It was oppressively quiet, like she was the only thing alive in the woods.
“Three months,” she mumbled.
What in the world was there to do in a forest for three months? Walk around? Look at trees? Commune with the stupid deer? At least in the city, there were libraries and coffee shops. There was nothing like that here. Rylie wasn’t even sure there were showers.
A splashing sound drew her attention back to the lake. The canoe had drawn close to her side of the shore. Rylie shielded her eyes to look at the person sitting inside.
It was a boy. He was probably her age, or maybe a little older, judging by the breadth of his shoulders. His arms were dark tan, like he had already been camping for months, and he was looking right at her.
Rylie chewed her bottom lip. One of the guys from Golden Lake? He was going to get in trouble if he was caught so close to their shore.
She raised a hand to wave at him. After a moment, he waved back.
Her dad came out of the office. “Okay, everything is settled. They told me you’re in Cabin B3. Sounds like you’ll be with some nice kids! Why don’t I take you there?”
“I can find it myself,” Rylie started to say, but her dad looked sad. She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. Show me.” Glancing back at the lake, she saw the canoe had moved on. The boy was gone.
The cabins for Group B were laid out in a rough circle around another fire pit. A few girls were trying to get a fire going, carrying wood up the path and piling pine needles between the rocks. The sun was still high, but Rylie could tell sunset would fall quickly in the mountains.
“Here it is!” her dad said. He rubbed his hands together, looking between Rylie and the cabin like he wasn’t ready to let her go. “I could help you unpack if you want.”
“I really think I can handle it,” Rylie said.
He sighed and handed the bag over. “You’re right. I have to let you go someday.”
“You could let me go home,” she whispered, but he didn’t hear. He hesitated at the mouth of camp.
“Love you, pumpkin,” he called. Someone near the fire giggled.
Rylie slung her backpack over her shoulder. “Love you too, dad.” She didn’t wait for him to leave. She couldn’t stand to see the other girls whispering.
It was going to be a very long three months.
***
Rylie managed to skip orientation by telling Louise that she was sick. Once she was alone, Rylie pulled out her diary and opened it to the first blank page.
Dear diary, she wrote. I hate my life. Rylie considered the words with a frown, chewing on her pen cap. Camp could be interesting, I guess. Maybe if I see it as a learning thing instead of a punishment for the divorce…?
She dropped her pen. Why fake optimism?
Stretching her cell phone over her head, she searched for reception in the cabin’s tiny loft. No bars. She wouldn’t even be able to text her friends back home. Rylie flung her phone to the bed and tried not to let frustration choke her.
“I can’t believe this,” she told the empty room.
Rylie hid from a few campfire sing-alongs and hikes in the first week, but after begging illness for a few days, Louise forced her to go to the infirmary.
She tried to fake a cough. The nurse wasn’t fooled.
“You can stay overnight, but you’re going back to the cabins tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?” Rylie asked. “I could be diseased and contagious. Maybe I should go home.”
The nurse gave her a look which obviously meant nice try, and Rylie was back in her cabin the next morning.
She didn’t mind sleeping on a tiny cot in the loft. (All the other beds were taken by the time she got there.) She did, however, mind having to share her living space with a bunch of teenage girls.
Rylie’s friends back home were mostly guys, since all the girls she knew were catty and stupid. And these ones hated Rylie for no reason at all.
They shot nasty looks at her before going to the morning activities, and they didn’t talk when they saw her in the evenings. Her roommates avoided her during the day and treated her like an alien when Louise forced them to interact.
Dinners were the worst. The cooks offered some kind of meat product slathered in gravy on most nights, and just looking at it made her queasy. Rylie had been a vegetarian ever since she learned how animals were butchered in the seventh grade.
“Tofu?” asked the man in the hairnet behind the counter. “You want tofu?” Which meant, of course, they didn’t have it.
She sat down to eat her carrot sticks, trying to imagine herself anywhere but the mess hall: maybe watching a movie at the second-run theater on thirty-second street, writing a journal entry on a park bench, or reading a book at the coffee shop on the corner.
Rylie closed her eyes and let her imagination carry her away. There were no moths fluttering around the lights and no mosquitoes. Only percolating coffee and an indie guitarist in the corner. Maybe a cute guy at the next table. She could sip a mug of chai tea and drift away on guitar melodies.
“Where is she from?” whispered a girl at the table behind her, stirring Rylie from her fantasies. She was loud enough for everyone to hear. It had to be deliberate.
Another piped up in the same fake whisper. “I don’t know. Her dad dropped her off. He was wearing glasses like this.” Rylie glanced over in time to see the girl holding her hands in front of her eyes to indicate big circles. “And he was super fat.”
“Where’s she been all week?”
“She hides in one of the cabins. She never comes out. It’s so freaking weird.”
“Look at her clothes.”
“Look at her hair.”
Rylie’s cheeks flamed as she touched her white-blonde hair. Even though she always thought it was too pale for her face, she had never heard anyone talk about her like that before. A rope of embarrassment twisted in her stomach.
She dumped her remaining food into a trash can and hurried back to camp. Sunset cast long shadows over the path. Rylie wanted to be back in bed before it got dark so she could hide from the night’s campfire activities.
The cabin’s lights were already on, and the sounds of laughter poured out the window. Rylie pushed the door open.
Her four roommates were clustered around a cot by the door. “…but I hope he doesn’t ask me out,” read Patricia in a nasal voice. “I don’t want to reject him and hurt his feelings, but I don’t want to be his girlfriend, either.”
Rylie recognized those words. She had written them herself.
In her diary.
The contents of her backpack were spread across the room as her roommates pawed through them. Patricia held out her diary so everyone could see it. None of them had noticed Rylie yet.
“I bet she made it all up,” said Kim. “Who would want to go out with her, huh? She wouldn’t even show up for the date!”
“What are you doing?”
The girl with the gold anklet looked up. Amber. She was holding a pair of Rylie’s shorts in one hand and Byron the Destructor, her favorite stuffed cat, in the other. “We noticed you hadn’t unpacked yet. We were just… helping,” she said before bursting into giggles. The other girls followed suit.
Rylie stared at them. Her embarrassment in the mess was nothing in comparison to the numbness spreading through her now.
“Nice teddy bear,” said Kim before dissolving into snickers.
“You guys—you—I can’t…” She didn’t know what to say. Her mouth worked, but no sounds came out. “It’s not a bear. It’s a cat.”
She ripped the backpack off the bed. They had gone through everything—even her underwear. Rylie snatched her diary out of Patricia’s hands.
“Way to be grateful,” laughed Amber. “Didn’t you hear me? We were helping!”
Eyes stinging, Rylie backed up until she hit the door. Why were they laughing? What was so funny? “Of course,” she whispered hoarsely. Helping.
Rylie flew out of the cabin and
passed Louise, who was setting pokers and marshmallows on a table by the fire.
“Where are you going?” called Louise. “Rylie? Rylie!”
She ran without looking where she was going. She passed a line of people heading back from the dining hall, and she knew they could all see her crying. Everyone would know what Patricia and Amber did to her. The teasing would only get worse.
Rylie had to stop by the office on the shore of the glistening lake. Her chest felt constricted and she wheezed with every breath. She fumbled for her inhaler and tried to let all the air out of her lungs, but it took a few tries before she could calm down enough to breathe at all.
She sucked down the medication. Wheezed again. Took another puff. Slowly, her air passage relaxed.
“How could they do this to me?” Rylie rasped, fist clutched around her inhaler. “I hate them. I hate them.” The full moon’s reflection blurred in the water. It was laughing at her too, just like everyone else at the camp.
She couldn’t stand to be there a minute longer. Rylie threw her backpack onto her shoulder and plunged into the forest.
She didn’t know how long she walked. The trail grew thinner and twistier. She stumbled over a log in her path and the bark scraped her shin. Blinded by tears, Rylie pushed on. She didn’t know if it was the way back to the parking lot, but it didn’t matter since she didn’t have a way home. She needed to get away.
The trees grew so close together that she had to climb over them to keep going. Occasionally, she glimpsed the full moon between the branches, but she could always feel it watching her.
At long last, Rylie came to a cluster of trees she couldn’t pass. Too tired to find a way around them, she flung herself onto a mossy boulder to rest.
Her racing heart gradually slowed. All the fury and embarrassment drained out of her, leaving only a small, burning coal of shame in the pit of her belly.
None of this had been in Rylie’s plans. She wanted to go to a summer concert series at the park by her house. She planned on seeing a new exhibit at the art museum, too. Maybe it wasn’t glamorous, but that was how she liked to have fun: on her own in the city, or with a couple friends from school. Not surrounded by harpies at camp.
Of course, now Rylie wasn’t surrounded by anyone. She had gotten her wish. She was alone.
She was also lost.
Rylie looked around from her perch on the boulder, but there was no sign of a path now, much less humanity. She didn’t even have any light. Fear trickled in at the edges of her mind. She had no maps, no compass, or anything else to help her get around.
Rylie pulled out her cell phone. Still no reception. The GPS didn’t even work.
Something rustled in the bushes nearby. She froze.
“Hello?”
She lifted her cell phone to illuminate her surroundings with the screen. It cast stark shadows on the bushes and trees, but it was too dim to see further than a couple feet.
The soft, rhythmic sound of feet against pine needles whispered around her.
“Who’s there?” she called. Fear made her throat tighten again, and she gripped her inhaler. Rylie crept around a tree, peering into the darkness. Maybe it was a deer or something. “If that’s you, Amber, you better hope I don’t find you. I’ll—I’ll beat you up!” She sounded much braver than she felt.
A bush shook behind her. Rylie turned, but nothing was there.
Her breathing roared in her ears like an ocean tide. The entire forest was silent and eerie, as though everything living had vanished. Even the moon was gone now.
Picking a random direction, Rylie started walking, keeping an uneasy eye on the trees around her. She wished she had a flashlight. Even better, she wished for a helicopter so she could fly off the mountain.
She eased around a thick tree. A pair of golden lights flashed in front of her.
Eyes.
Rylie jumped backward, but the lights disappeared instantly. She froze. Her heart pounded.
The eyes had been low to the ground, more like an animal than a human. She could hear it rustling amongst the foliage.
She was being stalked.
Lifting her cell phone a little higher, she stared around for another glimpse of eyes. A twig cracked like a gunshot. Rylie gasped and spun, and her inhaler dropped from her hands.
She bent down to search for it, but her fingers only found dirt and pine needles. Her heart pounded. Her lungs started to ache.
Something growled, and Rylie decided she didn’t care about her inhaler anymore.
Backtracking toward the trail, she whispered a silent prayer to the black sky: “Please, please just let me get out of here. I’ll never do anything this stupid again. I swear.”
A hulking gray body flashed in front of her. She jerked back and her heel caught a low rock. Rylie lost her footing. Her cell phone flew from her grip. The back popped off, the battery dislodged, and all light vanished.
She hit the ground. Something heavy, hot, and furry struck her body.
Pain ripped across Rylie’s chest. She screamed into the night, but nobody was there to hear her.
The Boy
Daybreak.
Rylie flung a hand over her face to shield her eyes from the sudden sunlight. How could she have forgotten to close the curtains in her bedroom before falling asleep? Dragging the sheets over her head, she rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
“Campers! Turn out!”
Campers?
It took a long moment for her thoughts to fall into order, but then she remembered everything: her dad abandoning her at camp, her week in hiding, the horrible dinner, finding the girls looking through her belongings, her flight into the forest…
And the attack.
Gasping, she sat up. Rylie was on her tiny cot in the loft, but she had no idea how she had gotten there, much less survived the beast.
“What the…?”
She took inventory of her body. Her arms and legs were fine. Her stomach and chest—why did she remember so much pain in her chest?—were unmarked. She ran her fingers over her face and found nothing. The window by her bed was open to the cool morning air.
Had everything in the forest been a nightmare? It felt so real: the eyes, the furry gray body, the dense trees and dark night.
But how would she have gotten back? Rylie had been hopelessly lost.
She reached under her cot for her backpack and found nothing there. Her other belongings were missing, too. Her clothes, her journal, and her cell phone were nowhere in sight. She must have dropped it all in the forest.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Rylie muttered.
The other girls were getting out of bed to go to the showers. Amber shot a glance up at the loft. “What a freak,” she hissed to Patricia.
Rylie was already too upset to care about the insult. Her roommates filed out carrying toothbrushes and towels and shampoo, and she sat on her cot feeling just as lost as she had the night before.
Louise poked her head through the cabin doorway. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t stay inside all day. If you’re feeling good enough to run off in the middle of the night, you’re feeling good enough to shower.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“I can’t find any of my stuff,” Rylie said. “My backpack. My clothes.”
Louise planted her hands on her hips. “You took them with you last night when you left camp. Did you drop them on the trail?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me where you went and I’ll look for you.”
“I don’t know,” Rylie repeated. When the counselor gave her an incredulous look, she added, “It was dark.” And I don’t even remember how I got back.
“I’ll tell the other counselors to watch for your bag. In the meantime, I’ll get clothes and a towel so you can shower.”
She followed Louise to the office. The woods around camp were so much more alive than the day before. Birds sang in the trees, building nests and swooping after bugs. Ch
ipmunks scurried up and down tree trunks while rabbits burrowed through the underbrush. The earthy, woodsy scent of dirt and cinnamon bark filled her nostrils.
Louise found clothing and a towel for Rylie. “These are unclaimed items from last year’s lost and found,” she said. “You can keep them. Get going.”
Rylie tried to suppress her disgust at the idea of secondhand clothes, but if she hoped to start blending in with the other girls, this wasn’t the way to do it. Baggy t-shirts and too-large shorts were going to make her look shrunken, awkward, and an even better target for teasing.
The water for the showers was pumped from the brook, so it was freezing cold. She rinsed off quickly and emerged shivering, wrapping the ratty old towel around her body. Rylie stared down her reflection in front of the mirror. Her blonde hair lay limply around her face and shoulders, and her wide eyes looked helpless and prey-like.
She watched everyone leave through the mirror. Several girls whispered and pointed as they passed, but her reflection distracted her before she could get upset.
Four parallel, silvery gashes had appeared on her chest, like old scars. But Rylie didn’t have any scars.
She turned this way and that until the light caught her skin in such a way that she could make out the lines. They looked like claw marks. “It doesn’t make sense,” she murmured. Someone behind her giggled, and Rylie’s cheeks grew hot. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud.
Dressing quickly to hide the scars, she went to the dining room alone. At least there had to be something vegetarian for breakfast, like pancakes or toast.
The forest during the day felt like a completely different world than the forest at night. An early morning sprinkling of rain left lush moss and dewy sparkles on the bushes. Golden sunlight made shadows dance on the trail.
Rylie was so absorbed in the life and colors of the woods that she didn’t notice she had company until he stepped in front of her. It was the boy from the canoe.
“Hey, hang on a second!”
His voice was deeper than she expected. Seeing him closer than before made her realize he wasn’t just dark-skinned and broad-shouldered—he was also really cute. He had a strong nose and full lips, offset by shaggy brown hair slanting over one eye. A single fang hung from his pierced left ear.
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