Wilderness Reform

by Matt Query, Harrison Query

Genres: Coming of Age; Horror; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

The authors of the “impossible to put down” (The Guardian) thriller Old Country return with a terrifying novel about a wilderness camp for troubled teens that is plagued by mysterious events and disappearances, taking survival and discipline to a frightening extreme.

Thirteen-year-old Ben is sent to a remote reform program for troubled teens by a juvenile court judge. But when he arrives at the camp, located on the edge of the vast wilderness of northwestern Montana, he immediately recognizes that there is something off about the counselors. They’re too friendly and upbeat…yet Ben can tell there’s an undercurrent of menace.

As he gets to know the boys in his cabin, he soon discovers that they each have far more going for them than whatever crime landed them there. And each has a different critical skill, one that could help them unearth what is really going on in this place—and how to make it out alive. They are inching ever closer to the truth, and the hidden evil beneath the camp’s surface will make itself known in order to deter them.

Release date: July 2, 2024

Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

PROLOGUE

THERE’S A very particular kind of hot, coarse pain in the lungs that can only really be experienced after running from something that’s trying to kill you.

The boy had never run that hard or that fast in his entire life. He’d also grown up at sea level. Even after spending several months in the Northern Rockies, a healthy thirteen-year-old flatlander will still get their ass kicked by extreme exertion at high altitude. But he ran as fast and as far as he could before his legs and mind gave out, when he collapsed onto all fours and crawled over to lean his back against a large, lichen-covered boulder.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been here. He could feel spit, snot, and tears pouring down his face.

He tried to look up the mountain to see if they were close, but his peripheral vision was just a shimmering blur. It was like looking through a paper towel roll. He couldn’t see them coming, couldn’t hear them, but even if he did, he did not know if he could keep going.

He noticed a sting in his hands and brought them up to his eyes, turning them over to examine them. Both were covered in blood, dirt, and the bone-white curls of freshly frayed palm skin. He looked down at a spot on his elbow that burned and found that most of the flesh between his elbow and wrist was just gone—replaced by blood caked in dirt and pine needles.

In that moment he remembered his younger brother getting a big scrape like that on his arm when he fell off his bike the summer before, and he remembered his elder brother calling it “road pizza.”

Thinking of his brothers made him start to cry again in dry, wheezing sobs. He told himself he shouldn’t cry right now, he didn’t have time, and it wasn’t going to help anything. In reality, he hadn’t actually stopped crying much since he started running earlier that day.

He leaned his head back against the boulder and had to muster all the strength and discipline he had left to keep from screaming in frustration up into the dry, hot forest canopy.

He heard thunder in the distance—one of the brief afternoon lightning storms that thrashed against the granite mountains above tree line. He could picture the wrath in his mind. He’d seen and had actually been within quite a few of these high-country storms now. He’d grown used to so much over the last few months, so many things he’d never been exposed to until the morning he got torn away from his home and sent into these goddamned mountains.

After a long moment he pushed himself forward, wiped his face on his shoulder, and got a grip long enough to take stock of his surroundings.

He still had a long way to go down the mountain before he reached the stream, and then would have to follow the stream for another several miles. When will this mountain end had unintentionally become a mantra he asked himself again and again over the last hour. It was like some hellish treadmill covered in sharp-faced boulders, near-vertical walls of rock and scree, and house-sized snags of trees and deadfall. The boy had never known something so menacing and oppressive.

He wondered what the hell he was even going to do when he got back to camp. Would anyone believe him? Did the other grown-ups know what the hell was actually going on up there?

The dread of what was behind him shot a bolt of energy into his trunk and legs and the boy was up and moving down the mountain again. When he finally reached the stream that carved its way through the draw at the base of the valley, he collapsed into the fine gravel bed under the shallow, frigid water. He drank freely with his head almost entirely submerged. He was more exhausted than he’d ever been, but the water helped his body tap into a reserve of strength, and he kept going, splashing directly down the cold mountain stream in his frayed boots.

Eventually the streambed got too steep and rocky, so he had to go back up onto the boulder-strewn ridge a ways and maintain a parallel course with the creek.

The boy was lowering himself down a rock ledge when he heard a sound that shot a dump of adrenaline through his body with such force he instantly went numb, frozen in place.

It was the

wailing.

It wasn’t really a wail, as he understood the term before he got here, but there was no easy way to put it into words. It was a teakettle shriek, a pig being slaughtered, a piece of corrugated steel being tortured and bent by hurricane winds. Maybe it sounded different to everyone.

He dropped down to all fours and crawled under an overhanging shelf of rock, forcing himself up into the bit of cover it provided, willing himself to shrink as much as he could. He stared down at the creek and strained his ears to try to identify any approaching sounds over the babble and hum of the fast mountain water.

A blur caught his attention to his left. It was so startling it felt like his stomach lurched up into his throat, but he tried not to move more than his head, which he slowly turned.

He saw it then. A fox, a red fox had scrambled up into a small crag in the rocks, similar to the one he was taking refuge in himself. It wiggled and writhed its way into the hiding place, just the way he had. When it couldn’t get any farther, the animal tried to go still, but the boy could see it was shaking as badly as he was.

The fox looked across the steep slope and locked eyes with the boy. They just sat there, the boy and the fox, eyes riveted on one another’s, shaking in terror and dread. The boy knew they were hiding from the same thing.

After a long moment, the boy felt it.

The taste of cold steel filled his mouth; he could feel the zing of stomach acid boiling over his tongue and coating his teeth. Then the keening in his ears started, faint at first, but growing into a high-frequency shriek that throbbed behind his eyes. He felt the warmth before he realized his bladder had released.

He looked back to the fox and could see the small beast was wincing and flinching as well, making canine snuffing noises. The boy glared at the animal with fierce eyes, willing it to be silent.

More movement caught the boy’s eye in the foreground along the slope between himself and the fox. He saw dozens of mice, voles, and small sage lizards running between the two outcroppings where they hid, down the incline toward the stream—away from them—jumping and skittering over the pine needles and rocks.

The boy felt something on his hands, and looked down to see that worms and centipedes were pouring out of the wet soil around him, writhing and gyrating once they reached the open air.

He looked over at the fox. It looked as though its senses were as besieged by the shrieking wail as his were—he saw in the fox’s eyes that this was a misery that transcended species.

Right before the boy was about to pass out, the fox bolted from its hiding place. It exploded out into the open ground between them with incredible speed, bounding

up the slope and between the trees so fast the boy could barely follow it with his eyes. The fox disappeared in a blur above the rock outcropping under which the boy was hiding.

The wailing stopped the moment the fox disappeared. The boy unclenched his jaw, shuddered, and almost began to cough as the shrieking and its paralytic effect washed out of him. But then he heard something else above him up the slope, near where the fox had disappeared.

It was an animal’s frantic breathing and whining. The frenzied canine sounds grew in urgency until a deep, muffled crack punched across the forest, immediately ceasing the panicked noise—like a tree branch being broken underneath a blanket. He wanted to cover his ears, he wanted to wipe the tears from his eyes, but dared not move a muscle. Then he heard a wet rip and tear, and what sounded like a burlap bag of stones being tossed into the forest floor.

“Not the boy, just a fox.”

Despite how different it had become, he knew the voice immediately. He knew who it belonged to. What it belonged to. Hearing the voice made him gag and dry-heave, which he tried to do as quietly as he could, clamping both bloody hands down over his mouth so hard he could feel his cracked fingernails cutting into his cheeks.

All he heard in response or acknowledgment to the voice was a guttural grunt from farther up the ridge. Immediately thereafter, he heard what sounded like a dozen hooves beating into the forest floor, then splashing and pounding as they charged their way down the stream, away from him, but in the direction he needed to go.

He didn’t move until long after the echo of hooves traveled down the valley and disappeared entirely. He worked his way back down to the stream and felt the bite of cold as he plunged his torn, ragged boots into the water.

The boy saw a long, sharp piece of shale rock under the surface of the shallow creek, and picked it up. He gripped it tightly in his right hand, ignoring the burn of the splinters and fresh scabs in his palm cracking open.

In that moment he made a solemn promise to himself, one he would hold to until his last day if he survived this. It became his new silent mantra, repeating in his head over and over as he put one foot in front of the other, and kept moving.

If I actually manage to escape this place, I’ll never set foot anywhere near the mountains again as long as I fucking live.

 

CHAPTER 1

 

SOUTHERN LOUISIANA

A RESTAURANT’S GREASE trap stinks in a way that’s impossible to forget. The stench locks itself into a brain like initials carved into an old desk. Ben realized this in the days that followed his first close encounter with the vile waste.

He had found himself wedged into a small opening between a brick wall and a dripping, stinking grease trap behind a diner. He tried to stay as silent as he could as he watched the flashlight bob toward him down the weed-covered, trash-strewn alleyway.

He had not known it at the time, but the minute or so he spent in that hiding place would haunt Ben for a very, very long time. It was the first time in his life he’d been completely floored by dread. Paralyzed almost. He’d never felt anything like it before; he’d never felt his hands, joints, and mind completely seized up by shrieking, hysterical panic. It felt like black swamp mud filled his veins.

In the days that passed since that moment, he’d thought about it constantly. The grease trap’s putrid citrus stench of rot, the inch-thick black grime on the bricks and cracked asphalt around the trap, the humidity in the air, the din and roar of his heartbeat in his ears, the shrieking cicadas, the cop slowly pacing down the alley toward him. He’d actually gagged on several occasions as he’d recall the sensation of the reeking burnt-orange grease running down the sides of his face, his neck, forming an adhesive slick between his shirt and shoulder blades.

To Ben, it felt like every excruciating detail of the moment was laser-burned into whatever part of the brain was right behind the eyes.

Ben had robbed a gas station a few blocks away from that diner and its disgusting grease trap. He’d only had an airsoft gun, the orange muzzle of which had been lazily Sharpied over in the dark on his walk toward the gas station. Thing looks real enough, he’d thought.

The lady at the counter certainly couldn’t tell the difference. He grabbed about eighty dollars from the register and as many candy bars, jerky sticks, and packaged shitty pastries as he could carry. When he saw police lights start to pulse off the dirty windows of the abandoned old building across the street from the gas station, he bolted out the door. Ben ran as fast as he could until he saw the hiding place, and went for it.

He figured it was likely the cops had already seen him turn into the alley, but he dove behind the grease trap anyway. He thought about running once he’d wedged himself into the hiding spot, but he was shaking too badly. He was too exhausted, too dehydrated, too malnourished. His body knew it was already over. The grease and grime embraced him. Ben felt like he was stuck to a roach trap; those strips of adhesive brown tape the insects get trapped onto as they skitter across, then even more stuck as they kick and writhe until death takes them. Once the cop’s flashlight got to within about thirty feet, all Ben can remember is that he started screaming.

He screamed that he didn’t have a gun, he begged not to get shot, pleaded to be helped out from under the grease trap. He cried as he was put into the back of the cruiser. The next day, he cried more on the ride home from his arraignment in the back seat of Aunt Nicki’s old Buick. Not once on the whole drive did she glance up at the rearview mirror to look back at him through the haze of cigarette smoke. Worse than the smoke was the razor-edged silence, the kind that was loaded with the assurance of beatings and pain.

Over the next week, Ben caught up with the buddies he’d grown up with in Lafitte, Louisiana. He regaled them with the tale of his days on the run. He told them about how he’d stolen his neighbor’s johnboat and split off into the bayou, how he’d broken into private fishing camps where he drank good bourbon and robbed crab traps for his meals. He told them about how he’d finally run out of supplies and camps to raid, and about how he’d stashed his boat along a canal somewhere in Plaquemines Parish, then hiked up Highway 23 in the dark with a plan to knock over the first gas station he came across, then finally about how that plan had gone

pear-shaped and how he’d been caught by the constables.

He told them about how he’d kept his mouth shut throughout a blistering, night-long interrogation from multiple different detectives. He told them about the deals he’d been repeatedly offered, which he’d repeatedly refused. He said he’d told the detectives to go fuck themselves, that he’d happily do his time in Louisiana state’s juvenile corrections, where he had plenty of friends he was excited to catch up with. Ben’s buddies were proud of him. Their elder brothers were proud of him too. Part of Ben felt like a king, like he’d sunk a buzzer-beater three.

In reality, no detective interrogated Ben. No one offered him a deal. He hadn’t been driven by some outlaw spirit as he’d stolen the boat, broken into the fishing camps, or knocked over the Chevron station. From start to finish, all he’d felt was fear and anxiety. He’d done it all to try to find somewhere safe to take his little brother, Wade, where their aunt couldn’t find them—and he’d been scared shitless the entire time. He hadn’t even considered how he’d sneak back to his hometown of Lafitte to get his little brother, let alone how he’d actually smuggle the small child away. The whole week was just a poorly planned cascade of fiascos, catalyzed by one moment of meteoric panic and rage. Panic for his little brother, and rage at being too small and not knowing how to protect him.

He hadn’t even actually been brought to the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office detention center in Davant, fabled among his friends, their elder brothers, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers. He spent his one night in “jail” locked in a sterile, fluorescent-lit room in the back of some double-wide that served as a district patrol office somewhere off state highway 23. He’d been relegated to this unique incarceration due to the late hour he’d been arrested and his only being thirteen years old. It felt worse to Ben somehow. It was insulting.

Ben spent several hours in that room disgusted by the stinking grease that still caked his upper body and head. He had been waiting for it to begin drying and crusting, hoping this would help abate its stench and allow it to be scratched away, but the nature of the wicked substance prevented that, so he tried to focus on how he was going to go about doing the one thing he’d always been good at: manipulating adults and talking his way out of shit.

He had read and thereby memorized the Bill of Rights and portions of several state statutes that he’d deemed potentially helpful based on their focus. He also had access to a collage of courtroom and interrogation scenes from television and movies he’d logged away over the years. However, over the last few hours Ben had started to see how truly useless that archive of surface-level information was. He’d sound like a damn fool just spouting off recitations of black-letter law without knowing when or how to

use it. There was an operative nature to state law and constitutional rights; he knew they had to be employed in a particular sequence to specific facts. However, he didn’t have any fluency in how to do that, and knew he’d sound like a dumbass to try. That aside, Ben did know that he was not required to talk to law enforcement without a lawyer present, especially as a minor, so he’d just have to rely on that as his mainstay for now.

Finally, the sound of slow, dragging feet in the hall outside preceded a massively obese corrections deputy who opened the door and trundled into the small space holding both a bottle of water and a bag of chips in one meaty, pink hand. Sweat glistened on his forehead and rendered swathes of his white uniform almost translucent under his arms.

Ben’s panic had worn off at that point and had been replaced with exhausted irritation. He looked up at the deputy and spoke without solicitation for any such comment.

“I want a lawyer here if you fixin to question me.”

The deputy just glanced at Ben with cold eyes as he set the water and chips on the collapsible camping table, the only thing in the room other than the flimsy, plastic deck chair Ben sat in. He spoke as he turned and headed back toward the door.

“Boy, you tink anyone here gives a fuck about anything yous gots to say?”

The officer talked with that raspy, Cajun twang that could make Ben’s skin crawl. His mom, aunt, and all the men he’d been around as he learned the English language spoke with such a strong, French-peppered version of this accent that even most Louisianans struggled to understand them.

Ben wasn’t sure why it grinded his gears so badly, hearing that insufferable parlance that afflicted so many of the white folk reared in the swamps south of I-10, like Ben himself. When Ben was tired or angry, he’d hear that same Acadian lilt flood into his own voice. It would come out from somewhere deep in his throat to sizzle into the skin of his words like a boiling acid, eating away vowels and rendering down consonants.

For the briefest of moments, Ben’s subconscious urged him to withhold a witty response, but he had been alone for too long. Since he’d run away, he’d been deprived of any good opportunities to properly screw with a grown-up. He was as hungry for that opportunity as he was for the bag of chips in front of him. It’s what he lived for. It was all he had.

Ben leaned back and rested an ankle on the opposite knee. He pushed back with his foot still on the ground, tilting the chair to lean back a bit onto only two of its flimsy legs.

“Maybe not your boss, but I spose I could say quite a few things that’d make you give a fuck, Boudreaux.”

The cop snorted through his nose, ceased his progress toward the door, and turned to face the boy. Ben knew it was very unlikely that this man’s name was actually Boudreaux, but from the big man’s accent alone, Ben knew—that the cop knew—that calling someone “Boudreaux” was a subtle

 way of calling someone a dumbass. This particular aspersion would only register as such to someone who grew up in Acadiana, someone who grew up in Cajun country.

The deputy narrowed his eyes and leaned his head toward Ben. Ben could see from subtle features on his face that the man’s brain was attempting to gin up some response. He pointed at Ben as he replied.

“You still yappin, couyon. You said without no lawyah present you was gonna chut the fuck up, so how bouts you chut the fuck up.”

Ben made himself grin at the man before he responded—not a happy smile, but an amused smile. He couldn’t put the differences between smiles or facial expressions into words, but he knew them all, had all their little nuances cataloged away, and he knew their different effects on grown-ups. He knew this difference between a happy smile and an amused smile was important right now.

“Well, heavens to Betsy, sir, I did not mean to hurt your feelings so badly. I think what’s most important for us right now is for you to take in some deep breaths to try and calm yourself down, alright?”

The man clenched his fists and began to stride toward where the boy sat, as Ben knew he would.

At that same moment, Ben let the front legs of his chair fall and planted both feet on the ground. The noise and sudden movement made the deputy flinch. Ben stayed seated, leaned his upper body toward the man, pointed his face up to the right, and used his index finger to tap on his jawbone on the left side of his chin—making sure to maintain the same amused smile as he did so.

As Ben also suspected he would, the man checked his flustered surge toward the boy, looking confused and surprised as he came to a stop a few feet away. Ben kept tapping on his jawbone as he spoke.

“Land that hook right here, my man, right in the off switch. Come on, Boudreaux, help reform me.”

The man cocked his head to the side as lines around his eyes and forehead formed, slowly evicting the look of confusion and replacing it with a disgusted glower. He stared down at the boy and ran his hand up his neck to his chin, which he rubbed back and forth a few times.

The coarse rasp of the man’s big palm against his two-day stubble sounded abnormally loud in the small room. Ben could almost taste his rage.

After a long moment, the deputy began slowly shaking his head as he backed away from the boy toward the door. He eventually forced an awkward smile as he reached back to open the door to leave, suggesting he’d found a few words. Ben

 already knew the gist of what was about to be said.

“Whew, boy, that lips gon’ get you killed fore you turn eighteen, you know that, right?”

Ben leaned back again and began slapping a palm on his belly before the cop had even finished speaking, and shouted out his reply just before the door was slammed shut.

“Not before them clogged-up arteries get you, hoss!”

Ben’s smile faded as he tried to will away the pressure building in his tear ducts. He felt his efforts fail as tears fell down his cheeks. He wiped them away aggressively with the sleeve of his shirt. He was wearing the same old T-shirt he’d had on for the last week; it had a cartoon version of the legendary lumberjack Paul Bunyan on it, grinning broadly as he held an axe over his shoulder in one hand and gave a thumbs-up with the other.

Ben was tough, he’d had to be, and was certainly no stranger to confrontation, but he was still just a boy being sworn at and threatened by a grown-up. A big fucking scary one, at that. He could talk shit and banter with anyone he’d ever met, better than anyone he’d ever met, but he could still be plagued by fear—the kind of red-hot fear that can only be felt by a kid.

Before the arraignment the next day, Ben learned that the prosecutor already had clear security camera footage of him pointing the fake gun at the terrified old woman behind the counter at the Chevron as he stuffed his pockets with cash and snacks.

Ben did not interrupt the flow of information the well-dressed lady appointed by the juvenile court to represent him decided to direct toward Ben’s aunt Nicki. He knew he understood it far better than Aunt Nicki did, and had also gathered more than enough to grasp the fact that they had him red-handed, dead to rights. At one point the attorney asked Ben why he ran off and robbed a business. Ben didn’t tell her about his plan to find somewhere safe for him and his little brother to live, somewhere quiet, somewhere without any adults, somewhere Aunt Nicki wouldn’t find them.

He just shrugged and told her he didn’t know.

CHAPTER 2

ONE MORNING, a couple of weeks after getting arrested, the strange voices coming from the living room were not actually what awoke Ben. The strange voices were how he would always remember being awoken, but he was really forced from sleep by the searing beam of light that shone into the bedroom he shared with his younger brother in his aunt Nicki’s double-wide trailer.

That sunrise light was concentrated into a braid of fire by the dirt and mildew that caked the window on the eastern wall of the little room. It had often been the first thing to irritate Ben every day for the last five years. It was always the day’s first bully and nuisance.

Ben rolled over, stretched his legs out, then pulled his knees toward his chest, hauling his tingling feet onto the bed from where they’d hung off the end of the mattress he’d outgrown years earlier.

Ben’s little brother, Wade, was already awake, lying on his side on a filthy little mattress on the floor across the room, spooning a dirty, flaccid stuffed animal older than either boy. He was staring at Ben, waiting for him to wake up.

“Who that in the livin room with Aunt Nicki, Pee-Pan?”

Ben squeezed his eyes shut, responding in a half whisper.

“That ain’t my damn name, Wade.”

Ben felt bad as soon as his brother responded, hearing the embarrassment in the little boy’s voice, but disregarded it as he tried to will himself back to sleep for a few more minutes.

“I mean Ben! Sorry, sorry, Ben.”

The boys’ mother had called Ben Peter Pan, a story she’d read to them before bedtime, even though she’d often pass out midsentence on the floor between their little beds long before the boys did. Wade never learned to pronounce the two words Peter Pan properly. Pee-Pan was as close as he could ever get. He was quite little when she died, and unlike Ben, he could not remember what she looked like, he could not remember her boyfriends or how angry she could get. One of the only things Wade remembered about his mother was her having called Ben that. Wade had told Ben once the year before, in the best way a small child was able to explain, that he could actually hear their mother’s voice when he thought about the words Peter Pan—the sound having been stored away as some early trace code in his brain. So, in a way, Wade was lucky, as that magical name from that wonderful story was really the only thing she ever left behind for him.

Ben knew this; he knew what Wade meant by it. Ben knew his mother was not a saint, but he knew she used her hands and feet to hurt him far less frequently than Aunt Nicki did. And even when she did, he remembered how she would rock him afterward, crying and apologizing and saying sweet things. Ben knew that the nickname was the only special thing left in this world that was shared between him, his brother, and their momma. But it was still embarrassing to have his little brother calling him Pee-Pan in front of his friends—it being a nickname far more analogous to piss bucket than the fictional character’s actual name. So, Ben had been trying to train it out of the small child.

Ben had stolen a nice copy of Peter Pan from the school library earlier that year. It was nicer than the one he remembered his mother reading them, better illustrations at least, and Ben would read it to Wade several nights a week until he could hear the little boy’s breathing fall into the steady wheeze of sleep.

After Wade fell asleep, Ben would read through the 1984 copy of the ninth edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, or one of the “new” tattered 2006 Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes the school library had gotten a month earlier. The collection was missing volumes 6, 17, and 29. This infuriated Ben, but he inhaled them nonetheless and cataloged their contents in his mind as though it were a chore.

The only books he derived real pleasure from reading were those about famous explorers and treasure hunters and the prizes they sought. Explorers like Cabeza de Vaca, Lewis and Clark, Frémont and Carson, John Wesley Powell, Shackleton, Cook, and the rest. On the treasure-hunting side, the Holy Grail, El Dorado, the Holy Lance, Quesada, Gaspar, Fawcett, Blackbeard, and of course his own hometown’s namesake, Jean Lafitte.

Exploration and treasure-hunting was a comfort subject for Ben, and for some reason, it had been since before he could even read. His family never had the money for him

to get into sports or hobbies, nor had any adult or peer in Ben’s life ever taken the time to introduce him to those kind of things one does for recreation or enjoyment. As such, in Ben’s thirteen years he’d not been introduced to the notion that it was a normal, human thing to seek out sources of personal, recreational pleasure. He did not have time or freedom for such a thing. Even so, for one reason or another, encountering any historic account of a person or group setting out into the wild to find something valuable or legendary had become one of his most profound sources of peace and private enjoyment. There wasn’t a library or bookstore between Slidell and Lafayette that Ben hadn’t spent hours in reading about these men and these things.

“They been talkin awhile now, B. Talkin bout you.”

Ben’s eyes opened wide at Wade’s words. He blinked through blurred vision and pushed himself up onto his elbows, shifting his position within the inveterate sunrise hell beam so that its mustard-yellow, dust-animated light seared into his chest and belly instead of his face. He began straining his ears to pick words out of the muffled conversation.

“What you mean talkin bout me? What’re they sayin?”

Wade yawned as he shrugged.

“I dunno, somethin bout the trouble you’re in, what to do about it.”

Ben gestured for Wade to stay put, then slowly pulled the blanket off himself and crept to the bedroom door. He slowly turned the doorknob, then pushed the door open a few inches at the precise speed necessary to avoid a loud whine from the rusty hinges. Not too fast, not too slow. He’d done it many times.

The volume and clarity of the voices from the living room amplified immediately. Ben could hear his aunt Nicki and someone else. It was a man’s voice, but he did not talk like a cop, or like anyone else who grew up in south Louisiana. More like a teacher, or a coach. Ben strained his ears and held his breath to hear what this strange man was saying.

“…really one of, if not the best program in the country for boys like Ben. It’s a type of program that falls under a category we’d call adventure-based therapy. Our model implements a wilderness expedition and survival approach for the purpose of therapeutic intervention, guiding at-risk youth, like Ben, and helping them develop the emotional toolbox to maintain a sustainable mindset of self-respect and self-reliance. And while I know you’ve already signed the guardian authorization, we have dozens of references who I would still encourage you to check in with—both parents of graduates and, of course, graduates themselves. Do you happen to know Frank Davis, who lives down the street and goes to school with your nephew?”

Ben heard his aunt Nicki’s reply come on the heels of a long, raspy wheeze, which he knew was her exhaling a thin band of Pall Mall cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah, I know Frank.”

“Well, Frank graduated from our program last year, as you might’ve known. We consider him to be quite a success story and a testament to the efficacy of our program. His maturity, discipline, work ethic, accountability, and dedication to school skyrocketed when he returned from Montana, and he’s still doing quite well today.”

Ben knew Frank. The kid had gotten sent off last summer to some weird juvie program out of state after he’d gotten busted stealing at the Dollar General. To Ben, Frank was a whole different dude when he got back. Stopped hanging out with his crew, got a weekend job, spent all his free time doing chores for his parents and studying, going to church. Ben just figured he’d gotten scared into a little Goody Two-shoes, right quick.

Ben heard his aunt’s voice again.

“Yeah… I’ll be damned. He’s a fine boy now, night and day compared to how he was before he got sent off. Only time I see him now he’s doin chores for his momma or grandma or volunteerin down at the church. I didn’t know he’d done this Montana thing, though. I thought he’d just gone to corrections, found Jesus o’ some shit.”

The strange voice responded.

“Yes, ma’am. Frank completed our program last August, and according to his parents, he’s kept on the straight and narrow ever since. We’re really proud of him. That’s what we want for your nephew Ben. We don’t want to see young men like Ben get sent to corrections. Your nephew’s armed robbery charge is quite serious, even for such a young guy, so we’d like to avoid youth introduction to the justice system altogether. It has unpredictable outcomes, unlike our program. And as you know, we’ve already got the deferral authorization from the court, so Ben will have his charges dropped upon completion of our program.”

Ben could hear his aunt take another long drag, and knew her words came through a cloud of smoke.

“Well, like I already said, he ain’t gonna just up and go witch y’all. He ain’t never left Louisiana. He ain’t gonna like the sound a’this program, outside in mountains all day. Y’all best mind that boy, he’s liable to run on ya, nasty little devil he is. He’s got friends in juvenile corrections, probly over half his damn friends at this point. That’s what he’ll wanna do, and Lord knows I can’t talk him into nothin no more.”

“Well, Ms. Denton, Ben’s thirteen. As his guardian you’ve made this decision. As I mentioned in our emails, ...