Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  And then: Why do you wear that every day? Like, honestly. Tell! Us!

  I couldn’t say, “Because it works.” I said I didn’t know. The kids weren’t ever mean about it, but I was sensitive and I felt different. Like I was this neon and ugly sweat suit. Like I’d never grow out of it, have to wear the ten sets of it forever.

  Luckily—perhaps because of Jacob—I never got teased badly. Our relationship granted me amnesty. But when I went to summer camp for the first time, I didn’t have my brother to protect me.

  Alone at camp, the task of picking out my clothes seemed daunting, I felt incapable, and I tried to assemble an outfit that would “work.” I made it: tall white socks and high-waisted pink jeans-shorts and a purple Harry Potter T-shirt. No underpants. No one could see underpants, so I didn’t need those. I’d check everything in the cabin’s tall bathroom mirror before I left each morning: the shirt didn’t cling tight to my soft belly; my stiff shorts hid my thighs. I wore the same thing each day for the entire month.

  Each day a new grass stain or marker-line or spill of paint or juice.

  Each day I felt worse about my reflection in the cabin mirror, uglier.

  The girls would ask me if I “touched myself,” and no matter if I said yes or no, they’d glance at one another and giggle. I felt horrible. One night in the cabin, when they all thought I was sleeping, I lay in my bunk bed and listened to the girls as they—all of them—and our on-duty twenty-three-year-old counselor talked about the too-high white socks I wore, my “grandpa shorts,” how hideous I looked. They decided together that I must have no friends.

  Through that night I replayed their voices’ contempt of me, their high tight tone, quiet high pitches, harmonizing in their disdain for me. I felt betrayed by the counselor—a grown-up. I wanted to die—or to become queen.

  On the final day of my month away at camp, sun high, grass still damp from overnight rain, my mother finally came to retrieve me. I was relieved, but I also felt embarrassed for her to see me. She would see that I couldn’t care for myself. I hid from her in the dining hall bathroom; I held my hairbrush bristle-up under the faucet, peeled off my Harry Potter shirt before the sink-mirror, prepared to brush my hair. My hair was matted—I had taken all my showers but never brushed—and my old purple shirt, a tiny pile on the bathroom floor, was stained and smelled a little. I pressed the brush-head against my rat’s-nest dread and pulled. Strained my little neck. The brush didn’t budge.

  Back home my mother resumed dressing me.

  There was no full-length mirror in my childhood house, no mirror in my parents’ room at all. I once pointed out that we had no long mirror, and my mother said with pride that we weren’t people who would ever notice that, it wouldn’t occur to us to miss it. She was speaking for us both.

  She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.

  Through middle school, I didn’t shave my legs or use deodorant. Girls began to ask about my hairy legs. One day in eighth grade, I found deodorant in my locker, with a note written in girlish handwriting, unsigned. It told me I smelled. It was true. I was hurt. But after that I still didn’t simply commit to wearing deodorant daily, instead passively subjecting myself to adolescent years of whispered disdain. Basic hygiene was a terrible struggle. Anything my mother didn’t do for me, I didn’t do for myself.

  I was blushing—panicked. In my mind in months holed up in the Cinder-block Palace alone, Kickoff had become a place I could flee to and be myself—and be liked. But at last at Kickoff’s golden field, I feared I looked slapdashly dressed in my pink shorts; they were ancient. I thought I must look terrible—awkward and tactless, embarrassingly flushed and frumpy. I felt the full presence of all my amassed problems with me.

  Mounting anxiety paralyzed me.

  I wandered to the concrete bathrooms: Men, Women. Then I saw others: an old man and gaunt boy by the water fountain, a woman in a sports bra stretching her arms.

  I walked in the open women’s doorway, the space felt cold and hollow. It was blindingly dark. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light. I had already tried to reinvent myself on this trip, but all I had done was avoid my real life. I had told Left Field that I was going back to school. It no longer felt true. I’d left my freshman year with four weeks left. I was now only a girl, a dropout, walking away from life into a desert. I wanted to cry, to once and for all purge my endless self-loathing—to change.

  Looking into my reflection above the sink, I dreaded what I already understood to be true: I wouldn’t reinvent myself at Kickoff. Just being someplace new couldn’t just suddenly imbue me with new confidence. Fleeing to the desert didn’t transform me into the poised and lovely woman I wished I were. I was here—on the PCT at last—and I was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable I still was in my body. I was awkward in Newton and at college, and here on the trail I remained just as uncool. This place wouldn’t change me. Nowhere could.

  Through my darkly tinted prescription sunglasses, I saw myself: a chunky dirty girl. I was ugly, had bad posture and thick glasses. I was chubby, my curly hair a mess. I felt unattractive, I always had. I had been mocked for my too-big-for-my-face lips, for wearing the wrong socks; I’d never had clothes I felt good in, not beautiful or even comfortable within my skin. I hadn’t gotten attention from the boys at my high school or my father either. I was unseen. I had always been unseen.

  Tomorrow a crowd of mystery faces would filter in, and the pressure to reinvent myself among my new people, my very tiny new community, felt momentous, and I remembered camp, and I remembered Colorado College, my many failed beginnings, and so soon people could find out I was uncool, long-rejected, damaged—unlovable—and I decided, my heart revving, No. I never wanted to go back to summer camp, or to Colorado College. Now, finally actually standing on Kickoff’s grounds, I saw a big vacant space, the stakes for me felt so impossibly huge, the pressure felt tremendous, and anything could happen—the greatest night of my life or an immediate terrible fall.

  Again away from my mother, I’d begun to wish for beauty newly. I wished to be a girl who possessed it. I wanted to occupy my body in the way that dancers do—fully, and with grace and intention. I wanted to be able to touch my fingertip swiftly to my eye, one-two, the way people do, the way everybody could. The way I couldn’t. It was useless. I couldn’t. I stalled in the campground bathroom, squinting, seeing only that I was unseen, uncool, unattractive—raped—profoundly defeated, and alone. It was a little hard to see crisply in the dim bathroom through my sunglasses. In my effort to redefine myself, I realized I’d condemned myself to see my whole walk through dark lenses. In the mirror I could detect only a fat girl destined to be forever hidden behind glasses so thick no one could see that she was beautiful.

  Jacob had told me I could put on makeup, do my hair—and I agreed, but I never had. I felt helpless to make myself feel attractive.

  It would be months and more than a thousand miles of wild independence before I would begin to truly see how my face and my body were transforming—my wide hips and little waist, C-cup breasts; my eyes: honey brown and as big on my face as they were when I was two. Huge, kept beneath dark shades. My skin olive. Warm and smooth.

  My self without my mother.

  Myself as I was seen.

  I wish I could have known that my lips would soon transform in my vision of myself from too large and awkward into my most alluring feature.

  To my reflection I said, “I am the girl who wears glasses.” I turned the faucet off and tried to straighten. Blushing, hands still wet, I walked back outside and into the sun, and saw the man and the boy, speaking to each other, muted in infinite relentless brightness.

  It happened quickly. I saw that the boy was smiling at me. I stepped over to them. “Hey,” I said loudly. Closer, I saw that the boy wasn’t a boy, really, anymore, any more than I was a girl. He was probably twenty, j
ust very thin. He had high cheekbones, his features masculine but also delicate; he was handsome. “Where you guys from?” I asked them; my face flushed. I couldn’t place them.

  “I come to here from Switzerland,” the young one said. He was still smiling, so big, watching my face. “I like to be here for hiking. Yes.”

  “From outside L.A., just here for Kickoff,” the older man answered. So they were not together. I made a note then to myself: people together on the PCT are probably not together; they just only happen to be walking the same pace.

  “And you come to here, too? For the hike?” the young one asked me back. His cheeks were hollow like a hungry teen’s. I watched his exposed arms, their graceful gestures. This boy was athletic, poised and confident—asking me. He was also here to begin walking the trail north.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. I looked away, to his running shoes. “Thru-hiking.” I pressed my lips together, trying to thin them.

  The young one smiled, I nodded and walked back toward where I’d left my pack, fleeing, and without my asking, he followed me, all the way back to my picnic table.

  He told me that his name was Daniel.

  I said cool, ha. I watched him. His effortless posture; he was so beautifully at ease in his body. “Wild Child,” I said—tentatively breaking the naming rule. I was trying on a fresh identity, a brave new name for what I was, still not liking who I was in truth. We were supposed to be given our trail names, but I trusted no one with my identity. I didn’t want to keep being Debby Parker.

  Daniel said that he wanted to hike on, not stop and wait for Kickoff. It would be hectic. He just wanted to walk. The older man was gone, the boy was talking to me alone now. He was looking at me intently. I felt his stare and shifted in discomfort; I felt terribly exposed. I looked down, away, at the dead quivering grass.

  His accent was thick and strange, though, and I liked it. I liked his boyish grin, those sure, toned arms. His posture—that beautiful ease I terribly envied. His smile was undeniable.

  When he finally looked away, hopped up to sit on the picnic table, I realized the statement that he was going to skip Kickoff was really a question to me, and, coming from him, the invitation didn’t seem aggressive or frightening. I trusted his smile.

  And so somehow in only that sweet moment he had entirely convinced me that his intent eyes weren’t scanning me for reasons to dislike me or ways to hurt me. That his grin’s curl wasn’t predatory. Instead it seemed he was looking at me unapologetically because he liked the girl he saw. He simply wanted to walk with me. He’d only just met me and already he was interested. I felt a small thrill in my anxious chest. He was cute, magnetic—and, amazingly—he seemed to believe that I was those things, too. It was crazy. He was staring, stirring my core; I was shifting. I wanted him to look at me longer, wanted to hold this feeling longer.

  This boy, his interest in me, was the god-sent exact best antidote to my social fears. His easiness soothed me.

  I reminded myself that I’d come to Kickoff to make friends, to find someone good to walk with, and here was someone who was trying to befriend me, to walk with me. And I was here to hike. Not to arrive and immediately start waiting. And Kickoff might be raucous—dangerous.

  And I believed these things.

  But the truest reason I was compelled to leave with this handsome Swiss boy I didn’t know at all was not my need for a hiking partner, or desire to walk more miles immediately, or fear of getting gang-raped by rowdy men. It was simply that leaving with Daniel would mean that I’d miss Kickoff—and thus defer the massive pressure I felt. I felt the hurt of my first day of camp, Day 1 of college. The next day. How I’d fallen. How, arriving to new green lawns, new places populated with people who’d never known me, I was forced to confront the truth I really already knew: being here was not enough to make me different.

  I feared I’d wreck this new beginning, too.

  Leaving with Daniel would mean skipping the risk of falling tomorrow again.

  I looked squarely at him. I said okay.

  I walked first, Daniel tight behind, to the edge of the field, into the shallow hills and openness. Pale sage and creosote bushes lined the trail, and I felt vacant, a little scared. We exchanged questions, better questions than answers. Daniel, what’d you do in Switzerland? I raced the mountain bikes for the cycling competition. What did you to do when in Colorado? I studied writing. I was a college student.

  How old are you?

  Twenty. But he’d be twenty-one in three months.

  How old are you?

  Nineteen.

  Yes. He thought I was nineteen.

  I didn’t yet know what I wanted from him, a companion or somebody to be nice to me, to redeem men, or just a friend to walk with. I didn’t know why I was talking to him; he was another college-age stranger.

  Tomorrow nearly a thousand people—gear vendors, hikers, aspiring thru-hikers, trail angels—would populate this mute space. Since winter I’d daydreamt of the big bonfire consuming wood, the joy, the starlit barbecue and pre-journey camaraderie. They would grill hot dogs and burgers, laugh in the light of fires, in the darkening chilling evening desert air. Meeting, talking, finding their future closest friends, their future selves.

  And I would be gone with Daniel.

  I walked with Daniel out into the open desert, low shrubs and dirt in all directions, my heart knocking against my breast. I noticed Daniel also was not ultralight, his tall pack stuffed-taut, dense. I guessed his base weight was thirty pounds, though his feet still sprang quicker, lighter than my own.

  The plants along the trail grew taller, greener; the trail climbed up in elevation. We were hiking to the base of the Laguna Mountains, six-thousand-foot peaks that actually get snow. These new big plants were bushy, abrasive looking, like steel sponges. I breathed deep in, out, in, out, trying not to sound too winded. We were hiking fast. I was striding quick, jog-stepping in determined spurts to stay with him, feeling good about my impressive pace so far.

  His arms swung gracefully as we walked on. My pulse was bumping in my thumb pad, I was grinning and also sad, excited, terrified, walking out into open desert, impossibly vulnerable, exposed to Daniel’s goodness or his bad, wishing on every puff of dust spraying behind his heels that he was good.

  After about four miles, four hundred feet of elevation gain, we took a rest at Cottonwood Creek, a weak little streamlet. The brush grew taller, fuller here, one of those little water-made oases thru-hikers walk into and then out of in a moment. Back out to desert.

  That’s where another man, Edison, caught us. Edison told us he’d seen us leave Lake Morena together and had been tailing us all morning. We looked “less gay” than everyone else. “Yo,” he said as he tossed his pack down and sat. “’Sup tards.”

  “Hi,” Daniel said. That big smile again. “The water is good.”

  Edison raised both eyebrows at me and licked his chapped lips. “’Sup.” He unzipped his pack and pulled out a paper can of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting, started eating it with a spoon. “This shit’s ridic for calories,” he said. “Best thing to carry.”

  We talked as we walked. Edison was twenty, from some small town in Tennessee. He’d been working at a cannery in Alaska, but had lived in Colorado before, working as a ski lift operator and liked that better. More fun and hot girls.

  I said I went to school in Colorado. Or, go to school.

  Daniel said he skis, too.

  “Man, no,” Edison said. He ignored me, talked toward Daniel. “I’m a boarder.” His limp straight hair flap-flapped against his shoulders with each step; his head poked forward, forward, forward like a prehistoric bird. Primitive.

  They talked for hours. I remained quiet. Edison had a joke—Why aren’t little niggers allowed to jump on the bed?—and I felt suddenly awake. Scared.

  “Why?” I said. Daniel hadn’t said it, I’m not sure he knew he was supposed to.

  “’Cause they’d get Velcroed to the ceiling.” He giggled. />
  Daniel laughed, though I don’t think he understood, or I hoped he didn’t.

  Daniel had a joke, too. “There is two gay men, and one man says to the other man: I have to break up with you. The other man asks why this is. The original gay man says: because when we started anal fucking your asshole was the size of a dime, but now it is the size of a quarter.”

  Neither Edison nor I laughed. “Um,” I said.

  Daniel was first in our single-file line, and he turned back and grinned at us and nodded.

  “Kinda think something was lost in translation,” I said.

  We walked along the edge of a long canyon, Daniel in front and Edison last. A black-speck chopper flew low, descended out of view, still loud, near here, and Edison talked about snowboarding out in Colorado, about what makes girls hot and hot names versus not hot names. Kaley is a hot name. Emily is not. Tara is hot. Rebecca no.

  I didn’t ask for judgment on my name.

  The sky was dark with clouds now, and for the first time since Mexico we lost the sun. It shined through a bright cloud. The helicopters were loud, those double-bladed choppers. They flew low. We walked fast, all three of us; Daniel stepped high over a rattlesnake and said, “Snake is here.” I stepped over it. A moment later we heard a hard rattle. Edison skip-jumped over the snake and jogged to us. Thirty feet up the trail, Daniel and I waited.

  “What did happen?” Daniel asked.

  “I kicked that fucker,” Edison said.

  I looked at Daniel, prayed he hated Edison’s stupidity, the absolute idiocy of creating such a massive and senseless risk. He’d just risked his life for nothing. He was entirely unpredictable—and, therefore, unsafe—and I was horrified, finished with him. I was done.

  The sky hung over us like a shadow, and I opened my mouth and a silent word came out and then I tried again: “Idiot. You’re an idiot.”