by Jenn Bennett
“Guitarist,” Lennon corrects quietly, but I don’t think anyone hears him except me.
“Didn’t one of your moms crash at Billie Joe Armstrong’s house for a few weeks?” Reagan asks, programming a route into the SUV’s navigation system. “Doesn’t she know his wife, or something?”
Before he can answer, Summer pipes in with: “Is it true that your moms were, like, together with your dad all at the same time?” She pauses, and says in a lower voice, “I mean, the three of them?”
“I got your meaning,” Lennon says.
“That’s just what I heard around school,” Summer tells him apologetically. But not so apologetic that she’s shutting the question down.
“I’ve heard that around school myself,” Lennon says.
“Well?” Summer prompts.
“My parents did a lot of things,” Lennon says enigmatically.
The intrigue inside the car is high. Scandal! Gasp! Thing is, Sunny and Mac are one of the most in-love, devoted couples I’ve ever known. Whatever they’ve done or haven’t done is none of anyone’s business. I start to say this, then wonder why the hell I should defend Lennon if he’s not even bothering to defend himself. I know it used to bother him, all the rumors people at school spread behind his back. Everyone loves to discuss his family life. Even my dad has accused Sunny and Mac of being heathens.
Maybe Lennon doesn’t care anymore. Maybe he’s just embracing it.
“One hundred percent rock-and-roll,” Brett says. “Kerouac would have so approved of that. Did you know he and his best friend Neal Cassady both slept with Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s wife? Wild, huh? I bet you have crazy stories growing up in a punk-rock household.”
“So crazy,” Lennon says flatly.
Brett claps his hands together and tells us all, “This dude right here has legendary blood in his veins. San Francisco punks were the Beat Poets of the eighties and nineties.”
Huh. Now I’m connecting the dots. Brett thinks Lennon has pedigree. That’s why he’s decided Lennon is a “wild man.”
Lennon looks wild, all right. About as wild as a depressed corpse.
“Okay, we’re all here and everyone’s acquainted,” Reagan says. “Are we ready to roll?”
“We’re gonna have some crazy-ass fun this week,” Brett says, throwing his arm over Lennon’s shoulder so that he can snap a quick selfie. Lennon’s expression remains dour while Brett sticks out his tongue toward the screen. “Right?”
Lennon leans back in his seat and echoes his previous words. “If you say so.”
“Right, Reagan?” Brett calls out to the front.
“Let’s do this,” she confirms, shifting the SUV into drive. “Sierras, here we come.”
As Reagan drives down Mission Street, she informs us that the drive to the glamping compound is more than four hours. And for the first few minutes, the car is loud and chaotic, everyone trying to talk at once. Reagan is telling Kendrick about the camp’s amenities while Summer adds her own commentary about a glamping site in Colorado that her parents visited for their anniversary. Brett is trying to tell Reagan about nearby places mentioned in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And surprisingly, Reagan seems interested. This is news to me, because she usually tunes out whenever Brett goes all rhapsodic about the Beat Poets at school. He’s always trying to get people to drive across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco for afternoon excursions to Beat-friendly City Lights Bookstore—“It’s a historic landmark.” And Reagan is always complaining that poetry is boring.
And throughout all of this, Lennon stays quiet.
Maybe it will be easy to ignore him.
I glance around the car, and it really hits me that, minus Lennon, I’m going on a weeklong trip with some of the most popular people at school. Mom was right. I needed to do this to feel less like an outsider. I’m going to have fun. Everything’s going to be fine.
Lennon’s unwanted presence can’t ruin this.
And I am definitely not scratching my arm. If anything was going to make my hives worse, it would be Lennon. So I can’t let him. Deep breaths. I’m okay. I’m totally okay.
After we head out of the East Bay, conversation becomes as monotonous as the valley scenery. Outside my window, I spy flat farmland, fruit trees, wide blue skies, and the occasional small town. Long stretches of highway are punctuated with truck stops and roadside fruit stands, and people turn to their phones for entertainment. A little over halfway through the trip, Kendrick points out Bullion’s Bluff, a tiny historical mining town just off the highway. “They’ve got a fairly big winery,” he says. “My parents brought me once. The downtown is totally nineteenth-century Gold Rush era. I’m talking Old West saloon and general store. Gold Rush museum. The works. It’s schlocky, but it’s fun.”
Since Summer complains that she needs to use a public restroom after drinking an enormous soda, Reagan decides to pull off the highway. After passing a run-down gas station, we spot the downtown area easily enough. Kendrick was right: It looks like a set from an old Western movie. A sign even brags that one was filmed here in the 1980s.
The Gold Rush museum looks pretty shabby and has an entrance fee. We agree to forgo that and head to the Bullion General Store instead, parking alongside a line of travel trailers in front of a wooden hitching post—no horses, alas—and a water trough filled with planted cacti.
Inside, the spacious store is bustling with tourists, jammed from floor to ceiling with goods for sale—everything from old-fashioned candy and brown bottles of sarsaparilla, to gold-nugget jewelry and a mining cart filled with polished stones. It also smells like peanut butter fudge, which makes me hungry. Peanut butter is my weakness.
The candy counter has a line, so while Summer looks for a restroom with Reagan, and the boys are magnetically drawn to a display of mining pickaxes—complete with a cardboard standee of a cartoon old-timey prospector—I meander around the aisles until I’m in an outdoor gear section. A sign advertising “bear vaults” catches my attention. Or maybe it’s the gigantic stuffed bear that’s standing on two legs with its arms raised. A sign hanging around its neck reads KINGSLY THE BEAR.
“Gross,” I whisper, seeing that part of its dusty fur is ripped. It also smells funky. But honestly, I’d take all the motley smells in this place 100 percent over the SUV, where Brett’s aftershave was starting to give me a headache.
“You have one, right?” a deep voice says.
Lennon steps next to me like a ghost from the shadows.
“Jesus, sneak up on people much?” I complain under my breath. “Have one what?”
He points to the canisters lining a wooden cubby on the wall. A pleasant scent wafts from his clothes. “Bear vault.”
“Not planning on capturing any bears, so no.”
“They’re for storing food, foolish human.”
I give him a sidelong glance. He’s holding a square of candy inside wax paper. When he takes a bite, I realize why he smells so nice. Peanut butter fudge.
“So good,” he mumbles. He knows I’m a PB addict. At least, he used to know. Maybe he forgot and is completely oblivious that me watching him eat this is total food porn.
I ignore his little moan of ecstasy. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Juggling his fudge, he grabs a black barrel-shaped canister off the shelf and flips open a hinged lid. “Bear vault, to store your food. Bears can smell food from a couple miles away. Not even kidding. They will tear down cabin doors and break car windows to get their grub on. You have to keep everything inside one of these babies. Food. Toiletries. Anything with a strong scent, like Brett’s cologne.”
I give Lennon a dirty look. Brett’s wearing aftershave, not cologne. At least, I think. Who wears cologne? I mean, other than my cranky grandpa John. That’s my dad’s homophobic and slightly racist father, who thinks everyone should “speak English.” My grandpa Sam doesn’t speak English, but he sure as hell doesn’t wear cologne.
“I’m sure the glamping
compound knows how to keep bears out of food,” I tell Lennon.
“They do, which is why no food is allowed in the tents, unless it’s in a bear vault,” he says, crinkling the wax paper as he peels it back for another bite of candy.
I hold up an invisible phone and pretend to talk into it. “Hey, Siri, is Lennon full of shit? What’s that? Oh, he is. Great. Thank you.”
“Hey, Siri? Is everything I just said true?” he says, playing along. He pretends to wait for a response and then talks into the bear canister. “Why, yes, Lennon. It most certainly is. You’re in a Bear Zone. It’s against federal law to store unprotected food.”
“That law sounds completely made-up,” I tell him.
“Didn’t you read the rules?”
What rules?
Lennon rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. “I also emailed Brett a list of things we’ll need on the trail. He said he was going to share it with the group.”
What list? I’m suddenly worried that I was left out of the loop. Forgotten. And this just reignites my anxieties about whether my presence is wanted on this trip. But I’m not telling Lennon this.
“Reagan bought a lot of stuff for this week,” I report. “But I don’t remember any bear containers. She’s been camping here before, so maybe she knows something you don’t. Maybe we don’t need them.”
Lennon mumbles an unintelligible curse under his breath. “We’ll definitely need them when we go backpacking.” He holds the canister behind his neck to demonstrate. It’s about the same size as his head—too big. “You can strap it to the top of your pack like this, or down at the bottom, which might be better for people prone to balance problems.” He smirks at me with his eyes.
I fantasize about bashing his big head with the stupid bear vault. “Why are you here?”
“Why are any of us here, Zorie? Life is a mystery.”
I groan. “On this trip.”
“Oh,” he says innocently. He’s not smiling, but there’s a fraction of humor behind his eyes. “The cologne bandit invited me. I’m ‘the coolest,’ apparently,” he says making air quotes with one hand while he takes another bite of fudge.
Again with the snark. Why is he hanging out with Brett if he hates him so much?
“But you knew I was coming?” I probe.
“I did.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
He shrugs. “I only recently decided to go.”
Is that true? I remember back to when Reagan first told me about off-trail backpacking and her not being sure if Brett’s “friend” who told him about this bucket-list hidden waterfall was committed to coming.
“Why?” I ask.
“I have my reasons.”
“Which are . . . ?”
Lennon stares at his fudge for a long moment. Then he seems to change his mind about what he was going to say and hands me the open canister. “Get this. And maybe a bear bell,” he says, pointing to a display of big silver bells designed to be clipped to a backpack. “It gives bears a gentle warning that you’re in the area, so that you don’t surprise them. A surprised bear is a defensive bear, and a defensive bear kills.”
Is he serious? I think he is, but I’m not totally sure. And before I can ask for clarification or point out that he’s avoiding my question, he retrieves something from his pocket and dumps it inside the open canister. Then he walks away.
I look inside the canister. Sitting at the bottom is a square of peanut butter fudge wrapped in wax paper.
What am I supposed to think about this?
I retrieve the fudge and return the canister to the display shelf, abandoning Kingsly the Bear to catch up with the others. Just because Lennon cries bear vault, doesn’t mean I really need it. It’s insanely expensive. Besides, Lennon has a penchant for being super technical and obsessive about details. I think he’s exaggerating the urgency of bear protection.
Probably.
At the last second, I double back and grab a silver bear bell off the rack.
Better safe than sorry.
Part II
7
* * *
The monotonous fruit fields change to rugged foothills covered in lodgepole pine trees as we head west. When we turn off the highway, gray granite cliffs flank the twisting uphill road toward the national forest. Carved wooden signs with painted white lettering point the way to a variety of sights, each marked with distance and pertinent details:
CANYON WALK, 6KM. 3.5 HOUR RETURN.
SCEPTER PASS, 4KM. WEAPONS PROHIBITED.
BLACKWOOD LAKE, 10K. NO PETS. NO FIRES. OVERNIGHT STAY REQUIRES WILDERNESS PERMIT.
And then finally, our destination:
MUIR CAMPING COMPOUND: 2K. 1 HOUR RETURN. WHEELED VEHICLES PROHIBITED PAST PARKING AREA.
Wait, what?
“This is us,” Reagan reports, turning. I make a mental note of a High Sierra bus stop here and wonder if this is the route I’ll need to use to get to the star party on Condor Peak.
A small, paved parking area sits at the end of a rocky driveway. A dozen or so cars are parked here, most of them luxury vehicles. We find an open space near some wooden steps that lead into thick forest. Another sign sits near the steps, stating that the trail is private property and only for guests of the compound. People using the trail must fill out a form and deposit it inside a locked box.
There is no road past the parking lot.
“Get everything you’ll need,” Reagan reports. “Unless you want to spend all your time hiking back and forth to the car. The walk back is fine, but it’s all uphill to the compound.”
“We’re hiking to the compound?” I say, staring at the sign. “Two kilometers?”
Reagan gives me a labored look. “Don’t start, Everhart. I warned you about hiking.”
I’m not even that upset about the hike. It’s just unexpected, is all. “I didn’t—”
“How long is two kilometers?” Brett asks.
“It’s nothing,” Reagan tells him brightly.
“A little over a mile,” I elaborate.
“Oh, cool,” he answers, but he’s smiling at Reagan.
And Reagan is smiling back at him. “Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.”
Why are they smiling so big? Did I miss a joke? And now they’re high-fiving each other—hard enough to hear the smack of palm-on-palm. It’s so . . . goofy. Lennon’s head turns toward mine, and even though a fringe of black hair obscures one eye, a single dark brow rises in shared judgment of the stupid high five.
Or maybe he’s judging me.
We all fill out the trail registration cards at the information sign—in case anyone goes missing or gets murdered along the way, they’ll know your name and next of kin. And after Brett and Lennon haul down everyone’s stuff from the rooftop travel carrier, I’m soon reminded that I’m a human Weeble toy, barely able to stand under the misaligned weight of my backpack. But it’s not as if I can repack everything in the middle of the parking lot. So I do my best to strap it on and adjust my stance.
“Saddle up, team,” Reagan says loudly to the group. “Luxury awaits us at the end of the trail.”
It’s just two kilometers, I tell myself. And the woods are pretty amazing, all shady and smelling of pine needles. Birds are chirping, and it’s not too warm. I can do this. About five minutes up the first steep hill, I begin to have doubts. Ten minutes up an even steeper incline, I’m picturing Reagan with one of those prospector axes from the general store lodged in her skull. By the time we reach the final stretch toward the compound, I’m just wishing I could drop into a fetal position.
The sign for Muir Camping Compound appears, and I nearly weep when I spot a big building inside a break in the trees. My head is sweating, and I’ve been walking uphill in a hunched-up position for so long, I’m a hundred-year-old woman with osteoporosis.
But it doesn’t matter. The promised land is in front of me, and by God, it may have been worth all that misery, because the compound is gorgeous. A modern cedar lodge sits
at the forefront: walls of enormous windows, fat timber beams, stacked-stone fireplaces jutting from the roof. Lush forest surrounds it. Jagged mountains in the distance. The whole scene looks like something out of a dream. We head inside.
Warm sunlight streams through double-high windows as we tread across floors of polished river rock and stop at the registration desk. It smells so nice in here, like cedar and fresh-cut flowers. And they have expensive candy sitting in a bowl for the guests. I resist the urge to fill my pockets; Brett does not. He holds a finger up to his mouth and winks at me, stealthily emptying imported chocolate into a pocket on his backpack, while Reagan informs the middle-aged woman working the desk who her mother is.
The woman’s name tag reads CANDY. For a second, my oxygen-starved brain reads this as some sort of sign that Brett’s been busted, then I realize it’s actually her name. “You’re Belinda’s daughter?” she says to Reagan. “I barely recognize you. Didn’t you stay with us last year?”
“I did,” Reagan reports cheerfully. “Mom called you about the change in guests, right?”
Candy looks us over. “I was under the impression that your group would be girls. . . .”
You and me both, Candy. I sense a kindred planner spirit in her as she’s double-checking her computer screen and an old-fashioned paper registry. Reagan assures Candy that nothing is amiss with our guest list and begins providing her with everyone’s names. I meander around the room, and Brett joins me while I examine a wall of framed scenic photos. “Lennon said you take crazy-good photos of stars. I thought you just looked at them.”
The jittery feeling I get whenever Brett is nearby returns. Why can’t I just feel normal around him? “I . . . do both. Look and take pictures. Of stars. With my camera.”
Ugh. Zorie sound like cavewoman.
Brett just laughs, easy and warmly. “Not with your mind?”
“No,” I say, hoping my cheeks aren’t red.