The Color War Read online

  James looked up. "You ever shot a gun?"

  Once, Monroe's older brother DeShawn had let him hold his P380. Raymond could remember scratching his nail against the grooved metal where the serial number had been filed off. At the time he'd felt like he was holding lightning in his hands, like if he let out the breath he was holding the trigger would go off. Now, when he thought about that gun, he just wanted to throw up.

  Raymond shook his head. Beside him, Winslow pulled a penknife out of his sock and began to pare his fingernails. Matthew blinked once, then turned to the other boys. "We've got a camp meeting in ten minutes," he said. "Who needs to use the latrine?"

  Raymond was the last boy out the door. He was wondering if and when he would be seeing Melody again, and he was concentrating so hard on remembering what her skin had felt like that he almost didn't notice Matthew slipping a hand into Winslow's duffel and confiscating the knife, with no one the worse for wear.

  *

  He saw her once, walking across the empty archery field behind Reverend Helm during the opening address to campers. He couldn't be sure it was her, not with the half-dozen life jackets looped around her neck and the kickboards stacked in her arms, but his body started doing crazy things--his pulse hammering and his palms sweating--and before he knew it he was standing on his feet when everyone else was sitting, and the reverend was asking if he had a question.

  "No, sir," he muttered, and he sat down, all the heat in the world flooding his cheeks.

  The counselors played pranks on one another. Someone put toothpaste on the toilet seat. One of the girls turned on a blow dryer and baby powder exploded in her face. Matthew went to put on his socks one morning only to find the toes cut off, so that they pulled up over his knees like leg warmers. Raymond didn't understand why, if you were lucky enough to have a friend, you would try to make him look like an idiot in front of everyone else.

  He asked James as they were getting ready for bed that night. "Why do they think that stuff is funny?"

  James answered a question with a question. "Why do they think we want to go to this stupid camp?"

  Raymond considered this. "I guess it's supposed to be like a vacation."

  "The problem with vacations," James said, "is that you still got to go back home."

  One night, Lamar got homesick and cried when they were toasting marshmallows. Matthew told them he was going to a place called Trinity College in the fall and showed them a picture of his girlfriend, Susannah, who led the younger girl campers and who looked a little like Melody. At nine o'clock--lights out--Matthew coached them in their prayers. They lay in the darkness for several minutes, keeping time with Lamar's sniffling, and then Matthew asked if they wanted to hear a ghost story. Raymond curled up under the covers, scared by the image of Matthew's pale face in the reflected glow of a flashlight. He listened to Matthew spin a story about a man named Ichabod Crane and a Headless Horseman who wouldn't stay dead. In the silence that followed, Raymond waited for someone else to take the first breath.

  James's voice broke the spell. "That the scariest story you ever heard?"

  "Just about," Matthew said.

  Raymond could hear James roll over in his bunk. His words were muffled by his pillow. "You should try hanging on Blue Hill Avenue with me," he said. "We got stories to last you a lifetime."

  The next morning, when the boys went to the latrines to shower, the water streamed purple, orange, red--a tacky, sweet mess that splattered Raymond from head to toe. "Damn," Winslow said as some of the spray hit his mouth. "It's raining Kool-Aid."

  Raymond looked over at Matthew, who had been the target of the prank. His skin was painted like a rainbow, the perfect canvas. Raymond looked down at his own chest and belly. The colors were harder to see against Raymond's skin, but he could feel the stickiness and taste the sweetness in his mouth.

  Matthew turned off the faucet and unscrewed the showerhead, which had been jammed up with the powdered mix used to make juices in the mess hall. "Not cool," he yelled out the window to the girl counselors who were outside waiting to hear the reaction to their night's work. But Raymond noticed he was grinning while he said it.

  *

  At Camp Konoke, Melody taught swimming to beginners. Raymond figured this out from the locker room, watching her through a cobwebbed window as she demonstrated how to make bubbles through your nose. So when Matthew asked them to raise their hands if they knew how to swim, Raymond didn't move a muscle, even though he knew the front crawl and the breaststroke.

  He stepped into the lake, letting it lap at his ankles. He felt a little sick to his stomach, and he knew it was because he had lied, but then again, hadn't his mother told him to make friends at camp, and wasn't that what he was doing? "Raymond!" Melody said, remembering him, and he smiled. "How many of you can hold your breath for a count of three?" she asked, and when they all said they could, she dared them to do it. Raymond held his breath for five counts, just to show off.

  He was careful not to look like a good swimmer, because he didn't want to get bumped into the higher-level group, which was taught by a boy with a birthmark on his shoulder that looked like a sunburst. So Raymond sank a little during his dead man's float, and he swallowed water several times on purpose. Then Melody waded toward him, picking him out of the group of six to be her guinea pig. She stood behind him, modeling the windmill of the freestyle stroke, her hands each covering one of his and her breath falling on his ear. "See?" she said. "Over, then through. Over, then through."

  Raymond followed her gaze as she watched the next group of campers arrive for their swimming lesson. "That's it for today, guys," Melody said. "See you, Raymond."

  "See you," he replied, realizing for the first time how cold the water in the lake really was.

  *

  Without knowing how it happened, Raymond became accustomed to the sound of starlings waking him up, instead of cars and sirens. He learned how to saddle a horse and how to tie square knots for rigging. The backs of his hands and his cheeks became sunburned. He relearned the front crawl, and with Melody's help he swam longer and faster than he ever had before.

  Raymond looked forward to the three days of the week when he had swimming with Melody. On those days, he was the first one out of his bunk; he walked a little more purposefully from activity to activity. He spent the time he wasn't with her dreaming of the moments he would be.

  The other kids in his cabin noticed. Matthew gave Raymond the nickname Phelps, after the legendary swimmer. Mrs. Knott, who treated him for his swimmer's ear, said she was pretty sure he was growing a fin. Only James seemed to notice that this was about more than just swimming. One day, as they sat in a steamy tent, weaving bright yarn around popsicle sticks to make god's-eyes during Arts & Crafts, James grabbed Raymond's out of his hand and held it up to his chest, along with his own--a makeshift bikini top. "Looky here," he sang. "I'm Melody the mermaid."

  Raymond yanked his ornament away from James. "Cut it out," he said fiercely.

  "You defending your girlfriend, Raymond?" James laughed. "Like some kind of white knight? Oh, wait, that's right. You black."

  "Shut up," Raymond gritted out. He looked to the edge of the tent, where the counselors were gossiping over a magazine. He could go to them for help, but that would make this an even bigger deal than it already was, and Raymond just wanted it to stop.

  "You ain't nothing special to her," James said. "You just the charity flavor of the month. Next week, she might rescue a kitten from the SPCA instead of you."

  "She's helping me with my swimming."

  "Yeah," James said. "Is that your ticket out? You gonna swim yourself right off the streets?"

  Raymond lifted his chin. "Maybe I will. There are tons of brothers who are famous athletes."

  "Name one swimmer," James said.

  Raymond couldn't. "Just 'cause I don't know one doesn't mean it don't exist."

  James looped some red yard around the crossed sticks. "You believe that," he said, "and you