“Yeah?”

“I felt good. My pa-rents were proud. I thought I had a posi-tive mes-sage. Then, the MC looked into the cam-era, with tears—” My voice is almost a squeak. I’m not sure I can finish the story.

“Tears in his eyes? What did he say?” She leans forward.

“He said, ‘Friends, this girl needs speech thera-py.’”

She starts to interrupt, but now I’m determined to finish. “He said, ‘With-out your help, she won’t get it.’”

Sara throws her head back. “What a complete and total asshole!”

I laugh. I can’t believe I’m laughing. Until this moment, I saw nothing funny about it. After it happened, I tried to put it out of my mind, but instead I kept getting stuck, asking myself what I could have done to make my point better. Now laughter has broken the logjam and is washing over my brain, carrying away the trash.

Sara is thoughtful. “That’s a classic telethon story. The idiot couldn’t see it—you’re a speech-therapy success story. As good as it gets.” She studies the tangle of trees on the other end of the field. “Or else he was scratching around for an angle to get the phones lit up. Never mind that it’s false. And insulting.”

I’m engaged, thinking again. “Some-times, I wish we didn’t have tele-thons.”

“Yeah.”

“But with-out the tele-thon, this camp would-n’t be here.”

“Exactly. It wouldn’t.”

She turns back to the badminton game. “Who’s playing for who, anyway?”

“I’ve got De-nise.”

“Naturally—she’s ahead. I shouldn’t have asked!”

I raise my left eyebrow. I have good control of that eyebrow. The sun has moved so high that the shadows of two pines over our heads shrink to mere polka dots. Poor Denise and Peggy Jo are soaked with sweat.

“You know,” Sara says, “there are a lot of telethon stories around here. I’ve been collecting them. People do telethons, year after year. And each year it seems they get more uncomfortable.”

I nod.

“There are exceptions. Impossible dreamers like Dolly and maybe the aussies—who can tell?—some people love the telethon, genuinely. But most of us are just pretending. We keep our feelings hidden, even from ourselves. Underground. Under cover. And it’s our silence, our cooperation, that keeps the whole structure in place. Withdraw that support and it all falls down.”

She pauses. There’s nothing to say, but I feel my head nod.

“So,” she says with dancing eyes, “I’ve been working on a little scheme. A small conspiracy.”

What now?

“I’ve been thinking we should make a real statement at Talent Night. Bag ‘Morning at Camp Courage.’ Do something meaningful. Guerrilla theater. A reverse telethon.”

“A what?”

“It’s a futuristic fantasy. A world where cripples are in control. Nothing like it has ever been done here. Nothing at all like it. Amazing, huh? It’ll blow the lid off.”

“Ta-lent Night is to-night. We have a skit prepared. It’s funny.”