Soul 4 Sale

Listen, because I’m going to go through this quickly.

My mom didn’t know what to do with me because I kept fucking and stealing. Sometimes I’d even steal from the guys I was fucking. Nothing serious, just change and smokes. She said she had enough. In fact, she screamed it till she went blue in the face. My mother turned into a blue balloon at a shitty party. Sometimes I wish I was a little pin.

She found an ad in the local paper that she read religiously.

CAMP FOR PROBLEM KIDS $250

I almost cut her tires so we couldn’t go, but then I got to thinking that a bunch of fucked up kids like me all in one place would be a riot. She threatened to call my dad and the cops if I didn’t go. Between those two, I don’t know who I hate more.

She dropped me off at a dinky ferry crossing and told me that this was my last chance to make things right. She’d had it up to here (holding her hand way above her head). I thought ‘Jesus Christ mom I know you run the community theater and should probably stop conveying every god damn feeling you have with a beaten to death cliché.’ I answered “All right” and gave her a weak side hug. I’m not an easy kid I know it.

The ferry dropped us off on some dusty island and a lot of the kids looked up at the sky. Maybe they wondered too, “Why are we so damned that we ended up here?” Out came this guy dressed in a really unfortunate vomit-beige and green khaki combo coupled with what my mom would call a ‘100-watt smile.’ He was the furthest thing from authoritative or holy.

The first week was okay. I met a girl named Rachel, but I called her Bambi. She was doe-eyed, she had freckles all over her face, and she looked like she would snap like a twig if you blew too hard in her direction. But I liked her, and I decided ‘She’s how I’m going to get through this.’ She was sweet enough to switch bunks when I asked. I wanted the bottom. Just in case.

The second week, things started to get weird. I was given garden duty, which was fine. Mom always said I had a green thumb. My favourite are orchids, they’re finicky; just when you think they’re dead and gone and you’re ready to toss them they surprise you by blooming again. Like a fucking phoenix or something.

Rachel got secretary duty, so she was attached to the leaders. She told me from the top bunk that she started to like 100-watt-smile guy. The crickets screamed outside. ‘Really!?’ But she thought it was love. I wanted to say ‘there is no love in a place like this,’ but I just stayed quiet and cold and let her dreams dissipate into the hot summer air.

The third week was fucked up. It started badly because they moved Rachel from my barracks and I barely saw her the following days. The quick morning prayer we usually said at breakfast grew to be an hour-long before every meal and was broken into two sections. The first one, a quiet mediation on how we could do our duties more efficiently, the second, a chant about how God is in the doing of things. 100-watt smile guy circled us one-by-one to make sure we were chanting clearly and placed a hand on our back and one on our chest, then pressed if we weren’t loud enough. Puke.

It was the Thursday or Friday; I was losing track of days. They banned personal belongings in the barracks so I couldn’t write in my diary anymore.

At the end of most days, I passed by the main cabin. If Rachel was done, we’d skip showers and sneak down to the water and gossip till she fell asleep on my stomach. I’d get us back when I heard a leader yelling curfew in the distance.

But on that Thursday or Friday, as I got near the main cabin, I heard a horrid shriek and then a heavy thump. Then a whimper.

I ran to the window for a better look, even though I knew what was going on.

Mr. 100-watt smile was shirtless and breathing heavily. He spoke in slurs that came from a mouth that had changed into a beast’s. Tied to a fallen chair I could make out Rachel, motionless and colourless.

I quickly snuck to the back of the cabin and pushed in a screened window. It made a sound as it fell, but he didn’t hear because all his growling. I then threw myself into the devil’s den.

I crawled to the hallway of the front room, where I hid behind the wall. I had him locked in. I reached into my garden bag and pulled out my favourite shears. They were rusty but still sharp enough to cut through tough stems, dead branches, and hopefully flesh.

I charged and pushed the shears as far as I could into him. He fell back, shocked. His awful chanting switching to horrible gurgle and gagging sounds. But I had already turned away. I was only thinking of Rachel, hurrying over to check her breath.

Just breathe, just breathe,

Rachel please just breathe.

As if she was answering my prayers, she sucked in deep and long. Her face wasn’t blue anymore, but reddish and bright and full of life. I knew she would live, and at that moment I swear she had wings and they were on fire.

It was pretty easy for the camp owners to chalk up the incident to a bad apple leader and a problem kid with an over zealous imagination. There weren’t any witnesses when it happened, and most reporters, like the one that came from the same newspaper that my mom got that fucking ad from in the first place, made the kids’ views on the camp seem ‘unreliable.’ Still, the marks on Rachel’s neck were enough for the police to call an investigation.

The following month, a reporter would ask me “well dear, why’d you go all psycho on your camp leader what really did set you off” and I responded something so fucking badass, I said, “listen closely, you idiots might not be seeing it really for what it is but if I had been given another chance I’d stab every single one of them.” When the dumb reporter dared ask why, and I responded so coldly, almost quietly, “cause it was giving cult. And no one needs another fucking cult.” I looked over to my mom and the way she looked at me wide-eyed and afraid and like I was something to be restrained now rather than just tamed. I ran my hand over the ankle monitor that I covered in orange stickers and I thought shit, maybe the place did change me, even if it’s not in the way that my poor mom wanted.

The end.