from her espadrilles in the cabin.
“I handled them.” Arnetta sucked on her teeth and proudly grinned. “I told her we was going to gather leaves.”
“Gather leaves,” Octavia said, nodding respectfully. “That’s a good one. Especially since they’re so mad-crazy about this camping thing.” She looked from ground to sky, sky to ground. Her hair hung down her back in two braids like a squaw’s. “I mean, I really don’t know why it’s even called camping—all we ever do with Nature is find some twigs and say something like, ‘Wow, this fell from a tree.’” She then studied her sandwich. With two disdainful fingers, she picked out a slice of dripping tomato, the sections congealed with red slime. She pitched it into the stream embrowned with dead leaves and the murky effigies of other dead things, but in the opaque water, a group of small silver-brown fish appeared. They surrounded the tomato and nibbled.
“Look!” Janice cried. “Fishes! Fishes!” As she scrambled to the edge of the stream to watch, a covey of insects threw up tantrums from the wheatgrass and nettle, a throng of tiny electric machines, all going at once. Octavia sneaked up behind Janice as if to push her in. Daphne and I exchanged terrified looks. It seemed as though only we knew that Octavia was close enough—and bold enough—to actually push Janice into the stream. Janice turned around quickly, but Octavia was already staring serenely into the still water as though she was gathering some sort of courage from it. “What’s so funny?” Janice said, eyeing them all suspiciously.
Elise began humming the tune to “Karma Chameleon,” all the girls joining in, their hums light and facile. Janice also began to hum, against everyone else, the high-octane opening chords of “Beat It.”
“I love me some Michael Jackson,” Janice said when she’d finished humming, smacking her lips as though Michael Jackson were a favorite meal. “I will marry Michael Jackson.”
Before anyone had a chance to impress upon Janice the impossibility of this, Arnetta suddenly rose, made a sun visor of her hand, and watched Troop 909 leave the field hockey lawn.
“Dammit!” she said. “We’ve got to get them alone.”
“They won’t ever be alone,” I said. All the rest of the girls looked at me, for I usually kept quiet. If I spoke even a word, I could count on someone calling me Snot. Everyone seemed to think that we could beat up these girls; no one entertained the thought that they might fight back. “The only time they’ll be unsupervised is in the bathroom.”
“Oh shut up, Snot,” Octavia said.
But Arnetta slowly nodded her head. “The bathroom,” she said. “The bathroom,” she said, again and again. “The bathroom! The bathroom!”
ACCORDING TO Octavia’s watch, it took us five minutes to hike to the restrooms, which were midway between our cabin and Troop 909’s. Inside, the mirrors above the sinks returned only the vaguest of reflections, as though someone had taken a scouring pad to their surfaces to obscure the shine. Pine needles, leaves, and dirty, flattened wads of chewing gum covered the floor like a mosaic. Webs of hair matted the drain in the middle of the floor. Above the sinks and below the mirrors, stacks of folded white paper towels lay on a long metal counter. Shaggy white balls of paper towels sat on the sinktops in a line like corsages on display. A thread of floss snaked from a wad of tissues dotted with the faint red-pink of blood. One of those white girls, I thought, had just lost a tooth.
Though the restroom looked almost the same as it had the night before, it somehow seemed stranger now. We hadn’t noticed the wooden rafters coming together in great V’s. We were, it seemed, inside a whale, viewing the ribs of the roof of its mouth.
“Wow. It’s a mess,” Elise said.
“You can say that again.”
Arnetta leaned against the doorjamb of a restroom stall. “This is where they’ll be again,” she said. Just seeing the place, just having a plan seemed to satisfy her. “We’ll go in and talk to them. You know, ‘How you doing? How long’ll you be here?’ That sort of thing. Then Octavia and I are gonna tell them what happens when they call any one of us a nigger.”
“I’m going to say something, too,” Janice said.
Arnetta considered this. “Sure,” she said. “Of course. Whatever you want.”
Janice pointed her finger like a gun at Octavia and rehearsed the line she’d thought up, “‘We’re gonna teach you a lesson!’ That’s what I’m going to say.” She narrowed her eyes like a TV mobster. “‘We’re gonna teach you little girls a lesson!’”
With the back of her hand, Octavia brushed Janice’s finger away. “You couldn’t teach me to shit in a toilet.”
“But,” I said, “what if they say, ‘We didn’t say that? We didn’t call anyone an N-I-G-G-E-R.’”
“Snot,” Arnetta said, and then sighed. “Don’t think. Just fight. If you even know how.”
Everyone laughed except Daphne. Arnetta gently laid her hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “Daphne. You don’t have to fight. We’re doing this for you.”
Daphne walked to the counter, took a clean paper towel, and carefully unfolded it like a map. With it, she began to pick up the trash all around. Everyone watched.
“C’mon,” Arnetta said to everyone. “Let’s beat it.” We all ambled toward the doorway, where the sunshine made one large white rectangle of light. We were immediately blinded, and we shielded our eyes with our hands and our forearms.
“Daphne?” Arnetta asked. “Are you coming?”
We all looked back at the bending girl, the thin of her back hunched like the back of a custodian sweeping a stage, caught in limelight. Stray strands of her hair were lit near-transparent, thin fiber-optic threads. She did not nod yes to the question, nor did she shake her head no. She abided, bent. Then she began again, picking up leaves, wads of paper, the cotton fluff innards from a torn stuffed toy. She did it so methodically, so exquisitely, so humbly, she must have been trained. I thought of those dresses she wore, faded and old, yet so pressed and clean. I then saw the poverty in them; I then could imagine her mother, cleaning the houses of others, returning home, weary.
“I guess she’s not coming.”
We left her and headed back to our cabin, over pine needles and leaves, taking the path full of shade.
“What about our secret meeting?” Elise asked.
Arnetta enunciated her words in a way that defied contradiction: “We just had it.”
IT WAS nearing our bedtime, but the sun had not yet set.
“Hey, your mama’s coming,” Arnetta said to Octavia when she saw Mrs. Hedy walk toward the cabin, sniffling. When Octavia’s mother wasn’t giving bored, parochial orders, she sniffled continuously, mourning an imminent divorce from her husband. She might begin a sentence, “I don’t know what Robert will do when Octavia and I are gone. Who’ll buy him cigarettes?” and Octavia would hotly whisper, “Mama,” in a way that meant: Please don’t talk about our problems in front of everyone. Please shut up.
But when Mrs. Hedy began talking about her husband, thinking about her husband, seeing clouds shaped like the head of her husband, she couldn’t
