The Color War by Jodi Picoult Page A

beautiful pass and a layup against the two biggest kids in the third grade? Still, he didn’t want to tell his mother that he spent most of the day in front of the window fan, repeating Pat Sajak’s words, because he liked the way his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else.
    Her smile flickered just the smallest bit, the way the TV did when too many people in the building were using their fans and air-conditioning units. But just as quickly, she turned to Raymond again. “I’ve got some news, little man,” she said, taking his hand and leading him to the living room, where his grandma was still watching television. She leaned down to kiss his grandmother on the cheek and toss her a pack of chewing tobacco—her only vice. Then she settled Raymond on the couch. “You,” she announced, “are going to summer camp.”
    At this, Raymond went still. “Summer camp,” he repeated. The words felt like stones on his tongue. He didn’t know anyone who went to summer camp, not from his neighborhood or his school.
    “Bible camp,” his mother said. “It’s like Sunday school, only better.” She didn’t tell him it was a Christian charities camp, run by a collection of MetroWest pastors and staffed by rich white kids looking to pad their college applications. She did not tell him how, those three weeks he was gone, she’d be staring out her window at night with her hands pressed to her mouth, willing her son to be thinking about her.
    She cupped her hand around Raymond’s cheek. “You’ll get on a big bus,” his mother said. “And you’ll go out to the mountains with a bunch of other kids from the city. You’ll get to ride horses, Raymond. And play basketball, and swim.”
    Horses scared Raymond, with their long yellow teeth; and he could play basketball right down the street in the empty lot, as long as the older kids weren’t meeting up there to do their business. “Swim where?” he asked.
    “I don’t know, honey,” his mother said. “Some lake, I guess.”
    Raymond thought about last summer, when he and Monroe had run through the streets and splashed in the spray of the fire hydrants the town had set gushing. Once, after begging his mother for weeks, he had gone to the metropolitan free pool, but it smelled like piss and he didn’t ask to be taken back.
    “I like it here fine,” Raymond said.
    His grandmother snorted. “That’s just why you ought to leave.”
    “You’ll make so many new friends,” his mother pleaded.
    Raymond looked around at the faded blue walls of the kitchen, at the wrinkles on the backs of his grandmother’s hands, at the way his mother’s eyes were asking a question, even though her words had just been a plain old sentence.
    He thought of Black Jesus, reaching out his hand to Black God, almost touching. He thought of how, at one bodega, he had tossed two gallons of milk in the air like Monroe had taught him and pretended to take a whopping fall, smacking onto the floor. The store manager had rushed over to make sure he wasn’t hurt, and then had given him a candy bar to keep him from crying. He remembered that as he walked into the splintered sunshine, Monroe had been waiting, having seen the whole prank. “Eight-point-five,” Monroe had said. “You get points for the tears, but your technique needs work.” He remembered breaking the Snickers bar in two; giving Monroe the bigger half.
    “All right,” Raymond said to his mother. “I’ll go.”
    * * *
    Camp Konoke was really a Christian retreat in the heart of the Berkshires, where—as one of the overseeing pastors said—God liked to come for His vacations. It might have been true—the velvet slopes of the mountains were dotted with wildflowers, and tucked into the valley was a lake as blue as a jewel. For three weeks each summer, kids from the inner city in Boston were given the blessings of fresh air and sunshine. With the exceptions of morning prayers and evening vespers, there was little to distinguish