As Jeff’s breathing slows down, I stare out at the huge sky, and my mind speeds up. And I realize: I just left my life today. My heart races as the thought sinks in, this high-up anxiety in my ribs that feels like it’ll speed faster and faster till my heartbeat spins out and I can’t keep up. I threw everything away. My mom, my school, my house. I hate it all, but it’s all I had, and I can’t believe it’s gone. Everything is gone. Well, except for Jeff. I still have that. I grab onto that, clench it tight in my mind, repeat it over and over, I’m here with him, until my heart slows down and I can breathe. I breathe in his smell, trying to swallow it, keep it inside me, keep him inside me, something solid to hang on to.
* * *
• • •
The next morning when I wake up, he’s already gone. I rub my eyes, pick the dirt from my fingernails, and emerge from the tent, blinking back sunlight. I hear him before I see him, over by the school bus with the punk kids and Dirtrat. The guys are talking shit, punching each other on the arms, joking, loud. They remind me of John McDonnell and the guys at school, except with piercings. They have a ringleader, too, this guy with a black patched-up jacket, louder than the rest. The guys jockey for position around him, try to top each other while he listens. Purple-hair girl is like one of the guys except beautiful—loud and elbowy, taking up space. The baldhead girl—I heard someone call her Naya—just sits there, sleepy, laughing at their jokes. Crass blares from tinny speakers inside the bus, interrupting the birds. Jeff laughs again and I stand there, watching. He doesn’t see me.
For some reason I feel uneasy, rudderless. The same feeling as in the tent last night, but worse now, because he’s over there. Not here with me. “Shut the fuck up, Bender!” the black-jacket guy yells at Naya’s boyfriend. The purple-haired girl calls him a capitalist pig. Jeff laughs, another joke that I don’t get. I look away.
Aaron’s in the kitchen, doing dishes. As he dries the last one, he looks up and catches me watching him. I blush.
Shit.
But he just smiles. He looks over to Jeff at the bus, then me, and puts his dish towel down and walks over to me.
When he gets to where I’m standing, he says, “Hey—are those shoes comfortable?”
I look down at my Docs, spattered with mud, ten times more worn than they were a week ago. “Yeah? I guess.”
“Good. Come for a hike with me?”
I look at him, his worn tan Carhartts, his crinkly eyes that know things, older, certain. He wants me to come with him? If I was blushing before, now my face must be like a fucking cherry.
I look back to Jeff at the bus, the guys around him; I smell pot smoke. Naya digs in her backpack like she’s looking for something, then disappears inside the bus. Another guy swigs from a flask. Dirtrat laughs at something. Jeff still doesn’t see me.
I feel guilty, but I want to go.
“Okay.”
CHAPTER 8
We hike past the kitchen, out of the camp, till the woods thicken and the clearing ends. I look for a trail, but all I see are ferns. I hang back, not knowing where to walk; Aaron senses it and turns around. “Just follow me,” he says, reading my mind.
In a few minutes we’re out of earshot, and I suddenly get nervous. The trail is narrow; brambles scratch my arms through the sleeves of my flannel. I don’t know him. We’re alone, just me and him, and I don’t know why he brought me here, or if I should have come. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough to get Jeff’s attention; maybe I should have checked with him. I remember that look on his face when Sage wanted me to hang out with her, when Nutmeg asked me to help him with the dragons. Maybe I shouldn’t be here.
My nerves build up and mix with creeping guilt and it adds up, piling onto itself, until I finally blurt, “I came here to the Free State with Jeff, y’know.”
The seconds after that open like a chasm.
It’s possible that I might be the biggest asshole that ever lived.
I hear his footsteps on the leaves; my face is hot.
He finally says, “I know.”
I am the biggest asshole that ever lived.
“Sorry,” I mumble. “I didn’t mean I thought—”
He stops and turns around. His eyes are kind. “I know,” he says again. “It’s okay.” I squint at him, trying to see what he’s hiding, but his eyes are too clear to be lying. There’s nothing to uncover. “Sage is my girlfriend.”
“Okay,” I say. “Sorry.”
“No worries.”
We walk in silence for a while; that rudderless feeling just gets worse as we go deeper into the woods.
After a long time, Aaron says, “So.” I jump a little, startled. Branches interlace above us, pale green lichen dripping off black silhouettes, sunlight filtering through the canopy. “You just came up here ’cause your boyfriend did, right?”
I look at him, embarrassed. It’s true, but somehow I feel like I should have a better reason. “I guess so? I mean, there were a few things.”
He just waits.
“I mean, he got kicked out of his house, and I got in a fight with my mom.”
“Right,” Aaron says.
My heart thunks. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, and for some reason I care.
“But your first night here—that was pretty cool what you did.” He lets it hang there, like it’s a question.
“Thanks?” I say, not sure that’s the right answer.
“Sure, yeah,” he says, like that wasn’t the point. “But I mean, where did that come from?”
“Me locking down?” I ask. He nods. I don’t really want to tell him the reason: that I could tell Jeff thought that he was supposed to be the one, and I didn’t want him to feel bad he wasn’t doing it. But I also feel like Aaron is a person you don’t lie to. “I guess—it felt like nobody else really could, so I sort of had to.”
He nods. “But you didn’t have to.”
It’s like he’s arguing with me, sort of, except he’s being kind. It’s weird, and I can’t find my footing. “Okay?”
“I mean, it’s still a decision to stand up when nobody else can. That says something about you.” I guess I must look insecure, because he smiles at me and says, “Something good, I mean.”
“Oh.” I feel relieved, even though I’m still not exactly sure what he’s talking about.
“So I thought I’d show you something,” he says. The forest has thickened as we’ve walked deeper in; moss blankets the tree trunks like green velvet. “Since you’ve got that in you. I thought you should see the reason that we’re up here.”
“Okay,” I say.
What I really want to say is Why? Why is he bringing me out here and not Dirtrat, or Jeff, or any of the school-bus kids. What does he mean, You’ve got that in you? But I don’t want things to be weird, and I don’t want him to think I think that I’m special or something.
“Some of these trees are five, six hundred years old,” he says. “The framework for a whole system that’s been here that long—animals, all the other plants. Once you cut them, you can’t get that back. And there’s one really special one back here; she’s more than a thousand years old. We call her Legacy.”
I mean, a thousand-year-old tree, that’s cool, but I don’t get why he’s bringing me all this way to see it. It also seems pretty weird that they would give it a name, and call it “her.” It’s not a person.
The trail narrows even more; branches reach up and over our heads to make a tunnel that holds us. It’s like pictures of fairyland in children’s books, except it’s real. We walk and walk, and he doesn’t talk anymore, and eventually that stops making me uncomfortable and I get used to the silence, and then suddenly the path ends and the woods open up, and I see what he means.
I’ve been in forests during Andy’s Scout trips; I’ve whizzed by a million trees on highways; I’ve camped out here. But this is different,
and suddenly I understand why he brought me all this way.
Pretend you’re standing on a sidewalk, looking at a skyscraper a thousand times taller than a person, so tall you can’t even see the top of it as it narrows to a point and merges with the sky. Pretend you’re dwarfed by it: your hands, your bones, your life suddenly tinier than dollhouse miniatures, smaller than specks on the ground out the window of an airplane, minuscule dots in the shadow of this huge thing before you.
Now imagine that this thing wasn’t built by hands the size of yours, wasn’t put together by a person out of steel and stone and glass, but is actually alive, like you are, covered in green moss and lichen, glistening with raindrops and crawling with creatures, squirrels ducking in and out of its trunk, whole colonies of ants, entire worlds coexisting, fitting together perfectly on the body of this one ancient thing. And looking at it, just looking at a stupid tree, you somehow understand what math is, what biology is, and chemistry: it’s all a map of this, this perfect equation where every part fits perfectly into the whole, and the whole is part of larger wholes, and these are part of even others, and out and out and up and up, past what your mind can picture, every part of it alive. And you suddenly understand, in a way you haven’t ever realized, that you are alive, that you’re a part of it. You’re not like asphalt and Kmart; houses, Doritos, and cars. You’re like this. And for a minute, just a minute, the ground is solid underneath your feet, and you feel safe.
CHAPTER 9
We hike back in silence, not wanting to erase what we just saw. It’s weird that it could give me all those feelings. It seems silly that it’s this big intense thing: I mean, it’s a tree. A bigger version of all the trees around us. But somehow the scale of it turned it into something else. It was bigger than a building, older than a person; it made being small feel like a good thing. I haven’t felt that since I was little. Even if it’s stupid, I try to hang on to that feeling. I want that back.
When we get back to the fire pit, the sun is setting. Leftover light slivers through tree-branch silhouettes, making patterns like lace on the ground, and I see the math of it, here, too, how everything fits together, intricate and interconnected. And then I look up and see Jeff. I see him see me, and then Aaron, Jeff’s eyes measuring the space between us. I see the math of that, too.
When Aaron wades into the group to help make dinner, Jeff sidles up beside me. “Where’d you go?” I can’t look at him; I don’t know if he’ll be mad.
I want to explain what happened, seeing Legacy, but I’m not sure it’d make sense to him. “We just went on a hike.”
“You were gone a while.” I still don’t want to look at him. “What were you guys doing?”
“Nothing,” I say, and he just looks at me. “I mean, it’s not like that.” I hope it’s dark enough that he can’t see my cheeks flush. “Sage is his girlfriend.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, suspicious. “Then how come you guys were gone so long?”
He’s never been jealous before. I feel guilty, but I also feel this kind of satisfaction, knowing he needs me, that those guys by the school bus aren’t more important to him. For a minute I look at his eyes above his sharp cheekbones and it occurs to me I have some power, that I could rub it in if I wanted.
But I back away from that. I don’t want to hurt him. “He just wanted to show me Legacy,” I tell him. “The really big tree? The one we’re protecting.”
“Yeah, but why’d he only take you?”
He only took me because I was the one who locked down. Because he saw something special about me then. But I can’t tell Jeff that. So I just look at him.
“I mean, did you ask him to?” he asks.
“I mean, it just sort of happened—”
“How?”
“Well, he invited me out there—”
“Right,” he says. “But why just you?”
This conversation is starting to make me feel far away from him, and shitty. Like I did something wrong, even though I didn’t. “I’m not really sure,” I say, and tell the truth, because now I kind of have to. “I think it had something to do with me locking down that night? I think he wanted to show me because of that. Like to show me what we’re fighting for.”
As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I know it was the exact wrong thing to say. He’s looking at me with that same weird mix of admiration and jealousy as the night that I locked down—but now it isn’t jealousy of Aaron, it’s jealousy of me.
I backtrack: “Look, I came back here to be with you. Okay? I’m here with you. Not someone else. Don’t worry about Aaron. It wasn’t like that.”
He looks at me.
“I’m here with you.” I need him to believe me. He’s still the only thing I have. I look right into his eyes.
His gaze flickers and he looks down. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
* * *
• • •
After dinner I help Sage and Aaron with the dishes, water washing the grit from my fingernails. Exile starts the campfire, and the flames snake upward as the sun sinks behind the trees, day turning to dark. Halfway through rinsing I look up and see Jeff head over to Dirtrat and those school-bus kids. The loud one with the black patched-up jacket is apparently named Stone; he seems meaner than the rest, with squinty eyes. I can tell by the way everyone clusters around him that he’s the boss. Jeff offers him a cigarette, which is crazy; he’s got one pack of American Spirits with him. I’m shocked he’d share. Stone takes it, motions for Jeff to sit with all of them, and pulls out a flask.
I squint through the smoke to watch them; they’re too far away to hear, but I see Jeff lean in, impressed. It reminds me of how Jeff looked at me that first day at Point Defiance Park, like I was as smart as him, like I was someone that he’d want to know.
* * *
• • •
The next morning the sunlight pries my eyelids open and I watch Jeff sleep beside me. Last night, falling asleep, I kept thinking about my hike with Aaron. How he saw me, picked me out; how being near that tree I saw the math and patterns and aliveness that were all one thing; how safe and small and holy that made me feel for those ten minutes, and how that feeling seemed totally normal for Aaron. That means he’s had that feeling before. Lots of times. That means he knows all kinds of things I want to know.
Aaron saw something in me, though I have no idea what, and in the woods he showed me things and assumed I’d understand them. I wanted to know more about those things. I wanted someone who could show me all of them.
I don’t know if Jeff can, I think to myself, watching him sleep. And then I flinch, because that thought scares the hell out of me. He’s all I have. It’s not like I’ll ever wind up with Aaron. Even if Aaron thought of me that way, which he doesn’t, his girlfriend is the only female human on the planet who’s basically ever been nice to me. I don’t want to wreck that. I don’t want to wreck whatever they have together. I don’t want to wreck anything. I already did that. I wrecked my whole family. That’s enough for an entire life.
I need to be with Jeff. But I also felt something out in the forest that I’ve never felt before, something better, and bigger, and real. I don’t want to give that feeling up.
That means I need to make Jeff understand it.
Today I’m awake first, so I can stop him before he heads over to the bus with Stone and Goat and them. I can show him what I saw. I rustle his shoulder and wake him up. He grunts, then rolls over and rubs his eyes to look at me. “What’s up?” he says, bleary.
“I want to show you something,” I say, the same way Aaron said it to me.
* * *
• • •
After coffee we start on the path. Jeff starts to go first, but then realizes he doesn’t know where we’re going, and there’s this awkward moment, like when you get stuck facing someone in the hallway and nobody’s sure who’s supposed to move first. Finally he takes a
step back and I go in front of him. “Do you have, like, a map or something?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I just remember where things are.”
“Oh,” he says like he’s not sure what to do with that.
He falls in step behind me and it’s weird not talking; I’m used to him always having something to say, and I don’t know how to fill the space. I don’t want to, really: I want that silence back from yesterday. But I don’t know if it’s okay with him.
We go up a hill and down it, and when we spill out onto flat, I can see the clearing up ahead, the one that’s right near Legacy. I hear a rustling and look closer. There’s movement.
“Shh.” I stop him, nervous. I don’t know if it’s a person or what. Whoever it is, I don’t think they should know we’re here.
“What?” Jeff says, too loud.
“I saw something up there,” I stage-whisper. “Shh.”
I go ten steps ahead of him, creep up quietly toward the clearing. When I get there, sun dapples the branches, yellow and white; flecks of dust swirl in the air. I get close enough to see that it’s a deer. She’s eating, head bent to the grass, elegant and graceful. And behind her is Legacy, reaching clear into the sky.
I don’t trust Jeff not to scare away the deer. I’ve never seen him really be careful with anything. But I have that feeling again, the one from yesterday. The feeling of something beautiful. I need him to know what that feels like.
I tiptoe back to get him. “C’mere,” I whisper, as soft as I can manage. “Just be quiet, and go slow.”
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