Of Trophies and Hidden Depths
Tom didn’t want to be here. He never wanted to be here. But every year, the orphanage sent him to summer camp.
He knew everyone that attended was an orphan. That was the whole point. But he didn’t care about all the other kids that had no parents.
They weren’t special. Not like him.
Tom leaned back against the wooden cabin’s outer wall and listened to the water lapping at the dock where, in a few days, he’d be forced into a kayak and out onto the lake.
He wondered idly if anyone would drown this year. It had happened before, two summers ago. They’d dredged the lake for the boy’s body, and Tom had watched them pull him out, bloated and grey. They’d found another body, too - shrunken, skeletal, and evidently a surprise to the police. He’d wondered often, since, who that corpse had once been, and how many months - years? - it had spent under the murky water, its dead eyes watching camps of orphans paddle on the surface.
He’d asked a grass snake, last year.
“I don’t go down to the lake’s depths,” it had hissed. “There are many secrets there, and I seek only sustenance.”
Tom had sneered at the snake, and watched it disappear into the undergrowth around the lake’s edge.
This year, Tom wondered once again what the lake hid from prying eyes. He wondered why the orphanage continued to insist on sending him to this collection of wooden cabins in the middle of nowhere, to spend a week playing team-building games with utterly ordinary children. He wondered why they didn’t recognise his superiority.
Well, this year he wouldn’t be playing. He’d been practising some of his special skills in the lead-up to camp. Billy Stubbs had been quite entertaining in his grief, and Amy and Dennis’s trip to the cave, with the ghost story of the camp’s lake-bound corpse, had been the highlight of his spring.
The box in his wardrobe was yet to be filled. The few trophies he had collected took up but a corner. The summer camp was, if nothing else, an excellent place to add more mementos - further evidence that he was special. That he was better than these orphans.
Five days later, Tom watched from between the trees as the police divers resurfaced again. They were still looking for little Martha, but she wasn’t in the lake.
She was hiding.
Tom had asked her coldly why she kept crying, and demanded that she stop. She’d answered that she was homesick, and that was when Tom found out that not all orphans lived in orphanages. Some lived with other family members, or were fostered or adopted.
Martha had an auntie and uncle, and a dog, and she still dared to spend hours crying every day. What did she have to cry about?
He’d shaken her roughly while he asked, and a locket had glinted in the sunlight. He’d torn it from around her neck, and she’d cried at that too, saying that he’d hurt her and she needed the locket back because her parents were in it.
The rest of the encounter was a blur. Tom still had the silver locket, with the grainy photos inside and a smear of blood on the clasp. And Martha wasn’t in the lake.