(2) Nature must be respected and preserved.
(3) Nature is best experienced through a window or video screen within a climate-controlled room, because nature is also gross and dirty and, in late March, freaking cold.
Okay, that last one’s less “fact” and more “opinion,” but an opinion that is still entirely right because I am an indoor girl, dammit! I just happen to have outdoor-loving friends. Even Nari! Who will gleefully camp in leggings, ballet flats, and a chunky cable-knit sweater like a catalog model.
So, yeah, we were camping. In March. Despite my protests and reasoning that we could totally not and say we did since we were already planning to do that for the rest of the week anyway. But I was outvoted and overruled by the “best lies are based on truth” argument.
Keagan drove us around the dirt access road searching for the campsite Nari had reserved for us weeks ago. Not that that seemed necessary, seeing how we were one of maybe half a dozen groups batshit enough to want to go camping this time of year. When he finally spotted the right numbered marker, he parked and we climbed out.
Arms full of six-person tent, sleeping bags, backpacks, coolers, bags of food, blankets, and camp chairs, we waddled our way up a narrow trail through a stand of trees to the campsite, which sat on a sort of knoll? berm? whatever the hell you’d call it. A spot with a fire pit and a picnic table overlooking the beach and ocean below.
And, okay, inarguable fact number one? It was gorgeous. Frigid and wet in that way where it wasn’t raining but the air was so heavy you could feel the water in it, like potential rain. Like, breathe it in and in and in and maybe drown a little, or at least feel your body’s H2O percentage rise. But gorgeous.
I dumped my armload of crap off to the side of the empty patch of ground where we were going to set up the tent and walked the few paces over to the top of the knoll to take in the view. It was a study in gray. Deep grays, thin grays, white grays, bluish grays, metal grays, even a few patches of sunlit grays, and on and on. You could do whole series of the ocean on overcast days. Not even stormy days, just overcast. This not-quite-tranquil, not-quite-turbulent in-between. Clouds of every colorless shade. Small whitecaps on small waves. The muted beige of the sand and the sea grasses blowing in a light wind.
“When is someone going to invent a self-assembling tent?” Keagan asked behind me.
I looked back to see San helping him put together the poles, the joints snapping where their elastic marrow pulled them taut. “Don’t those exist already?” San asked.
“In a form that won’t collapse and suffocate you in your sleep?” Bells said, looking up from where she tugged at the corners of the tent, laying it flat atop the tarp she’d already spread out on the ground. “Maybe.”
I turned to help Nari dole out the sleeping bags and pads. After a minute, she looked up and said, “I’m going to make sure we didn’t leave anything in the car,” and headed off down the narrow trail.
I followed.
A pace behind, fighting that hiking-downhill feeling of wanting to run or trip gracelessly, I said, “We didn’t leave anything in the car.”
She glanced back. I could still hear Keag, San, and Bellamy putting up the tent behind us. “I need to check something.”
“A nefarious-plan something?”
Nari stopped and turned to face me. “It’s not nefarious.” She looked offended, actually hurt.
I quirked an eyebrow. “Dubious, then?”
She turned and started walking again.
“Hey.” I jogged a step to catch up. “It was a joke. We’re on the same side. Are there even sides?” It was a stupid question, because of course there were sides. Nari’s. Keagan’s. But also, there weren’t. Because he was here, too. And we were all in this together. Keag’s voice of complicit dissent—disagreeing agreement? unified disunity?—notwithstanding.
At the car, Nari unlocked the driver’s door and slid into the seat. I walked around to the passenger side, and after a pause so brief it might not have even been real hesitation, she reached over and unlocked my door. I got in and shut the door behind me. Even after most of the day with us in it, Keag’s car still smelled faintly of pizza. Pizza essence. Eau de grease and old cheese. Like after the five of us got out, taking our scents with us, it oozed out of the seats.
Nari opened the glove box in front of me and pulled out her prepaid phone. She’d been using it from the beginning. Since before the plan was a plan, as far as I knew. Maybe she used it for other d0l0s stuff, too.
“What are you checking?”
“Emails mostly. Foster’s.” She flicked at the screen with a finger. “I want to keep track in case anything’s canceled or changed.” Her brow creased. After a minute she reached past me, chucked the phone back into the glove box, and slammed its door. “Service out here sucks.”
“Shocker,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry about the nefarious thing. And the sides thing. You know I think this is awesome, right?”
She shrugged.
“Look.” I angled toward her. “I know how much you want us to forget everything for now and have fun, but this isn’t all on you, Narioka Diane. We’re all doing it. You don’t have to keep things secret. I mean, Kurt Cobain killed himself in ’94. It’s not like the year was that nice.”
I searched the backseat and found the bag with the unicorn headbands and light-wand thing, and held it up like, Here, this is what we came for. “We got this. All of us. Even Keag,” I said, opening the door; then, because I can’t help myself, I added, “I mean, come on, what could go wrong?”
SANTIAGO
Five Years and the Future
The sun slid toward the horizon, a brilliant orb behind cloud cover that stretched and softened its light into a glowing halo. I stood atop the berm at the edge of our campsite and watched that light, the rays that pushed through like taut translucent ribbons and turned the choppy surface of the water to blinding shards of mirror where they fell. It was beautiful and immense, the kind of beauty that reminds me I’m so immeasurably small, the kind of smallness that makes some people feel expendable and alone but makes me feel integral, one of many, part of the human mechanism, giving and taking, creating and breaking, each of us a fragment of what came before and what’ll come after.
The sun dipped below the horizon and I turned back to my friends.
Reese, looking over Keagan’s shoulder into the pot he was stirring on one of the propane stove’s two burners, said, “That looks like cud.”
Keag scoffed. “How would you know what cud looks like?”
I added a log to the fire. We’d bought two bundles of dry wood at Walmart and scavenged what we could nearby, but that wasn’t much. The fire wasn’t likely to last long.
“It’s regurgitated grass, Keagy. I think my imagination can handle the stretch.”
“Whatever,” he said, and grabbed a paper plate from the stack, ladling a pile of stewed kale onto it and adding a scoop of brown rice from the second pot before handing it to her. “You’ll eat it, and you’ll like it.”
Reese saluted and took her plate over to sit by the fire. I stood to fill my own. “Think of it as a sponge. Soaking up some of the garbage we’ve been eating all day.”
“Like donuts and coffee,” Nari said. “Or bread and alcohol.” She took a picture of Keagan at the stove with one of our phones, then accepted the plate he held out for her. She’d been doing that all evening, taking pictures with various phones, instructing us to pose and even change clothes a few times, saying she’d swap out time stamps to make one evening look like four after we got back. Between those and the random pictures we each took with the disposable cameras for fun, it was a strange mix, both real and fake, occasionally at the same time, and altogether a fitting parallel for this adventure as a whole.
Bellamy sat with her plate in the camp chair
next to mine. “Or replenishing a deficit,” she said. “Like watching an episode of Nova after bingeing three straight seasons of Real Housewives to salvage a few lingering brain cells and your sense of human decency.”
We all laughed.
“Fine,” Reese said. She held up a forkful of kale, wrinkling her nose at it before shoving it into her mouth and chewing and swallowing with her disgusted expression unchanged. “Yeah, super gross. But thanks for considering our health, Keag.”
Keagan sat down in his chair, took a huge bite of greens, and gave us all a giant mush-filled grin. “You’re welcome.”
I laughed along with the girls, but after years of friendship I knew that Keagan’s theatricality was directly correlated with his level of discomfort. And sure enough, the moment the others looked away, his expression fell.
“Okay,” Reese said, displaying her empty plate before dropping it into the fire. “Nutrients replenished. Now I’m going to eat delicious hyper-processed animal parts.” She got up and dug the package of hot dogs out of the cooler. “Anyone else?”
“That’s horrifying,” Nari said. “Also, yes.”
Finishing our kale and rice, each of us save Keagan switched to hot dogs, holding our skewers over the fire.
“I want to play a game,” I said.
“Something pig related?” Reese asked, waggling her eyebrows.
I shook my head. The fire was getting low. Bellamy handed me her skewer to hold while she added another log and stoked it with a stick. It was fully dark now. The sound of the water and the breeze, a steady hush, made everything feel both big and small, huge with the ocean and open air, but tight and close with the five of us huddled around the light of the flames. Opposite of what I’d felt watching the sunset, the dark made me feel like we were the only people in the world. “I want to know: Where are you five years from now? If everything goes exactly the way you want it to.”
“Aw,” Reese crooned. “Santiago the eternal optimist.”
“You know me. Rainbows and kittens and glittery unicorn farts. Also, now you get to go first.”
“Fair enough.” She tested the temperature of her hot dog with her fingers, then held it up in the air to cool. The skin was crisp and one side split. Tapping her finger against her mouth and staring into the middle distance, she settled back into the bucket of her camp chair. “Let’s see. Five years means I’ll be twenty-three, so I’m sure my fae heritage will have made its full appearance by then.”
“Reese,” Bellamy groaned. “Play along.”
“Okay, okay.” She took a bite of her hot dog, chewed, swallowed. “I’ll be in art school. Chicago, maybe, or New York. A city, for sure. Somewhere stuffed full of weird and interesting people. Or just a more, um, eclectic assortment.”
“Are you calling us allos boring?” Nari asked, feigning offense.
“Mmm…,” Reese said. “Yes.” She grinned, showing all her teeth. “As I was saying. Somewhere that stinks of creative brilliance.”
“And BO,” Keag added.
“Yes, and body odor,” Reese said. “Loads of it. Which will inspire my senior project and breakthrough series. It’ll be my first semi-major gallery show, something to do with individuality versus the sheer masses of humanity, of flesh and fat and skin and body hair. That fascinating mix of our general disgustingness and our brilliance. Space travel and symphonies and syphilis.
“The show will be a massive hit, and I’ll sell nearly all the pieces at the opening, including a few to the tastemakers. I’ll build my career on it.”
“What else?” I asked.
“Besides art?”
I nodded.
Reese shrugged. “Not sure. I’ll still talk to you fools and visit everyone as often as we can, though I won’t come back to Oregon much, since after my parents’ divorce finalizes and I graduate, I doubt they’ll both stick around. My mom will probably end up God knows where, and my dad might stay here for work, or maybe he’ll transfer, or quit and start over. Meet the real love of his life. Have a few new-beginning kids.” She shrugged again. “It’ll be good.”
I smiled at her, then looked at the others. “Who’s next?”
Nari raised her hand. She talked about going to Berkeley, graduating at the head of her program in three years, counting summers, because she’s a badass and because she’ll have impressed and/or intimidated a good number of her professors into letting her test out of the basics, which I’m not sure is even a thing. “After graduation I’ll have my pick of job offers from a few of the big ones. Google or Apple or somewhere. And from there I’ll claw my way up the ranks. Basically I just want to do whatever I want with the most advanced computing technology in the world.”
“That all?” I asked, smiling.
She grinned back, one eyebrow arched. “For now.”
She’ll also be happily either married to or cohabitating with Keagan, who took over the narrative after her to say that maybe he’ll learn a trade. “Be an electrician or something. Maybe own my own construction company someday. Or just work for someone good. So, sure, five years?” He scrubbed his head with his beanie. Like mine, his hair had grown back past the obnoxious, itchy stage, so now the movement was more a tic, like cracking his knuckles. “Let’s say I’ll be working with a carpentry crew. Working with my hands. Building stuff. Living in the Bay Area with Nari as she works toward being the next CEO of Google—”
“Or my own company!”
“Right, or your own company. I don’t know, maybe I’ll do custom kitchens or restorations or something for all the rich people. I think I’d like that. Fixing things up. Making old stuff new again.”
Nari, her chair pushed up close to his, leaned into his arm and gave him a look of total adoration. Keagan stared at the dying fire, brow tight. He reached for the stick we’d been using to stir it, then stood instead. “I’m gonna look for more wood,” he said, and walked off into the dark toward the shore. Nari watched him go until his head ducked below the beach side of the berm, then got up to follow.
“Welp.” Reese yawned, unfolding her limbs and pushing herself up out of her chair. “I’m tired. And freezing. And you guys don’t seem like you need a third wheel. So I’m going to bed.”
Bellamy blushed. “No, Reese, it’s—”
Reese gave Bells a salute and a wink, then crossed between me and the fire.
“ ’Night, Reese,” I said.
“ ’Night, kiddies,” she said, and trekked over to the tent, zipping herself inside.
NARI
Phobias and Facades
I followed the roll of our campsite’s berm down toward the beach. The sand was deep, and I was wearing impractical shoes. The wedge heels of my ankle boots sank with each step. I had to concentrate hard on not twisting an ankle. Keagan had walked down along the edge of the water to the other side of the small cove our site sat above and was sitting on the next knoll over, arms propped on his knees, staring out at the water. His fleece North Face jacket was flat black in the light from the few visible stars and the glow of the shrouded moon. I hugged my coat tighter around me and climbed the little hill to sit beside him.
He didn’t look away from the water.
I’ve always hated the ocean at night. It’s the hugeness of it. The cognitive dissonance, how even though dark water looks empty, even though you can gaze out at it and half convince yourself it’s an enormous velvety carpet, you know instead it’s teeming with fish and sharks and whales and plankton and probably at least one kraken.
I feel the same about space. Right then, above all that black ocean, small patches of stars showed through the clouds. And as I took in their majesty, their flickering brilliance that Bellamy wanted to someday shoot her body through at ungodly speeds on a vessel of her own design, I thought, Ick. And Oh, sweet Jesus, why? The emptiness, the silence, the unknown, the minuscule capsule of susta
inability amidst an endless uninhabitable abyss. Like the water, space seemed oppressive in its utter indifference to you, in the very many ways it could kill you.
Bells tried to explain it (her space hard-on) to me once, likening it to another world, like d0l0s’s, one where I had so much freedom, so much room for possibility, but one most people would never try to understand. And I was like, Nope. Crushing airless vacuum versus intangible strings of decipherable code that I could manipulate for my purposes? Yeah, I’ll take the latter. To which she said something about string theory and universal fabric and similarities and I was still all Nah, because everything being constructed of the same infinitesimal fibers regardless, coding will never cause my corporeal liquids to effervesce inside my skin (low-pressure symptoms, look it up).
Keagan gets it because he’s claustrophobic. And nothing exemplifies the terror of inescapable small spaces like a boat on deep water at night or a freaking spaceship or, say, a caving trip with your much older sister when you’re seven and the flashlight decides to melodramatically flicker a few times in a “narrow rocky corridor of perpetual darkness and slow death,” as Keag describes the moment he realized his phobia.
Which is a thing I know about him, which, actually, is a story I’ve heard at least half a dozen times from four points of view (Paisley’s, Brent’s, Keag’s, and the aforementioned much older sister, Beth’s), because we know things like that about each other. All the little things you learn about someone after two and a half years of them being your favorite person. Like how they like their coffee (as tea, sweet, since Brent’s originally from Georgia and brought the tradition of that particular nectar northwest with him) or how they wear their socks inside out because they’re weird about the feeling of the seams. You learn the big things, too. Like how being good and decent and unfailingly moral, to a strict and pretty unmeetable degree, is one of the most important things to them.
I slid my arm around Keagan’s and set my head on his shoulder. The campsite behind us, the next one over from ours, was empty. The waves lapped at the shore. The breeze pushed through the dry beach grasses. And Keag was angry. I got it. He saw all this as moral failure. I thought he was wrong, but I got it. But when Keagan’s angry, he gets quiet. And pestering him (as I was, per usual, dying to do) doesn’t work, makes him angrier, which makes him quieter, a self-perpetuating system.
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