The number in Dez's notebook was four hundred dollars.
I want it on the record that I said no. I said it immediately, and I said it in my vice-principal voice, the one that once stopped a food fight mid-throw. Dez put the notebook away so fast he nearly lost the pencil.
"Respect," he said. "I'll mark you down as a hold."
"Mark me down as his sister."
"Same thing," he said. "Statistically."
By Friday, the sealed-guess pot had grown to five hundred and sixty dollars. Twenty-eight people had put twenty dollars into a manila envelope to guess what could make my brother crack. Dez kept the envelope in a locked desk drawer and checked on it every hour, the way new parents check a crib.
Camp Tamarack sat on the north shore of Loon Lake, three hours from the city. It was a children's summer camp from 1952 until someone realized adults would pay four times as much for the same bunks. The cabins had names like Chipmunk and Bobcat. The dining hall still had a sign that said NO RUNNING, NO SPLASHING, NO EXCEPTIONS.
Ruth stepped off the bus first. She wore a fleece vest and carried a clipboard, a whistle and the Sunday crossword. She blew the whistle once to get our attention, then looked faintly embarrassed that it had worked.
"Teams," she said, reading from the clipboard. "Team Loon, captained by Elliot Vance. Team Heron, captained by Grant Holloway."
She read the names. Dez was on neither team.
"Mr. Achebe has asked to remain neutral," Ruth said. "As the bookmaker."
"Switzerland," Dez said, raising a hand. "I'm Switzerland."
Then she read my name. I was on Team Heron. Grant's team.
Grant turned to me with the slow, delighted smile of a man who had just been handed the ball on the one-yard line. On the other side of the gravel lot, Elliot did not turn at all. He was reading the camp map as if it were a merger agreement with a hidden clause.
Our cabins were assigned by team. I shared Heron Cabin 2 with four women from the analyst pod and a raccoon that visited at night. One of my bunkmates was Marisol Ortega, a thirty-one-year-old associate and former lifeguard. She treated every body of water as a personal responsibility.
"Can I ask you something?" Marisol said, unrolling her sleeping bag. "And you can totally not answer."
"That's usually how questions work."
"What's he like? At home?"
I thought about it. Elliot at fourteen, writing the Accords in pencil. Elliot at twenty, driving four hours to my school play and leaving before anyone could thank him. Elliot at thirty-five, at our father's funeral, standing at the back so nobody would see his face.
"He's exactly like this," I said. "Just with more cereal."
Marisol accepted this. Everyone accepted it. That was the trouble with my brother. He had built a face so convincing that even I sometimes forgot what was behind it.
The first official event was the canoe relay.
Each team put four people in a canoe and paddled out to a red buoy and back. Elliot announced, before anyone else spoke, that he would paddle stern. Nobody argued. You did not argue with the Glacier about steering.
Before he climbed in, I watched him take a small tin from his jacket pocket. He opened it, removed a single almond, and ate it. Then he put the tin away.
I knew that tin. He'd had a version of it since law school: one almond before every negotiation, never two. When I asked him about it once, he said two almonds would be "a different strategy."
"Is he eating a nut?" Grant whispered beside me.
"He's preparing," I said.
"For a canoe race?"
"Everything is a negotiation," I said. "That's his whole personality."
The race started badly for Team Loon. Their bow paddler was Dmitri from Compliance, who had never been in a boat and steered by apologizing to the water. Elliot corrected for him with long, silent strokes. By the buoy, they had caught us.
On the way back, Dmitri dropped his paddle. He reached for it. The canoe tipped hard to the left.
Marisol, who was on Team Loon, did what any lifeguard would do. She lunged across the middle thwart and grabbed the nearest steady object to rebalance the boat. The nearest steady object was my brother's side.
What happened next took perhaps one second.
Elliot jerked like someone had plugged him into a wall socket. A noise escaped him. It was very short and very high, somewhere between a hiccup and a startled duck.
His paddle shot straight up into the air and spun twice. The canoe rocked violently. Four grown professionals grabbed the gunwales and held their breath.
The canoe did not tip. The paddle came down. Elliot caught it one-handed and resumed steering.
His face was completely, perfectly blank.
Nobody in the canoe said anything. On shore, thirty people stood very still. A real loon called from somewhere across the lake, as if asking what that had been.
Team Loon reached the dock four seconds ahead of us. Elliot climbed out, straightened his windbreaker, and walked toward the dining hall without a word.
Grant stood at the water's edge with his hands on his hips. He was not looking at the scoreboard. He was looking at Marisol, then at the canoe, then at the back of my brother's windbreaker.
"Huh," Grant said.
Dez wrote something in his notebook. He underlined it twice.
By dinner, there were four new guesses in the envelope.
I know this because Dez told me, and because the people who placed them were not subtle. They stood near the dining hall bulletin board, arguing in whispers.
"It was the water," said one of the guys from Team Heron. "He's afraid of water."
"He paddled a canoe," said Marisol. "Voluntarily."
"Maybe it was Dmitri. Maybe he's afraid of Dmitri."
"Everyone's afraid of Dmitri in a boat."
I ate my chili and said nothing. Across the hall, Elliot sat at the end of the Loon table. He was cutting a cornbread muffin into four equal quarters.
He did not look up. He also, I noticed, kept his elbows tight against his sides, the way you would hold an umbrella in the wind.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from our mother, who had joined the twenty-first century two years earlier and had immediately mastered the caps lock.
ARE YOU TWO GETTING ALONG. DID HE EAT. HE NEVER EATS AT THESE THINGS.
He's eating cornbread, I wrote. In quarters.
THATS MY BOY, she wrote back. Then, a moment later: REMEMBER THE ACCORDS.
I put the phone face-down on the table. When your mother is sending you treaty reminders, you know the weekend is going badly.
After dinner, Ruth stood and tapped her water glass with a spoon. The room went quiet.
"Field Day begins at nine tomorrow," she said. "Five events. Winners get bragging rights and the last of the good coffee, and losers do dishes. Questions?"
Grant stood up. He did not raise his hand. Grant never raised his hand. He believed hands were for catching.
"I've got a proposal," he said. "Make it interesting."
"It's already interesting," Ruth said. "There's a raccoon."
"Higher stakes." Grant turned to face the Loon table. "Captain to captain. Whichever team loses tomorrow, the losing captain stands up at the bonfire and shows the room what makes him crack."
"Define 'shows,'" someone called.
"No dodging, no speeches," Grant said. "Show us."
The room made a sound. It was the collective intake of thirty breaths.
I looked at my brother. My brother looked at his cornbread.
"And if you lose?" Elliot asked, still not looking up.
"Then I do it. I've got nothing to hide." Grant spread his arms wide. "I cry at dog food commercials, I'm afraid of geese, I'm an open book."
"You're a pamphlet," someone muttered.
Ruth set down her spoon. "Elliot. You're under no obligation."
That, I realized too late, was exactly the wrong thing to say. You could ask my brother to do almost anything. You could not tell him he didn't have to. Telling him he didn't have to was like telling a river it was allowed to stop.
He set down his knife. He lined it up with the edge of his plate. He looked up at Grant for the first time all evening.
"Accepted," Elliot said.
The dining hall exploded. Dez was already writing so fast his pencil squeaked.
I sat there, frozen, with a spoonful of chili halfway to my mouth. Because I understood something nobody else in that room understood yet.
I was on Team Heron. If we won tomorrow, my brother would have to stand by a fire and show everyone his weakness. And there was only one person on our team who knew what it was.
Across the room, Grant caught my eye and gave me a slow, friendly wink.
Up next: Field Day
Continue to Part 3 →