by Jeff Hirsch
“Guys, I don’t care how many times you ask me, I’m not going to let you bring a goat up here.”
“But Gre-er!”
“No goats!”
There was a peel of laughter and then a shriek as DeShaun chased Cash and Shan—Ricky and Margo now—toward the dining hall in the main lodge. I got up from the bunk and headed for the door.
“Card, wait.”
Hannah was standing by her cot with Hershey Bar at her side.
“I was thinking maybe you could come down and eat with us tomorrow. It’s hot dog night. For some reason the kids have decided that’s something they’re really, really excited about. We end up playing games and stuff after. I’m sure we can find a way to make it safe for you.”
I thought back to the music and the swirl of bodies the night of the dance and how strongly I felt pulled toward it. I shook my head.
“Then maybe the three of us can go look at fireflies again sometime.”
The way Hannah was smiling made her whole face brighten. The whole room. All the knots inside me loosened and fell away.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that.”
I hung out at the edge of the camp and waited until Greer got the kids corralled into the dining hall for lunch.
“Hey, save your old buddy Greer a little something, okay, guys? A morsel. A crumb. I beg you.”
He came to the doorway, wiping his hands with a dishtowel. When he saw me, he stopped cold.
“So,” he said. “How’d the mission go?”
“Mission?”
He stepped out of the doorway and onto the grass. “Yeah, you were gone so long, I figured it must have been because you were a secret agent who’d been activated to deal with issues of national security. Either that, or you were just a titanic jackass.”
He balled up the towel he was carrying and lobbed it at my chest. I caught it and kicked at the patch of ground in front of me.
“Titanic jackass,” I said. “Definitely.”
Greer laughed. “Damn. I was really hoping for the secret agent thing.”
Benny came to the doorway and yanked at Greer’s sleeve. “We got any more lemonade?”
“Yeah, in the kitchen. I’ll grab some in a second.”
“Hey, Ben.”
Benny didn’t even look at me. He turned around and went inside without a word. My stomach sank as I remembered what Hannah had said about all the excuses she and Greer had made for me. I’m sure they’d done their best, but Benny was smart. He had to have known what they were doing.
Back in the dining hall, there was a crash of glass breaking and then Astrid called out for Greer. He rolled his eyes wearily.
“Duty calls.” He started into the hall, then turned back. “Hey! You still working on that garden?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. Why?”
He smiled that big, goofy smile of his. “Feeling the urge to return to my roots as a subsistence farmer. Let me get these demons squared away, and I’ll meet you there.”
He put up his hands, and I tossed the towel back to him.
“All right, monsters!” he bellowed as he went inside. “What’s going on in here? Who’s up for more lemonade?”
The kids responded with a shouted chorus. All except Benny. He dropped his fork, then left the table and stomped out the back door. I started to follow him, but thought better of it. Greer and Hannah had given him excuses. Did I have anything better?
I stopped at the supply shed on the way out of camp and grabbed the packets of seeds, a rake, and a shovel. Hershey Bar came out of Hannah’s cabin and trotted along beside me as I set out for the garden, hoping there were enough summer days left for anything I planted to grow.
20
“YOU KNOW what our problem is, man?”
“No. What’s our problem, Greer?”
“We never had any fun with this whole thing.”
It was a few days later. The day of the Marvins’ carnival. Greer wanted to escape the insanity of the kids getting ready, so we were walking from one side of Lucy’s Promise to the other. It was past time to start heading back, but Greer kept taking these random little turnoffs that stretched the trip out longer and longer. Also, he wouldn’t shut up.
“We had a golden opportunity. Kids came up here with, like, zero knowledge about the world. We could have told them anything!”
“Like what?”
“Nothing bad! Just like, I don’t know, the virus was caused by aliens. Or unicorns!”
“And we would have done this for fun?”
“Sure,” Greer said. “But also for science. We could have seen what believing things like that could do to people, like, psychologically.”
“So you’re saying we should have spent the last year performing psychological experiments on a group of deeply traumatized children.”
“Well, when you put it like that . . . No, it’d be like we were giving them a more exciting world. They’d probably thank us! If they ever found out about it.”
“It’s almost hard to believe we never put this plan into action.”
A turn that would have led us right to camp appeared up ahead, but Greer dodged at the last minute and we looped back around onto another trail.
“Uh, Greer?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are we going?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’ve spent the last hour taking a twenty-minute walk.”
“So what?” he said. “The birds are singing. The sun’s out. Oh! You know what we should do? Go for a swim.”
“You have to leave for that carnival in like an hour.”
“A short one! Come on!”
He tore off down the trail, but I didn’t move. When he finally realized I wasn’t following, he turned around.
“What?”
“Dude,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Why?”
I just glared at him.
“Hey! Look at this!”
He dashed over to a stand of trees just off the trail. I stood there and watched as he poured every ounce of his attention onto what was clearly an entirely ordinary leaf. Turning it over. Bending it in half. Holding it up to the light. I came up behind him.
“Seriously,” I said. “What’s going on, man?”
“Nothing. I was just—I was thinking. That’s all.”
“About what?”
Greer held up the leaf. “Check out the veins on this bad boy. Is that insane or what? Did I ever tell you that I’m pretty sure I used to be a botanist?”
“Greer.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “For real. I was just thinking about how you brought Hannah up here, and at first that seemed like it might have been a really bad idea, but then it turned out to be a pretty good one, right? It’s been good for the kids, I think.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah, it is. It totally is.” He went back to fiddling with his spectacular leaf. “And I was thinking about how in general she’s, uh—she’s pretty cool, right? Like, as a person.”
He glanced up at me for half a second, then away again.
“Uh . . . yeah,” I said. “She is.”
“Yeah,” Greer repeated. “She’s like a really solid person, right? Nice, but not goody-goody nice—genuinely nice, but with a little bit of an edge still. Like how she’ll laugh at your jokes and all, but you’re pretty sure she could also kick your ass if she had to. Which—I don’t know why that seems so cool to me, but it totally does. Anyway, that’s what I thought, that she was pretty cool. And that’s what I thought you’d think too, so that’s why I wanted to”—he swallowed hard—“you know, check with you.”
“Check with me?”
“Before I said anything. To her. About, uh . . .” He looked away, grimaced, started again. “About her being cool.”
“Greer—”
“It’s totally okay if you, you know, think she’s cool too. I can back off. I will back off. I’m happy to back
off. I mean, if you feel that way—”
“I don’t.”
He cocked his head, clearly skeptical.
“I don’t. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.”
“It would matter,” he said. “It’d matter to me.”
“No, I mean . . .” I looked down at my gloved hands. “Greer, we can barely be in the same room with each other.”
“Well, yeah, but sooner or later that Lassiter guy is going to get his act together and come up with a cure, and then you could—”
“Things are the way they are,” I said. “You should talk to Hannah. Today.”
Greer thought for a second, then tossed the leaf aside and started marching toward camp.
“No! No way,” he said. “Forget it. I changed my mind.”
“What? Why?” I chased after him. “Greer, I want you to!”
He threw his hands in the air. “No, it’s stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wouldn’t even know what to say. And there’s no way she’d ever—I mean, I’m sure I had all kinds of slick moves before I was infected, but—”
“You didn’t.”
Greer stopped short, with his back to me. I hadn’t meant to say it—didn’t even know I was going to until the words came out of my mouth. But I guess it had been building up since that night in the museum, and there was no taking it back now.
I eased up behind him, the crunch of my feet on the trail overloud in my ears.
“You want to know anything else?”
He slowly turned. When our eyes met, there was a second of acknowledgment—that I’d known and said nothing—and then he looked off into the woods.
“My family,” he said. “Are they here?”
I shook my head.
“What happened to them?”
“You’re sure you—”
“Just tell me.”
I wanted to hand Greer a prettier world than the one he’d grown up in, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. His past belonged to him. If he wanted it back, I had to give it to him.
“You lived on this compound out in the woods near where the quarantine fence is now. You and your mom and dad, and your brother. I think your folks stayed, hoping they could wait out the virus, but then you got infected.”
“And they just . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “They left.”
Greer scuffed the toe of his shoe in the dust, then looked up at me. “So we knew each other. Back then.”
“Yeah.”
“Were we friends?”
“No.”
“Did I have friends?”
My throat clamped shut, but I forced the words through. “No. You didn’t.”
He was quiet for a moment. A small wind ruffled our clothes.
“It’s weird,” he said. “But I think I knew that.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “All this—you and Hannah, the kids—it feels new. You know?”
Greer turned and started back along the trail. I joined him, and we walked in silence awhile.
“So is there anything else I should know?” he asked a little hesitantly. “I didn’t go around kicking puppies or anything, did I?”
I didn’t want to lie to him, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the whole truth either. I went back over everything I knew about him, everything I’d ever seen or heard. There had to be something he’d want to hear. A bridge between the old and the new. Something good.
“You were never afraid of anything,” I said.
Greer’s eyes brightened. “Seriously?”
“Not anything or anybody,” I said. “Certainly not girls with green hair.”
He smiled to himself. “Cool.”
We came around a bend in the trail and started to hear the kids’ voices from down in the camp.
“And you’re sure I didn’t have any slick moves.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You definitely didn’t.”
“So . . .”
“So, what?”
“So what do I do now?”
There couldn’t have been a worse person to ask, but I was the only one there, so I tried to come up with something. I remembered our first year in Black River, when Mom and Dad took us to the county fair and you met that girl at the shooting gallery.
“There’s going to be a Ferris wheel at this thing, right?”
“I think so.”
“Wait for it to get dark,” I said. “And then take her up in that.”
“Then what?”
“Just . . . be you.”
“Old me or new me?”
“New you,” I said. “Definitely new you.”
By the time we got back to camp, it was utter pandemonium. Music was pumping from the radio as kids ran from cabin to cabin and in and out of the dining hall. Hershey Bar and Snow Cone were exhausting themselves, barking and jumping as if they wanted someone to simply stop and explain what the hell was going on. To add insult to injury, one of the kids had tied a pink party hat to Snow Cone’s head with a length of green string.
“That dog’s going to snap one day,” I said.
“No kidding.”
Makela ran by, and Greer shouted to her. “Yo! Makela! Where’s Hannah?”
“Haven’t seen her since breakfast,” she said as she disappeared into her cabin.
Greer ran a shaky hand through his hair. “All right, I better go find her so we can get this train moving.”
“Why don’t you let me?” I suggested. “You go get ready.”
“You sure?”
I looked him up and down. He was sweating like a madman and his clothes were rumpled and stained with dirt.
“Yeah. A lack of moves is fine, but looking and smelling like a homeless guy is not going to work in your favor.”
“Right. Good point. See ya later.”
He took off. After a little searching I found Hannah at her old campsite, sitting at the edge of the mountain with her back to me.
“I think you’ve got the right idea,” I said, taking a spot down the ledge from her. “It’s crazy back there. Greer’s going to have to—”
I turned toward her as she hurriedly wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“You all right?”
She nodded briskly, then wrapped her arms around her middle and looked out at the valley below. Her hair blew in the wind.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s stupid.”
“Hannah.”
She glanced at me, then took hold of the key and squeezed it until her fingertips went red.
“I yelled at Crystal this morning.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve gotten kind of friendly over the last few weeks. More than with the other girls, I guess. And it’s been nice, but . . . she’s got this huge crush on Ren and she found out this morning that he doesn’t feel the same way. She showed up wanting to talk about it, needing to talk about it, and I just—”
Hannah’s eyes narrowed on the stone between us, as if she were searching for something in its crags.
“What?”
“I told her I didn’t have time for her and her stupid crush.” Her eyes flashed up at me. “I actually said that. I didn’t even know why. It was like I was watching myself do it.”
“It’s just—it’s stress or something.”
Hannah shook her head. She let go of the key and hugged her knees to her chest.
“You remember the night we saw the fireflies? How after Greer left, it was just me and you up here and we . . .”
I nodded, feeling the pinch of that memory.
“After you left, I had this feeling like I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “Like the tent was collapsing around me. The second the sun came up, I was down in camp, talking to Astrid about moving in with them.”
Hannah made a fist and laid it over her chest.
“It’s like there’s this second heart in my chest, right next to
mine, and whenever I get close to somebody, it starts to beat harder and harder. And I know there’s only one thing I can do to make it stop.”
“What?”
“Run,” she said. Her voice was hollow, frightened. “As fast and as far away as I can.”
Her eyes glistened but she wiped at them before any tears could fall. More than anything I wanted to put my hand on her shoulder, or draw her to me—but I knew I couldn’t.
“And it’s not new,” she said. “I’m sure of that. Every time I feel it, I can tell.” She turned to me again. “Why would Lassiter’s wipe everything else away—my name, my life, my family—and leave that behind?”
“Hannah . . .”
There was a rustle in the trees behind us.
“Guys? Hannah? Card?”
DeShaun and Ricky were standing in the clearing, just off the trail.
“Greer says it’s time to go,” Ricky said.
“Actually,” DeShaun corrected, “he said if you guys make him deal with ‘those pint-sized demon spawn’ on his own, you’re both dead to him forever.”
“Okay,” Hannah said. “We’ll be right there.”
“You all right, Hannah?”
She managed a brave smile. “Yeah, D. I’m good. You guys go ahead.”
Once they left, Hannah dabbed at her eyes and tried to fix her hair.
“So. Any carnival-going tips for me?”
Her face was red and her hair was a tangle of vines. She was so beautiful I didn’t think I could stand it.
“If someone asks you to ride the Ferris wheel with them, say yes.”
By the time I got back to camp, the kids had disappeared into their cabins to finish getting ready. Greer wasn’t in his, so I decided to check the dining hall. I went into the kitchen and found it empty. At first I thought the dining room was empty too, but then I saw Benny.
He was sitting alone at one of the tables, with a can of soda in front of him. As soon as he saw me, he got up to leave.
“Ben. Wait.”
“I have to get ready. It’s almost time to go.”
“Just a second. Please.”
He stopped where he was, his little body framed in the sunlight coming through the open front door.
“I shouldn’t have left like that.”