by Amy Reed
“Hey!” calls a woman’s voice from behind us. It’s shocking to hear the voice of a stranger in this secluded place. We haven’t seen another human being in hours. For a moment, a spark of fear passes through me. People get murdered in places like this.
“Hey,” says Hunter, smiling. I turn around to see a woman, probably in her early twenties, and an older man, probably midthirties, both with long dreadlocks and friendly, dopey grins.
“You found our secret spot, man,” the guy says. “This is the best campground in the whole state of Michigan. Totally free, man.”
“We didn’t even know it was here,” Hunter says. “We just kind of fell upon it.”
“That’s how you find the best stuff,” the girl says with a slight Southern drawl. “Happy accidents.”
“It was destiny, man,” says the guy.
“You can’t plan magic,” says the girl. They’re both nodding mindlessly like bobble heads, like caricatures of dumb stoners, but they are totally serious.
“I’m Chesapeake,” says the girl.
“Mountain,” says the guy.
“Hunter.”
“Such a violent name for such a gentle man,” says Chesapeake with a tilt of her head. Was that supposed to be flirting?
After an awkward pause, I realize it is my turn to speak. “Kinsey,” I say.
“Cool, cool,” says Mountain while Chesapeake keeps nodding and grinning.
I know I’m supposed to be open-minded and not judge without getting to know someone, but I really don’t want to keep talking to these people.
“Hey!” Chesapeake says way too enthusiastically. “You guys should totally hang out with us tonight! We have veggie dogs!”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Mountain. “Cool.”
“Yeah,” says Hunter, looking at me for confirmation. I try to send him a psychic message of NO while smiling, but he does not receive it. “Sounds good,” he says. “We can bring some chips or something. I got a bottle of whiskey to share if you’re down.”
“Oooh!” Chesapeake squeals. “Whiskey goes perfect with veggie dogs.”
“And brownies,” Mountain adds. “Magic brownies.” Chesapeake giggles.
“We have to finish setting up camp first,” I say a little too sharply. God, I am such a downer.
“Well, come on by when you’re done,” Mountain says. “We have our own secret spot behind the shed by the dock. Can’t see it from the road.”
“Will do,” Hunter says, eyeing me with a smirk only I can see. He knows how uncomfortable this is making me. And he loves it.
* * *
“What did he mean by magic brownies?” I ask Hunter as we navigate through knee-high weeds and what appear to be broken tractor parts to Chesapeake and Mountain’s camp. It’s twilight and everything is golden orange. It would be peaceful if I weren’t so nervous.
“You can’t be that naive, can you?” Hunter says. He’s carrying a bottle of whiskey and I have a bag of corn chips and a jar of salsa. I feel like the girl in the movie Dirty Dancing when she shows up all nerdy at the underground dance party and says, “I carried a watermelon,” to sexy Patrick Swayze.
If we didn’t already know they were here, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed Chesapeake and Mountain’s campsite. Their beat-up VW bus is perfectly hidden by a grove of birch trees. Folding chairs and a small table circle the campfire, laundry hangs on a clothesline strung between two trees, a picnic table is covered with a checkered tablecloth and a mason jar full of wildflowers, and they even have a rug laid beneath the bus’s sliding side door. It looks like they’ve been here a long time and don’t plan on leaving any time soon.
“Friends!” Chesapeake yells, crouched at the water’s edge, completely naked, holding a washcloth and a bar of soap. The water is filmy from her bath. She splashes herself with the freezing water and lets out a yelp, then walks toward us without any shame. “Now where’d I put my towel?” she says. I look away, but there’s Mountain climbing out of the bus, also naked. What the hell is going on?
“Hunter,” I whisper. I can hear the panic in my voice. I pull on his sleeve. “Hunter!” He’s in a trance, staring at Chesapeake as she bends over to pick her towel off a rock. She seems to be taking her time on purpose, enjoying the attention.
“Oh, hey, guys,” Mountain says. “Didn’t realize you were here. Let me put some pants on.” He gets back in the bus and I can breathe again. Chesapeake grabs some clothes off the clothesline and gets dressed. Hunter watches as she pulls on her jeans, as she raises her arms to put her shirt on. All I can see is the fuzzy blond bush of her armpits.
“Hunter!” I hiss. “Stop staring. It’s rude.”
“It’s only rude if the attention’s unwanted,” he says, throwing me his signature grin. “Or are you jealous?”
“I hate you,” I say.
We sit around the fire and they immediately get to drinking. Hunter pours me a plastic camping cup half full of whiskey. I take a sip but nearly gag. In the time it takes me to consume maybe a tablespoon, the others do a quick progression of more shots than I can count, cheering to things like “freedom” and “chaos” and “sky.” Hunter’s face is lit in a way I’ve only seen when he was taking pictures at the ghost town. So now I know there are two things that make him happy.
By the time the veggie dogs are done, everyone is drunk. Even I’m a little tipsy, which, as much as I hate to admit it, is not an entirely unpleasant feeling. It makes these people a little less annoying. But only a little. Chesapeake and Mountain start waxing poetic about life on the road, Hunter in rapt attention, hanging on their every word. They keep talking about freedom, about not having to follow anyone’s rules, about being able to follow their bliss wherever it wants to take them. They are so full of shit.
“But you’re not doing anything,” I blurt out. I must be drunker than I thought. Hunter laughs so hard he nearly falls backward, as surprised as I am at what came out of my mouth. But I keep going. I can’t stop myself. “How can life be satisfying if all you do is wander around?”
“Not all who wander are lost,” Chesapeake says sagely, like she’s the first person who ever thought to say that.
“That’s just a bumper sticker,” I say.
“Excuse my friend here,” Hunter says with his mouth full of corn chips. “She’s a little uptight. It’s my mission on this trip to help her loosen up. As you can see, I have a lot of work to do.”
“Cool, cool,” says Mountain, smiling at me with wet lips. “We all gotta start somewhere, man.” Could he be any more patronizing? Does he really think he’s more evolved than me?
“Yeah, like I used to want to be a ballerina,” Chesapeake says, her Southern drawl getting thicker the more drunk she gets. “But back then, my name was Edith.” That makes her crack up. She laughs uncontrollably while Mountain roots around in the cooler. Hunter just drinks his whiskey like it is completely normal to be getting wasted with strangers in a ghost town.
“This!” Mountain announces as he pulls out a tinfoil package. “My pal Ferret in Denver baked these. Best pot brownies in the country, I’d say, and I’ve sampled a few in my time.”
“Yum,” says Chesapeake, clapping her hands like a toddler.
Hunter looks at me and wiggles his eyebrows. “No,” I say.
“Your loss,” he says as he grabs a smashed glob of brownie out of the tinfoil Mountain offers.
“Bon appétit,” Mountain says, and they start chewing.
I don’t know why I don’t just leave then. I could easily walk back to our camp with my flashlight and leave Hunter there to spend the night with his new ridiculous friends. But for some reason I stay, quietly turning into a spectator rather than participant in the evening. They forget I am even there. I watch them get more and more wasted; I listen to them make less and less sense.
After an hour, they are b
arely intelligible. Their eyes are slits and their words are jumbled. Is this supposed to be fun? Do they actually enjoy being this fucked-up? I sit silently, like an anthropologist observing some lost tribe whose customs are so unfamiliar it’s hard to even recognize them as the same species.
After being invisible for an hour, it is shocking when Mountain suddenly stares me down and says, “Are you loose yet?”
“What?”
“Have you loosened up? Or are you still wound up tight?”
“Tight,” Hunter mumbles beside me, only capable of single syllables by now.
“I could give you a back rub,” Chesapeake says. “I give really good back rubs.”
“No thank you,” I say.
“I feel loose,” says Mountain.
“Loose,” says Hunter.
Something suddenly feels very wrong.
“There’s lots of room in the bus,” Chesapeake says. “It’s really comfy.”
“I know Hunter’s in,” Mountain says.
“In,” says Hunter. He can barely hold himself up anymore. His eyes are closed and his head is drooped against his chest. Hunter is not in for anything besides passing out.
It is definitely time to go.
“Hunter,” I say, tugging on his shirt. “Hunter, come on. I’m tired. Let’s go.”
“You can sleep here,” Chesapeake purrs. “Both of you.” She gets out of her chair and glides over, the reflection of the fire dancing in her eyes. “With us.”
“Sleep,” Hunter mumbles. “Here.”
“No sleep here, Hunter.”
Chesapeake puts her hand on Hunter’s shoulder and lowers herself onto his lap. He doesn’t seem to even notice her weight. She puts her arms around him and attempts to kiss him, but he’s too wasted to even try to kiss back. He’s like a zombie sitting there, half-dead.
When I stand up, Hunter is startled back to life. “Kinsey,” he says. “Don’t leave me.” He tries to stand, knocking Chesapeake off him.
“Ouch,” she says as she lands on her butt, then starts laughing the monotone huh-huh-huh of stoners. Mountain joins her, laughing from his chair on the other side of the fire, eating chip crumbs out of the bag and watching us through half-closed eyes like we’re a TV show.
I reach for Hunter’s arm as he struggles to get up, but his sudden momentum sends him forward. His leg gets caught in the cheap folding chair. He has no balance. He’s blind and falling and I can’t catch him. He’s going forward, too fast, too hard, into the fire. Into the fire.
“No!” I scream.
Headlights. Metal. Brakes.
Scraping. Smashing. Gone.
Camille.
Going. Going. Gone.
I am blind as I reach for him. I grab onto air.
He is gone.
Burning.
Gone.
He is fire.
I am air.
We are nothing.
No. This is his arm in my hands. This is Hunter falling against me. That is my elbow slamming on the ground, Hunter a lump on top of me. “Huh?” his whiskey mouth says. The dreadlock twins continue their huh-huh-huh.
The fire flickers against the trees, turning the night on and off. And Camille’s in the shadows, watching us, laughing.
After several tries, I manage to pull Hunter to his feet. Chesapeake and Mountain have laughed themselves into a passed-out stupor, Chesapeake a lump on the ground, Mountain slumped in his chair covered in chip crumbs. I have to half carry Hunter back to our camp, stopping several times on the way for him to lie down, once to hug a tree he finds particularly beautiful, and once to throw up. “My whiskey,” he says, wiping his mouth. “I left my whiskey.”
“Fuck your whiskey,” I say.
When we finally make it back to our camp, he falls into the tent and immediately starts snoring. I am exhausted, but I am too angry to sleep. I sit outside on the picnic table, listening to the darkness. I lie down and look up at the sky, but where there were once hundreds of stars, there is now just one. Its blinks taunt me, telling me I can never reach it no matter how hard I try.
I hear something splash in the lake. Something big.
The air is cold.
The trees and abandoned buildings seem to thicken, crowding around me, becoming solid, an impenetrable wall, a tunnel.
I look up but all I see is black; even the one cruel, lonely star is gone. There is black everywhere. I could search forever and only find black.
“Camille?” I whisper.
The wind blows and leaves rustle. The rusty swings in the decrepit playground creak. I flip the switch on my flashlight but it doesn’t turn on.
A voice sounds in the distance, a cross between a cry and a moan. It sounds pained. Searching.
“Camille, is that you?”
Nothing. I’m being stupid. It’s not cold. I try my flashlight again and it sends a beam of light across the campground. The voice was an owl, talking to the night like owls do. Camille is dead and there’s no such thing as ghosts. I didn’t dream last night. I haven’t felt her for two days. She is gone.
When I crawl into bed, Hunter is snoring a sickly, wet snore, the tent full of his drunk breath. I wedge myself as far to the other side as possible, my face against the nylon wall. As soon as I close my eyes, I feel exhaustion pulling me under. Like quicksand. Like drowning.
Is that you, Camille? Are those your hands pulling me under? Are you waiting for me? Do you miss me as much as I miss you?
EIGHT
The golden morning sun sparkles on the lake, but I am not impressed. Is this going to be the ritual every morning? Me getting up early and sitting around waiting while Hunter spends an extra couple hours filling the tent with his rancid breaths? We could be fifty miles from here by now, fifty miles away from crazy Chesapeake and Mountain, fifty miles closer to San Francisco, but I have to wait out his drunken hibernation.
I wonder if he dreams during these sleeps. Or does the alcohol turn everything off? Maybe that’s the solution; maybe Hunter is on to something—maybe alcohol is the magic potion for keeping ghosts away.
For three nights in a row, I haven’t dreamed; for three nights, I’ve slept beside Hunter. It’s like something about him protects me from my own brain. I hate to give him that credit, but I don’t know what else it could be.
I hear rustling. Like a repeat of yesterday, Hunter stumbles out of the tent and immediately pukes. Is this how he starts every day? I don’t even want to think about the state of his torn-up stomach, his poisoned liver, his eroded esophagus.
“It’s fucking hot,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He walks to the lake and splashes himself with water. “This water is fucking cold,” he says, then just sits there with his head in his hands, the sand sticking to his bare legs.
“Do you remember anything from last night?” I say. He doesn’t respond. “Do you remember almost falling into the fire? Do you remember how those two freaks practically tried to date-rape us?”
“What?” Hunter says, almost soberly. He looks up and is almost able to focus his eyes on mine. But it’s too much effort, and his head falls back into his hands again.
“You don’t remember that? They wanted us to have some kind of orgy in the back of the van.”
“That did not happen.”
“Yes it did.”
“You are so paranoid. They were probably just being friendly.”
“Hunter, you’re the one who was so wasted you can’t remember.”
He mumbles something I can’t quite make out, but I think I hear the word “prude.”
“What did you say?” My voice is shrill.
“I don’t know what’s more frigid, you or this water.”
“Fuck you, Hunter.”
“Yeah, right. It might help, though. Loosen you up a little.”
I turn around and stomp back to the tent. I throw out our sleeping bags, the pants Hunter managed to take off in the middle of the night, and everything else I can find. I start pulling out the stakes with way more force than is necessary.
Hunter, dripping and caked with sand, is in his boxers and long-sleeved shirt as he staggers toward me. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“We’re leaving,” I say. “Right now.” I imagine I sound like what normal mothers sound like when talking to an unruly child.
“Don’t get my stuff all dirty.” He reaches down to pick up his pants, his movements slow and pained like an old man’s, his words still noticeably slurred.
“You’re still drunk,” I say. “I’m driving.” My stomach lurches as I say it, fear threatening to change my mind. But there’s no way I’m letting him drive in this condition. As scared as I am of getting behind the wheel, I’m more afraid of him.
“Fine with me,” he says, pulling down his wet boxer shorts without even turning away. I avert my eyes just in time. “Nap time for Hunter.” It takes all my strength not to turn back around and kick him in the balls.
My driving doesn’t go very well at first. Luckily, the adrenaline of my anger is strong enough to overpower my panic, but I’m still overly cautious. I drive way too slow at first. I hit the brakes at the smallest surprise. When a squirrel runs across the road, I slam the brakes so hard, Hunter has to open the door to puke. I make him get out of the car and won’t let him in until he brushes his teeth and drinks some water.
Hunter is in and out of sleep for the next hour. My knuckles are white on the steering wheel and I can feel every muscle in my body tense, ready to jump out of my skin. Images flash through my head, gruesome snapshots not quite in focus but threatening to solidify the more panic seeps in. The more peacefully Hunter sleeps, the more my chest tightens, the less I can feel my feet, my legs, my hands, until the numbness spreads to my lungs and I can’t breathe.
I’m driving. I’m actually driving. I’m driving a car for the first time since I killed my best friend.