Wild Bird

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  “Lots of snow sports around here,” John says, totally invading my thinking. His arm shoots across my face as he points. “Right up there is Park City—it’s fabulous.”

  I squint at him. “Fabulous? What guy says ‘fabulous’?”

  Dax leans forward, invading from behind. “I think it would be fabulous if we could quiet the monster in my stomach.”

  “Hungry?” John asks.

  Dax pats him on the shoulder. “Dude, you broke the code.”

  “Are we stopping at the usual place for their last supper?” John calls up front.

  “That’s the plan,” Michelle says via the rearview mirror.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re pulling into a Burger King drive-thru. “Hungry or not, get something,” Michelle tells us. “We’ve got a three-hour drive ahead of us, and then it’ll be a whole new kind of cuisine for the next eight weeks.”

  John snickers. “Cuisine. Nice.”

  “Sounds fabulous,” Dax grumbles.

  I’m still feeling queasy, but I order a burger anyway. I can take a hint.

  Dax gets cut off after his fourth item and starts whining like a little kid. “Dude. You said it was our last supper. Come on!”

  After the food comes piling through the window, Michelle pulls around to the front of the building and Dax and I get escorted inside one at a time to take a “potty break.”

  “We won’t be stopping again until we reach base camp,” Michelle says. “If we’re going to get in the field before dark, we have to hustle.”

  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I don’t care, either. I do my business, get back in the SUV, and, after we’re on the interstate again, eat what I can, then close my eyes. The snowy mountains are behind us now, my head still hurts, and I’m so, so tired.

  I wake up to the sound of snoring. It sputters to a stop as I sit up.

  “Thank the Lord,” John says, eyeing me, and there’s a chorus of “Amen!” from Michelle and Nash up front. I check behind me, looking for someone else to blame, but Dax is out cold, sleeping like a baby.

  Out the window, the earth is flat. Flat and dry and covered with low, dusty, gray shrubs. We fly past a sign in the shape of a beehive with the number 24 inside it. “Where are we?” I ask, feeling like we’ve landed on some alien planet.

  “We’re getting close,” John tells me. “Another half hour?”

  “But…” I strain to look farther ahead, and then across John out the other side. The same dusty gray shrubs go for miles in every direction. “Where’s the forest?”

  The hippie-dippie counselors grin at each other. “You’re lookin’ at it,” John says. “This is our version of wilderness.”

  We zoom by a patch of wicked-looking plants—spindly arms with needles everywhere. “We’re camping in the desert?”

  “Beautiful time of year for it,” Michelle says through the mirror.

  I pinch a look at her. “Oh, I can see that!”

  She laughs. “Seriously. You’ve come at a great time. Spring in the desert is beyond compare.”

  I watch the pathetic excuse for landscape zoom by, and the pit of my stomach knots up. “Do my parents know this?” I ask. I sound whiny, but I need to know.

  I really need to know.

  “They do,” Michelle tells me.

  So that’s it. I suspected it before, but now it’s an indisputable fact.

  My parents hate me.

  Beehive-24 has one skinny lane in each direction. There’s not much traffic. Big surprise. We’re in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.

  “So what happens next?” I ask.

  John nods. “We stop at the clinic, where you’ll get your physical, then head over to base camp, where we’ll issue you your gear. Then it’s out to the wild, where we’ll meet up with the Grizzlies.”

  “There are grizzlies out here?”

  He laughs. “That’s the name of your group. You’re joining the Grizzly Girls. There’s six in the group right now. We do staggered starts, so you’ll be the newbie.”

  “Lucky number seven,” Michelle says.

  “And the only Rabbit,” Nash adds, like he’s so excited for me. “Everyone starts at Rabbit. You advance to Coyote, then Elk, then Falcon. By the time you earn Falcon, you’ll be ready to fly.”

  Dork.

  Hippie-dippie shrub-hugging dork.

  “So I’m a rabbit among grizzlies,” I mutter. “Great.”

  “Actually,” John says, “you’re a Rabbit who is also a Grizzly.”

  From behind us, Dax says, “That’s a rad image.”

  I turn around. “When’d you wake up?”

  “Back at spring in the desert being fabulous.” He stretches out his neck. “So what am I?”

  From the front seat, Nash calls, “You’ll be on Rabbit in Snake.”

  “Yum, if you’re the snake,” he says. He sits back, then springs forward again. “I’m guessing Snake is the superbads?” He sounds so calm. Like none of this is new.

  “Adjudicated, yep,” Nash calls back.

  “What’s that?” I ask John.

  Dax answers for him. “Judge assigned me. It was this or jail.” He snorts. “I ain’t no dummy.”

  But then he looks out the window and gets quiet. I look, too, and know exactly what he’s thinking.

  This is jail.

  We are prisoners, but instead of being locked up in small cells with bars, we’re trapped in the wide open, surrounded by thorns and dry endless desert.

  There is something worse than flat land with low gray shrubs for as far as the eye can see: pathetic shacks collapsing in the middle of flat land with low gray scrubs for as far as the eye can see.

  Maybe the Middle of Nothingness, Utah, is considered a town, but it’s more like a rotting corral battered by tumbleweeds.

  The sides of the road into town slope off into shallow ditches. No sidewalks. No curbs. No clean and green. Just worn, cracked asphalt fading into dirt.

  A mangy coyote trots alongside the road like a thirsty desert wolf. It glances at us as we pass and keeps right on trucking. Its eyes look sharp and dangerous, and they flash almost golden in the sunlight.

  “Dude,” Dax says, watching it too. I can’t tell what kind of “dude” it is, good or bad, and I don’t ask.

  After the shacks on the outskirts of town, we drive by a few houses and some more boarded-up buildings. There’s a market with a post office sign, and a fire station that’s half burned down.

  A real confidence booster.

  But for all the things this tumbleweed town doesn’t have, what it does have is two pristine churches, right across the street from each other.

  Dax notices too, because he says, “We must be in God’s country.”

  “They take their prayers seriously around here,” John tells him.

  Dax snorts. “I can see why.”

  He actually gets a smile out of me for that one.

  “Okay, guys,” Michelle says, pulling up to a brick building with a faded blue sign announcing CLINIC. “We’ll get your physicals here, go next door for supplies, then head out to the field. Daylight’s burning, so please cooperate with the procedures regardless of how lame or invasive you think they are. You don’t want to be hiking in the dark.”

  My heart starts beating weirdly fast as I stand up, and walking to the clinic door gets me totally winded. Dax doesn’t look much better. “We’re at seven thousand feet,” John says, reading us. “You’re both used to something near sea level. It’s going to take a couple of days to acclimate.”

  Inside the clinic, Nash and John take Dax one way, and Michelle takes me another. We go down a short hallway, and Michelle taps a knuckle on a half-open door. Inside, I can see a woman in a lab coat behind a desk. She stands and smiles. “Come in, come in.”

  “This is Wren Clemmens,” Michelle says. “Wren, this is Dr. Kumar.”

  “Right on time!” Dr. Kumar says.

  Her voice singsongs. A happy bubbling brook. I’m not in the m
ood for singsongy doctors. I growl at her without making a sound.

  She points me to a chair. “Have a seat, won’t you?”

  I’ve been sitting all day, but the silent growl exhausted me, so I sit.

  I’m just so tired.

  Michelle takes a seat in the corner as Dr. Kumar perches on the front edge of her desk, facing me. “I’m going to do a basic exam,” Dr. Kumar singsongs. “Blood pressure, temperature, that sort of thing.”

  I let her, and it’s no big deal.

  Then she sits behind her desk and turns her dark eyes on me. “So. Tell me about your recent drug and alcohol use.”

  She says it with a smile. Like she’s my friend. Like of course I use drugs and alcohol.

  “I don’t do drugs,” I tell her. “And I only drink…once in a while.”

  She crosses her arms and keeps her eyes on me. “Wren,” she says softly, “this program won’t work if you can’t be honest.”

  I force myself to not look away. I’ve been in this exact situation with my parents because of Anabella—the narc. I know how to stick to my story.

  “Fine,” she says, pushing back from the desk. “You’ll have a therapist in the field helping you come to grips with that.”

  Her singsongy voice is not so friendly anymore, but Fine? That’s it? No cross-examination? I watch her as she walks around the desk and toward the door. No calling me a prevaricator?

  She opens the door with a tight smile. “Michelle will take you to the supply room.”

  Well, that was easy! “Thanks,” I tell her, and she gives me that tight-lipped look and a nod. I know she thinks I’m a liar, but what do I care?

  We walk over to the building next door, and Michelle gets another woman to go with us down to the supply room. Once we’re inside it, Michelle locks the door. It’s a sliding bolt lock, too. Metal on metal. Sssss-clink.

  All of a sudden, I’m noticing that the second woman’s got some beef to her. Bench-press beef. Like, Olympics, hello?

  I look from her to Michelle as I back up. “What is this?”

  “It’s for privacy,” Michelle says.

  I look around at the tall rows of shelves that hold camping stuff. “Uh…why do we need privacy?”

  Michelle shoves a cardboard box at me. “Because you need to strip out of everything you’re wearing and put it in this box.”

  “Here? Now? In front of you?”

  “Sorry, but yes.”

  “That’s not exactly private.”

  “We’re more concerned about Dax or the male staff walking in unexpectedly.”

  “So…but…why?”

  “We need to make sure you’re not carrying anything into the field.”

  I still don’t get what she’s talking about. “Like?”

  “Drugs.” She frowns at me. “Even though you don’t use them. Right, right, I know.”

  “But—”

  “You need to turn over what you’re wearing. We’ll issue you clothes for in the field—everyone starts with the same equipment. Now, please. Let’s get this over with.”

  The other woman gets busy at the shelves, and by the time I’ve stripped down to my underwear, she’s handing over stacks of clothes. I can see T-shirts, a sweatshirt, a jacket, socks, a pair of hiking boots, and pants with big, dorky pockets and zip-off legs just like Michelle’s, only sand tan instead of army green.

  “Those come off too,” Michelle says about my underwear.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  I just stare at her until the beefy woman says, “Get with the program, kid.”

  She’s scary and she’s moving toward me.

  I strip.

  “Now squat,” Michelle tells me, “and cough.”

  “What?”

  “Squat and cough!” the beefy woman snaps. “And cough hard.”

  “Why?”

  “Wren, it’s part of procedure,” Michelle says.

  But the beefy woman explains. “Users get creative with the way they smuggle stuff in. Not that you’re a user, right, we get that.”

  “It’s procedure,” Michelle says. “We have to do it.”

  It’s cold and I’m standing there in front of a nature hugger and an iron pumper feeling very…vulnerable. And since they’re between me and the door and I’m naked, I can’t exactly ditch it out of there. So I squat and I cough. And I cough again, harder. And again, even harder. And when they’re sure I’m not smuggling anything, I take the clothes they give me and get dressed.

  “What are you going to do with that?” I ask the beefy woman, because she’s walking away with my box of clothes.

  “We’ll label it and tape it closed. You’ll get it back when you’re done with the program.” She unlocks the door, but before she leaves, she turns to tell me one more thing. “Also, if you decide to run, we’ll use it to have tracker dogs pick up your scent. Don’t want you dying out there in the desert.”

  I watch her go, and it finally hits home.

  I’ve just put on my prison clothes.

  Michelle, John, and Nash try to teach Dax and me how to make packs out of thick blue tarps. Besides what was packed in our duffels, they’ve given us all sorts of stuff—clothes, a small, metal “billypot” for cooking, toilet paper, wet wipes, sunblock, a plastic bag bursting with “curriculum materials,” food, and other random things. We’re supposed to magically fold everything inside the tarp and wrap it up with a parachute cord. And once we’ve made this big blue blob, we’re supposed to strap a sleeping bag and ground pad to it and attach seat belt straps so we can carry the whole mess on our backs.

  Seat belt straps. Which look like they’ve been cut out of wrecked cars! The whole thing’s stupid, and three tries later, it doesn’t even come close to working. The yippy-hippies keep giving us instructions, making us try again, telling us that creating balance in our packs will create balance in our lives.

  What a crock.

  Dax hasn’t said a word since the physicals. He looks pretty dorky in his prison clothes, but I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing about me. His backpack bundle is a disaster, all lopsided and falling apart. But then, so is mine.

  “Try again,” Michelle tells us. “You can’t have it coming apart on the trail.”

  It takes two more tries, but finally our backpacks are good enough and we’re told to “circle up” right there on the cement floor. Then the three of them tell the two of us The Rules.

  It’s a really long list.

  We have to say “I understand” after every single one.

  Pretty high up on the list is “No profanity,” followed by an annoying explanation about cussing being a form of masking emotions and how one of the purposes of wilderness therapy is to get to the bottom of our feelings, and a major goal is to learn to articulate our feelings so that we may better communicate the hot-button topics that have driven us to being where we are today.

  I’m glazed over by the end of that rule and just say, “I understand.”

  But Dax tells them he bleepity-bleep-bleep-bleepity-bleep-bleep understands.

  I hold my breath, expecting them to go ballistic, but Nash just smiles at him—like he really does think it’s kind of funny—and says, “That was your last cigarette, sailor. In the field there will be consequences.”

  When The Rules are finally done, they make us walk in a sandwich line through the building—John and Michelle ahead of Dax and me, Nash behind us. John’s man-bun is right in front of me, and it’s pretty impressive. I can do a bun with mine, but not like his. Not even close.

  We stop at a room with a carved wooden sign over the door that says GROUND CONTROL, where an old guy with knotty knuckles and a scar across his cheek hands three walkie-talkies to the hippie-dippies. “Fully charged,” he says. “You’re good to go.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” John says.

  “See you on the airwaves, Major,” Michelle says, which makes the old guy laugh.

  They move along, but I hang back for a second, looking in
side the room. The wall clock says it’s 5:15. There’s some electronic equipment on a table, big maps on the wall, and next to the map a whiteboard with lists of names in different colors—GRIZZLY, BUFFALO, SNAKE, FOX, and BADGER.

  Nash pushes me along, and when I’ve caught up with the others, I ask, “How many campers are out here?” because every heading on the whiteboard had a list of names.

  “Too many,” John says, and Michelle adds, “We wish there wasn’t the need.”

  Dax turns his head to whisper, “Right. At what it costs to put us here? They’re lovin’ it.”

  “What’s it cost?” I whisper back.

  “Let’s just say you could be driving a new car.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Yup. But instead you get to sleep in the dirt.”

  There’s a truck waiting for us outside. A really old, beat-up pickup truck. And I am getting royally ticked at my parents all over again for wasting so much money to send me to Desert Jail when a guy steps out from behind the wheel of the truck. He’s young. Like he might still be in high school. And he’s…gorgeous. Wild black hair and dark, red-tinged tan, and silver jewelry.

  I can’t help staring.

  In the middle of Ugly Acres, there’s…that?

  “We ready to do this?” he asks, and when the hippie-dippies tell him yes, he says, “Packs in back,” and slides into the driver’s seat.

  “Wren’s up front with me,” Michelle says. “Dax, you’re between John and Nash in back.” Then she hands Nash a bandanna and shakes one out herself.

  There is a god, I tell myself as I scoot in next to Mr. Gorgeous. He has a plan.

  Michelle gets in, shoving me closer to him. So close that our legs are touching. I’m suddenly floating on a big hit of happy.

  And then Michelle says, “Wren? Hellooooo, Wren?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I need to blindfold you.”

  “What!?”

  I look in the backseat.