EDDIE REICHER WAS A FREAK. They all said it, and so that’s what he believed. He heard the whispers everywhere he went, the harsh stabs spoken in low voices, hands covering mouths in a ridiculous attempt to keep him from hearing. But he heard.

“Look at his face,” they said.

“What do you think happened?” they asked.

“Poor thing,” one lamented, although Eddie always detected the morbid joy that laced what was intended as empathy, like arsenic in warm milk.

“Just ignore them,” his mother would say as her own back stiffened and her jaw clenched to show them that such gossip had no effect on the Reicher family. Maybe Eddie could have taken her advice if it weren’t for the sight of his father’s hands, which curled into fists every time someone commented on his deformed son’s monstrous appearance.

He hates me, Eddie would think. He’s ashamed of me. He wishes I would dry up and blow away on the wind like a cluster of dandelion seeds.

It was true. Eddie was a freak.

But that hadn’t always been the case.

He was born with the face of God’s favorite angel. That’s what his grandmother told him once when she emerged briefly from the thick fog that shrouded her mind. She said that when he was a baby, she held him in her hands and thought, Has there ever been a more beautiful creature in all the world? His smooth, soft skin. His wide blue eyes. The way the corners of his lips always seemed to curl up into the hint of a smile. Gramma came alive in that moment, warmed by the memory, only to be pulled, seconds later, back into the thick of that impenetrable, swirling cloud.

He had the face of God’s favorite angel. 

And then he tried to pet Roscoe.

“Oh shit, here comes Freak,” Asher said, not bothering to lower his voice.

When Eddie first came to Camp Cottonwood, he’d tried to explain that his last name was pronounced “Riker,” like “hiker.” It took less than five seconds for Asher to make the leap from “Reicher” to “Reeker,” then to “Reek,” and finally, after a quick polish and obvious rhyming scheme, “Reek the

Freak” was born. None of the other kids used the nickname in Eddie’s presence, but that was even worse. He would have preferred they had the courage (if you could call bullying a kid with a fucked-up mug “courage”) to say it to his scarred face.

But like most nicknames born from cruelty, this one stuck, and for the rest of the two weeks at summer camp, Eddie Reicher was known as “Reek the Freak.”

Asher had his duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Even at twelve years old, his arms and legs were roped with muscle. A stubby, thick neck sprouted from his meaty torso. Dark, wild eyes bulged from beneath the sharp ledge of his brow, and his overly large mouth was pulled into a constant grin that exposed what seemed to be too many teeth.

“Heard your parents finally decided to abandon you.”

The other kids who had gathered around Asher—kids who Eddie knew by name but would never call “friends”—tilted their heads to hide their smirks. Eddie saw their bodies hitching under the weight of their own overstuffed bags as they giggled.

Only June scowled in protest. June, who towered over even the boys by a good six inches.

June, who made Eddie’s chest burn as if he’d been dared to eat a fistful of peppers.

Eddie stuffed his hands into his pockets and kicked the toe of his sneaker into the dry earth. “Their flight was delayed.”

Asher’s shitty smirk widened. “Yeah, delayed for the rest of your life.”

“They’ll be here tomorrow morning,” Eddie said to the ground.

For a moment, all the kids fell silent. Tomorrow morning?

But that would mean . . .

“You’re spending another night here?” June asked, her voice gentle as always but with a squeak to it that Eddie loved, like an opening door announcing itself.

Eddie didn’t get the chance to respond. Asher was already guffawing in his exaggerated way, meant to cut a clean line between his side and that of the other. The unaccepted. The banished.

“Have fun tuggin’ your worm!” he choked out between overly enthusiastic bellows.

Eddie had no intention of tugging his worm tonight. He wanted morning to come as quickly as possible so he could leave this godforsaken place.