The first game was not the turtle race — that was second — but the candy-grab, in which Roman and Spartan Nits and Novices raced in relay a hundred yards to hurl themselves at a ten-foot-high pile of sawdust full of secret candy, burrowing for thirty seconds, timed from the arrival of the first runner, and bringing back as much as they could grab to the team pile, which would be weighed and tested against the other team’s pile at the end of the race. The whole enterprise yielded few points to the winning team, but as the opening event it was enthusiastically attended and the spectators routinely screamed themselves hoarse.
Jemma started the relay, running against Tiffany Cropp, the youngest daughter of an intensely competitive Roman family whose sisters were famous for their beauty, speed in the water, and the violence with which they wielded their field-hockey sticks. Tiffany, at age seven, was fiercer even than her sisters, though still ugly, like they’d been when they were her age. She had been known to find girls she lost to in the Olympiad and beat them till they cried. This made Jemma nervous.
“I’m going to win,” she said, as they were waiting for the gun to sound. “I’ve got new shoes.” Jemma looked down at them, keds so white and spotless they almost hurt her eyes. Her own shoes, red-white-and-blue and dusted with stars, were holdovers bought special for the previous year, and though too big then, now they pinched.
“My mom has a big silver crown,” Jemma said, not comforted or inspired by the statement, but it was all she could think to say.
“Your mom is smelly,” Tiffany said quietly, crouching down and touching her fingers to the grass like a professional runner. “Ass-smelly,” she added. Then the gun sounded, and they were off, Jemma flying along on the encouraging screams of her brother and parents, which she thought she could make out quite distinctly among the larger encompassing screams of the crowd. She beat Tiffany to the pile; the counselor called the start of the thirty seconds as soon as her fingers touched it, and Jemma felt like she had been gathering candy forever when she heard Tiffany’s little body collide against the sawdust with a solid thud. The layers of dust had been sitting all night; they were warm on the surface but cool inside. Jemma very much enjoyed the feel of it against her hands, and the lovely clean smell, so much that she had to concentrate very hard to keep from being distracted from her task. This early in the race the candy was easy to find; she grabbed the hardly buried chocolate flags and lollipops and gumballs and sour bombs and piled them in her pockets and, when those were full, held out her shirt to make a basket. She should have known better than to look over at Tiffany, who was already shrieking in triumph, but she did. Her pockets were overflowing and she had a gigantic candy bosom, and even as Jemma watched she withdrew a foot-long tootsie roll from the sawdust, too long for her pocket or for her shirt. In less than five seconds she tied it in her hair. Then the bell sounded and she ran off, letting her hand push a little sawdust in the air as she turned away from the pile. It flew toward Jemma’s face but it missed her.
Jemma beat her back to the line of children waiting to run, and slapped Martin Marty’s hand two or three seconds before Tiffany reached her team mate, but Tiffany had gathered a whole four ounces more candy, the full weight of the tootsie pop that she shook dramatically from her head, the last thing to fall on her pile. “I told you,” she said to Jemma, without a hint of charity, and indeed the Spartans went on to win the candy grab. Jemma and her team mates watched bitterly as the candy was distributed among the victorious team, with not a single sour jelly for the losers, even from what they’d gathered themselves.
Jemma did better in the turtle race, thanks to Mr. Peepers, in whom her faith had not been misplaced. He’d even been hard to catch; that’s how she knew he would be a winner. In late June turtles started disappearing from the woods around the reservoir. Jemma had only started looking the previous week, and was lucky to find somebody so fine so late, when all that were left were the aged and crippled and the permanently numbered turtles of years past. Mr. Peepers won his heat and placed third in the whole competition, beating Tiffany’s turtle, #22, in the first race. Tiffany paced her turtle during his whole run, straddling his lane and shouting at him incessantly until he began to wander in circles, and then simply lay down and withdrew into his shell.
The morning passed with the lemon-eating contest, the pogo-jousts, honeydew bowling, the Nit-toss, the Aspirant kick-ball game, and finally, the event that closed the morning games, coming well after morning tea but before the afternoon barbecue, the Great Red Rover. Every class lined up on the field, every child wore a number to be called by, since the group was too large for everyone to be known by name. It was a narrow Spartan victory, though the Cropp sisters remained an unbroken chain almost till the end. Tiffany, Alex, and Meg, they were lined up all in a row, and there was a quality to their voices as they called out your number that was almost electric and certainly disheartening. Jemma ran deliberately far to the left of them when she was called, and did nothing to help earn her team’s victory. She bounced right off the chain and landed on her back. But a big Spartan boy, Martin’s brother Jonathan, broke the Roman chain in the end. From prison Jemma saw Tiffany turn and bite herself softly on the shoulder, an expression she saved for her most furious rages.
Jemma stuffed herself with fried chicken and polished her old shoes with her greasy fingers, shared candy with some congenial Romans, lay in the grass with Rachel Rauschenburg and watched Calvin and some other boys roll the spare watermelons down the hill, and wore, briefly, her mother’s crown. At one o’clock she joined the march into the woods to liberate her turtle. Halfway there she stumbled on the mangled body of number twenty-two. He was belly down in the grass, half his shell caved-in, broken in the lines of the tiles. Jemma shielded Mr. Peepers’ eyes and walked on, knowing already, long before she saw the blood on her shoes, that deadly-kedded Tiffany had killed him for losing.
Nit, Novice, Aspirant, Myrmidon; Footpad, Freshman, Sophomore, Junior; Senior, Bronze Senior, Silver Senior, Gold Senior: every summer-camp class had their primary event, the one they trained hardest for, and the one that if won would yield the most points. The Nits had their toss, the Novices their turtle race, the Aspirants their tetherball tourney, the Myrmidons their soccer match, and the Footpads, Calvin’s class, their big lacrosse game. Jemma sat in the aluminum bleachers between her parents and watched her brother running back and forth across the field. She knew him through the obscuring helmet because his name was on his jersey and his stick was painted neon green.
She did not entirely understand the game. The carrying and throwing of the ball, the excited running about, the positions of the goals and duties of the goal keeper; these made sense, but she could not figure why it wasn’t more acceptable to beat the opposition with your stick. She wanted to see a duel, sticks swinging and blocking, boys ducking and leaping, and if two of them happened to do it balanced on a floating log in the river, it would be all the better. But all the checking was unofficial. The game paused now and then when one or the other coach decried a perceived foul, and gathered the wronged boy to him to examine and comfort him, and exhort him to vengeance and greater violence.
Calvin was good. He had been practicing all summer, in camp and evening team practice and on his own, throwing the ball against the wall of the house while Jemma sat in the driveway and watched, catching the ball again no matter how hard he threw it, sometimes without even seeming really to look at it. Twice Jemma saw him do it with his eyes closed; the third time the ball struck him in the head and knocked him on his back, so their mother, watching from the porch, made him put on his helmet even for solo practice. He scooped up a lost ball just at the Spartan goal and darted away with it. Jemma’s wrists made sympathetic cradling motions as he ran down the field. He’d tried to teach her to cradle the ball, but she failed to master it, and every time she’d tried to run with the ball it dropped out of the net and rolled away. Once she had to chase it all the way down to the Nottingham’s house.