Wild Fell by Michael Rowe

not for girls.” I was utterly baffled by her nonchalance. To me it was the theft of our summer together at the hands of my parents. My mother didn’t even like her. I briefly considered sharing that dislike with Hank as a way to bring her more in line with my thinking on the injustice of the matter, but I reasoned that it would be unnecessarily cruel.
    “So what? I’m more like a boy than you are. You couldn’t even climb a tree till I showed you how to do it, Jamie. I’d probably have more fun than you would. I
get
all that stuff. Don’t be mad, but you’re way more like a girl than I am.”
    I thought for a moment. There was no malice in Hank’s voice. She was simply stating a fact both of us were aware of, one that didn’t really bother either of us. She was right—we were an odd pair in our reversals.
    “I’m going to hate it. I’m going to
really
hate it.”
    “Don’t be such a baby,” Hank commanded, ever the pragmatist. “You’ll probably have a great time. And when it’s over, you can come home.”
    I had one last, terrible, burning question. “Hank?”
    “What?”
    “You won’t find a new best friend while I’m away, will you? We’ll still be, you know, best friends when I get back?”
    “Don’t be such a baby,” she repeated, but kindly this time.
    “Come on, swear?”
    “I swear.”
    “
Pinkie
-swear?”
    “We have to be face-to-face for pinkie swear, dummy.”
    “Okay, let’s just
pretend
we pinkie-sweared, then.”
    Hank sighed. “Okay, Jamie, pretend-pinkie-swear.”
    “Promise?”
    “I promise, Jamie. We’ll be best friends till the day we die.”
    Late that night, after I was sure my parents had gone to bed, I lit the candle in front of the mirror and tried to call Amanda so I could tell her what I had told Hank—that I was going away, even though I wanted to stay home that summer. I wanted to beg her to come with me, to find a mirror somewhere in the camp where I could see her.
    “Amanda, it’s me. It’s Jamie. I have to talk to you.” I closed my eyes and relaxed my throat and willed her to speak to me, through me. But no words suggested themselves. I tried again, concentrating harder this time. I squeezed my eyes so tightly shut that I saw purple supernovas exploding behind my eyelids and my head throbbed with the sheer effort of my concentration. I tried again. “Amanda,
please
come out. Don’t be mad. I have to go. I don’t have any choice. They’re
making
me go.”
    The candle flickered, and then went out.
    In the dark, I whispered, “Amanda . . . ? Is that you? Don’t be mad . . . please? It’s not my fault.” But when I switched on my bedside lamp, I was alone in the mirror.
    I lit the candle every night for seven nights, but she never came.
    A week later, I left for summer camp. In all that time it was as though Amanda had never even existed, as though she had been nothing but a flittering enchantment I had conjured up from the depths of my imagination.
    I spent three long, horrible weeks at Manitou as one of the camp’s two untouchables. I was in a cabin with five other boys, all of whom had been to Camp Manitou before, and all of whom seemed to be friends already. Worse still, they were friends in that way young boys have of being friends not based necessarily on shared experiences but simply on shared gender. They all spoke the same language, a language with which I had never been naturally fluent. Boys can smell difference at five hundred paces, and whatever they smelled in me, they hated everything about it on sight.
    The ringleader was a boy named John Prince. He was a big ugly kid with a forest fire of red hair and a face that was prone to flushing just as hot. He had small, cold fish eyes and fists like hams and, based on my last name, he nicknamed me Brown Nose that first night.
    The next night, I was short-sheeted and spent half an hour trying to unmake my bed while the five other boys laughed in the dark at my fumbling because I