—from the Boy Scout Oath
Getting “knifed”: well, it bit like a goddamn son of a bitch. That’s what Poppy’s Paw would’ve said.
Pennsylvania woods loomed large. Shocks of light scrambled through branches, splayed out brown and gold across the fighter’s ring—across the two warring scouts.
Poppy huffed, spit once into the dirt, then lurched for Toby’s throat.
Her uniform had come untucked, and her baggy green slacks streaked black where he’d tossed her into the fire pit. Even her teeth throbbed. She wanted to take off her belt and whip the metal buckle right across his head—emboss his temple with the Boy Scout emblem—but even worse, she wanted to win just one game of Knives this week, especially against Toby.
Knives Rule 1:
The first scout to speak, wail, cry, scream, or otherwise, loses. Everyone must be absolutely silent, or else the scoutmaster will wake up from his post-dining-hall nap.
Knives Rule 2:
Scouts are civilized. Knives must stay closed. If your knife unfolds, you lose. Whoever gets the most hits in on the other wins.
Knives Rule 3:
Don’t be a little bitch.
Toby crouched, grinning. Poppy was going to fishhook that grin right off his ugly face. The thirteen-year-old boy wore his new acne like a merit badge in Puberty Studies: several of his zits had popped, exploded red across the collar of her tan button-up. He was getting the better of her. He’d already knifed her eight times with the butt of his Swiss Army, mostly in the ribs. Pain snaked through her. She’d unhinge her jaw and swallow him whole.
Poppy’s leap toward his face became a tackle. The bun of box braids on top of her head bounced off his stomach, spilling free. Wild, she struck upward, a fist still clamped around the wooden tang of her buck knife. Four knuckles connected with Toby’s jaw.
A groaned Oooooooh went through the ten or so boys circled around the makeshift fighter’s ring.
Toby yelped without opening his mouth and yanked Poppy off him by her twist of braids, spun on top of her, and brought the butt of his knife down hard against her sternum.
The air went out. The lights flickered. She couldn’t help but let out a real wail. Her chest was going to split in half.
A metallic creak-creak-creak of rusty springs came from the scoutmaster’s tent. He was either rolling over in his cot or was woken by the fight. Several boys whispered, nodding from the circle to his large, olive tent and back again.
Toby pinned her, and as she tried to roll free, the butt of his knife thwacked against her shoulder bone.
Toby growled, arcing both hands above his head.
She’d already lost and she knew it, so she spit out the only words that mattered: “You. Fucker.”
Toby’s chest swelled, and he drew the knife up even higher, as if this was exactly what he’d been hoping to hear.
“Enough, enough!” A gangly boy stumbled into the ring, pulling on Toby’s shoulders. The boy didn’t let his voice rise above a pleading whisper. “She cried and she lost—please let her go.”
A loud creak came from the scoutmaster’s tent.
Toby rocked back on his heels and stood up. He elbowed the boy aside. “Get off me, Squirt.”
“Please don’t call me that,” said the boy.
Toby snarled a laugh, flinging flecks of spit onto the buttons of his uniform. “I’ll call you whatever I want, Stevie the Squirt.”
Stevie shook, as if he were the one who’d just played a game of Knives.
Poppy gasped in the dirt.
“Should I call you Stevie the Savior? I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You wanna play me, Squirt?” Toby snapped open the leather sheath on his belt and slid his pocket knife inside.
“No,” said Stevie.
“Huh?” said Toby, flicking Stevie’s head. “You wanna play me, Squirt?”
“No,” said Stevie, his eyes on the ground.
Toby patted his sheath. “Not much of a savior after all.”
The gaggle of onlookers whooped as Toby rejoined their ranks, voices rising well above a whisper.
Toby glowered down at Poppy, still curled up in the dirt. “A girl in the Boy Scouts is like a poodle playing at being one of us wolves.”
“Ha, a poodle!” one boy laughed.
“Poppy the widdle poodle,” cooed another.
In the distance, a bugle player belted out a short medley.
“Bird Studies in five,” said one boy.
The scouts dispersed, gathering their things, and headed down the gravel hill beyond their camp toward Algonquin Lodge.
• •
Stevie squatted and dared to put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you OK, Poprocks?”
“Don’t call me that,” she whined between breaths. She’d had enough of nicknames for a thousand weeks of summer camp.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Why’d you—” Poppy gasped, “—stop the game?”
“What?”
“Let me breathe,” she said.
“Do you want me to walk you to the Yurts?” he asked.
After the medical staff’s story about tweezering a tick out of an especially clueless boy’s dick hole, no, she did not ever want to visit the Yurts.
“Get off already,” she rocked in place, too stunned to push his hand away.
“OK, well, should I get Mr. Ulrich?” Stevie motioned toward the scoutmaster’s tent.
Mr. Ulrich already thought she was a wimp. Knew she was a wimp. He’d use any excuse to send her home, say she couldn’t hack it. He’d probably say she’d seen a spider and screamed, cried, pissed her pants. Mom would have to take off work, drive four furious hours down from Erie just to give her an earful about how any self-respecting woman wouldn’t spend her summer playing park ranger with a hundred horn-toad boys. Where you SHOULDA been’s working the salon, learning how to PROPERLY sweep up, smile at regulars, keep your lips sealed and listen to ladies who know the way of the world, learn to nod your head and call a lady ma’am. Poppy would dig herself a deep grave before she was holding a pair of styling shears, and a woman with big hair in an even bigger chair vented about a husband, a boyfriend, an unrequited love while hairdresser Poppy chirped back, “Oh, honey, honey, well, aren’t the whole lot of them just like that.”
The scoutmaster called from across the camp, “Afternoon, ladies.”
“Afternoon, sir,” Stevie answered, doing his best to block the scoutmaster’s view of Poppy.
“Everything all right?” he slurred, his mouth foamy white. A neon green toothbrush stuck out between his teeth.
Stevie threw up a three-fingered scout salute and called back, “Yes sir, yes sir.”
Poppy moaned and, not without hating herself for it, let Stevie help her up and into her tent.
• •
Stevie had the sense to wait outside while Poppy fixed her uniform: one lapel undone, a sock’s shredded red rim—everything coated in grime—her neckerchief patterned with blood from a nasty split in her gums.
Poppy had never had an orgasm, but she thought that’s what unzipping her binder must have felt like. Stiff as a sawed cast, the black fabric cracked open and she breathed, really breathed. It was her battle armor. Exposed, she made sure the inside tent flaps were secured shut. Pain pulsed up to her throat, and she ran a couple of fingers over the worst of it. Red and blue bullseyes spotted her ribs, darker than her torso. She touched the center of a bruise and winced as pain beat back her prodding. With an old T-shirt, she wiped all the collected sweat from around her armpits and rebuttoned her uniform, pulling the silver nugget of her neckerchief slide up as far as it would go. With one hand, she gathered up her hair, with the other she searched the deep chest of her footlocker for pins.
“All good in there?” Stevie whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s hurry!”
She needed a few more seconds to catch her breath. Careful of the wolf spiders that might be hiding in a mesh corner, Poppy adjusted the mosquito netting around her cot, tuning the dowel rod supports like old-timey TV antennae.
“We can’t miss the sign-in sheet,” Steve hissed.
“One second,” she hissed back. She couldn’t miss Bird Studies. She eyed the handbook halved on her footlocker: just one badge to go, and she would be a Star Scout, top rank in the whole troop, probably the youngest Star Scout in all of western PA. And these boys wouldn’t forget it. She would never let them forget it.
“Poprocks, c’mon, please . . .”
If there was one useful thing her mother had left her with, it was the pain pills, one tall amber vial of them. Whatever Oxycodone Hydrochloride was, it made her feel like she could take on each and every one of these boys.
“Literally one sec, Stevie—Christ on a cracker.”
Poppy pried off the white top, popped one in her mouth (not too many at once, her mother had been insistent), and swigged it down with a hot gulp of canteen water.
She grabbed the Bird Study manual off her footlocker and ducked outside.
• •
“Mr. DeBrito, is it true that ugly women lay eggs?” a scout crooned. A few boys snickered at the two latecomers as they entered the lodge, taking seats in the back.
“Well, son, I think that—well, your parents can better explain the intricacies. . . .” Mr. DeBrito, the Bird Studies merit badge counselor, curled a manual in his hands, pointed it at the boy and waved it around as if this wand would conjure an appropriate answer.
Another boy leaned out of his seat and looked toward the doors. “Say . . . that a woman back there?” He pointed.
Poppy shrunk in her chair: there were seven different troops at Camp Rodney and even though the week was almost up, in some troops her “disrupting presence” (as she’d overheard adults say) was still just a campfire rumor.
Toby cupped his hands and shouted, “Oh, that ain’t no woman!”
Every boy but Stevie barked laughter.
Poppy blushed, never happier the red rushing to her cheeks wasn’t visible.
“Enough, enough!” said Mr. DeBrito. “Women don’t lay eggs, but we’re certainly, certainly not here to talk about any of that.” He patted down the white hair fencing a shine of baldness atop his head. “But, you know who does lay eggs?”
“BIRDS!” a boy shouted.
“Ah yes, birds,” said Mr. DeBrito. He pointed at a cardinal embossed on the manual’s cover. “Now, as I was saying, to fulfill your final requirements, you must bring in an egg by last class, that is to say, tomorrow morning. The winner will be the scout who locates and produces the largest egg. Additionally, he will be publicly recognized at the final banquet—”
“—I laid a big brown egg this morning. A big old egg!” shouted a boy, extending his arms wide as they could go.
The classroom erupted.
“I don’t . . . what?” Mr. DeBrito shuffled in place. “Well, a brown egg could be a crow egg, a cowbird egg, a thrasher egg, a barn owl egg. . . . Mmm, yes, there are even some wood storks by the river this season. . . .”
“It came out my butt,” said the boy.
Mr. DeBrito paused, the shiny flesh on the top of his head now a shade of purple. “In the event that you do not produce—”
“—I also produced an egg,” began a boy, stifling laughter with the edge of his neckerchief, but before he could finish the joke, Mr. DeBrito shouted:
“IF YOU DO NOT BRING an egg I will fail you. I will fail you. I will fail you.” His small eyes darted from one scout to another, daring them to challenge him further.
The boys hushed.
A small scout with big glasses raised a hand.
“Yes?” Mr. DeBrito sighed, waving him on. “Thank you for not blurting the first thing that came to mind, boy.”
“Sir, should we really be invading these species natural habitat? Our manual states very clearly—”
“Nerd,” coughed one boy.
“Nerd. Nerd,” coughed several others.
“Enough!” shouted Mr. DeBrito, “I will not be contested at every turn by you PISSANTS!” Mr. DeBrito rolled his neck and, eyes on the ceiling, murmured into the edges of his mustache, “professor emeritus—volunteer—volunteer—how many years?—oh, yes, sleep sans air conditioning—leave the comforts—summer after summer.”
Far in the distance, a bugler belted lunch’s melody, and the scouts filtered out.
• •
For the past two years, when Poppy thought she was going to cry, she went somewhere private and stared at the silver blade of her father’s buck knife, the one she’d now lost three games with, the one engraved in tiny cursive along the spine: For a Girl Who Knows Herself. Every time she thought she was going to cry, she’d take that knife and carve a small V in the soft, brown skin just below her collarbone and just above her left breast. It wasn’t for attention. She wasn’t some babe in the woods. (Although, as she sat on her cot, exhausted, she had to admit that she had searched the woods for six fruitless hours, used every ounce of sunlight to find a goddamn egg.)
The V was for Victory, her father’s name. She’d once heard him laugh: All us Baptist preacher’s boys got serious names.
Poppy unfolded the knife. The blade clicked into place. She ran the point across the tip of a finger, then threaded it through a patch of dead skin along the inside of a knuckle. Black binder unzipped, she looked down at the silver-pink scar and pressed hard against one line going down, hard against one line going up, and she bled like she always did, a small runny V.
She hadn’t found an egg. She didn’t know how to climb a tree, and the nineteen billion times she’d tried, well, she was too weak. She’d fallen again and again. What’s one more bruise? The manual was useless. There was no Wi-Fi out here. No instructional YouTube videos. She’d die before she asked for help. Poppy rocked on her cot, screwed her metallic blue Maglite on/off in the blueish dark. The sun was well behind wave after wave of Appalachia mountain peaks. Class was early in the morning, just after breakfast. There would be no victory for her. Outside the tent, boys laughed and whipped gold marshmallows at each other.
“Gross, dude! It’s stuck in my hair!”
“That’s what your mom said!”
More laughter.
As their campfire crackled, Poppy went back through the handbook, running a finger across the requirements for Star Scout.
She closed the book.
• •
In Poppy’s dream, she dug frantically through deep, black forest dirt. There was a species of bird, she was sure, that buried its eggs underground—big purple eggs, bigger than anyone else could possibly have found. Giddy, she scraped and scratched and clawed, but her nails broke against hard stone, one after another. She couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t. Blood oozed from her fingertips. The grinding of nails and bone grew louder and louder.
Poppy flung her head forward. Rivulets of sweat dripped down her thick eyebrows and stung both her eyes. Even on top of her sleeping bag, the tent was a furnace. Moonlight speared gaps in the folds of the tent’s entrance, and she could make out, just above each curling set of toes, two huge wolf spiders hovering in a dance between the corners of her bed’s mosquito netting.
The scraping came again, lurid against the floorboards just outside. She propped herself on her elbows and drew her knees away from the entrance, from the dark, toward her chest.
She looked to her knife, just a reach away. If the boys wanted to harass her, she’d put up a fight. A hell of a fight, she thought, gripping the silky cover of her sleeping bag.
Adrenaline sloshed in her stomach. She counted down a lunge for the knife.
Three.
Two.
One.
• •
The flaps of her tent whipped as if a strong breeze were speaking. A small voice whispered, “Poppy, can I come in?”
“Stevie?” she hissed. “What’re you doing?”
“Can I please have permission to come in?” he whispered back.
“Yes!” she said, “yes, c’mon.” She was decent: in a shirt and shorts, even with how sweltering it was. She would never have slept in just underwear here.
Stevie ducked beneath tent folds, crawling on his forearms. Curls of black, dirt-matted hair made a bobbing, almost comical, appearance as his flashlight rolled and scraped its way toward her.
“Huh, roomier in here than I’d of thought it’d be,” he said, hopping onto the opposite cot. “Must be nice not dealing with a roommate snoring.”
Poppy slid out the side of her cot and crept toward the bed’s edges, level with either corner where the wolf spiders hovered, now frozen.
Stevie pointed his flashlight at her cot. “Sheesh, those are big ones. I’m surprised you don’t—”
SMACK. Poppy wapped her palms together, splattering one heel-sized spider into a slurry of brown goop.
“Wha!— ”
The other spider skittered down the netting in an attempt to escape a similar fate. SMACK.
Poppy wiped remains of the two obliterated spiders off her hands and onto a sweaty T-shirt. “What is it, Stevie?”
“Christ,” he said. “Couldn’t you have just, you know, shooed them away?” His voice was shaky. He sounded more than shaky. He sounded dizzy, faint.
Poppy palmed her flashlight and pointed it as Stevie’s face. He flung up a bruised hand.
“Stevie, what . . .” Poppy wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Between his fingers, she could see a single, black eye, and what should’ve been its white, stained a deep crimson. Blood crusted the edges of his nose, smeared across his upper lip, probably from where he’d crawled across the tent’s floorboards.
Stevie adjusted the straps of his backpack. “I got into it with, uh, Toby,” he said.
“Into it? You mean like Knives?” Poppy huffed through her nose.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah I—I saw you hadn’t found an egg and, me neither, so I thought of a way to get us both one.” He massaged either strap of his pack. “Big ones, too, they must be from the same bird.”
“Oh my god, Stevie!” Poppy jumped across the small distance between them, cupping her hands around his face.
Still tender, he grimaced for a moment, then smiled, wide.
She kissed one cheek and the other where a scrape ran from below his eye all the way to his chin. Then, she hugged him. Really hugged him.
“How—” she backed up a bit so she could see. “How’d you manage it?”
His cargo shorts were bunched, tight at the crotch.
Stevie laid a quick forearm across his lap, embarrassed.
“Uh, you know,” he stammered.
Poppy swiped her uniform off the footlocker and hopped into her pants.
“The guys were talking about how they all had eggs and . . . you and me, we’d searched those woods for hours and hours, so I did the only thing I could think.”
Poppy imagined Toby on the ground, squealing beneath the weight of Stevie’s knife, how Stevie must have pounded him again and again and again, really made that son of a bitch squeal uncle.
“I got two eggs.” Stevie smiled.
In the place Poppy knew she should’ve felt joy, there was a hot sliver of metal wheedling into her heart. With each beat, it jabbed at her. Sharp. A jab. Something like jealousy. Jab. Something like disgust. What good was Toby beaten if she wasn’t the one to do it? How badly she’d wanted to win at Knives. Did she need a protector after all? A savior?
Stevie the Savior, Toby had said.
Stevie the Savior.
Her chest constricted. The little red V above her heart throbbed. Tacky with blood, it itched worse than a bug bite, a spider bite.
It itched like a demon.
“Here,” Stevie said, “for you.” He turned and shrugged off his pack, unzipping the front pocket.
“Wait,” she said. There they were, peeking out of the front of his backpack, two giant, speckled eggs, each wrapped in thin toilet paper.
She itched the V. She itched it and itched it until it opened up, warm across her chest.
“Play me,” she whispered.
• •
“What?”
“Play me,” she whispered again, this time drawing her father’s buck knife off the lid of her footlocker.
Stevie’s good eye went wide, his face even redder than it’d been before. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Play me,” she said, louder.
Stevie closed his eyes and scrunched his face. “Are you insane? Do you see what I did for you? Do you even see?”
“I see you, Stevie.” Poppy stared at his scraped chin, his pronounced underbite. The white beams of their flashlights mixed with moonlight, leaking silhouettes in shadows across the tent’s canvas.
“Just take a damn egg. Don’t make everything so difficult!”
“I don’t want any gifts.”
“It ain’t a gift, just a thing, here,” Stevie reached into the bag and Poppy crossed the room.
“I don’t need no savior,” Poppy spoke through her teeth. She jabbed her fist—the fist wound around her knife handle—into the center of Stevie’s chest.
Stevie stumbled to the edge of the tent. “Are you serious? It’s just a fucking egg.” Stevie pointed to his pack, still on the cot. “It’s just a fucking merit badge!”
“Grab your knife, Stevie. It’s a game, and I can win it myself.” The closed blade’s spine dug into her palm.
“Poppy, I am not playing Knives. I’m going back to my tent. I’m going to bed.” Stevie’s hands shook and, without taking his eyes off her, he swiped a hand behind him in search of the entrance. “I’m probably not even going to stay in Boy Scouts. I only even came this summer because of you.”
Poppy hated that he’d said what they both knew out loud—hated that he’d beaten Toby—hated that she needed the egg he’d won.
She swung her fist in a wide arc, aimed anywhere on his torso, but Stevie ducked, and the butt of her knife collided with his chin.
Stevie crumpled.
“Stop!” he cried, crawling away, through the entrance. The flaps came open, and lantern light illuminated his path through the dirt as he half stumbled, half crawled away from her tent, away from her.
She stood barefoot on the floorboards, light from outside cutting the inside of her in half. Sweat stung her eyes. She didn’t let the knife slip out of her palm.
Standing over Stevie’s backpack, Poppy unwrapped one egg, tissue paper falling to the floor. She could hear Stevie huffing outside. She palmed the egg. It was enormous, speckled brown. She thought it would boil from the heat radiating from her closed hand.
She wasn’t going to cry ever again. She’d won a game of Knives. She had an egg. She would be a Star Scout.
• •
The egg was so warm she thought it might hatch. She opened her palm. Smears of brown ink ran in smudged lines across the egg’s white shell. The speckles were Magic Marker.
Magic Marker.
It was a chicken egg.
The boys must have stolen eggs from the dining hall.
Poppy undid the back ties of her tent and stepped out. She chucked the egg as far and as high as it would go, far into the forest, far enough she would never hear its impact.
She wouldn’t turn in no fuckin’ chicken egg.
