by Carrie Mac
I sit up, tidying the cards back into the little waterproof bag we carry them in. “Why are you awake?”
“Couldn’t sleep. I sorted my crystals.”
Smallest to tallest, cloudy to clear. I touch the sharp, glassy tip of the most beautiful one. A scepter about half as long as my pinkie, cloudy with tiny shards of purple amethyst at the base, then not another blemish. It didn’t even need to be washed.
“That one is for Preet,” he says.
“She’ll love it.” I set it back down in its place.
“Why are you up, Annie?”
Not because I was dreaming of Preet and Pete and a unicorn.
“I had a dream the fire was coming.”
“It does smell stronger. What if it gets too close?” he says, but then he shakes his head. “No. It can’t move that fast. We’re fine.” He takes the cards from me and tucks them into the lid of my pack. “Come on, let’s sleep outside.” He chases me out, giving me just enough time to shove my feet into my shoes.
While I shrug on my fleece jacket, he collects the sleeping bags and mats, the sacks full of laundry and spare clothes we use for pillows. He sets up our beds just outside the tent, where it’s still flat. He lays his bag atop his mat and climbs in. “Shooting star. There.”
“Did not.” I wriggle back into my bag.
“Did.”
I see one too, right away, arcing across the sky all bold and bright at first and then thinning into invisible.
Pete’s arm is under my head, just how I love it. Our sides touch, from shoulder to calves. These sleeping bags zip together, and I want to tell him we should, because why not, it’s almost cold.
But I don’t say it.
And neither does he.
Not because we both know that I am not the unicorn, but maybe because we’re both thinking that Preet might be.
“It’s stupid, what Ty said.”
“Stupid.”
“We’re us,” I say. “And you and Preet are Pete and Preet.”
I can feel him nod, but he doesn’t say anything.
“And unicorns are the thing that makes you better than the other guys. Because you’re you, and you like rainbows and sparkles and painted nails and feather boas just as much as you like rock climbing and working on your truck and fighting wildfires.”
He’s asleep. I wish he weren’t, because with the silence come my own thoughts, and being alone with them isn’t always the best thing. I fall asleep and dream about wildfires and unicorns and Preet, striding through the flames to walk right between Pete and me, no matter how often I squeeze my eyes shut and move us farther and farther.
The sun is a dark orange this morning, but Pete and I aren’t worried. Besides, it’s not like we can really go back, because this is day three and we’re just about halfway to Loomis, where we’ll come out and phone Fire Camp for a ride for the last twenty miles. Once we can charge our phones. Lots of people would hitch the rest of the way. But not us. We made a pact to never do that again. Also, we don’t know where the wildfires are. The smoke is everywhere. Worse to the west, yes. But also thickening to the south. The north is clearer, but there’s a mountain right there, which means we’d have to hike straight up to go that way. Like, an elevation of nine thousand feet in less than five miles.
It’s clear to the east, and that’s where we’re going, so there is nothing to worry about. The fires don’t scare me. They’re like bears. Give each other a wide berth, that’s all. It’s been smoky all summer for the last three years. If we waited for clear skies to do anything in the wilderness, we’d never do anything at all.
After about three hours of hiking, we come to a rushing creek and, beyond that, a field of snow that shouldn’t be there, considering it’s June. It’s covering the trail for as far as the eye can see. Neither of us is wearing proper hiking boots. We never do. Always approach shoes. Kind of half hiker, half shoe. Lighter. Faster. And not waterproof at all.
“I’ll see how it holds.” Pete gingerly takes one step and ends up sinking to his knee. “Crap.”
“Crap.” I help him out, hurriedly untying his shoe and dumping out the snow and shaking out his sock before the snow has a chance to melt. “That’s not going to work. Our shoes won’t ever get dry again, no matter how long we park them beside a fire.”
Damp feet equals bad news.
“Barefoot?” Pete suggests.
This isn’t as odd as it sounds. Pete and Everett do a lot of barefoot running, so his soles are as thick as hide. And always dirty. Sometimes he shoves his gigantic feet in my face just to drive me nuts. It works.
“I don’t want to.”
“Might have to.”
“That’s a mile at least!”
“You can do it,” he says. “Easy peasy, Annie Bananie.”
“But my feet are so pretty and tender.”
“Only compared to mine, maybe. If you want to see pretty feet, look at Preet’s.”
As if I haven’t. Either she gets a professional pedicure every month, or she’s really good at doing them for herself. If we were actual friends, I’d ask her. But we’re not. We’re Pete bookends. We should have team shirts: No, I’m with Pete! An arrow pointing one way. No, I’m with Pete! An arrow pointing the other way.
Pete powers up his phone. “I need to plug this into the charger,” he says as he moves, aligning ourselves with the topo maps. “Hmm.”
“Are we lost?”
“Nope.” He glances up, smiling. “What we are is close to the hot spring I told you about. We weren’t going to go north for another five miles, but we can angle up from here. It’s two miles south of the PNT. And we’re about four miles south of that, so we’ll angle up to it.”
“Whoo-hoo!” I start running along the creek, doing a little dance. “Let’s go find a hot spring!”
* * *
—
We hike for hours along the creek, on a trail that isn’t a trail at all, or not for humans. It’s an animal trail, nearly carpeted with grassy pucks of cow dung from the range cows, wet dollops of bear scat full of partially digested berries, and millions of round turds of all sizes, from moose to rabbit—and, if I were to get down on my knees in all that shit and really look, mouse and vole and shrew too. All the shit.
“We are literally walking in shit,” I say after an hour of silence. “Do you remember when Gigi fell into that pile of manure my dad had just dumped by the garden? She really was a serious drunk.”
Pete is deep in thought. He doesn’t hear me, or he’s pretending not to.
“We should sing something,” I say. “Scare off the bears.”
Nothing.
“Because some of this is bear shit. Look at all those huckleberries and grass in it.”
Pete just trudges along ahead of me.
I stop. “Pete!”
“Huh?”
Gigi always said that Pete is a very skilled ruminator. I think we were about ten years old when she said so for the first time. “Perhaps because of the tragedy he experienced at such a young age,” she’d say. “Yes, yes, you too, darling Annie, but Pete is more sensitive than you. You are a pouter. A grudge holder. But you do not ruminate.”
“I promised Gigi that I would make you better.”
“This is making me better.”
“I feel like this hike is your one chance, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Okay, maybe it’s me. Maybe I think that, and so I want you to get it right,” he says. “This is the hike where you kick your own ass, Annie. Because Gigi isn’t here to kick it. If we leave this up to your dad, you’re going to still be living with him when we’re thirty, and he’ll still be making you salads from his garden and getting you to feed the chickens like you’re still a kid. And then he’ll say, ‘Banana, you go ahead and do what
you need to do.’ Just like he does now. Annie, seriously. Seriously. So, so seriously. We’re members of the Dead Mom Club. We know how to do life better than other people, right?”
“When my mom died, Gigi didn’t get out of bed for a week.”
“Fair.”
“And when she did get out of bed, she spent a month in her satin pajamas and kimono.”
“Did Gigi flunk eleventh grade because she lied to everyone?”
“She left school when she was fifteen.”
“Did Gigi have a mom like yours?”
“A good, pious Christian woman who knelt on sugar to pray.”
“So, also crazy.” Pete sighs. “Play along, Banana. Let’s make the most of this trip.” He reaches into his pocket and brings out a candy, stuck in its wrapping. Unicorn Whatsits that Preet brought back from England en route home from India after spring break. You suck on them and they turn your tongue a surprise color. Red, purple, blue, orange, green. “Truce?”
“Truce.” I unwrap the candy and pop it into my mouth.
Unicorns aren’t Pete’s thing just because he swears to this day that he saw one behind an abandoned hospital on a mountain outside of Zagreb when he was five years old and backpacking with his parents. That’s when he started collecting them. And maybe that’s when he started to be like a unicorn in a lot of ways, because by the time I met him when we were seven and he was starting school for the very first time after being homeschooled, he was already kind, and strong, and always wanted the best for people. He didn’t care that people teased him because he couldn’t read yet. He’d still cheer on the worst bully to get his best time in track and field.
Ty and Paola don’t know anything about unicorns. Not real ones.
* * *
—
As we climb toward this hot spring, I can’t stop thinking about my mom. One of the last times I saw her was when she came to pick me up and take me to a hot spring she’d heard of off Stevens Pass. I was ten. She wouldn’t let me bring Pete, so I was in a foul mood. The hike in was kind of like this, but she was bounding up the steep hillside, tripping and laughing, being the version of her that was great, until it wasn’t.
We’d parked late, and it was a two-hour hike in. She was practically running along the trail, and I couldn’t keep up with her.
“Where’s your energy?” she shouted from a plateau above me. “Get moving! We’re not allowed to be up here after dark.”
It was private land, and the owner gave permission for people to be on it only during the day.
“Hurry up!” she shouted when she was so far ahead of me that she looked like just another stump.
“You’re going to wreck this!” she screamed at me when we finally found the hot spring. “Look at all this beauty all around, and here you are so lazy and slow that we’re not even going to have five minutes in the pools!”
Two pools, parked at the edge of the cliff overlooking the valley. She wanted one all to herself, so I took the smaller, cooler one. We went in naked—she hadn’t brought suits—and I was so worried that someone else would come that I could hardly appreciate how stunningly special it was to be there with her on the side of a mountain like that, as the sun went down, pulling the jagged horizon into a cool, blue darkness.
* * *
—
Pete and I walk for miles, mostly in silence, until we get to where the hot spring should be.
No hot spring.
“Pete,” I say. “Where did you hear about the hot spring?”
“My dad’s friend. He hiked down to it from the PNT a few years ago.”
“A few years?”
“Maybe a lot of years,” Pete says. “But he was really specific. Okay, so it’s not exactly right here.”
“Or over there.” I spin. “Or there, or there.”
“We’ll find it.”
“Or we won’t.”
“Annie,” he says, and the way he says it, I know he’s got heavy things to say. I want to plug my ears. I want to hike all the way through without stopping and start fighting fires, because he got that part right. That’s what I need. Heat and flames in my face, death slapping my cheeks, and me with a shovel, my muscles aching, digging a trench and hoping the fire won’t jump it. I don’t want to think about anything else right now. I don’t want to think about Gigi, or my mom, or hot springs. Other than how we didn’t find this one.
“Can we just focus on the fact that there is no hot spring, and no stink of sulfur to lead the way?”
“The smoke is so bad we might not smell the sulfur.”
I bump him. “The smoke is so bad and I can still smell your nasty stank.”
“I love you too.” He pulls me into an exaggerated hug, emphasis on his sweaty, hairy armpits. “Do you love me?”
“Not your pits.”
He kisses my forehead, holding me against him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I don’t want to be your jail keeper. You know that. I would do this hike with you anyway, even if it wasn’t an intervention to get you back into your life.”
“I’m sorry that I still kind of want to wallow.”
He kisses my forehead again, and that’s when my body betrays me, and maybe his is betraying him too, because I feel the pressure of him against me, which sends a hot shoot of longing to every last capillary in my body.
He pulls away, turning his face so that I can’t see his red cheeks. So I didn’t imagine it. There is something there, from him to me.
“You failed a year of school,” Pete says. “And you lied about it. You lied to Gigi about doing the work I brought you. You lied to your dad. And now it’s caught up to you.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“Do it online, then.”
“You sound like my dad,” I say. “I don’t want to do it at all. I told him the same thing.”
“You have to, Annie. So you can get into college. So you can get a decent job.”
“That’s you, Pete,” I say. “Maybe I just want to quit school altogether and get a real-life education. Now let’s go and get back on track for real. As in, right now.”
Right away I step in a giant, soft pile of bear poo, almost purple with berry remains. Ahead I see more fresh bear poo. Big bear poo. Really big.
Grizzly. In the area.
“Pete?”
“Yeah?”
“Grizzly shit.”
I imagine a bear, constantly on the move to stay ahead of the fire. Looking over its shoulder at the flames slithering up a hillside not far enough away. Us, between the bear and the fire. The fire winning. A disaster big enough to knock Gigi’s death to the side for a while. Something hot and dangerous, chewing up forests and sending the animals running for their lives. The smoke so thick they have to close the highways. Everything impossible to ignore.
* * *
—
The trail really is too narrow to walk side by side, but I walk so close behind Pete that I keep bumping into his pack. Our bear bells jangle, but whether or not they are effective is up for debate. Pete is wearing our big can of bear spray on his belt, but still we sing stupid little-kid songs, because whenever we get into bear country, we can’t think of an actual good song to sing.
“My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me.”
We’re hardly singing. Shouting, really.
But then I hear it.
Wuff, wuff. In the forest, just to my right.
“It’s in there,” I whisper.
We know that we aren’t supposed to run away from a grizzly, but we speed-walk so fast that I bet we clear five miles in one hour, trying to put some distance between the bear and us.
* * *
—
I can hardly breathe by the time we get to a small clearing with no fre
sh grizzly scat. I down the rest of the water in my bottle, and so does Pete. We’re still close to the river, so we find another animal trail to the shore. The river is fast and wide and deep and clear, but we use our water filter system anyway. All it takes is one bout of giardia for a person to swear off not filtering water. “Look over there.” Pete points across the river. There is a narrow meadow with bright green grass butting up against one of the prettiest little rock faces I’ve ever seen. Even from across the water, I can see how I’d go up.
“How do we get across?”
“I think I saw a really wide shallow spot about a mile back.”
“Totally worth it,” I say. “We can keep going northeast along the other side.”
So we turn around and head back, away from the grizzly.
* * *
—
The water is not deep, but I wouldn’t say it’s shallow. We take our shoes and socks and pants off but put on the lightweight sandals that we bring every time we hike. They have a strap across the back and two across the foot, so they’re good as water shoes too. Right now, though, I can’t look away from Pete in his boxers.
Pete, who puts every single muscle in his body to work, and it shows. Pete, who has the best ass I have ever seen, in real life and anywhere else. His boxers are a snug fit, unlike his other ones, so I can see the bulge at his crotch, which puts a hot rock of something in my gut and reminds me of our one and only kiss. True to Pete, the boxers have unicorns wearing party hats on them. I want to say something about a party in his pants, but even my thoughts are stuttering, so I decide not to. I step into the water, my pack balanced atop my head.
“Oh my god, that’s cold!” I tighten my grip on my pack. “Those new?” I actually do know what underwear he has, so these are probably from Preet. They look like the kind you buy at REI for thirty dollars a pair.
“From Preet. We were in REI together and she saw me looking at them.”
“So! Cold!”