Mama, help me. Summer could try to summon her mother all she wanted, but she was not there.
Summer was alone.
Taured stopped walking and faced her. Summer looked around. She’d been so focused on her thoughts that she hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going.
They were in the hallway, near his office, but he’d walked past it. Only two doors stood on this side of the hallway, which dead-ended at a brick wall. Taured opened the closest one. He stood with his hand on the knob, smiling at her.
“Go on in,” he said. “I’m going to get Doc.”
Fear drove her feet forward, through the doors and into—
Darkness.
She looked back at Taured and for a second he smiled. Then the door closed.
Summer was alone in the dark.
11
Then
A year later
“You swing like a rookie, Summertime.”
Her name sounded wet in his mouth. She didn’t like it when he called her that anymore.
Her hands gripped the bat, her breathing hitching in terror as she stood over home plate; she wouldn’t look at him, but she could always feel his eyes as they probed. It was a sixth sense she wished she hadn’t acquired on that terrible afternoon a year ago. Since the day she’d overheard his conversation with Sammy, everything had been…different. The change was noticeable to everyone; she’d gone from being attentive and eager to sullen and rebellious overnight.
“We don’t have all day.” He scratched his chin, eyes narrowed, focused on her.
She took the stance he’d taught her, and it pained her to do so—to obey him—even if it were something she cared little about, like softball. Softball was merely the newest way he’d found to torture them. Before that, Taured had become obsessed with the chemicals companies were putting in food: he made lists of bad foods and good foods, posting what they were and were not allowed to eat on the doors of the dining hall.
“Isn’t that very Luther of him?” her mother had mumbled when she first saw them nailed to the door. As the weeks went by, Taured had added to the list, saying that anyone who ate what was on them would be sent to isolation, insisting they work together as a community to bring about change in their own bodies. The list grew and their meals shrank. For three months they ate one meal a day consisting of nothing but broths and the vegetables they grew at the compound. Taured called it detox fasting. The crux: people started passing out, falling down while they worked outside, malnourished and dehydrated from the laxatives he made them take. When productivity went down, the food came back, this time in the form of potatoes, which they also grew themselves. When he got something in his head, Taured’s obsession would overtake the compound.
They were less hungry than a year ago, but as his focus shifted to softball, he was learning more creative ways to break their bodies.
He’d keep Kids’ Camp on the field behind the compound from sunrise to long past dark, suspending schoolwork, with no exception for the heat. They sat beneath the unrelenting sun, waiting for their turn to be “conditioned.” She heard the boys refer to their long days of softball as boot camp. They woke, they ate, they ran two miles in the desert, and after that Taured would have them work out in the obstacle course he’d created, having them do sit-ups and push-ups at various points until it was time to break into teams and play softball. In the evenings, they’d have more games, during which the parents would gather to watch. Most everyone was pretty okay at it, but there were a couple kids who largely sucked. Summer was one of them, and she was on this week’s rotation of humiliation.
“What’s the matter with you? I’ve never seen a more useless woman.” He was rough when he repositioned her, his eyes glassy. She recognized the look inside of them; his eyes got like that when he was in his bad moods. When he was in one of these moods he was dangerous; he’d put words in your mouth if he needed to punish you, create conflict where there was none. Her dread picked up speed when she looked over at third base and saw that a kid named Skye was pitching. Kids’ Camp was divided into the boys’ side and the girls’ side, and the two sides didn’t interact much as a rule. But what she did know about the man/boy who had eyelashes that looked like pale spider legs was that he was cruel. And worse than that: Taured liked him. Skye made eye contact with her, and she felt a plunging in her belly as his flaxen hair lifted in the slight breeze. There was a look of solid determination on his face. He wound the ball above his shoulder in little circles. Taured had told him what to do, she realized, and he wasn’t going to take it easy on her. She licked the sweat from her upper lip and glanced to her left, where Taured had the men set up the makeshift bleachers with benches from the cafeteria.