Excerpt
"Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown
Winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize
The game was called Husbands. We played the year we were all thirteen and fourteen, fellow campers at the all-girls Camp Pinecrest in Louisville, Maine. Camp was a group of crumbling 1920s-built log cabins dotting a steep mountainside next to the shores of dark freezing Crystal Lake. You heard it. Crystal Lake, like in Friday the 13th, if you can believe it. And yes, the place was horrifying, but not in that way.
Here’s how the Husbands game went at the beginning. Our fearless, no, feared alpha girl, Rachel Fine, partnered up everyone in the bunk into married couples. There were eight of us, so four husbands, four wives. Everyone had to play, no exceptions. There were no other rules per se. The game didn’t start with the bad stuff, that came later; at first it was sweet, almost innocent.
In the first days of the game, Rachel chose to be married to one of her pretty, petite minions, both named Jen. Jen S and Jen Z. They were both about 4’11”, from the same town on Long Island, and wore crop tops and painfully tight high ponytails. They did competitive gymnastics and never let you forget it, constantly bursting into a back handspring or sliding into a split without provocation or warning.
I’m telling this out of order, but listen, I have told this story before. In fact, I told it to my husband when he first floated the idea of sending our beloved twelve-year-old daughter to sleepaway camp. When he heard the story, his jaw was on the fucking floor. So, I’ll get to it all, but you really need the background first.
Rachel and I had been in the same bunk at Camp Pinecrest since we were seven. Both of us lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and as New York tradition demanded, we were shipped off to sleepaway camp at the earliest possible opportunity, practically still sucking our pacifiers. I remember feeling sorry for Rachel the first time I saw her. I spotted her as I stood clutching my mother’s hand waiting for the bus at the pickup stop in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rachel was tiny, even for a seven-yearold, bony and stringy as a featherweight fighter. She stomped her sneakers on the sidewalk in a deliberate showy way as she trailed behind a uniformed woman, presumably her nanny, who staggered under the weight of Rachel’s giant purple duffle bag.
When the doubled-decker silver monstrosity of a transport bus finally pulled up, Rachel turned and smiled at me, staring directly into my eyes like a grown up. I heard her laugh when I blushed and turned away. Rachel had a pointy, elfin chin, long wavy red hair, and large slightly protruding eyes the colour of olives or a swamp. She was one of those people who was never exactly pretty, but she so firmly believed in her own beauty that everyone else did too.
“You should sit with me,” Rachel said, pointing at me. Not precisely an invitation, more like a command. As we sat together on the bus, she stuck her hand out the window and gave her nanny the finger as a farewell gesture.
“Bye loser,” she yelled. That was Rachel. I was obviously entranced.
Anyway, flash forward six years, and we were in our thirteen-year-old bunk, called the Porcupines, for short: the Porcs. Whoever thought calling a bunch of fragile adolescent girls “the Porcs” should be investigated and possibly censured, but the Porcs we were.
The summer we played Husbands was the first year we did not have a counselor in the cabin. Instead, the cabins housing the thirteen and fourteenyear-old senior campers were set in a semi-circle surrounding a larger counselor cabin in the middle, like seeds around the edge of a watermelon slice. Camp tradition held, as long as you didn’t sneak out or make too much noise, the counselors would pretty much leave you to your own devices.
Despite our new lack of supervision, in the first week of camp, we were subdued in the face of so much freedom. We revisited an old favourite game, Ghosts, spending all our free periods trying to contact the spirits. Each night, we all surrounded whomever Rachel chose to be the “possessed.” That lucky customer would lie topless, back against the splintery wood floor while the rest of us ran our fingernails down the skin of her arms, scratching just hard enough to hurt or attract the attention of a ghost. The toplessness was a new development this summer, instituted by Rachel to help “entice the spirits.” No one liked lying there partially naked, but we could see Rachel’s point: bare breasts made a statement.
“Light as a feather stiff as a board,” we chanted over and over, squealing with fear when the wind whistled through the gaps in the old log walls, but exhaling with relief when nothing otherworldly showed up.
But on the sixth night of that week something changed. We were chanting, tracing our nails down Izzy’s delicate forearms, when Rachel’s high sharp voice sliced through the séance. “This is dumb,” she said and instantly everyone lifted their hands. Izzy bolted up to a seated position and clutched her tee-shirt to cover her bare chest. We looked at each other, all simultaneously aware that our foray into spiritualism was now a thing of the past.
“Let’s do something different. Let’s be married couples,” said Rachel. Someone laughed, a nervous, jagged giggle. Rachel’s ideas always went pretty much unchallenged, but Izzy seemed to think she had some genuine psychic ability and maybe wasn’t willing to let Ghosts go quite so fast. “What will we do,” said Izzy frowning, her deep dimples quilting her cheeks.
“One of us can be a husband and one a wife,” Rachel explained.
“What does that mean,” Kendra asked as she braided her shiny blond hair, something she did incessantly to draw attention to its length and abundance.
“We will just be married couples, and act like husbands and wives,” Rachel said, speaking slowly as if this game and its rules should be immediately obvious.
“That seems kind of babyish,” ventured Kendra.
I suspected everyone was confused, but looking around, I saw all the girls’ faces were turned towards Rachel, flowers seeking the warmth of their sun. So, we might be skeptical, but we would go with it, because we always did.
“I’ll be married to Jen,” said Rachel.
Both Jens looked over from their beds.
“Jen S,” Rachel clarified, and Jen Z slumped.
“Emma,” Rachel pointed at me, “You are with Kendra.”
Kendra rolled her eyes and flicked her braid over her shoulder like an angry pony. She would not have tried that with me in past summers. Even though we were only a week into camp, it was clear that this summer, for some unknown reason, I was now out of favour with Rachel. It started the very first day, when instead of choosing the bunk next to me, Rachel had inexplicably picked the bed farthest away. We had always been best friends at camp, but now Rachel spent her days whispering in the Jens’ ears, laughing, all the while looking straight at me.
Maybe it was because I had sprouted up six inches over the winter returning to camp an awkward five-foot-nine-inches tall. I was also now fully developed, my curves amplified by a little layer of baby fat which unfortunately had not melted away in the fires of puberty. The biggest problem was my new breasts. I had thirty-two D’s, a mixed blessing that would one day get me out of speeding tickets and into frat parties, but at this point, were a liability. The first night of camp that summer, as we undressed for bed, Rachel had looked at my breasts with a combination of curiosity and disgust. “They are huge,” she said looking away shuddering. After that, I had started slipping into the bathroom stall to change clothes, just me and the hairy wolf spider that lurked in the corner.
Even though we agreed to play the Husbands game, everyone wanted clarification. “Who is who? Izzy asked. “Like who is the husband and who is the wife?”
Rachel cleared her throat, “It will obviously look better if the more petite people are wives, but whatever you guys think.” This was Rachel’s version of being democratic. Obviously, we all agreed; the tiniest prettiest girls should be the wives.
Except for Rachel herself. Rachel gave herself the role of husband; and except for me: she decreed that night (and every night after) that I play a wife.
I obviously did not fit with the other wives. My first “husband” Kendra and I were like Jack Sprat and his wife. I was a few inches taller, and she was a flat-chested ballet dancer built like a sapling; I probably outweighed her by twenty-five pounds. But once Rachel assigned you a spouse, you were an official married couple for the entire night and the whole next day. Rachel allowed some group input into the development of the game: One of the husbands, Brynn, a muscular field hockey player with a donkey bray of a laugh, suggested you should have to call your spouse “Sweetie” and “Honey” and we all agreed. Mainly the husbands bossed us around — the wives had to clean up for the husbands, make their beds, do their chores on the bunk chore chart.
“Honey, please get me a chocolate milk from the mess hall,” Izzy would say to her wife, Jen Z.
“Darling, fold my clothes neatly,” Rachel commanded as Jen S lovingly put her laundry away.
In the beginning, we all thought the game was kind of stupid and the wives were obviously pissed off at the extra work. But the weird thing was, and this was not a Rachel rule, by unspoken agreement we never played Husbands when anyone outside the bunk was around. It became a de facto secret, even before it needed to be. Before things progressed. We always knew there was something wrong with it, something strange.
By the summer of Husbands, we all finally had our periods. Even Izzy, whose performative thinness and budding eating disorder had staved it off, had finally gotten hers, screaming with terror and joy when the first red drops materialized in her underwear. So, by week three of the Husbands game, Rachel deemed that the wives needed to live up to certain standards of personal hygiene.
Rachel decided that sanitary pads were gross. She made an ultimatum — no more pads, no exceptions. I was the last holdout, petrified of putting in a tampon. I had tried before, of course, and it hurt like something tearing deep inside me. There simply was no room. I did not even let my mind explore the specifics of how an adult penis would fit there.
Rachel became obsessed with my inability to use tampons. She would not let it go. It came to a head one night that third week. She installed herself like a jailer, sitting on the dirty floor outside the bathroom stall, waiting until I successfully inserted a tampon. “It’s not that big a deal, just put it in like a plunger,” Rachel called from outside the stall. I looked to the wolf spider for help, wondering if a toxic bite would get me out of this.
I came out of the stall sweaty and shaking. “I can’t, it won’t fit.”
“It’s so weird, it fits me and Izzy, and we’re so much smaller than you,” Rachel mused.
“Right,” said one of the Jens, “You are, like, enormous compared to us. I would think your vag was bigger too.”
“It’s disgusting and unsanitary; it’s not fair to the rest of us,” said Rachel. The Jens nodded, their ponytails bobbing in agreement.
“Wait,” Rachel said grabbing a fresh tampon from the communal box next to the sink, “Just lie on the bed and I’ll put it in for you.”
— Melissa DaCosta Brown is a graduate of Duke University and has a masters in Journalism from Northwestern University. She worked for MSNBC and ABC News affiliates. Her short stories have been published in Waccamaw, Subnivean, Ponder Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Lascaux Prize.
Read an interview with Melissa DaCosta Brown
