by Carrie Mac
We walked down the dirt road, with a full moon above so bright and big that we should’ve been able to see, except the smoke socked everything in, and we had to use our headlamps. It was so thick that by the time we heard the thumping bass half a mile away, we were both surprised that the rave hadn’t already been evacuated.
“We should turn back,” Pete said.
“No way.” I grabbed his arm and we ran the rest of the way. “I am not going to be this close to a real rave and not go.”
We walked right in, suddenly finding ourselves in a sea of glow sticks and tiny lights of every color and degree of twinkle and blink wrapped around arms and torsos, feathered angel wings dotted with twinkling lights in blues and greens, and everyone was dancing to the music the DJ spun on a folding table just above the river.
And on the other side of the river? Not even two hundred feet from the bank?
The wildfire. It wasn’t supposed to jump the river. Two hours ago, that fire couldn’t have. I hadn’t noticed the wind change, but here it was, and once a fire is after you, you cannot run fast enough. Sometimes you cannot even drive fast enough. And it’s the unpredictable behavior of a fire like that that makes people abandon their cars in a slow-moving evacuation and start running. A fire can change so fast that it devours entire towns, with people trapped in their homes.
Trees like flaming matches, a writhing carpet of flames covering the forest floor.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Then we did the thing you’re never supposed to do in a packed theater.
“Fire! Fire!” Pete yelled. “Everybody has to get going now!”
And while it wasn’t a movie theater, it was packed, and there were only a few ways out besides impossible bushwhacking. People started screaming and running, grabbing each other’s hands and heading away from the river to where the cars were parked. The music kept thumping, and when I glanced up to the stage, the DJ looked oblivious, with his headphones on and the light show still strobing and pulsing behind him.
“We have to go tell him,” Pete said.
“Look around you, Pete!” Everyone else on the stage was pulling cables and trying to collect the sound equipment. “He wants to keep going. He’ll get out. He’s doing the Titanic. We have to go!”
I grabbed his hand and we ran. Back up the dirt road, our lungs hurting as we sucked in the smoke. We half expected to be flagged down by the trucks as they evacuated the trail maintenance crew, but we made it all the way back to camp, where we stood, panting, for just a second before we made a beeline for the outdoor kitchen and the tap. I drank so much water that I got a stomachache and almost threw up, but I felt amazing. Amazing amazing. The adrenaline ran hot through my veins, and even though most of me wanted to go back, the sane part knew that we had to get some sleep.
Pete and I ran back to the wall tents. Boys in one, girls in the other, no matter how hard we argued to be in the same one. “We’re best friends! We’ve been sleeping in the same tent since we were seven and my grandmother built us a tent out of sheets hung over the clothesline.” But they would have none of it. Boys in the boys’ tent. Girls in the girls’ tent. No exceptions. We kept pushing. “What if we were gay? That’s the same as having a boy in the girls’ tent and a girl in the boys’ tent, right? Because you think we’d have sex? How does that even make any sense?”
“Boys in the boys’ tent,” Hassam, the boys’ leader, said. “No exceptions.”
“Girls in the girls’ tent,” Jill, the girls’ leader, said. “No exceptions.”
Said the two college kids who we saw leaving those tents and making out on the dirty couches at the back of the camp kitchen.
“We have to tell everyone,” I said.
“Right now,” said Pete.
“I just need two seconds to gather myself and pretend that what happened didn’t. My heart is beating so fast.” I pulled his hand to my chest. “Feel it?”
“Me too.” He pulled my hand to his chest.
Right then the two tent leaders and the other leaders—trails, tools, kitchen, and logistics—appeared from the far end of the camp, flashlights bobbing like giant fireflies.
“Campers!” Jill shouted.
We dropped hands and leaped apart, even though it would never have occurred to Unicorn Pete that holding hands meant anything more than just plain holding hands.
The logistics leader lifted an air horn and sounded three blasts, adding insult to injury to my ears, which were still ringing from the rave.
Three blasts equals evacuation. So they already knew.
“You two, stop!” Hassam shouted when Pete and I headed for the tents for our packs, already ready to go, which was the way they had us keep them, for exactly this reason.
“I’m going to take three seconds out of this evacuation to tell you this.” Jill shone her headlamp in our faces. “You are not welcome back next year. Inappropriate behavior.”
“For seeing the fire first?”
“You can’t see it from here,” she said.
“No, seriously, because we were holding hands?” I shouted, which surprised Jill and me both, considering the incredulous look she gave me. “Seriously? I’ve known him since I was seven! Do you even have a friend like that?”
Without looking away from me, she grabbed the air horn and blasted it three times, exactly in the space between me and Pete.
“Consider it a foot for each blast,” she said. “As in, if I see you closer than that, there will be real trouble. Now get your packs and meet at the trucks! Go!”
* * *
—
Pete and I got into the backseat of the truck that the trails leader was driving. He’d seen us get in trouble, but when he finally noticed us back there, shoulder to shoulder, wedged beside the biggest kid in the camp, he just slammed on the brakes for a second, before shaking his head and gunning it to catch up with the convoy.
When we passed the rave, the clearing was empty except for all the trash people had left behind. The parking lot was chaos, with people trying to get out. Cars and trucks and beat-up old vans kicked dirt up, not that you could tell the difference between that and the smoke. And even though people were packing in as many carless strangers as possible, there was still a large group waiting for a ride. It was surreal, seeing all those glowing necklaces and people entwined in fairy lights, like so many elfin evacuees, stranded in the forest.
The muster point was the ranger station, where we waited for Pete’s dad to come get us. The smoke wasn’t so bad down there, but our clothes and packs stank of it. We sat on the lawn out front, watching everyone bustling around, even if we weren’t sure what all the excitement was about, considering there was no wildfire threat down here. Jill hurried back and forth, from the admin building to the sheds at the back, ignoring us mostly, except to throw us the odd increasingly dirty look.
“What can she do?” I could tell by Pete’s voice that he was actually asking that, rather than implying that there wasn’t anything she could do. “Right?”
What she did do was talk to Pete’s dad when he showed up an hour later. She tried to talk to him privately, but Everett wouldn’t have that.
“You can say whatever you want in front of them,” he said. “Seeing as they’re who you’re going to talk about, right?”
“I don’t care about how long they’ve been friends,” Jill said. “I don’t care that they say that they’re just friends. I don’t care if they are gay or straight or bi or ace or queer, in whatever sense of those words, nor do I care if they have sleepovers seven nights a week at both their homes, at the same time.” Apparently, she’d been practicing this speech when she was hurrying back and forth, considering how it rolled off her tongue so smoothly now. “The rule here is boys in one tent. Girls in the other. And even though both Pete and Annie are exceptionally hard workers on the trail, the tr
uth is that they might as well have passports to a country with a population of two, and their own language and currency to go along with it, when it comes to being team players.”
“Gotcha,” Everett said.
“Furthermore, they are not welcome back next summer.”
“Gotcha.”
“We weren’t coming back anyway,” I said, like a brat.
“Fire Camp,” Pete said, like someone who had just remembered that we needed letters of recommendation from the trail project to get into Fire Camp.
“I’ll be in touch with them,” Jill said. “I’ll make sure they know all about you.”
“Gotcha.” Everett glanced at me, then Pete. “No point backtracking now. No groveling allowed. That would just poke the bear some more, and you’ve done enough of that.”
“And great.” Jill threw up her hands. “You’re not taking this seriously either.”
“Nope.” Everett shrugged. “What, penises in one tent, vaginas in the other?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“How do you know what’s in anyone’s pants? And how do you know who wants into anyone else’s pants?”
Everett paused, and Jill glared at him.
“Safe drive home,” she said, then turned on her heel and walked as fast as she could without running to the admin building.
* * *
—
Everett put an arm over each of our shoulders.
“We don’t need a talk, do we?”
“No,” Pete said.
“Definitely no.” I pressed my hands together under my chin, as if to pray.
The Talk.
Everett and my dad had sat us down all together when we were fourteen, because Gigi had said that she was going to do it if they didn’t. With cheeks as red as his prized tomatoes, my dad told us not to be stupid, which was fair enough. Advice received. But then Everett told Pete not to, more specifically, put his penis into my vagina. At which point Pete and I slid into a heap on the dirty carpet and howled with horror for the rest of the day. Only, it was less than a minute, because then Everett said that if we did have penis-in-vagina sex, we should use a condom. A condom! My dad leaned forward, head in his hands. Everett offered him a glass of water. Gigi was there with one before Everett could stand up, which meant she had been listening to the whole conversation.
That entire exchange was awkward and horrible for everyone but Gigi, who had a big grin on her face that said she could’ve done a much better job but this was entertaining as hell.
Penis-in-vagina sex with each other had never occurred to us. Or at least not to me. Until that very moment.
* * *
—
Before we drove home, we climbed up the little hill behind the building, under the power lines, and ate the PB&J sandwiches Everett had taken the time to make before coming to get us. A thermos of cold milk, and apple slices sprinkled with cinnamon too. Pretty much the same meal he’d been making for us since Pete’s mom died.
“You two are old enough to make your own choices about your bodies and each other,” Everett said. “That’s what matters. The dads agree.” The moon glowed so bright now that there was hardly any smoke, and we could see to pick the wild strawberries growing all around. I remember that smell most of all. Warm strawberries and smoke and the thought of what it would be like to do the thing that everyone thought we were doing already.
* * *
—
We’ve just passed May Creek, where the rave was, but instead of heading straight north, Pete takes a cut to the right. He hands me a page protector with five or six sheets of paper. Topographical maps.
“I’ve got the waypoints in the GPS too.”
“Where are we parking?”
Pete shrugs. “We’ll find somewhere.”
“Where are we going in?” I say. “Why didn’t we just park at the trailhead?”
“We’re going to go parallel, south of it.”
“Why?”
“Less people. And a hot spring that my dad told me about that is epically secret.” Pete pulls over and puts the truck into park. “Pee break.”
He gets out and goes to the back of the truck, but before he’s done, he’s waving for me to come. With one hand, obviously. By the time I get out there, he’s done and is shushing me with both hands.
“Snakes,” he whispers, pointing. Just ahead of us, nestled in a group of boulders on the other side of the road in a wide patch of sun, is a knot of snakes. Just garters, but big ones.
“How many do you think there are?” I ask.
“Maybe five? Six?”
We creep forward. I pull my phone out of my pocket and start a video.
“What do you call a snake that works at a construction site?” Pete asks.
I turn the camera on him.
“I don’t know, Unicorn. What do you call a snake that works at a construction site?”
He grins. “A boa constructor.”
I laugh, and then I swing the camera back to the snakes because I hear a rustle. They’re untangling, and there are eight of them. Skinny, about two feet long each, shiny green-black, slithering into the bush. When the last one has disappeared, I turn the camera back to Pete.
“What’s a snake’s favorite subject?”
“Hisssssstory,” Pete says. Then he hooks his arm across my shoulders and steers me back to the truck, which is already so dusty that it looks like we’ve been driving for days on this logging road in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
“Did you tell your dad that you changed the route?”
“And yours.”
“Did you bring new topo maps too?”
“I didn’t have time to print them. But I have them on my phone,” Pete says. “Now, I hope you’re going to give me my badge for safety and preparedness, because I am all over the safe and prepared on this one. The US Safety and Preparedness badge shall be mine!”
This is a joke we have, the Unicorn Scouts Safety and Preparedness badge. We’re not particularly safe or prepared, but we always get away with it. If we worried too much about being safe or prepared, we’d never leave the house. And we would not be here, on a rough road, bouncing along with nearly no shocks—he should’ve replaced them last fall—fishtailing, correcting. Fishtailing, correcting. Pete does take care of his truck. He’s just saving up for new shocks. He calls his truck the Unicorn, but it is not sparkly or graceful. It does have a plastic shimmering horn screwed into the hood at just the right place, though. And it is, perhaps, magic. Because it has never broken down on us. Lift package, exhaust out the top so we can go through puddles the size of small ponds, ham radio and its wobbly antenna like a giant insect that’s had the other one broken off, and a decal of a unicorn with its mane blowing in the wind that takes up most of the hood. And about a million other unicorn stickers, many with rainbows, which is maybe why someone once spray-painted faggot on the side, and another time scratched gay above one of the tires. He’s never taken off either.
“How far up this road?” I yell over the music.
“Maybe ten miles?”
“My ass is already numb.” I get up onto my knees to check on our packs in the back.
“I tied them in,” Pete says. “Don’t worry.”
They’re fine. So dirty now that I wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a police lineup, but still sitting side by side, cinched to the strap that runs across, the one that the previous owner used to hook his dog onto.
* * *
—
The truck slides toward the edge on my side. For a moment, I can see straight down, the fallen trees, boulders, and a narrow, rushing river at the very bottom.
“Safety and preparedness!” I shriek, but I’m laughing too as we climb up, up, up. Pete gears down when it gets super steep. I change the music to o
ne of our playlists: Get Your Ass Outside.
It’s not mellow, like it might sound. It’s DJ Ninja, drum and bass. He played at that rave in the forest, which I didn’t know until we got home and I looked it up. And then I had no idea he was so famous until Preet freaked out when I asked if she knew who he was.
* * *
—
We crest the hill and the road levels out. Suddenly we’re in rangeland, miles and miles of grassy hills, cattle guards, and open-range warnings.
Pete speeds along this part. Fifty miles an hour, his back end slipping on each corner. We come around a sharp one, and he gears down suddenly and then slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a giant tea party of cows gathered in the middle of the road. They’re chewing their cud, their tagged ears flapping at flies, and they’re staring at us with big, wet eyes and slimy noses.
We sit there, knowing how this goes.
You wait.
Honking your horn does nothing.
Getting out sometimes makes them skittish enough to move, but they once got too skittish and I had to jump into the back of the truck to avoid being trampled. So we wait.
“Uno?”
“Sure.”
There’s a deck in the glove box, and a joint too, I discover. I pull out both. I hand him the joint while I start shuffling the cards. He immediately chucks it out the window.
“Pete! What the hell?”
“This is a clean and sober trip,” Pete says. “Clean clean. Both of us. For the whole trip. No exceptions.”