Angry Management by Chris Crutcher Page B

college,” she says. “What about that?”
    “We change our plans. I’ll go where you go.”
    “It’s too late to change.”
    “Then I’ll work in McDonald’s for a semester and bulk up. Don’t even think about trying to change my mind.”
     
    Our dilemma is resolved. It’s nearing the middle of August. I contacted the University of Idaho and told them the next nuclear scientist to come out of therewould have to be someone other than me; I’d been made a better offer by Burger King. My new idea will depend on Sarah Byrnes’s willingness to do the same.
    “You’ve curbed global warming?” she says.
    “Close. Look at this.” I hand her two brochures.
    “Rather than make me read them, why don’t you just tell me, like you’ll do anyway.”
    “As you wish,” I say with a flair. “It’s a place called Mountain Lightning, up out of Bozeman, Montana, way high in the Rockies.”
    “Mountain Lightning.”
    I ignore her dismissiveness. You have to do that if you’re going to love Sarah Byrnes. She can flat cut you up with a look, or a comment. “It’s like a camp.”
    “Oh, I love to camp. Nothing like lying on the hard ground and peeing in a hole and freezing your butt off under a beautiful but arctic sky high in the Rocky fucking Mountains.”
    “Yeah, there probably is nothing like that, but this is a camp with cabins and beds and all the amenities. Well, not satellite TV, but no hard ground to sleep on either. Look. It’s for blind kids. It says here their philosophy is kind of like what I thought Kyle Maynard’s parents’ philosophy was. Just pretend everyone’s like you. They have sighted counselors and blind counselors. Withoutmy glasses, I almost cross over. I’m, like, bilingual in their world. And look here. They want counselors with ‘expressive’ language skills, ‘people good at describing the physical world with passion.’ There’s formal writing and informal conversations and all kinds of other stuff. It says right here, ‘There has never been a good employee of Mountain Lightning who didn’t get at least as much as he or she gave.’”
    Sarah takes the brochures out of my hand. “Wonder what they mean by that?”
    “Probably that they don’t pay much. But we go where nobody sees us before they know us. It’s a year-round residential outfit. This is the perfect time to apply because a lot of the summer employees go back to school now.”
    “I don’t know, Angus.”
    I sing: “A friend of mine is going blind but through the dimness, he sees so much better than me.” I sing it badly. “We’ll be in the dimness, Sarah. Pleeeze! We can go to college any time. I mean, we know we will. But this is a once in a lifetime. It’s beautiful, I mean, look at these pictures.” I hold open the brochure. “Pleeeze, Sarah, think about it.” I stop and smile. “See, I told you, you’d get tired of me long before the other way around.”
    She takes the brochures. “I’ll think about it.”
     
    Dinner’s over. The mess hall is clean; dishes washed, tables scrubbed. Sarah and I sit on the porch outside the main meeting hall, waiting to tutor some of the older kids with their homework. It’s a smaller group in the fall. Many of the summer campers have gone to their homes and back to school. The fall and winter kids are a little more troubled overall; some of them have no place but here. Sarah and I are here as aides. Room and board and seventy-five dollars a week. In my first days I felt anxiety retreat on a daily basis. Nobody looked at me with disapproval as I lumbered over the trails or talked a group through the intricate paths from the cabins to the meeting hall or the school. The considerations I make to accommodate my charges’ lack of sight are nothing compared to the relief of living with people who don’t judge me before they know me.
    Sarah is a different person. She works with younger kids than I do, but she is so much better at it than I am. Such a natural. It