Chapter 3

No one then said a word. No one even asked for her permission. It was like Janet didn’t exist or, if she did exist then at least she didn’t matter. Instead, the good doctor and her protégé, her own three children, Jenny, 15 and her two twins, Jesse and James, 14 simply climbed into the car along with their friend Timmy and a boy whose skin was as black as the darkest midnight. This boy didn’t even bother to introduce himself but Janet would soon come to know him very well and know that his name was Chuck.

“Sure I guess I can take them.” Janet now said more than a little passive-aggressively. “You know ... if they’re going my way.”

It was more trouble to argue than it was worth, Janet now thought, and if she became angry about the lack of respect she had just been shown then, in the end, she would be made out to be the bad guy. Hopefully, what the camp director said was true and she wouldn’t be forced to drive too far out of her way before she could kick all of her uninvited guests out of her van. Now the statuesque blond who Janet thought might be as much as 8 inches taller than her own 5’4” height loomed over her.

“Oh, thank you Mrs. Smith” Dr Moore now said in a syrupy sweet voice that seemed to ooze right out of her.

“I promise you, if you just drop me off by my car, I’ll take all the extra children with me and drop them off myself.”

“Alright then that will be our first stop,” said Janet in reply. The pretty Mormon mom would never admit it to herself but she really couldn’t wait to get the black boy out of her car. For, though she had told herself that all people were god’s children innumerable times, Janet couldn’t deny what she knew to be true. Blacks were different. Sure, there were a few good ones among the masses but, for the most part, they were loud and vulgar and tended to be disorderly. They were unkempt and just as racist as any white person she had ever met. Of course, it was o.k. for them to look down on people of other races, on white women like herself but, worst of all, they were ill mannered and, even more repulsively, they almost never seemed to be clean. Janet now felt a shiver of disgust as it rolled down her spine. She then looked in the rear view mirror and watched as the black boy take a seat in the second row of the Suburban; directly behind the front seat passenger.

See, already acting like he owns the place Janet now thought but this time, instead of disgust, the pretty Mormon mom felt anger rising inside her. It was a feeling that would have to be squelched for her daughter Jenny and the two other women were also climbing inside her Suburban. It was just another indignity she would have to suppress for there was nothing that could be done about it but, while Janet thought she knew the true meaning of indignity, the pretty Mormon mom was about to have a lesson. A lesson that would show her the full and true meaning of that and many other horrible, humiliating words. Meanwhile, Janet’s SUV, now with eight people inside of it, turned and bounced through the dirt parking lot as it headed back towards State Road 58 and the Martinville Wilderness Area that it ran through. As it now faded into the distance, the camp director watched it go. Then, from out of his pocket the thin and nervous man took an old style flip phone; it was a device that was sometimes called a burner phone.

“Yeah they’re headed your way now” he said after dialing a number. “Yeah, just like you said you wanted.”

The camp director now paused with his ear pressed against the phone listening to what the voice on the other end was saying.

“Well, you better like ‘em...” the camp director then said in response, his voice rising in irritation.

“You know how many favors I had to call in just to make it seem like she couldn’t take the highway even for those few minutes?”

Once again, the camp director paused; listening intently to what he was being told.

“Yeah, all right, goodbye” he said finally.

Pulling the phone away from his ear, the camp director now flipped it closed. While the skinny, nervous man knew that the time until he got to see those four delicious looking women again would be agony, he also knew that, once they did meet again, he was most certainly going to have the most enjoyable time of his life.