Fun Camp by Gabe Durham Read Free Book Online

have souls or only half-souls. Until cloning has been fully researched, no one knows if clones will live productive lives as human beings. As humans, however, we have placed ourselves on top of a ladder, God’s power in our hands, and with time and research, any bumps and risks can be smoothed just like anything in the middle of being discovered. After school some days, I picture me in a clone sisterhood where we gang up on the prime-numbered sisters, good-naturedly, though I am not a prime number in the scenario. Seeing versions of ourselves everywhere is cautionary, and we exercise like madwomen then strip down to our underwear in full-length mirrors to compare. We all kiss different clones of the same boy and mix ourselves up, sometimes on purpose, in case it tastes somehow different. We get old and pass kidneys around and get mad at Dad together. All our birthdays fall on the same day and that day is my birthday.

COMPLAINT
    This is going to give me away but, whatever. Can you, Holly, an adult, presumably knowledgeable in the world’s rubbytouchy ways, tell me in good conscience that it’s my mind caught in the gutter when I lose my composure while singing, “Cool and creamy / We like cool and creamy / Cool and creamy / We like it a lot. // Do you like it in your face? / Yes I like it in my face. / In your face? / In my face! / In our face!” One go-through I could handle, but three? When in the second verse, we sing, “Do you like it in your ears?” And in the third, “hair?” Can you honesty tell me the song was not written with the intent of making naïve children sing about ejaculate? That an earlier draft was not instead called “Hot and Creamy” but that the author’s buddy got the bong out of his mouth long enough to suggest the author cover his tracks just a little? The truth is: You pulled me from morning cheers because I get the joke . The truth is: You barely got through your own scold with a straight face.

*
    Dear Mom,
    How often have you asked me what I would do without you? Five days apart, and we seem to have our answer: I would live, Mother. I live.
    Billy Matthews

HARD YEAR FOR EVERYBODY
    This game is Counselors-Only and begins on brooms. Fanciful, the way we like it, based on a movie my friend made when he saw a book a pretty girl was reading in the contemporary cinematic facelift of The Crucible . You drink and ride and drink and span the blacktop until you fall over. We rush around you and say what you’ll be, based on how you’re lying. Like one girl was spread-eagle so she became a patriotic ornithologist. One girl was dead so she became a ticket dispenser on I-90. One girl never fell so we cursed her children’s blood. It’s just fun, Holly. If you’ve got a better way of discovering God’s plan for my postgraduate life, scrawl it on a donut receipt, find some bored talons to stick it in, then tape up the bird and mail it wherever my soft body crumbled.

COMPLAINT
    What’s so fun about Water Pong? Since when is hydration a penalty?

CANTEEN BUCK CAPER
    It’s come to the staff’s attention that a traitor among you has started her own canteen buck mint. This camper would need access to a Xerox machine, the yesteryear restraint to keep from spending her last canteen buck, pale green cardstock paper, the moral bankruptcy not to care, and the brains to pull it off, so already that rules out most of you, including all first-timers and all inner city scholarship kids. A part of me just wants to shut down camp early over this mint—I am serious as a broken pact here—a mint whose counterfeit product is realistic enough to fool even myself, having surveyed thousands of spent bucks in search of the mark of the fake. It’s the fact that I can use the word thousands that tipped us off, our week-end sales usually hitting the mid to high hundreds. That and the tummy troubles evident among a certain contingent of Cabin 2 girls. And the series of increasingly elaborate disguises said girls