She shifts her weight, and the snow squeaks beneath her feet.
“This says it’s about zero-point-nine miles to the cabin,” I go on. “Where there’s heat, water, hot food, and real beds. There’s a little bit of tricky uphill, but nothing too bad.”
I lean over and zoom in a little on the spot where a few squiggly lines are running close together on the map.
“This right here is—”
“I can read a topo map,” she says tightly. I pull my hand back and grind my teeth together while it gets darker and colder and we stand around like two jackasses instead of getting a move on toward safety.
She’s like a… wounded hawk right now, or something, lashing out because she’s scared and cornered, and in this metaphor I’m trying to extend the raw meat strip of peace.
“Sorry,” she says, after a moment. “Yes. Thank you. It’s a steep uphill.”
She hands the GPS back to me and takes a deep breath and rubs her eyes and generally looks miserable, though that could be the terrible lighting. To my discredit, it makes me feel better that she’s having a hard time right now, because at least she’s taking it seriously.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Andi finally says. “If it all goes horribly wrong I’ve got a tent and a really nice sleeping bag with a broken zipper, so I’ll probably make it through the night.”
“Thanks for your concern,” I tell her, sliding the GPS into my pocket. She makes a face.
“Sorry,” she says again. “Look, I know this is my fault. I just don’t want to make everything worse. Not that I’m sure how it could be worse. This seems pretty bad and like it’s everything I’ve been trying to avoid every time I go hiking.”
I lean back into the cab of the truck, grab her sleeping bag, and start stuffing it into her frame pack.
“Could always be worse,” I call back over my shoulder. “Neither of us has any broken bones or concussions right now, there are no mountain lions I know of in the area, all the bears should be napping.”
“That you know of,” she repeats. “Should be napping.”
“Nature is unpredictable,” I say, turning my back to the driver’s seat and squatting so I can get the frame pack on. I swear I have to adjust every single strap on the thing. Andi watches me, her arms still crossed over her chest, her face tight. She’s got both gloves back on, the snow flashing through the beam of her headlamp.
“Are you gonna carry that no matter what I say?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Can I at least carry something so I don’t feel like you’re doing all the work?” she asks, so I hand her a small backpack from the truck’s cab. It has two water bottles and some emergency granola bars in it.
“Thanks,” she says, deadpan with that line of panic still running underneath. I stand, adjust the pack a little more, pull the straps tight. It’s too short for me, but it’ll be fine for a mile.
“We’ll be fine,” I tell her, swinging the door shut. Everything goes darker without the dome light on, dim as it was. Now I can’t see anything that’s not in my headlamp’s beam, and I don’t like it, but the alternative is worse.
“Yeah,” she says, and she nods, but she doesn’t look convinced. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ANDI
If I die on this hike, at least the headline will say Area Woman Dies While Semi-Competently Hiking to Safety, not Area Woman Dies While Chained to Tree; Motivations Remain Unknown. I don’t particularly think I’m going to die—Gideon seems pretty competent and, again, I do have a tent and sleeping bag with me—but I didn’t think it was going to snow, either.
I very much did not think I’d get rescued by Gideon Bell, but I guess the cosmos or whatever has a sense of humor. Or maybe a sense of drama? A sense of irony? I’m too tired to know what it is, but it’s something.
Whatever it is, I sure never thought I’d be here again, tromping through the woods with Gideon, wondering how much trouble we’re going to be in. It’s so familiar that I keep thinking I hope Dad doesn’t ground me this time before remembering that I’m an adult and that can’t happen. Even though the trouble we could get into now is die of exposure or get eaten by a mountain lion, at least Dad won’t use his Disappointed Voice on me.
Well. He might, assuming I survive this and can contact him later.
Gideon’s father didn’t have a Disappointed Voice. He never got grounded when we got home too late. He never told me about his punishments, but somehow, I still knew that they were worse than mine in a vague, kid intuition sort of way. I never put together what that meant until I was in college and hadn’t seen him for half a decade, though, once I started processing everything that happened. When we were five, or eight, or ten, it didn’t seem weird that he had to call his parents Sir and Ma’am or that saying I’ll do that in a second was considered backtalk or that he’d get in trouble if one of his siblings didn’t do their chores. That’s just what the rules were at Gideon’s house.
It wasn’t until college, when I was old enough and removed enough that the story became an event in my life instead of the single point everything else twisted around, that I realized it was probably why he was over at my house so much. I didn’t think about it at all when I was a kid, because that was the natural order of things: Gideon came over, ate something, and then we’d roam through the woods until one of us had to go home. He was quiet, even as a kid, usually happy to play along with whatever Unicorn Pegasus Princess or Dinosaur Stomp Destruction game I came up with. We were adventurers. We were pirates. We were settlers on the Oregon Trail, orphaned children living off the land, or magical people who could turn into birds, and those were our weekends and summers for years.
Gideon was clever, resourceful, and handy. He always had a pocketknife on him—even when we were in kindergarten, something else I had to process later—and sometimes we’d pull down tree branches and make shelters for ourselves, small, shady places to hide away from the world. He was a genius at damming creeks, climbing trees, and dressing minor wounds. He knew what all the birds were called and any time we saw a snake, he’d get so excited he couldn’t contain himself.
We were best friends, I think; at the very least I didn’t have a better friend. He was in a different category than my friends from school or dance class or girl scouts because he was constant, a baseline, a foundational bedrock. He was the only friend I had who’d known my mom. We told each other secrets, the kind that kids have: he told me about how he’d stolen his younger brother’s Hot Wheels because he was jealous, that he didn’t want his mom to have any more babies, that he’d eaten the last cookie and let his sister take the fall for it.
I told him about how I’d once tripped a girl on purpose during recess and how bad I felt, about the time I stole a purple marker from the school, that sometimes I hated not having a mom. The only secret I never told him about was Rick and my dad, but I guess he figured that out anyway.
We were best friends until suddenly, we weren’t.