Chapter Text
6PM
The air is hot and thick enough that it barely feels like air anymore. Evaporated sweat and incense smoke must make up forty percent of it by volume. It’s like swimming through blood.
The sunscreen they all have to wear forms a protective layer on Harrow’s face, from behind which she glowers at the other two members of Group West. Harrow (♇) is always glowering: the other two suspect it is the only expression her face can make. Who wouldn’t glower? If there’s one thing that Group West can agree on, it’s that being in the Summer Scouts sucks ass. It would take real weirdos to not be frowning all the time.
Gideon (♁), who is a weirdo, is smiling at the stupid joke she just made. She spends her time telling stupid jokes because it pisses Harrow off, and because it makes Ianthe roll his eyes, and because sometime’s Ianthe’s hot sister will be in earshot and hear her tell them and laugh as she walks by, which almost makes camp worth it.
Camp is not worth it. Ianthe (♆) needs to wear twice as much sunscreen as the other two put together. Sweat keeps plastering his long, nasty hair to his pale, nasty face. He’s never had to be this uncomfortable in his life, and he makes sure that the other two members of Group West hear it, at length.
The cabins are dark and miserable. The beds are itchy and miserable. The food is uniform in flavor (the flavor is ‘bad’) and wildly inconsistent in texture. This is a perfect combination that means everyone finds it disgusting.
In a week, they will be able to go home and stop thinking about God or the Devil or the prison he put her in. In a week they’ll be in their own beds and it’ll be someone else’s turn to guard the Devil’s tomb.
Right now, though, they’re walking towards the bonfire, and Gideon is saying, “What do you think he’s going to talk about this time? Maybe it won’t be about how we all suck and should hate ourselves more. Maybe this is the week he mixes it up and it’s a slam poetry jam.”
“Griddle,” says Harrow, “you are much less funny than you think you are.”
“Harrow,” says Gideon, “go eat a dick.”
“Mine’s available, Harry,” says Ianthe, which makes Harrow want to throttle him.
Gideon does think she’s pretty funny. Gideon is tall and good at sports and naturally nice in a way that Harrow and Ianthe aren’t. Gideon is the only person at Canaan Camp who still remembers how to make jokes, even if they aren’t very good. That’s not true, Ianthe still tells jokes. But all of Ianthe’s jokes are mean. Gideon likes trusting people and resents that she’s not able to.
Gideon is the only one of them who ever tries to be nice to people, which means everyone hates her.
Harrow would never eat a dick, because Harrow hates eating and hates touching other human beings and above all of that she hates ever being anywhere without a half-dozen layers of black between her and the world. Harrow resents anything that reminds her she has a physical body clinging to her bones. Harrow resents not being a marble statue left to stand watch over a graveyard somewhere cold with short days and long nights.
Harrow is the only one of them who actually seems to care about the Devil, which means everyone hates her.
Nothing about Ianthe is available. He feels like a shadow. He’s pale and insubstantial: when he isn’t standing next to his sister, he looks incomplete. You could claw at Ianthe’s facade of smarmy, sleazy indifference for years and find nothing but fake Halloween blood under your nails and an infinite Matryoshka doll of new facades nesting underneath it.
Nobody needs a reason to hate Ianthe, and if they do, he goes out of his way to give it to them.
Instead of throttling Ianthe, Harrow presses her thin, dry lips together and says, “We’re going to be late.”
Gideon groans and says, “But we left early as balls. ”
“And we have been walking for over half an hour.”
“As a matter of fact, we were late five minutes ago,” says Ianthe, who hasn’t looked up from his phone the entire time they’ve been walking. Ianthe loves delivering bad news. It’s the only sort of information he’ll divulge without being forced to.
“Fuck,” says Gideon. “You could have said something, you desaturated stick of asshole.”
“I could have,” said Ianthe, “and yet I didn’t. Shall we entertain other counterfactuals?”
♇ ♁ ♆
Ianthe’s phone conversation is going something like this:
Ianthe💖: babs, this is my most desperate plea. you must stage a rescue mission before corona and I die from dreadful company.
tern it up: if awful company could kill corona wouldve died in the womb
Ianthe💖: when I get back I am going to feed you your own tongue.
tern it up: lolll
♇ ♁ ♆
“We can’t be that far,” says Gideon, who is capable of hope against hope.
“We can,” says Ianthe, who isn’t.
“You are both blind and stupid,” says Harrow, “it’s right up ahead.”
And there’s the bonfire. The Bonfire Captain smiles at them and says, “Group West! Early again, guys.” This is one of his little jokes.
“Yeah, we were held up. Werewolf attack. It’s okay, I fought them all off and Harrow and Ianthe swooned dramatically and said good job, Gideon, your biceps are huge, ” says Gideon.
“Ha ha ha,” says the Bonfire Captain. He is the type of person who says ‘ha’ instead of laughing. “Sit down, folks.”
He throws more incense onto the bonfire. It smells of lots of things, none good: heretic bones, flowers plucked from places they weren’t meant to grow, shards of crystal from blown out radios, penitent orisons, putrefied apples.
Harrowhark sits as rigidly as if she had been taxidermied. The angle at which she holds her head seems to cloak her in a defensive forcefield that prevents anybody from approaching her and risking her military-grade scowl.
Gideon sits with appalling posture that her spine is going to regret in about five years. She can’t sit still, either, folding and unfolding her legs. The fire is reflected in her sunglasses.
Ianthe has almost melted into the shadows. He has a pathological slouch, a way of hiding behind somebody socially while in actual, physical space he’s right next to them. He’s letting his buttermilk waterfall of hair hide half his face.
The young are useful and dangerous, which is why the Summer Scouts need to exist.
The Bonfire Captain says, “Is everybody having a good time?”
A few people half-heartedly fake it.
“I Said,” the Captain repeats, “Is everyone having a Good Time?” He has an uncanny control over his cadence. His confrontationally cheerful expression makes it threateningly clear that he will repeat the question ten thousand times if he has to.
Everyone makes some vague sound of assent, except for Ianthe, who gets away with it by being invisible.
“We’re all going to hell for lying,” says Gideon quietly, which makes Harrow fume and Ianthe snort.
The Bonfire Captain says, “You know, I wasn’t the most popular when I was a kid.” The dread sinks in. A story is inevitable. Gideon would pay cash to be thrown into the bonfire instead of listening to it, but the free market has yet to meet her demands.
“There wasn’t anyone who had my back. There were a couple of guys I was friends with, and we had a grand old time, sure. But when the chips came down, I could only trust one of them. The other guy, I tried being nice to him. I tried to be the best friend I could. But at the end of it all, he just resented us. Whenever we’d sign up for something, he’d get cold feet.”
If Ianthe’s eyes rolled any harder they could power a small mill.
“So when it came down to it, when we had to do something that actually mattered? He chickened out. Tried to take a third option. It worked out real badly for him. That’s when the Devil gets you, folks. When you think you’ve figured out an easy way out. There’s no easy way to get anything worth getting.”
“This is drivel,” whispers Harrowhark.
“Damn right,” says Gideon.
Ianthe says, “Do you think we’ll be sent to the cabin?”
“Don’t ask that,” says Gideon, “You’ve jinxed it. I was hoping God would forget about us or something.”
“God doesn’t forget about anything,” says Harrow.
“We’re only here for another week, and they haven’t sent us there yet,” says Ianthe. “Surely you can put two and two together.”
“It’s called optimism, douchebag. And don’t call me Shirley.”
“Hey there, Group West!” says the Captain. “Feel like guarding the Tomb tonight?”
Ianthe says, “It is so difficult being right all the time.”
Gideon says, “It’s so difficult not punching you in the face.”
“Oh, please do. I might get sent home.”
Gideon does not punch him in the face, even though she thinks he deserves it. What’s done is done. Tonight they are going into the woods to meet the Devil.