The Color War Read Free Page A

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