Starry Eyes

by Jenn Bennett

He gives me a tight smile, and then shakes his head. “It will be okay. I promise. I’ll get you to Avani in one piece. And if you change your mind, at the very least I can get you to a ranger station inside the park by tomorrow.”

  The water is boiling. He carefully tilts the pan’s contents into his steel carafe before settling a mesh plunger on top. Then he sets a timer on his phone.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “French press.”

  “For coffee?”

  “Yep.”

  “Real coffee? Not instant?”

  “We’re camping, Zorie, not living in a dystopian nightmare.”

  “I’ll try to remember that when I’m digging cat holes.”

  He holds up two blue enamel coffee cups. “It could be worse. It could be winter.”

  Or I could be stuck in the wilderness, miles away from civilization, with the boy who crushed my heart in the palm of his hand.

  Oh, wait.

  I am.

  Part III

  15

  * * *

  Over coffee and a couple of rehydrated gourmet breakfast pouches that Reagan left behind, Lennon breaks out his big topographic map of the area and a black metal compass that unfolds to reveal several dials, a clock, and a ruler. He makes several measurements and jots down numbers with a mechanical pencil, and it all looks complicated.

  “How are you?” Lennon says, nodding toward my arm, which I’m scratching.

  “A little itchy,” I confess. Last night’s bear attack and fight sent me back into Hive Overload. “I’ve got some stuff to put on it, but—”

  “But what?”

  “It’s that stuff from Miss Angela.”

  He makes a face. “Oh, God. The miracle weed lotion that smells like a scented candle factory got hit by a bomb?”

  I point at him. “That’s the stuff. And not only does it make my eyes water, I’m sort of afraid to use it out here after last night. I don’t want to attract bears.”

  “Hmm,” he says. “Your worry is valid. I’ll try to think of a solution. In the meantime, here’s the route I have in mind.”

  He turns his map around to show me and opens up his journal, laying it on top. Across two of the journal’s pages, he’s drawn a not-to-scale map of our planned route, complete with a few tiny symbols sketched at various stopping points. I spot a notation for a waterfall near the bottom and point.

  “This is us?”

  “This is us,” he confirms.

  “And these tents are—”

  “Camping spots. We have to pass over two chains of mountains to get to Condor Peak.”

  “Rock climbing?” I say, suddenly freaked out.

  “No. Patience, grasshopper. If we go this way,” he says, tracing a dotted line with his finger, “we can hike through a network of caves that passes under the mountains. The caves have four exits, and one of them is on the south side of the mountain. Once we make it through, there’s an excellent valley where we can camp tonight.”

  “Hold on. Back up. Spelunking?”

  “Walking through a cave is not spelunking. It’s walking.”

  “In the dark.”

  “We’ll have headlamps.” He holds up his phone. “I saved a PDF of a hiking book that covers backcountry trails. It says there are several big caves along these foothills, but this one is the longest. And once we get to the other side of the mountain, we’ll be able to pick up a bigger trail.”

  I look at where he’s pointing on his homemade map. “I see three sets of tent symbols. Three nights?”

  He nods. “To make it to Condor Peak without killing ourselves. And if you change your mind, this is the nearest ranger station. It’s on the way, and we’ll be passing by it tomorrow. Whatever happens, I won’t leave you stranded. If you’re thinking that I’ve abandoned you before—”

  “I wasn’t.” I totally was.

  He presses his lips together, then adds, “We can do this, I promise. As long as we follow the rules, we shouldn’t have any more bear problems. This will be safer than spending three days in civilization. You’re more likely to die in a car accident than in a national park.”

  “There you go, bringing up the possibility of death,” I say drily. “I had forgotten about it, but now it’s fresh in my mind, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” he says, grinning. “Now, let’s pack up and hit the trail. Miles to go before we sleep.”

  Okay, I can do this. It’s not the plan I wanted, but it is a plan. One that’s been calculated and drawn on paper. I like that. It makes me feel less panicky. I just wish it were my plan and not Lennon’s.

  Getting ready to leave takes longer than I imagined. The group didn’t leave just the corpse of Brett’s mutilated tent behind. They left Reagan’s and Summer’s tents too, along with a bunch of camping supplies Reagan purchased for this trip. Guess she doesn’t intend to use them again, but holy moly, what a frivolous waste of money. Lennon is mad, because all of this mess completely violates the leave-no-trace policy of the backcountry. And we can’t physically take it with us: That would be impossible. All we can do is pack some of the food inside our bear canisters and scavenge a few items we may need. A single-burner camp stove. An additional Nalgene bottle. A backup lighter. Eco-friendly wet wipes. Reagan’s water filter. Because of my telescope, I can’t hold much of anything else in my pack, so Lennon carries most of it, attaching things to the outside of his pack with carabiner clips. What we don’t need, he stacks in a single pile inside Reagan’s tent.

  “We can report this stuff when we get to the ranger station,” he tells me. “They’ll send a ranger to pick it up.”

  “If the bear doesn’t come back and destroy it all first.”

  “Or that,” he says with a sigh.

  After all of this is finished, it’s late morning. I change into fresh clothes, brush my teeth, and try to tame my frizzy curls. When I’m finished getting ready, I take down my dome tent. It’s harder to pack than it was to unpack. And after watching from the sidelines, saying, “Nope,” and “Wrong way,” Lennon finally takes pity on me and helps. Then it’s just a matter of getting it inside my backpack, and I’m ready to go.

  As ready as I’ll ever be, anyway.

  We climb to the top of the waterfall, where Kendrick and Brett took turns diving the day before. I still can’t believe they’re gone. Or that I’m alone with Lennon. This is crazy. And it’s also physically demanding. Climbing a hilly trail, as we did yesterday, is far different from pulling yourself up tiers of rocks with a giant backpack. It takes me longer than Lennon, but halfway up, I begin to get the hang of it. There’s a sort of rhythm to climbing, one that’s careful and patient. Looking for the right handhold, taking time to push up with my legs, leaning into it. By the time we get to the top, I’m breathing heavy but feeling exhilarated.

  “Goodbye, Mackenzie Falls,” I say, peering down into the waterfall’s pool below.

  Lennon laughs. “The book I found it in called it ‘Unnamed Waterfall #2,’ otherwise known as ‘Greaves River Falls.’ ”

  “Those are terrible names.”

  “Mackenzie Falls sounds way better,” he agrees. “When I write my backpacking book, that’s what I’ll name it.”

  “Oh, you’re a writer now? And when can we expect to see Grim’s Super-Gothy Guide to the Dark Wilderness on the shelves?”

  “You remembered my code name,” he says, smiling.

  “Of course I do. I’m the one who came up with it.”

  He makes a satisfied noise, and we smile at each other for what I’m now realizing is a little too long, so I break the connection and look away. You know, before things get weird.

  Weirder.

  “Come on,” he says. “The trail I originally used to find this place is just beyond that boulder.”

  We make our way through the brush and spy Lennon’s trail. Much like the one we used to get here, it’s narrow and barely there. It could even be confused as a deer trail, or some sort of animal path. That mak
es me a little nervous, but Lennon assures me that it’s a real trail for real people. And at least it’s mostly under the trees, because the closer it gets to noon, the hotter it gets. I was prepared for this; I strip off my long-sleeved T-shirt to reveal a short-sleeved one beneath. It’s all about layers.

  After a half hour or so of hiking in silence, I feel more comfortable with both the trail and being alone with Lennon. He’s intense and quiet, walking steadily alongside me with his eyes constantly scanning the distance. And despite the zombies, chainsaws, and anarchy signs covering his denim jacket, he looks . . . not out of place, oddly enough.

  “When did your zeal for camping start?” I ask.

  He pushes a dark slash of hair away from one eye. “Last year, I guess. I was . . . going through some stuff, and Mac suggested the family trip to Death Valley. It just clicked for me. I loved everything about it.”

  “Sleeping on rocks?” My hip still hurts from the rock poking into it last night.

  “No, but that’s better with a bedroll beneath your bag,” he says, reaching back to pat the rolled-up pad attached to the bottom of his pack.

  Wish I had known that.

  “I just thought wilderness camping was exhilarating,” he explains. “You’re alone out here with your thoughts. No stress or pressure. No timetable. You could read all day, if you wanted to. Just set up your camp and do whatever. And I liked doing it all myself. At home, everything is provided for you. School is scheduled, dinner is served. You turn on the TV and everything’s programmed. But out here, nothing happens unless I do it myself. And that may sound weird, but I feel like I’m doing something real when I build a fire and cook over it. Like, yeah, if the end of the world came, I could actually survive. Most of the people at school would die in the wilderness after a week or two, struggling to stay warm or forage for edible food, or getting attacked by wild animals.”

  “You were pretty impressive with the bear last night,” I admit. “If you hadn’t told me, I would’ve run and probably ended up as bear dinner.”

  “Bear attacks aren’t common, but if you follow a few basic rules, you’re fine. If you were aggressive to a mama bear around her babies, then the chances of you being mauled are higher. It’s basically just common sense.”

  “Still. You knew what to do.”

  “The trick is avoiding them altogether,” he says. “But when you can’t, and the people you’re camping with are blockheads—”

  “Not all of us,” I say.

  “No,” he agrees, a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth. “But when you can’t avoid animals, you just have to treat them as a real threat and respect that they have the upper hand.”

  That makes sense. “So you got into camping because you like making fires and outwitting bears?”

  “I feel like I’ve accomplished something that’s measurable. I can feed myself—”

  He figured out how to make coffee out here, which is pretty much the pinnacle of cooking in my eyes.

  “—and find my way without a computerized voice telling me which way to turn. I know first aid basics. I know how to collect water if there’s no river in sight. I know how to build a lean-to in the woods. And that’s . . .”

  “Not nothing.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It’s being a capable human being, which is something I think a lot of people have forgotten how to do.”

  “So you come out here to feel like a manly man,” I say.

  “Right,” he says sarcastically. “Big, burly lumberjack. That’s me.”

  Well, he has the big part down. When I walk by his side, his tall frame keeps the sun out of my face.

  “I come out here because of all that, and because look at this place,” he says, gesturing toward the trees. “It’s serene. When Ansel Adams said, ‘I believe in beauty,’ he was here, in the Sierras. Maybe even walking this same path.”

  I have a weird sense of déjà vu, because this sounds like the Lennon I know, rattling off obscure quotes and talking about the city lights over San Francisco Bay as if they were magic. So maybe I do understand why he’d be attracted to hiking.

  He becomes self-conscious now, and laughs a little. “Besides all that, you never know what can happen out here. And that’s the thrilling part. A million things can go wrong.”

  I groan. “No, that’s what I don’t want to hear. I like all my things to go right.”

  “That’s not how the world works.”

  “It’s how it should work,” I say. “I like plans that go smoothly. That’s the beauty I believe in. Nothing is better than when things go exactly how I expect.”

  “I know that’s what you like,” he says, eyes squinting out the sun to peer down at me. “And there’s comfort in that, sure. But there’s comfort in knowing that when your plans fall apart, you can survive. That the worst thing imaginable can happen, but you can get through it. That’s why I like to read horror fiction. It’s not about the monsters. It’s about the hero surviving them and living to tell the tale.”

  “It’s nice that you feel that way,” I tell him. “But I’m not sure I have that same level of comfort. Some of us weren’t meant to survive.”

  “You survived the group abandoning us.”

  “For the time being. It’s only been a few hours. I’m weak. I may not make it through the night.”

  He chuckles. “That’s why I’m here. If you can’t survive on your own, hire help.”

  “I hope you know that the Everharts are broke as a joke and you will get no reward for bringing me back alive.”

  “Alive or dead, then. Excellent. That actually takes a lot of pressure off me,” he says with a devilish smile. “Oh, look. Here’s the trail that leads to the caves. Am I good or what?”

  A wooden post with several vertical symbols carved into it sits where our trail crosses with a wider one. It appears that the caves are a mere five-hour walk. In the midday sun. Uphill. Fantastic. It all looked so much simpler and kinder on Lennon’s homemade map.

  We walk until early afternoon, chatting occasionally about landmarks in the surrounding area and the places Lennon’s hiked previously. But when I fail to answer a question because I’m staring too hard at the rocky path, worried I might be close to passing out, Lennon makes us stop for lunch.

  We take off our jackets and sit on them, and after draining half my water supply, I break out my mom’s gifted turkey jerky while he pulls out roasted peanuts and dried fruit. We decide to share. He informs me that high-calorie, high-salt foods are the best things to eat when you’re hiking. These are pretty much my favorite foods, so maybe hiking and me will work out, after all.

  After lunch, we fill up our Nalgene bottles with filtered water from a nearby creek and hit the trail again. The land here is rockier, which sucks, because an hour into the hike, I’m getting tired already, and my feet keep stumbling over loose pebbles that slide over the sandy ground. It’s like trying to avoid thousands of land mines. I’m thinking the hiking boots might be better in this situation.

  “Not much longer now,” Lennon tells me after I slide and nearly fall.

  I don’t think I can make it. I really don’t. The sun is low in the sky, and we’ve easily been hiking for hours. I’m one slippery pebble away from casting aside my pride and begging him to stop again, when we crest a hill and find a small trail breaking away from the main one. I look up, breathing heavy, and am surprised to see a massive granite mountain across a field. One second it was in the distance, and now it’s right here.

  “This is it,” Lennon says excitedly, pointing toward the smaller path. “One of the cave entrances should be at the end of this trail.”

  “Oh sweet God, I thought we’d never get here,” I say, finding a renewed burst of energy to head down the new path. It doesn’t hurt that it’s level ground. “I can’t feel my feet. Should I be worried?”

  “No. You should enjoy the numbness,” Lennon says. “Later, when they hurt so badly and you’re begging me to cut them off, then you’ll
look back on these moments with nostalgia. Oh, look. Do you see it?”

  I do. It’s a black mouth leading inside the gray mountain. And as we cross the field and approach it, I’m startled by how big it is. The path just ends. No warning. No posted sign.

  “I thought you said this cavern has been explored,” I say. “Shouldn’t there be a park sign announcing it, or something?”

  “That’s only on the commercialized caves. A few around here have lights strung through them for tourists. This one gets a lot of cavers.”

  “Cavers.”

  “People who explore caves.”

  “I thought that was a spelunker.”

  “Spelunkers are the idiots who get lost in caves and have to be rescued by the cavers.” Lennon slides a glance down at my face. “Brett would make a great spelunker.”

  I roll my eyes, but secretly I’m thinking he’s probably right.

  “So what’s the plan?” I ask as we pause in front of the cavern’s entrance to unhook our packs and retrieve our headlamps. I decided to snag the one Reagan left behind, since Lennon pointed out that it cost several hundred dollars more than my basic model and would be a shame to waste.

  “It’s only about two miles from here to the exit on the other side,” he tells me as he straps on his headlamp. “It’s completely safe, so don’t worry. Thousands of people have been here before us.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling cool air emanating from the darkness inside. It’s like natural air-conditioning. Feels nice. “What’s the catch? Is there a cave troll we have to conquer?”

  “This isn’t Moria, Zorie. We aren’t crossing the Misty Mountains.”

  “Evil armies of miner dwarves?”

  “You mean orcs. The dwarves weren’t evil. Did we not do an annual Christmas viewing of The Lord of the Rings trilogy during Sunday dinners every December?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “You loved them.”

  I did. “Okay, Gandalf. What’s the catch about this cave?”

  “No Balrog to fight. No catch. That I know of. I mean, I’ve never been inside this cave.”