The dock at Camp Tamarack stuck forty feet out into Loon Lake. At seven o'clock, the water was flat and copper-colored, and my brother was sitting at the very end with his boots dangling over the edge.
He had changed out of his muddy clothes. He now wore a gray quarter-zip sweater, which for Elliot counted as a Hawaiian shirt.
I sat down next to him. Neither of us spoke. Whoever speaks first loses.
A loon surfaced about thirty feet out, looked at us, and dove again. I counted to forty. I counted to sixty.
I had once outlasted a seventh grader who had hidden a live frog in the teachers' lounge. I could outlast my brother.
"You saw," Elliot said.
I tried not to look pleased. I failed.
"I saw your hands," I said. "You let the rope go."
"I let the rope move. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"In a deposition, yes." He watched the spot where the loon had disappeared. "Ruth told you about Szabo."
"She told me why there's a bonfire."
He nodded. He took the almond tin out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers without opening it.
"Eight months," he said. "Every number is agreed, every clause is agreed. He sits across from me and waits, and I wait. He's waiting for something I can't put in a contract."
He set the tin on the dock between us. "And on Thursday, Dmitri from Compliance finally stopped apologizing to me."
"For what?"
"A typo, in March, on page forty of a filing nobody read." Elliot's voice did not change, but something underneath it did. "Seven months, Nora, he said sorry every time he passed my office. He thought I was keeping score."
"Were you?"
"I didn't even notice the typo." He looked at me. "They think there's a scoreboard in here, and there isn't. There's just a very ticklish man who learned at fourteen to never move his face."
I didn't say anything for a moment. The lake made small sounds against the posts.
"You could just tell them," I said. "Walk up to the fire. Say, 'I'm ticklish.' Sit down."
"Nobody would believe me."
He was right. They'd think it was a bluff. The Glacier, confessing to a weakness?
They'd assume it was strategy. They'd assume it was four-dimensional chess.
"So what do you want?" I asked.
He took a folded napkin out of his back pocket. It was a dining-hall napkin, and he had written on it in pen, in his small, careful handwriting. At the top it said: THE PINEAPPLE ACCORDS (REVISED).
I read it. Then I read it again, because I read things twice when they matter.
1. One participant only: N. Vance.
2. Duration: not to exceed ten seconds.
3. Location: ribs. Nowhere else.
4. The word "pineapple" ends all activity immediately.
5. No phones. No recording. No exceptions.
6. Afterward, nobody apologizes to anybody.
At the bottom, he had signed it. Below his name was a blank line labeled Witness.
"Ruth," he said. "If she'll do it."
"And you want me to do it. In front of everyone."
"I want it done by someone who will stop." He met my eyes. "You always stopped. Even at seven, even when you were winning, the second I said it, you stopped."
I hadn't known that he remembered. I had to look at the lake for a moment.
"Okay," I said. "But I have one revision."
He raised an eyebrow. One millimeter.
"Rule seven," I said. "You say it out loud. In front of everyone. That you agree."
He considered this the way he considered everything, like a man reading the back of a contract for trapdoors.
"Accepted," he said.
The bonfire was built in a ring of stones beside the lake. Somebody had found marshmallows. Somebody else had found a guitar, which Ruth confiscated on sight.
Thirty people sat on logs and folding chairs in a wide half-circle. Grant sat in the front row with his elbows on his knees. Dez sat beside him, holding the manila envelope like a holy relic.
Marisol was there. Dmitri was there. Everyone was there.
Ruth stood beside the fire with a metal bucket.
"Phones," she said.
There was some grumbling. Ruth simply held out the bucket. One by one, thirty phones went in.
Ruth put a lid on it. Then she sat on the lid.
Elliot stood up.
The fire popped. Thirty people went quiet. I watched them watch him, and I realized most of them had never once seen him stand up without a slide deck behind him.
"Team Loon lost," he said. "Terms were terms. Before we begin, here are the conditions."
He read the napkin out loud. All seven rules. His voice was exactly the voice he used in boardrooms, calm and level and slightly bored.
When he got to rule four, a few people glanced at each other. When he got to rule six, Dmitri made a small noise.
"Rule seven," Elliot said, and looked at the crowd. "I'm doing this because I chose to. I agree to it. Nobody here talked me into it."
He paused. "Grant tried. He's not very good at it."
A few people laughed. Grant put a hand on his heart.
Ruth took the napkin from him. She signed it on her knee, on the bucket of phones, with the pen she used for crosswords.
"Witnessed," she said.
Elliot sat down on an empty log at the center of the half-circle. He straightened his back. He placed his hands on his knees. He looked at me.
I stood up. My legs felt like they belonged to someone less sure of herself.
I walked over and stood in front of him. Nobody breathed. Somewhere behind me, Dez whispered, "Oh my God, it's her. It was always going to be her."
"Last chance," I said quietly. "You can still just say it."
"Ready," my brother said.
"You agree?"
"I agree. Proceed."
I want to be precise about what happened next, because thirty people have told the story since, and the story keeps getting longer. Here is the truth.
I reached out and poked him once, lightly, in the ribs. One finger. Left side.
Elliot Vance, senior partner, nine years without a chuckle, made a noise like a goose discovering a trampoline.
It was enormous. It was high and honking and utterly undignified. It burst out of him so fast that he actually looked surprised by it.
His elbows clamped to his sides. His knees shot up. His whole face, the face he'd spent twenty-six years holding still, collapsed into a helpless, crinkle-eyed grin.
I wiggled my fingers along his side for maybe two more seconds.
He honked again. Then he wheezed. Then, out on the dark water, a loon answered him, a long, wobbling call that sounded exactly like a second opinion.
"PINEAPPLE," Elliot gasped. "Pineapple. Pineapple."
I stopped instantly. I stepped back and put both hands in the air, the way I used to at the kitchen table. Four seconds, start to finish.
For a moment, the only sound was the fire.
Then my brother started laughing again. Not because anyone was touching him. Nobody was.
He sat on that log with his hands over his face. He laughed at the goose noise, and the loon, and the napkin, and nine years of a face that never moved. He laughed until he had to hold onto the log.
Grant went first. He let out one stunned bark of a laugh and then couldn't stop. Then Marisol joined in, then Dmitri, with tears rolling down his face.
Dmitri kept saying, "I'm not sorry, I'm not sorry," which was technically rule six. Then all of them were going, thirty people around a fire, laughing with a man who was laughing at himself.
Ruth, still sitting on the bucket of phones, took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.
"Eight letters," she said, to no one. "Starts with T."
It took a long time for everyone to settle down. When they did, Dez stood up with the envelope.
"The sealed pot," he said, his voice cracking slightly. "Six hundred and forty dollars. Let's see who called it."
He opened the guesses one at a time and read them aloud.
"Spiders, water, Dmitri." Laughter. "Feelings, feelings, geese—Grant, that's your weakness, not his. Clowns. The 1998 Knicks."
He kept going. Thirty-two slips. Not one of them said ticklish. Not a single person in the firm had guessed it.
Then Dez reached into the bottom of the envelope and pulled out one more slip. It wasn't handwritten like the others. It was a typed card, folded in half.
He read it silently. All the color left his face.
"Thirty-three," Dez said. "There were thirty-three slips. I thought I miscounted. There's a twenty folded inside it."
"What does it say?" Grant asked.
Dez turned the card around so the firelight caught it. One word, typed in capitals: TICKLISH.
And underneath it, the signature.
MR. ANANAS.
"He's here," Dez whispered. "He's at this camp. He's been here the whole time."
Up next: The Dunmore Room
Continue to Part 5 →