Chapter One: The First Bombshell
Reformed, they told us solemnly, told each of us, and our parents, and our counselors and social workers, and anyone else they had to convince, knowing perfectly well that we, at least, were far beyond convincing.
Reformed.
They weren't talking about us. The bad kids. The juvenile delinquents. The boys who had, until barely a month before, been living at Camp Green Lake Juvenile Correctional Facility, dwelling in tents in the middle of the Texas desert, and digging holes all day under the blazing hot sun.
No, of course it wasn't we who had supposedly "reformed." It was they. The ones whose very names we dreaded hearing, whose voices we heard and whose faces we saw in our nightmares. The ones who had been our captors, our slave-drivers, our hated guardians for those long days, weeks, months that had made up our grueling individual stays at the so-called "camp." The affectionate term reformed was reserved for the three criminals at Camp Green Lake who had not been there as a punishment for their crimes. Their crimes had then been unknown to anyone but themselves, though perhaps suspected by us from time to time. Their motive, the force that drove them, had been wealth beyond imagining. They had meant to obtain this wealth through us. Through our hard physical labor. Through our sweat and blood and suffering and sacrifice.
They had failed.
And now the Texas government was giving them another chance to succeed.
Though their methods at times somewhat transcended the boundaries of morality, their motives were always righteous. They have presented their case in such a fashion that it is our belief that the unfortunate occurrences connected to the facility known as Camp Green Lake were purely accidental, and that these three individuals are guilty of no more serious crimes than those for which they have now duly paid. Therefore, it is our decision that the Camp Green Lake juvenile justice facility be re-opened, its previous staff re-instated, and that its previous detainees return to serve the duration of their sentences.
Only two of us were spared.
Stanley Yelnats, who was cleared of charges, and Hector Zeroni, whose file was lost in a regrettable technical mishap...
I guess that old curse of Caveman's really was broken, then, just like he thought. At least, it certainly seemed to be done with him and Zero. They were living the good life now. But perhaps that curse hadn't really been broken at all; perhaps it had just decided to manifest itself in a new way, to come from a new angle, to strike a new group of victims.
Of course, none of us really knew what happened. How in hell could Mr. Sir, Pendanski, and that crackpot lady who we knew only as "the Warden" come up with a strong enough court case to achieve what was, for them, a sheer miracle? How did they manage to rake in the dough for some ultra-expensive, super-powered lawyer? Or did the stars just happen to be aligned in their favor on the day of the hearing at which they were tried for child abuse, negligence, and running a state facility under false pretenses?
There was no way we could know for sure how those three idiots pulled it off. All we knew for sure was that we...six boys technically identified as Rex, Theodore, Ricky, Alan, José, and Brian...found ourselves staring at the inside of good old D-Tent once again, sooner than we ever would have hoped or dreamed.
As Minion once said, "Empty cookies and busted eight balls...cosmic fill-in-the-blanks."
Of course, you haven't met Minion yet. But you will soon enough. See, things were bad enough with the unexpected little Camp Green Lake reunion. Yet they were about to become a lot more complicated than they had ever been before.
