“Hey, Pete,” Dave Snider would start. He’d be sitting in his chair, wearing one of the T-shirts with the cut-off arms that displayed his overdeveloped biceps to advantage. He had a Charles Atlas set at home, Rob knew, and subscribed to bodybuilding magazines.

“Yeah, Dave?” Pete would answer. They both had classic ducktails, which they wore covered with grease. They found Rob’s private-school English-style haircut ludicrous. Pete was paralyzed from the neck down, but he’d somehow gained second place in the cabin’s pecking order. Dave combed his duck’s ass for him.

“What’s black and crawls and catches flies?”

“Roy Campanella!”

Raucous laughter, in which the rest of the cabin joined while Rob blushed. “I don’t think that’s very nice,” he’d said the first time.

“He doesn’t think it’s very nice,” Dave mimicked. “What weighs two thousand pounds and twitches?”

“Moby Spaz!”

They called these jokes “spaz jokes.” What bothered Rob most about them was that they reminded him of the kinds of jokes his brothers and their medical-student friends would tell, having a game of pool in their father’s rec room, to relax after classes. (“Bring your friends over anytime, boys. You too, Rob.”) Except that theirs were supposed to be true stories. They played endless practical jokes on each other, most of them involving parts of cadavers they would cut off during dissection: eyeballs in the teacup, hands in the coat pocket.

“Hey, we were doing this old guy, and I thought, What the hell, and I cut off his tool, it’s all brown and shrivelled up, like they get, and I slipped it into my briefcase. So I go down to the Babloor, and I have a few beers, and I go into the can and I open my fly, but I stick this old guy’s dork out instead of my own. So I stand there like I’m pissing, and I wait till another guy comes in, and I shake it and it comes off in my hand. So I throw it down and I say, ‘Damn thing never worked anyway.’ You should’ve seen the look on his face!”

They related rumours from Emergency at the hospital, most of which seemed to involve women with broken Coke bottles stuck in them or men who had been masturbating with the hot water tap. “Had to get a plumber to saw him out. Came in with the tap still on and two feet of pipe.” “I heard of one with a crayon. Got stuck in the bladder. He came in because he was pissing blue and he couldn’t figure out why.”

“I heard about one with a snake.”

“Why do you tell those stories?” Rob asked them one night when he felt courageous.

“Why do, you listen to them?” James grinned.

“You’ll do it, too,” Adrian told him. “Wait and see.” Then, after the others had gone home, he said, more seriously, “You have to tell them. I know you think it’s pretty gross, but you don’t know what it’s like. It’s real life out there. You have to laugh or go crazy.” Rob tried to reject this, but it haunted him. Real life would be too much for him, he would not be able to take it. He would not be able to laugh. He would go crazy. He would run out into the snow with no galoshes, he would vanish, he would be lost forever.

“What weighs two thousand pounds and has an exploding head?”

“Moby Hydrocephalic!”

“That’s enough!” Rob said, trying to assert his authority.

“Look, Groaner,” Dave said. “You’re here to see we have a good time, right? Well, we’re having a good time.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “You don’t like it, you can beat me up.”

“Sure, go on,” Dave said. “Do your Boy Scout good deed for the week. Kill a cripple.” Bullying him with his own guilt.

It didn’t help that the other counsellor, Gordon Holmes, encouraged them. He smuggled beer and cigarettes into the cabin for them, ogled their girlie magazines, and told them which of the girl counsellors were “easy outs.”

“Hey, make out last night?” Dave would ask him in the morning.

“Not bad, not bad.”

“She go down for ya?”

Gordon’s secretive smile. Patting Old Spice on the back of his neck.

“Who was it, Pammer the Slammer?”

“Every time she pounds my back I get a bone on.”

“Hey, was it Jo-Anne?”

“Naw, she’s a crip. Gord wouldn’t take out a crip, would ya, Gord?”

“You got to go along with them,” Gordon told Rob. “Kid them a little. They’re frustrated, they got normal emotions just like you and me.” He punched Rob on the shoulder. “Take it easy, man, you think too much.”

Gordon went to a public high school in East York. His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom he called “the old lady.” He’d got the job with the camp through the Big Brothers. He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, and Rob could think of many good points about him, but he couldn’t bear to be around him for long. It did no good for Rob to tell himself that Gord would probably end up as a garage mechanic, that the kind of girls he talked about so freely were what his own mother would call “cheap,” that he would get one of them pregnant and have to get married and end up in a dingy, overcrowded apartment, drinking beer in front of the TV while his wife nagged him about the laundry. He was envious anyway, listening despite himself to the sagas of back seats and forbidden mickeys at the drive-in, of heavy petting, forays into undergarments by Gord’s daring fingers, triumphs over hostile elastic straps, conquests of breasts. He resented this sleazy freedom even though he knew he wouldn’t enjoy it himself, wouldn’t know what to say or where to put his hands.

He himself had never taken out anyone but his mother’s friends’ daughters, pallid little girls who needed to be escorted to their own private-school dances and didn’t know anyone else to ask. He bought them wrist corsages and steered them swiftly, correctly, around the floor in their dresses like layers of pastel toilet paper, their small wired bosoms pressing lightly into his chest, his hands against their backs feeling the rows of hooks that might conceivably be undone; but no, that would be too embarrassing. Though he’d sometimes felt his crotch tighten during the joyless foxtrots (he stood out the few chaste rock numbers the hired band would attempt), he hadn’t liked any of these girls, though he tried to make sure they had a good time. He had even kissed one of them goodnight, because he felt she was expecting it. It was three years ago, when he was still wearing bands on his teeth. So was the girl, and when he’d kissed her harder than he’d intended, their teeth had locked painfully together, at her front door, in full view of the entire street. Anyone watching would have thought it was a passionate embrace, but he could still remember the panic in her eyes, though he’d repressed her name.

Rob turned Jordan right, onto the Nature Walk that ran in a meandering oval through the small woods behind the boys’ cabins. It was paved, like all the other walks. The trees were labelled, and there was a little glass case at the far end of the oval where Bert the Nert, who was a nature buff, put a new exhibit every day. He’d taken Jordan on the Nature Walk several times before, stopping to read the labels on the trees, pointing out chipmunks and once a stray cat. Hardly anyone else seemed to go on it. He liked to wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn’t shy about his voice when there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert’s repertoire that stuck in his throat when the assembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his energetic accordion.

“Your name is the name of a famous river,” he told her. He hoped she would be pleased by that. He wondered if her parents had known about her, about what she was going to be like, when they named her, and whether they’d felt later that the expensive-sounding name was wasted because she would never match it, never sip cocktails on a terrace or smile like Grace Kelly in cool lipstick. But they must have known; it said in her file that it was a birth defect. She had one brother and one sister, both normal, and her father was something in a bank.