Free Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky

its head the color of a plum. I’d never seen anything like it before. And you call this a dick? I thought, speaking to my own parts in disappointment.
    “Who won the softball game?” he asked.
    I swallowed. Had he known I was looking at him?
    “Huh?”
    “Greens,” I said finally. “Greet hit a fly ball over the fence.”
    He nodded. He turned off the faucet, reached for a towel on the hook. “Don’t use up all that hot water,” he kidded. He stepped past me, mere inches away. His dick swung gently as he walked. I shuddered. If his towel had been bigger, he might have snapped it against my butt.
    I stood under the showerhead for another five minutes. The water felt hot, consoling upon my shoulders. Why had I waited so long? I shampooed my hair over and over, waiting for someone to step around the corner. But when no one did, I turned off the faucet, and stepped into my clothes, letting my hair drip so all my cabin mates would know that I was just like them.
    Two nights later, we all sat around the campfire, singing “The Circle Game”—an old Joni Mitchell song that Miss Mastrangelo strummed on a busted guitar while everyone squinted at their song sheets. We were due to leave Saturday morning, and I was already feeling nostalgic. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go home. I still hated it here, there was no doubt about that. It was that looking into the flame-lit faces of my classmates around the campfire, I thought, Time is already sweeping us forward. Our bodies are changing. We smell like our parents. Soon enough we’re going to separate and move away, and some of us will die sooner than we think, and as a group we’ll never be together again. Was this a pop song? I was shocked by my corniness. But maybe it was only because we’d all fallen into our respective routines, learning new skills, growing more relaxed with one another. And unfortunately, there was that other thing: Mr. Albertson had announced earlier that evening that Douglass Freeman was leaving camp two days early. He’d had a hard adjustment and had come down with a sore throat. And there was the sticky issue of contagion. “It would be best for everyone,” Mr. Albertson assured us, “if he left us.” He was right, for the announcement of his departure made an immediate difference. Everyone relaxed, became themselves, as if the world were returned to its proper order.
    It was dusk. I was walking down a path through the woods. I wasn’t supposed to walk alone, not without another camper, but it felt good to be lost in my thoughts, listening to the cheers and yelps of my classmates in the distance. I stepped up on a riverbank. I looked at the sawgrass weaving in the water, the impossibly vivid sky, thinking about how nice it would be to go back home again, to sleep in my own bed, to take a hot bath while my mother sat on the closed toilet seat listening, pretending she was interested in my stories. I wouldn’t even let my parents’ fighting bother me.
    I stepped closer to the fallen log beside the shore.
    And all it once it moved toward me.
    My whole body clenched. I didn’t yell. I’d seen alligators in our very neighborhood, where on winter mornings they’d crawl up out of the canals, sunning themselves in the backyards, looking for handouts of marshmallows. They seemed almost benign, bovine in that context—dumb, leaden beasts too stupid to fend for themselves—and yet they were known to have swallowed a neighbor’s Boston Terrier in one gulp, a veritable raisin. But this was the wild. It came to me that alligators had the capacity to run up to 60 miles-an-hour in short distances. The peach fuzz bristled on my neck. I started running, feet pounding the sand, all the way back to the dining hall.
    On the way I ran into Dickless standing in the path. I’d actually seen his face only three times all week.
    My chest heaved. “Alligator—” I said, winded.
    Dickless smiled in utter calm. “Oh really?”
    I swung my head back and