Creepy - Creepaway Camp 2025: Day 5 - The Bear River Wellness Institute & Time of Your Life

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

The Bear River Wellness Institute***Written by: James Fritz and Narrated by: Michelle Kane***Time of Your Life***Written by: Cameron Suey & Purpurina and Narrated by: Phil Van Hest***Hear more from Observable Radio at observableradio.com***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or our simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. listener discretion is advised. Scouting report. Well, things aren't looking good. So far, it looks like the camp has started to divide into smaller camps, or cells, if you will.

Each of these cells has started to form its own hierarchy, rituals, and in some cases, even an entirely new economic system. I haven't been able to, as of yet, determine how these cells are being divided, as it doesn't seem as though people have been sticking with their own podcasts nearly as much as I would have anticipated. which in turn also concerns me because it appears that some level of geopolitics seems to be a play that I haven't been privy to. Food supplies are suspect at best with no one wanting to confide in me as to exactly how much of the supplies they still have. Is my estimation that we will most likely run out of food before the end of the week, and things will quickly deteriorate from there. Thank you, Owen. Alicia?

Yeah, what? Can you confirm the accuracy of Owen's report? Um, no. And why not? Because none of that is happening right now? Interesting. Agree to disagree. Owen?

Sir. Dispatch back into the tree line and continue surveillance. I will. As soon as I get my binoculars adjusted. I can't see anything with them. Holding your cupped hands up to your eyes isn't the same thing as binoculars. It was the same thing as binoculars. the same thing for Bugs Bunny. Life was so much easier when we only had to worry about John being

completely unhinged. Maybe we leave Owen at home next time. No, he's my karaoke partner. Think we could just get back to telling stories? What's the rush? Oh, no reason. Definitely not because every time we get together, you seem to take another step over the edge, plunging the rest of us into a weird world of anxiety, paranoia, and concern. Good. As long as it's not a lot of of that. Anyone got a story? I do. It's about the Bear River Wellness Institute. Monday, November 7. At 3.27 a.m., two men broke into my bedroom and forced me up. 10 minutes to pack. No breakfast. No time to say goodbye to mom and dad. In Utah, it's legal if your parents sign off on it. It's called a parental escort service. I call it legal kits.

napping. I'm not going back to school. Instead, they enrolled me at the Bear River Wellness Institute. Took five hours to get there. There's nothing around except trees. Did they get sick of all the pranks at school? Nobody proved that I masterminded the unscrewing. Besides, that was our senior prank. Everybody bore responsibility for that. But I'll be the first to admit that, listing the principal's house on Realtor.com? Was my idea. And the cow prank was, too. Okay, I'm guilty of a lot,

but I don't deserve this. I don't take drugs or sleep around or get drunk. I just play pranks. Upon arrival, me and the other newbies had a seminar with Ms. Hardley, the headmistress. She's half parrot, half human. She screeched for an hour and 15 minutes.

Our parents are. sick of us. Kids are out of control today. We won't leave till we submit to the program. Blah, blah, blah. After the invocation, a dorm parent helped me unpack. She said that the school of grounds used to be a hostile. A more fitting title would be a hostile. My room's got a bed with the thinnest mattress on earth, a dresser that's missing a drawer, and a squeaky chair with a desk. There's asbestos in the ceiling. A single light bulb hangs over the room. But the absolute worst part are the posters in the hallways.

Work equals freedom. Submission is the key to redemption. They should make one that says, Leave the past in the past. Your parents did. Friday, November 11. Got through my first week at Bear River. I still haven't memorized all the rules.

They gave me an entire packet. Here are some of the good ones. No eye contact with students. No makeup. No shaving. No talking. No touching anyone. Leave stall door open.

Keep hair and braid. Yeah. They don't have rules like that in prison. Compared to this, Utah Correctional is a five-star hotel. When you're an adult, you have rights. If you're a minor, your parents can take them away with a penstroke. But if they think they can take the Joker out of me, I'll be here till I turn 18. But at least I'll have Anand to hang with.

I met him during kitchen duty. We talk whenever the dorm parents aren't around. He's a bigger rule breaker than me. His parents shipped him all the way from Florida. Correction, his stepfather did. for sleeping with his mistress. What better way of shutting a kid up than sending him to Bear River? We've been brainstorming different pranks to pull.

It's been months since I've pulled one off. I've got the itch. This place could use some new decor. Friday, November 18. I woke up at 247 a.m. to hang up the new posters. Anon is quite the artist. Some of them were masterpieces. I wanted to keep the one that read,

Submission is the key to orgasm. But Anon talked me out of it. I hung it up right on Hardley's door. It took two hours for the dorm parents to take them down. We put them everywhere, in the bathrooms, on the doors, in the kitchen, on the ceiling. I don't know how Anon got all the paper and tape. Good Prankster never reveals his secrets.

They're going to have a seminar for us tomorrow. Rumor is that when they find the masterminds, they'll send them to the rehabilitation station. Anon told me that the RS is Bear Rivers' version of solitary confinement. I don't care what they do. Listening to hardly screaming was worth it. The parrot almost had a connoissement. Saturday, November 19.

Next time I see my parents, I'll gouge their eyes out. Then I'll make them sit through a seminar. Hardly's got the process down. First, you wake up all the students in the middle of the night. Then you put them in a room with all the windows covered and no food or water. Once the seminar starts, you're time deprived, sleep deprived, and food deprived. They played the theme from 2001, a space odyssey when we walked.

We had to lie down on our backs, clap our hands, and scream for 15 goddamn hours. They make the students do shit like this during every seminar. Some of the veterans told me that a few months ago, they had all the students smack pool noodles on the ground until their hands bled. The dorm parents walked around and asked if we had anything to confess. If you were smart, you made something up. I confessed I made love to a Rottweiler and did eight balls on the weekends. What's crazy is they believed me.

According to their logic, everybody is guilty of something. If you deny that, you're resisting the program. Anon confessed that he got a blowjob for Ms. Hardley. Unfortunately, the dorm parents didn't believe that. The guards came in and threw him out. I think they put him in the RS for a breakdown. Thursday, December 1st. Okay, now I'm really fucking worried.

Two weeks and no anon. Is he still in the RS? Did they expel him or transfer him? Is he still alive? There's a rumor that the school kills some of their students. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. But how would they get away with it? The parents would sue the school into oblivion if it were true.

Then the police would come and shut it down. Hardly would know. She keeps records on everybody. The only problem is that I'd have to break into her office. Guards stand outside 24-7. Can I draw them away somehow? Fuck, things have gotten so bad without anon. I forgot to untie my shoelaces before a room and say,

and got knocked down a level in the program. Now they get to treat me like a six-year-old again. During the last seminar, they had each of us sit on stage while the rest of the students insulted us. Crack-hor, druggy, cow face, pork barrel, scale breaker. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't care less what some rando on the street thinks of me. It's different when the insults come from your friends. The only reason the program functions is because the students go along with it.

As long as you're not getting hurt, who gives a fuck what happens to anybody else? Hardly called it attack therapy. Nice euphonism for child abuse. Thursday, December 8th, one of Bear River's sister schools shut down. We onboarded 47 new students this week. But get this. One of those 47 is a non-spectrum. brother, Derek. He got sent away for throwing a beer bottle at his stepfather. Doesn't take any

shit. He and Anon must have been really close. He asked me to tell him if I hear any news about his brother. The hostiles completely overcrowded. I've got two roommates now. We alternate sleeping in the bed. Hardly implemented food rationing to deal with the extra students. All she cares about is green. The less she has to spend on us, the better. But there is a silver lining to all this. We've been stretched to the limit. There's a tension in this place that I didn't feel when I moved in. The dorm parents are starting to feel it too.

They've been sending more people to the RS, sometimes for no reason at all. There's talk of a rebellion brewing. Derek told me that the tentative date is next Friday. As a professional troublemaker, come trickster, come prankster extraordinary, I'd be remiss if I didn't do everything I can to help. I've been tasked with pulling the fire alone. All the exits will automatically unlock. They won't be able to keep us trapped any longer. We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore.

Friday, December 16th. 20 minutes before Armageddon, I'm shaking. as I write these words, everything's ready. Derek broke into the kitchen and stole all the knives. I've got mine on my desk, and I'm not afraid to use it. The official plan is to break into the computer lab and destroy all the hardware. Since all of our classes are online, the school won't be able to function without the desktops and monitors.

After that, it's every man for himself. But me and Derek have a special mission. We are going to find out what really happened. to Anon and the other students who disappeared. Once the fire alarm sounds and the guards are drawn away, we'll break into Harley's office and go through our files, see what the parrot has been hiding from us. Five minutes till freedom.

Saturday, December 17th. I know the truth. The honest, brutal, unvarnished truth. Bear River was never just a school for troubled teens. It's a place for parents to send their children to have them murdered. All of the kids who were sent to R.S. were killed and buried somewhere in the forest. My parents never knew about the school's ulterior purpose, but Anans did. His stepfather paid $385,000 to have him killed.

I've got all the evidence in front of me, two backpacks full of files from Hardley's office, checks written from a non-stepfather, a list of liquidated students, handwritten letters from parents with their final words to their condemned children. Thankfully, the parrot never made the move to digital. The riot went off perfectly. It was insanity. Half the students escaped while the other half stayed and trashed the place. The hostile is beyond repair. All the windows are broken. The electronics are toast. The light bulbs shattered. Somebody started a fire in the kitchen and burned the fucker down. Good riddance. Me and Derek stole some of Hardley's money and checked into a motel a few miles away.

The instant we went to our room, he broke down, cried for almost 30 minutes, took a pillow and screamed into it. There was nothing I could say or do to comfort him. But there is something we can do for Anon. The moment that we get our hands on a laptop and scanner, we're digitizing everything and putting it online. The world has to see what's going on. Bear River was just one school in a network. I won't rest until every one of them is closed.

If he were alive, Anon would do the same. Okay, well, I need to go hit the head. He's going to... What? He means the bathroom. It's an old sailing term. They called the toilet the head because it was at the head of the ship.

No, he's going to hit the paper-miche head that he made in art class. He also calls the head John. I don't want to ask him about it. No one should. Ever. Wait. We have an art class? Oh, yeah.

The observable radio podcast people are running it. I swear I saw Phil Van Hest around here somewhere. Oh, there he is. Hey, Phil, come over here. Hey, everyone, how's it going tonight? Wanted to introduce you to everyone. We should go around the circle and everyone say your names. Mlisha has to court.

I didn't get a single one out of that. I think I heard someone distinctly say Dilbert. Probably. There's a lot of us here now. So how are you like in camp? I assume you got one of those mysterious invitations to... I'm not sure I'd call it mysterious, but yeah, I got the invite. It's fun.

I never got to go to camp as a kid, so it's been interesting. But I am impressed by how well set up this place is. You all really put a lot of work into it. Actually, we were all drunk. Ow! Who threw their flip-flop at me? Esmi Chankla. I can head of fly from across the room,

and I have another one ready. Well, regardless, I just wanted to thank you all for the invite. It's weird here, but nice to put, you know, faces to voices. Speaking of which, did you have a story you want to tell? As a matter of fact, I do. It's called Time of Your Life. I built the radio from a kid I got at Christmas the year before I went to the camp. They don't make those crystal radios.

anymore, but it was just a few parts. Coil of wire, a hard plastic earbud, and an alligator clip that I attached to my metal bed frame to turn it into an antenna. I never picked up anything worth listening to, so it sat in pieces on my desk until Avi Singh slept over one night in spring. Avi was sharper than I was, and we both knew it, so I let him fiddle with the little coil while I read his comic books. Took him a half hour to find the signal. Loud, crisp, clear enough for both of us to hear if we pressed our heads together around the earbud. The music crawling out of the static sounded like the last bars of Walk This Way. Havi air drummed.

I grimaced and stuck out my tongue. But then the chords changed and the guitar played unfamiliar notes and it didn't sound like anything anymore. musical wallpaper. When that strange song ended, there was just one commercial, and I wish I could remember what it said exactly. I just remember what it made me feel. The voice was deep enough to make the little earpiece buzz with a warm vibration against our ears, and over a sound bed of running water and birds. The voice made promises.

Log cabins. Cnoos on a crystal blue lake. Archery beneath the summer sun. Caves to explore the time of your life. Camp Sprigin

in the Adirondack Mountains. An hour drive away. Avi wrote down the mailing address. The station never played anything other than the weird tribute band, and it faded after another five minutes, and never heard another sound out of that radio. But the ad stuck fast for the rest of the spring.

Camp Spriggin was all we could think about. Avi worked his parents with targeted promises, and I sweet-talked mine and did extra chores. It wasn't hard to convince my folks. They might have been irritated at the trail of abandoned hobbies littering our house, but two weeks without kids in the house was a powerful lure, and I made sure to remind them. Avi's parents relented in May,

and by June we were packing and unpacking in fevered anticipation, and when the day in July came, Avi left hours before me, headed for a planned breakfast stop with his parents and three sisters in the hills. My dad dragged his feet and fought with a coffee pot until it was nearly noon, oblivious to my irritation, and mom's gentle reminders. By the time we climbed into the nomad, we could have powered the car on my excitement. I remember the pines, the cold snap of the air once we climbed out of the valley. I remember Dad singing along with the radio, and the shimmering feeling of excitement felt almost illicit.

I knew it was all wrong the moment we turned off of the main road. Mom grimaced, mumbled about the altitude, and began to rub her temples. As we got closer, there was, No arch, no sign to welcome us, just a gravel road that ended in a complex of squat, ugly buildings made out of press board and vinyl siding. The ad on the radio had no pictures, of course, but I knew what I was seeing was wrong. There were no children, no log cabins. The thick, humid smell in the air promised still water choked without,

not a vast blue lake. My pride stuck in my throat, but I wanted to stay in the car, not slow down, and go home. The car stopped with a sickening lurch as dad killed the engine and radio. He pulled open my door, and I slid out onto the gravel.

The chunks of grace don't too massive and uneven to walk on without difficulty. The words to express my doubt were tumbling in my mouth when the first counselor appeared. It wasn't there when we drove up the road. I was sure of it. There was no sound on the stones to mark its approach. But when I looked up, it was there looming over my father.

And my father was a tall man. When last I saw him, it was from a distance and he was bent over with age, but still was well over six. feet. The counselor looked down at him like an adult to a child. Its gray eyes flicked over to me as it smiled and stole my breath from my throat. Its wide mouth glistened with tiny, dull teeth in a straight and perfect piano row. It winked at me and I felt the hot trickle of piss on my leg. Somewhere distantly, I was grateful for the recent pit stop. I gripped my father's hand tight and prepared to run with him to be swept up into his arms and protected from this predator,

but he was speaking with it, making apologies for our late arrival. My legs, denied flight, begged for collapse, but my father held me upright, looking at me with only mild irritation. Mom gave me a quick hug, a thickly whispered apology, and then slid back into the front seat to press her forehead and eyes with her fingertips. He's going to have a very nice time here, the looming thing said in a voice like wind-blown glass splinters. In the sunlight I could see its exhalation like a thin golden cloud of sparkling dust-moving,

It drifted around my father in lazy, slow fingers. I'll bet it's all he could talk about all year, laughed my father, fixing his eyes somewhere on the counselor's ribs, wrapped beneath a shapeless gray garment, as if he was looking at a different face than I. He coughed and then sneezed as the golden tendrils settled into his nose. I squeezed his hand so hard I thought I might draw blood. Let's get into your cabin with the others, sighed the counselor, pinning me again with its blank eyes. It gestured with a hand like a naughty gray spider and pointed to one distance, slapdashed building and then walked away without waiting for a reply. The gravel was silent beneath his

slender feet. I turned to my father in pleading terror and I could already see the answer on his face. I've thought a lot about whether I blame him for what happened next. He was not a loving man, but I don't think he saw what I saw. I have to believe that if he did, he would have taken me far away from that place. Instead, he looked hard in my eyes, sniffed his nose, and said, You begged us to come here. Is this going to be like Taekwondo? Where you just give up?

I had no answer to that. He pressed the hard leather suitcase into my hands as I struggled to think clearly. Look, Avi's already here. You're going to have a blast. He said it with a grin, and I think he believed it. Then he furrowed his brow to tell me that this next part was serious and used his no-arguments voice. Your mother and I haven't had time off in 12 years, and you're not going to ruin this for me. I'm sorry, Scooter, you're just not.

He ruffled my hair as I tried to catch my breath to speak. sneezed twice more and strode back to the car promising to see me in two weeks. Then the nomad accelerated back down the gravel drive a little too quick and vanished behind the turn of pine trees. The roar of my pumping heart filled my ears in the thick silence. Until I left that place, I never heard a bird or insect. I never saw a single living creature in those woods that wasn't drawn there. Standing there in the gravel drive felt like the far side of the moon,

and I cried without making a sound, still watching the road to see if my father might return. Eventually I knew I had to turn around. The counselor was waiting for me in the shade of the rickety building, a blank and unhurried look on its smooth gray face. There was a musty smell to the building as if it had been flooded recently, and strange gray mushrooms poked up in little clusters around the press board seams. It reached down when I arrived and plucked my leather suitcase almost gently from my grasp. I didn't resist, and it favored me with another baby-toothed smile as it tossed my last belongings into the building. yanking the door open and shut with a quick movement.

I heard it clatter into a pile of other soft objects in the dark as it grinned back at me and said, We'll store it for later, as if that answered all my questions. Let's head up to the cabin, shall we? It didn't wait for an answer as it turned and strode away towards the edge of the clearing with only the whisper swish of fabric. The path was freshly trodden grass here, yellowed and ground into the earth, and speckled with more little clusters of tiny pale mushrooms. Is Avi here? I managed, at last, squeezing forth the speech from my shivering body. The counselor looked back at me with a look of cartoonish concern and regarded me for a moment as if weighing its words.

Not yet, it breathed at last with a small golden puff from its lips. Part of me fell more alone than ever, but the rest of me was happy for him. Avi's parents would never have left him in a place like this. He would escape. The cabin looked no different than the buildings by the gravel drive, but it was half hidden in the afternoon shade of the pines. There were no windows, only a trio of greasy plastic skylights affixed to the flat roof. The counselor opened the door and reached out its arm far longer than it should have stretched

and placed one of those worm-fingered hands on my shoulder. I didn't want to go in that door, but I didn't want those hands on me ever again, and so I leapt forward straight inside. It made a sound like a breathy giggle, a pleased sound that made my stomach cold and queasy. Dinner is very soon. Make yourself at home, it offered waving a tree branch arm expansively at the interior of the cabin.

My eyes adjusted to the amber light from above to see a dozen boys. clustered in groups on a bare packed dirt floor the size of a large bedroom. The dusty yellow air filled with a soft chorus of sniffling wimpers. Most of them didn't even raise their eyes to me. I tried to step back over the threshold, but the door slammed shut with a rush of air and an impact that shook the walls. There was no handle on the inside. Only patches of budding fungus,

a fact that registered without much surprise. The other boys watched me pace the walls, looking for exits, windows, anything at all, before slumping to the floor. They had all done the same as they were brought here. Some of them had been here for hours. There had been hysterics and panic earlier in the day, but a sort of exhausted malaise fell over all of us.

Even me. We were caught. There was no. Now escape? There was no hope of escape. The sun had set, and the thin walls surrendered all heat by the time the counselors returned. There was another one this time. Its face had the same smooth and gray quality as the first counselor, but on this one the mouth was a dull and shallow wrinkle that never seemed to open, only twist and curl. The gray eyes were glossy and wide, fixed on me from the moment the door opened. As long as I saw it that night, it never broke eye contact. The other boys stared back, pinned in place by the owl-like gaze, as if it was staring at each of us personally.

There was no attempt at escape. We didn't even need to be told what to do. The first counselor stood outside the door in the harsh light of a sodium lamp, coughing with his mouth uncovered. The golden dust swirled in the street lamp glow and it drifted down over each of us as we lined up dutifully to be led away. At the back of the line, I watched him coat each child with a dry exhalation and I sucked in a deep breath and held it. We were a hundred yards away from the cabin when I let it go, drinking up the cold night air in ragged sips. The rest of the boys trudged on the path of pale mushrooms with no more than a quiet whimper. I tried to force my legs to break from the processional, but the muscles barely responded, distant, and sluggish.

Ahead, the main buildings of the camp were lit by the sickly light of a few lamps, but there were no other. other signs of life. At the front of the silent march, the wide full-moon eyes of the new counselor were still fixed on me, its head swiveling near a full rotation on the spindly neck. Even the thought of escape was hard to hold on to when our eyes locked. The other counselor glided ahead on light steps, opening the doors of the largest of the plywood buildings. There was no light inside, just a thick, choking dark that exhaled a gust of stale, musty air, and a shimmering of gold moats that caught the harsh lamplight. I thought I saw

something move in the darkness, a bare slumping of movement and a larger mass, but then the counselors blocked my view. One by one, the other children marched into that maw. The wood was wet and warped with fungal blooms, and other smells drifted out, things I didn't recognize then, but I understand now. I knew that there was no walking out of that building, but still my feet moved in time with the others. If the wide-eyed counselor had remained at the door, I would have followed the silent call right inside with the others, but it slipped inside with a sudden hungry lunge, and when those awful eyes broke from mine, a thread was cut.

The other boys said nothing, didn't even look up as I broke from the line. That was the last I saw them. I don't even remember their faces now. As the last of the boys slipped into the warm, humid darkness of the room, the camp lights shut off with an echoing snap. I waited for screaming. dreams, anything, but there was only the soft sound of wind in the pines.

My eyes were slow to adjust to moonless darkness, but I could make out the smaller building where the first counselor had thrown my suitcase on arrival. There was no lock and the door swung open without a sound. My suitcase, with its leather patching and recent arrival, was easy enough to find. The new flashlight from my father still lay tucked inside a mesh pocket in the inside, and in the anemic beam I saw a great pile of rucksacks and duffles and backpacks, far more than the number of children I had just seen. And there, at the bottom of the pile, with the bright yellow luggage tag I recognized from our practice packing sessions, was Avi's brand new suitcase.

I don't know how long I stood there, and I don't know if I understood what it meant back then, but I stayed staring at the yellow tag long enough for the counselors to notice me missing they were waiting for me when I came back out again standing like sentinels in the clearing between the building I froze in place waiting for them to lunge toward me and too terrified to turn my back on them but they only waited heads cocked as they gazed down at me making no motion

I started to back away, holding on to the absurd idea that these strange things might just let me leave after all of this. Still, they held their place, watching me step away down the gravel path. I saw only a brief flurry of motion from the tree line behind, but I understood they weren't letting me go. They were letting another take the chase. This new counselor made no pretense at human shape. Only a starburst of four long limbs and a small, hungry head budding from the central torso corded with pale gray muscles. It moved over the clearing like a shark in water, pale legs swishing through the grass.

In my nightmares, it's fast. I dream of it charging after me like a wild dog, outpacing a child in just a few hundred yards, and wrapping those fingers around me like cold ropes. Sometimes it leaps landing on my back before I can even move. But on that night I didn't look. All my pent-up desire to run, held fast by those cold eyes, spilled out, I turned and broke for the tree line. I never turned on the flashlight.

it somewhere in the woods. I ran by rabbit instinct, darting back and forth between the ghostly shape of the trees, with hands thrust out ahead, stinging from impact after impact. I pulled myself forward through the forest dark. It followed. I heard it skittering across fallen logs and over loamy drifts of dry pine needles. I heard it close the distance between us. It got close enough for me to hear it breathe, great wet exhalations that in my dreams are choked with golden spores. Then I heard it stop. Where the trees gave way to a downhill slope of young wild grasses, it turned and ran back through the woods with the same hungry enthusiasm. I listened to it crash away into the woods and waited, counting to a thousand before I was sure it wasn't coming back.

At the line in the grass where it had turned, I could see only a pale line of tiny mushrooms and nothing more. I made it out of the woods by morning. It was a logging truck driver who stopped for me first, took me half the way back home and out of the Adirondacks. He had only a few questions, but I had no answers for him. The thought of putting it into words seemed impossible. I just told him I wanted to go home, which... was not a lie. By nightfall, I'd walked the last few miles to my neighborhood.

There was no relief, no joy. I think I knew what was coming. My father answered the door with a blank look of mild concern as he looked me up and down. Can I help you? he asked. Not as coldly as he might reserve for a salesman or other unwanted guest, but in the tone reserved for strangers. I looked past to see my mother. on the couch, only distant irritation on her tired face.

I'm sorry, I said, surprising myself, I had meant to say it's me, but the words wouldn't come out. He looked down at my scratched hands and knitted his brows in concern. Are you hurt? Can I call someone? He asked with genuine concern, but I couldn't stay another second and look into the blank eyes. It was the same at Avi's house. His parents tried to invite me in and offered me food, but of course they'd never had a son, they said. I believed them. They were nothing but open and honest to me before.

Later that night, I snuck back and checked their trash cans. Avi's clothes and toys sat folded and packed in little plastic bags. It was easier as a ward of the state just to lie. When I tried to tell the truth in the first home, they increased my medications until the whole world went foggy. Once I told them what they wanted to hear and I reached adulthood, they let me go free. I never heard the signal again, not on any of the radios I built, but even without that, I learned how to read the trail.

Avi didn't just vanish. He was erased. There's no news article about him or any of the other boys. But there are shifts in population. School enrollments, demographic forms, census surveys. One missing kid can be hidden, but a hundred missing children make ripples in the records, no matter how you hide it. For a few summers, the camp must have kept operating, but then it moved a hundred miles at a time, each time leaving a ghost echo in the data. Missing children without names, but still leaving tracks.

And I found the ads. They don't appear for me, just like the radio signal, of course, but they do for kids. I had to wait in the library in the children's section long enough to get a few complaints, but I saw the pop-outs. And now I know where camp is going to be this summer. I know they won't look the same this time. I know that, like my dad, I won't see what they really are, but they can't hide from me. I'll know them by their breath. That golden fungal glow.

And I'm going to kill every one of them and burn that place to the ground. Hey, um, Megan. Can you help me with something? Sure, Jimmy. What's going on? I just... Okay, so I... What's wrong? Do you have any idea how we're supposed to tell John that he and Owen are actually right?

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