Newton gave Tim the compass coordinates. Tim said: “You’re a bit off-track, but it’ll be fine. Follow the path from here on out, okay?”
The sun hung low in the western sky. Its reflective rays turned the poplars and oaks into pillars of flame. The boys had rounded down from the cliffs around the northern hub of the island. Newton used his compass to keep them on track.
“None of this would’ve happened if Tim had come,” Kent sulked. “It’s his job, isn’t it?”
“Oh, bullshit.” Ephraim vented a harsh, barking laugh. “You wanted to play King Shit, Kent. Well, you played it. Now wear your crown of turds.”
The muscles humped up Kent’s shoulders—a defensive, kicked-dog posture. They walked in silence until Shelley said: “Kent’s right, the Scoutmaster should’ve come.”
Kent gave Shelley a look of pathetic gratitude. Next he was storming to the head of the line, which Ephraim was heading, elbowing the smaller boy aside to assume the lead. Shelley smiled fleetingly, nothing but a slight upturn of his lips—not that anybody noticed. Shelley had this way of hiding in a permanent pocket of shadow, that spot at the edge of your vision where your eyes never quite focused.
The boys came upon a large rock pile covered with spongy moss and decided to play King of the Mountain. It was a game they played often, but today it achieved a particular intensity—less a game and more of a fight. They played hard to dispel the jitteriness that had invaded their bones, a feeling whose root could be found back at the cabin. If they shoved and sweated and wrestled, it might just break the fear amassing inside of them, same way a good thunderstorm could break the intolerable heat of a summer afternoon.
Kent took command of the hill and repulsed their halfhearted attempts with hard shoves. He shoulder-blocked Max’s anemic challenge and flexed his biceps, his budding linebacker’s body set in a defensive stance. Dying sunlight petaled through the tree branches, glinting off his dental braces.
“Bring it on, Eef! I double-dog dare you!”
Ephraim stood at the base of the hill, arms crossed over his chest, hands cupping his elbows. A thin boy—so skinny he could slip down the drain hole, as his mom said—but his limbs were roped with powerful fast-twitch muscles, elbows and kneecaps hard as carbon. He thought about the mantra of his counselor, Dr. Harley: Don’t be a slave to your anger, Ephraim.
It was so hard. It bubbled inside him like that stupid geyser at Yellowstone Park, Old Faithful—except the geyser was, like, faithfuclass="underline" at least you could time it. Ephraim’s anger rose out of nowhere, this giddy charge zitzing through his bones and electrifying the marrow. His rage was a dark cloud passing over the sun where just moments before the sky had been clear blue.
“You chicken?” Kent flapped his arms. “Chicken-chicken brock-brock!”
Lips skinning from his teeth, a feral growl rising in his throat, Ephraim sprinted up the pile to tangle with Kent. He saw it in Kent’s eyes: this desperate, crawling fear. Fear of losing partially, but also fear of how far Ephraim might take it. And Ephraim saw how easily it could happen. His fist coming up over Kent’s clumsy arms, his fist hammering Kent in the mush, flattening his thick drool-flecked lips against the barbed braces, cutting the flesh open as the big boy toppled like a sack of laundry, Ephraim following him down, fists pumping like pistons to destroy the crude symmetry of Kent Jenks’s fuck-o face…
Ephraim saw all this in the elastic instant they were perched atop the pile—a silly prize, really; a mossy heap of rocks—and the possibility of violence, his easy capacity for it, drained the strength from his limbs. Kent took advantage, flinging the smaller boy down. He copped a bodybuilding pose, the flexed double crab, face set in a caricature of a despotic monarch.
“I… am… invincible!”
Ephraim frowned and rubbed his elbow—the skin torn, blood weeping sluggishly to his wrist.
“Not cool, big K.”
Ephraim found Newt scraping moss off a log. Newt was always wandering off to press stupid leaves into his stupid notebook, cataloging everything with a black Sharpie. Eastern Sumac. Indian tobacco. God, so dorky!
Ephraim wound up to give Newt a kick in the ass, feeling sort of guilty—Dr. Harley wouldn’t approve; nor would his mother—so he delivered a lighter kick than usual.
“Where’s the first aid kit, numbnuts?”
Newt rubbed the seat of his pants. “I got ears, Eef. Don’t have to kick me.”
“I figured your ears were in your ass, Newt. Looks like everything else is—I was just knocking the wax out of them. Aren’t you gonna thank me?”
Sighing, Newt dug the kit out of his knapsack.
“Sit down, Eef.”
This was Newt’s role: the nurturer, the motherer. He had a natural affinity for it, and the boys sporadically accepted his ministrations—accepted them, then returned to making Newt the object of their torments. And Newt allowed it, because it had always been so.
He tore open a peroxide swab packet, pressed it to the wound on Ephraim’s elbow. Ephraim hissed between clenched teeth.
“It’s just fizzy,” Newt said. “Shouldn’t hurt.”
Ephraim slapped Newt’s hand away. “I’ll do it.”
Newton’s eyes drifted to the sky. His nostrils dilated.
“What are you doing?”
“I think that storm’s coming,” Newt said. “You can smell it. Like, an alkaline smell, like when you rip open a bag of water-softener salt.”
“We don’t have a water softener, Richie Rich.” Ephraim bared his teeth in a mock-snarl. “We like our water haaaaard.”
“You can spot it in the water, too. See?” Newt pointed to the sea. “The water always turns red before a storm. Not quite bloodred, but close. The electricity in the air as a storm brews, right, it causes plankton protozoans to lift up off the seabed; these tiny little creatures—like, the tiniest living things on earth—inflate with oxygen and turn deep red, covering the whole sea and making it red, too.”
Ephraim slapped a butterfly bandage on his elbow.
“Holy shit, dude. Your brain’s too big. Why doesn’t it ooze out your ears?” His eyes went wide. “Actually… fuck me! I see it oozing out right now!”
Ephraim licked his finger and went to screw it into Newt’s ear—a classic Wet Willy. His finger stopped just short, though, a runner of saliva clung to a whorl of his fingerprint. It seemed a heartless thing to do, considering.
He wiped the spit on his pants, bounded to his feet, and raced off to join the other boys.
“Saved your life, Newt! You owe me one!”
THE TRAIL descended to a pebbled shoreline lapped by the ocean. The boys doffed their boots and rolled up their pants, wading in the icy October sea. Their ankles turned pig-belly pink. They hunted for the smoothest stones and had a skipping contest, which Kent won with ten skips by his count.
“Hey, guys,” Ephraim said. “Check this out.”
He directed them to a deep cut within the shore rocks, fringed with sea moss. The boys gathered round. Flashes of shining skin made oily in the guttering light; unknown shapes humping over one another. Silky sibilant esses—husssss, husssss.
“It’s a snake ball,” Newton said.
How many snakes? Impossible to tell. Their bodies were entwined, a writhing network of tubes like an elastic-band ball. Their bodies were dark—sea serpents?—and wet like living, livid oil; that peculiar reptile smell met their noses: wet and fetid like a dewy field spread with dead crickets.
“What are they doing?” said Ephraim.