d say things like, “I hope that bastard gets eaten by the Zimzee,” or, “That old man has some kind of Zimzee skin disease.”
On the first day of building New Veronia, Toshi arrived late. When he finally did show up, he turned pale as he told us that his dad wouldn’t let him get out of camp, that he had to leave in two short days.
“You can’t go,” Jay said. “We need you for the building and everything.”
“He must have a new girlfriend,” Toshi said. “Dad always wants me to get out of the house when he has a new girlfriend. He likes them more than me, even if they’re ugly.”
“No. Shit.” Jay paced among the trees. “We can’t with just two. It will be way harder. What if a bear invades?” He kicked savagely at a bush.
Already, the idea of New Veronia had become our collective fixation. We had to build the little city; our summer depended on it. My blood pounded with worry that maybe the course of our whole lives would be ruined if our plan failed now.
Jay said, “I know: this is band camp. The only thing you do all day is play songs; that’s the only reason you go. So I’ll just break your arm.”
“Ouch,” Toshi said.
“I’m sure it would work: broken arm, no band camp.”
I marveled at Jay: he always took things further than I could even imagine.
“You said yourself that you don’t want to go,” Jay reminded Toshi.
“It’s always too hot there,” Toshi said. “But it’s hot here, too. Maybe camp won’t be so bad…”
“This could work.” Jay started stalking around the confines of New Veronia, grabbing a plank of wood, a hammer, a rock. “We’ll set up a sort of station,” he called over his shoulder. “You lay your hand across here, see? With a gap right under where we put your wrist, and then I just sort of—” He lifted the hammer up over his head and arced it down.
“Um,” Toshi said, swallowing hard; he rubbed his wrist absently.
“Come on, Knees,” Jay said. “This will get you out of camp for absofuckinglutely.”
Toshi’s knees were shaking. This wasn’t the reason Jay called him Knees—it was some stupid thing because he was Asian, like Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese…—but this new twist on the nickname helped release the tension in my jaw. I laughed.
“But Jay,” I said, “with a broken wrist, he doesn’t do us any good, either. We need him to build stuff. He needs his wrists.”
“Shit!” Jay pounded the flat of his palm against his forehead, mocking me. “He needs his wrists. To build.” Birds in the trees above us squawked at each other and rustled their wings, sending a couple of leaves drifting down to the ground. “Think about it. One of his wrists is at least better than none of them.”
“What if… what if we just pretend that he broke his wrist?” I said. “I have my old cast from a couple years ago. They sawed it off me and it just kind of fell away in two pieces, but I still have it. There’s this sock thing that you can put over it, to hold it together and to hide all the signatures that say ‘Bennet.’”
Toshi looked up from where he’d been staring at his toes. “Yes—sure—that’s a good plan. My dad is afraid of doctors. We just tell him that I broke my wrist over at Jay’s house, and his parents felt bad and they drove me to the hospital and took care of the bill. Dad is always going on and on about how I’ve got to be careful, he wouldn’t take me to the hospital unless I were dying, blah blah blah. A couple of weeks ago, he drove a nail straight through his palm, but he just pulled it out and stuck a couple of band-aids on. His pinky doesn’t bend down all the way anymore. Doctors are the worst, you know? A broken wrist would probably cost about a thousand dollars.”
Jay pulled his fists away from his eyes, where they’d been pressing into the sockets. “You think it’ll work?” he said. “Really?”
Toshi said that you couldn’t be sure of anything, but I told Jay that yes, it would work.
Our New Veronia future again solidified: straight away we started to clear the earth in the big triangle that would hold our triplex. I’d drawn up plans the night before, and a pyramid-shaped house would serve us perfectly: each door could open into a different facing direction, and we would need to build the minimum number of walls.
We would use one huge, old tree as the center post for the house, and we would build the walls out around it.
“Do you really think this will hold up?” Toshi asked. “It’s not like you’re an architect. They have to go to school for forever, the way you do for any good job, and so I’ll probably be a landscaper, just like Dad.”
“Looks good to me,” Jay said, and so Toshi had to stop complaining.
We broke for lunch when the sun hung straight overhead. Jay peeled one of the bananas that Toshi had brought and held it in front of his shorts. “The guys told me about a new way of whacking off.”
Whenever Jay talked about “the guys,” he meant his high school soccer teammates. “You take a Styrofoam cup. You got it? And you fill it up with shaving cream and you put a lid on it. Then, on the bottom end, you cut a hole—it’s got to be a perfectly round hole just about the size of your dick—and that’s what you use. It’s, like, pretty close to a cunt. When guys say she creamed her pants? It’s like that.”
“That would make a huge mess,” Toshi said.
“Yo’ mama creamed her pants.” Jay shook his head. “Why am I even friends with you two bammers? Can’t say a single yo’ mama joke.”
I said, “That’s the sacrifice you got to make.”
“Bennet.” Jay threw his banana peel at me. “If you whack it to Stella, I will break off your dick.”
I scoffed, like he hadn’t caught me out. Jay always joshed me for being into his sister, and I always joshed him for thinking I was.
“She is such a cum dumpster,” Jay said. “Been out with some guy all this week. My dad’s going to have to marry her off fast as he can.”
Jay always said shit like this, and even if it was true, it didn’t make me like Stella any less: I’d heard that you didn’t want two virgins having sex together, that it might not even work. Look at Adam and Eve: God commanded them to be fruitful and multiply, but Eve couldn’t conceive until after the Fall. But Stella—she would know exactly what to do with my cock.
When we finished at the construction site for the day, Toshi and I left Jay and biked towards home. Without saying anything, we stopped at the Wawa along the way and each got a Styrofoam cup and a lid. You didn’t have to pay if it wasn’t full of soda. Then we biked to my place and snuck through the back door, into my room, where I unearthed my cast from the box of junk under my bed and fitted the two halves of it against Toshi’s wrist. The plaster wasn’t scattered with as many well-wishes as I had remembered, but there were notes from Toshi—be more careful so this doesn’t happen again—and Jay—guess your left hand will get in on the action now. I fitted it to Toshi’s wrist and wrapped it up with white athletic tape because the sock that had gone over the cast was lost, probably for the best, since it had smelled of old Swiss cheese. “How does that feel?” I asked.