The Alex Crow. Andrew Smith

rubbed the pad of his thumb on his pencil’s point. I was reasonably certain he was estimating things like sharpness and stabbing potential.

      My pencil had teeth marks in it.

      And Mrs Nussbaum instructed: “I want each of you to write on your cards. I want you to write about where you would most rather be, if you couldn’t be here right now at Camp Merrie-Seymour with your friends.”

      We all looked around at our cabin mates.

       Friends?

      “Come on, boys! You can do it!” Mrs Nussbaum prodded, raising the pitch of her voice about one-half octave above “drunkenly enthusiastic,” and just below the sound baby dolphins make.

      “Do we put our names on them?” Max asked.

      “Oh, heavens no! These are only for you. They are personal.”

      “Do we have to write in complete sentences?” Max said.

      Mrs Nussbaum frowned and shook her head.

      When we finished (and I had no idea what any of the other boys wrote), Mrs Nussbaum told us to fold our cards in half and tuck them under our pillows. Of course, when we did that, it sounded like a beer-can-crushing party. She told us we could revise our answers anytime we wanted to over the next six weeks, and that maybe we would all be able to see changes in ourselves by the time we had to go back home.

      I didn’t get what Mrs Nussbaum meant by revising our answers. No matter what I did for the next six weeks, if I unfolded my index card and looked at it again, it was still going to say the same thing. Who didn’t know that?

      And Bucky Littlejohn saw plenty of change in himself in his less-than-twenty-four hours at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. He saw a hole through his left foot, and at that moment was undergoing surgery somewhere.

      This is what I wrote on my index card:

      INSIDE A REFRIGERATOR

      It was not a very productive first group-therapy session, I think.

      After Mrs Nussbaum left, we all stood and attempted to make our way out of the cabin, but Larry stopped us. While Mrs Nussbaum was relatively controllable as far as the manipulative and uncooperative puppies of Jupiter were concerned, Larry was another challenge altogether.

      I’m pretty sure all of us were afraid of him.

      “You’re not going anywhere, fuckheads.” He said, “Now sit down.”

      So each of us sat at the foot of his bed, and faced across the cabin at Larry.

      “Let’s get something straight right now,” he said, “I’m in charge of you guys for the next six weeks. You haven’t even been here one day, and already one of you dickwads almost died. If I lose my job because of shit like this, they’ll send me home and my dad will kick me out of the house, or make me get a real job and pay rent and shit.”

      Cobie Petersen raised his hand, like a kid in a classroom.

      Larry was clearly irritated. “What?”

      Cobie said, “How old are you, Larry?”

      Larry glared at Cobie. I realized then that Cobie Petersen was very good at testing people’s resilience.

      “Twenty-two. Why?”

      Cobie shrugged. “Just wondering. Maybe you should get a real job.”

      Larry clenched his teeth and inhaled deeply.

      “Six weeks. Is that too much to ask? Come on, guys; give me a break. Then you can all go back home to your internet porn and video games while I get a new batch of losers who will never touch real girls in their lives.”

      Cobie raised his hand again. “You must get lonely here, Larry.”

      “Don’t fuck with me, kid.”

      Then Larry pointed at Max and said, “You. Arsonist. No more shit about burning down the cabin. Okay?”

      Max nodded. “I was only joking. Besides, if Jupiter does burn down, they’ll probably stick us in Uranus.”

      Everyone except Larry laughed. Even Robin Sexton, who obviously had a selective filter for the things he’d allow to pass beyond his toilet-paper gates.

      Larry’s finger aimed at Robin. “And you. Jerkoff. There’s no wanking allowed in this cabin. You think I didn’t hear you last night?”

      Robin twitched his fingers and said, “Huh?”

      Then Larry pointed at me, “And you. Marcel Marceau.”

      Well, at least I wasn’t first. But I did look down at my bare knees to confirm I was wearing short pants, and not the Pierrot costume, which may have saved my life in another time.

      I waited, but Larry didn’t have any warning for me. All he said was this: “You just keep shutting up and we’ll be totally okay with each other, dude, as long as you don’t kill yourself.”

      Then Larry stood up and looked at his wristwatch.

      “Now get outside and look at that big yellow thing in the sky. It’s called the sun. You have thirty minutes till lunch.”

      And that was our first cabin meeting.

      One of the inventions my American father came up with—this was years before I arrived in America—was a device that helped him sleep better at night.

      The problem with Jake Burgess’s sleep patterns had nothing to do with him. My mother, Natalie, snores terribly. I sleep downstairs from them, and even with my door closed I can hear her nightly snores. I can imagine a similar sound being produced by a giant tree stump being dragged by a tractor down a rough asphalt roadway.

      When Max was only two years old, Jake Burgess went to work on what he called a snore wall. The device was rather small—about the size of a deck of playing cards—so it could stay on the mattress between Jake and Natalie. When activated, the snore wall emitted a pulse of electric-charged microwaves that rigidly locked the molecules in the air above it in a perfect line, so they could not be agitated by sound waves.

      Natalie could snore like a sumo wrestler on her side of the snore wall, but Jake wouldn’t hear a thing.

      Jake Burgess was very, very smart.

      Unfortunately, the first successful time Jake used his snore wall, two passenger jetliners crashed when they collided with the barrier in the skies over their house in Sunday.

      Jake never used the snore wall again, but the Merrie-Seymour Research Group paid Jake an awful lot of money for the device.

      That was the kind of research Jake Burgess was good at.

      Too bad for all those people in the planes, but progress, you know, marches onward and will eventually trample anyone sleeping in its path.

      Jake invented all kinds of crackpot things for the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Max warned me about them. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if Max was actually making the things up in his head just to scare me.

      That’s where Alex, our crow, came from.

      It’s another story entirely.

THIS IS WHAT WE DO AT CAMP

      All the planets were tied for last place, depending on how you looked at things.

      You could just as well claim we were all racing in yellow jerseys on that night after the cancellation of the archery competition. Every planet in the solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, including the abandoned ones, had a score of zero.

      I was uncertain what rewards winning at the end of six weeks at camp would bring; if the object of winning in itself provided its