I turned to Kyle. “What the heck is a drum circle?”
He gave a small smile back. “It’s the best bit, come on.”
Kevin started hitting the drum and Kyle pulled me back into the middle of the circle, next to the fire. Drums appeared everywhere and people started bashing them, forming an infectious beat. I crossed my arms, feeling exposed.
“What do we do?” I asked, though my feet were already step-tapping to the beat.
“We dance,” he said simply. He gently took my hand.
The people who weren’t hitting the drums poured into the circle, joining us, their feet also instantly sacrificing themselves to the rhythm. Whinnie and Russ grabbed some maracas and wiggled their way into the circle, shaking in time with the others.
I tensed up. “I umm… Girls as tall as me…we don’t tend to dance. It looks like I’m the maypole on May Day.”
Kyle was already waving my hands over my head.
“Don’t be stupid. And what’s a maypole?”
The combination of his touch, the thud of the drums, and the flicker of the fire, just kind of filled me up. I grabbed his hands tighter and spun with him, my body surrendering to the music.
Everything sort of faded away as Kyle and I moved. He never let go of my fingers, and whenever I looked at him he looked straight back, the corners of his eyes crinkling. It wasn’t dancing like the way he danced with Melody – and I’m sure that’s because just one of my butt cheeks is the size of both of hers. But we were still proper dancing, our bodies in tune, all this heat building in me, rising from my chest. I looked over at Mum and she was staring right at me, hitting a drum. She nodded her head towards Kyle and raised one eyebrow…
… Reminding me…
“Every girl thinks they have some kind of connection with Kyle.” I.e. don’t be a statistic, Amber. A Kyle-support-group statistic.
I froze up.
“Umm,” I stumbled, not sure what on earth I was feeling. “Umm…” Our dancing ground to a halt.
“You okay?” he asked, his face sweaty.
“Umm,” I mumbled again.
And I was saved by Whinnie. She jumped between us and grabbed me aggressively before bending over and wiggling her giant jiggly bottom against my crotch in a perfect imitation of Melody. Russ bounced up too, doing this weird sort of shimmy, and I laughed and joined in. Kyle stood out for a second, his tanned arms crossed under his sleeveless T-shirt, then he jumped in and we all danced together like maniacs.
I was giddy with laughter. We formed a circle and took it in turns to dance around each other. Bodies swayed and moved around me. The beat always evolving. The firelight never waning. Mum tapped me on the shoulder, taking me by surprise, and gestured to join in. I nodded, and pulled her into our circle. She took both my hands and spun us as everyone else spun around outside of us – like we were the nucleus of a cell, if nucleus is the right word; I don’t know, I can’t remember GCSE science. We spun so fast that everything else became a blur, apart from her face. Her face that looked so much like my face, especially now her skin wasn’t sallow and yellowish any more, and her eyes weren’t red and watery like they used to be. Her sparkly eyes and her wild toothy grin were all I could see as we spun and spun and spun…and just a sliver of sadness found me, as I wished we were spinning back in time, back to before that day when she found Kevin and left me.
SITUATIONS THAT ARE DESTINED TO FAIL:
Me
+
American children
+
Discipline
Ten
It was arrival day.
The kids ran towards us like greased pigs shooting out the barrel of a cannon.
“I’m scared,” I whispered to Russ. “Why are they screaming?”
“Brace yourself for impact,” he replied as the wall of children got closer. I stood in my branded camp T-shirt and denim shorts, my hair bundled back into an already-frizzy ponytail. The instructions were simple enough. Get their names, check them off on the register, and then stand them in the appropriate zone until they’d all arrived.
So why did I feel like I was going into war?
The kids got closer. They ran with such energy, such a fighting look on their face, that it looked like one of those epic battle scenes in films – the slow motion ones where they all put their swords forward to charge, and the music gets all classical and they nobly run to their deaths. Except in those films, the soldiers aren’t followed by enthusiastic parents cradling video cameras, yelling, “Gideon, Mommy’s gonna miss you soooooooooooo much.”
I turned to Kyle.
“Why do I feel we’re about to fight to the death?” I asked. “That this is our precious home, and we have to protect it from the invasion?”
The corners of his wide mouth twitched up but he stared straight ahead.
“Just be careful of your genital area,” he replied. “They tend to run straight into it.”
Just as he finished his sentence, the first kid ran bang into Kyle’s crotch. He bent over almost in two.
“KKKYYYYYYLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEE,” the kid screamed, unaware of the agony he’d caused. “D’ya remember me? D’ya? D’ya?”
Kyle straightened himself up but still clutched his groin.
“Hey, Elias,” he said, in the most Disney voice I’d ever heard. “How could I forget you?”
More kids piled into him, like he was an electromagnet. Russ, on my other side, also had about eight children growing off him like benign tumours.
That’s good, I thought. They were here last year, that’s why they’re being hugged. Nobody will hug me thankfully…
… Then I looked up and I saw hordes more children come through the forest from the car park – straight for me. I pushed aside panic, took one deep breath and bent my knees, ready to take the impact.
BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM
I had a million kids hanging off me.
“Who are you?” they demanded. “Why are you so tall?” “Why is your hair red?” “Where’s my mom?” “Can I go on a jet ski? Can I? Can I?”
Why do American children sound infinitely more American than any other type of American thing?
“Woooooah, everyone,” I said, in the most fake cheery voice I could muster. “I’m Amber. And we have to get you all registered first.”
Kyle already had a kid over his shoulder.
“Amber’s come all the way from England to look after you this summer,” he said.
“Wow, England?”
And eight million kids detached themselves from Russ and Kyle and electromagnetized themselves to me instead.
“OUCH,” I yelled. A tiny child had run right into my vagina, their skull knocking into bits of it that should never be knocked into.
“I told you,” I heard Kyle say. I looked up, trying to hold my injured bits without looking like a sex-offender, which is hard when your injured bit is your genital section and you have eight million children hanging off you. “Protect the nether-regions.”
He smiled in a way that almost hurt my heart as much as my bruised vag.
“Okay, put down the scissors. No, I said ‘put them down’, not wave them near the eyeballs of your new friends.”
Charlie Brown was already my new nemesis. He’d been at camp for a total of three hours and I wanted to throttle him.
He chucked the scissors onto the floor. “When can we go to the lake? When? When? Can I go on the jet ski? Can I? Can I?”
Considering I’d already answered his questions three times, I tried ignoring him. I bent down to the dusty floor of the rec hall and picked up his abandoned scissors.
They were making their name necklaces. As the Art Person, I’d been given the responsibility for getting them made. It was hard though. Energy vibrated off them. It hadn’t helped that the first activity of the day had been giving them a tour of camp, i.e. showing them all the exciting things they weren’t allowed to do yet.