The Alex Crow. Andrew Smith

of insanity as far as I could see.

      It was mid-June here in the George Washington National Forest. I had completed the final months of my ninth-grade year at William E. Shuck High School. That was when our parents sent Max and me off to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

      They told us the experience was intended to get us to bond as loving brothers should. Max and I hadn’t made much progress along those lines.

      Max, after all, did not like me. He told me as much during my first week with his family.

      He’d said this: “Listen, dude, just because they took you in doesn’t mean I have to act like you’re my brother—because you’re not. You’re a stranger, just like anyone else I never knew.”

      Yes, it was a mean thing for Max to say, but I also empathized with his feeling intruded upon.

      And as usual, I didn’t say anything, so Max went on. “They’re nuts, anyway. She doesn’t know how to react to setbacks, and Christ knows, every time she turns around she’s getting kicked in the teeth. And he—he’s a freak.”

      I shrugged.

      And Max had told me, “He’s an inventor, you know, and he purposely creates things that destroy people’s lives. Like you, Ariel, only you’re not going to ruin my life, and neither will Mom or Dad.”

      So I was convinced Max hated me. He probably had good cause. What fifteen-year-old boy (we were the same age) would welcome the halving of his world with a foreigner who didn’t like to talk?

      I should explain that Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was a sort of disciplinarian’s boot camp—a detox center for kids who were unable to disconnect from cell phones and technology. For boys like that, being outside or sleeping in smelly huts crowded with strangers—things I had plenty of experience with—was the same as eternal condemnation to hell. And Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was not fun at all, which is exactly why Bucky Littlejohn shot himself in the foot.

      You almost couldn’t blame him.

      Neither Max nor I had a problem disconnecting from such things as technology and video games, and interacting with real human beings. The first time I’d even touched a cell phone happened after turning fifteen and coming to America.

      The first time I’d used a cell phone was to call for help when Mother slumped unconscious from blood loss behind the wheel of her Volvo as we drove home from the sauerkraut store in Sunday.

      I also found out later that Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was free of charge to our parents. It was owned by the lab company our father works for, the Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Every six weeks, the camp alternated its focus between technological addiction and weight loss. Two summers before, during one of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys’ “fat camp” cycles, Max, who is awkwardly thin, was sent.

      The summer he was thirteen, my brother Max lost fifteen pounds.

      To this day, Max has nightmares that prominently feature celery.

      The campers’ beds in Jupiter were arranged along one wall, packed so closely together that they were nearly impossible to make (something we were required to do every morning). We learned that we had to take turns navigating around our sheet-tucking duties. And the only reasonable way to get in or out of one of the beds without risking a fight or awkward bodily contact with another boy was from the foot of each one. Bucky Littlejohn’s cot sat empty along the back wall. After he left, which was on our second day—not twenty-four hours into the six-week journey to rediscover “the fun of boyhood” at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys—none of the campers in Jupiter wanted to claim the vacated bed by the wall; Bucky peed in it the first and only night he spent in Jupiter. Maybe he only attempted the bedwetting as an initial means for getting kicked out.

      Bucky Littlejohn was no quitter.

      The arrow-through-the-foot tactic was unarguably brilliant.

      The boys of Camp Merrie-Seymour were desperate.

      My sleeping spot sandwiched me between a kid Max and I had seen around William E. Shuck High School, Cobie Petersen, a pale-skinned, freckled sixteen-year-old who lived up Dumpling Run, a creek that was only about three miles from our home in Sunday; and a thirteen-year-old boy named Robin Sexton from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Robin twitched his thumbs constantly, as though he were handling an invisible video game controller, and he kept tight wads of toilet paper jammed into his ears because he said he couldn’t stand all the noise the world pushed into his head when he wasn’t wearing earbuds.

      Of course, there were no earbuds—no electric-powered devices of any kind—permitted for the campers at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. In fact, every one of the thirty-three boys assigned to the six planets of the camp was closely inspected upon arrival. Each of us was obligated to bring perfectly matched camper kits: duffel bags, which contained precise numbers of T-shirts, shorts, toothbrushes, and changes of socks and underwear, in which, for reasons I could only speculate, we had to write our names with permanent marker.

      They counted everything.

      Max’s bed was closest to the door.

      On our first night at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Max joked that he would be the lone survivor from Jupiter if our cabin burned down in the next six weeks, to which Larry, our counselor, warned, “Don’t get any ideas, fuckheads.”

      And then Larry proceeded to strip-search all five of us. We even had to turn our socks inside out.

      This may have pushed Bucky Littlejohn over the edge.

      So we five boys of Jupiter, who would be four the following night, stood there in our underwear while Larry emptied the contents of our duffel bags and tore the covers and bedding from our cots, just to make certain none of us had smuggled in a cigarette lighter.

      During the commotion, boys spilled out from the Saturn, Mercury, Mars, Neptune, and Pluto cabins. They taunted us from outside our screen windows. As long as the lights—kerosene lanterns, which were closely guarded by the counselors—were on in our solar system, everyone could see everything that happened in Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

      The other planets chanted and clapped at us.

      “Strip search! Strip search! Strip search!”

      Larry left the place a complete mess, and we had to clean it up—in our underwear—while the planets outside observed (after all, it wasn’t as though they could divert themselves with television or video games) and our counselor watched suspiciously from his bed, which sat uncrowded and isolated on the opposite side of the cabin.

      “Hurry up and straighten out your shit,” Larry said. “I want lights out in five minutes, and you’re all getting up at sunrise tomorrow morning. You’re going to have fun, fuckheads.”

      I was fascinated by the word. One more of those American things that made no sense to me whatsoever, I thought. If they’d allowed me to bring my notebook along to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, I would have written a reminder to eventually research the etymology of fuckhead.

      Still, I had no idea what to expect from Larry’s concept of “fun.” It had seemed to me that in just a few hours we had been through enough torment already. At dinner, they fed us something called “Beanie Weenie.” I had never heard of it before, but it was better than sauerkraut, so I ate it.

      It made no sense.

      Jupiter, an exact replica of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys’ other eight cabins (three of which were abandoned), was a strange and primitive design. To me, it most closely resembled an insect cage. The walls, which stood only about three feet high, were built with horizontal redwood slats. The entire upper two-thirds of them were nothing more than mesh screen all the way around, which is why the boys of the other cabins could watch us losers from Jupiter enact our dramatic failure in our underwear for their entertainment. Unless you were a counselor, who got to sleep in actual pajamas and had his own lighted-by-electricity toilet and shower facilities, there was no privacy anywhere in the camp. And we would eventually find out, too, just how miserable and damp it