They say I must have walked almost forty-seven miles, that the Spirit of the Falconer guided my feet to the new camp. Those who were unsure about Boss declaring me the compass said it had to be true, that I was something special.
The superstitions, the lore, the magic, they’re all as common to us as trees. But the camp’s explanation was wrong, and so was their belief in me.
What nobody knew was that I was playing out in the woods when I was supposed to be tucked away in the back of Rona’s trailer. I’d been pretending our mother was lost among the pines and it was my job to find her. Hours later, I broke the line of trees and saw nothing but tire tracks and an abandoned camp.
I wandered the forest alone until finally I came to a road. A family pulled over, a husband with a handlebar mustache and a wife with long blonde hair and strawberry-colored lips. They had a couple of kids, too—a baby boy in a car seat and a girl my age. The dad and mom seemed so worried: the dad’s brows pushed together, and the mom bent to her knees as they asked me questions about my own parents.
I knew where to find my camp. Boss had talked to Rona about pulling over at a rest stop near Memphis—where they’d let me take over and work my compass magic.
We piled into the car, the mom and dad in the front seat and me sandwiched in the back between the car seat and the girl. I must have seemed strange to them, my hair tangled and my dirty feet pressed against their beige interior. That didn’t stop them from following my directions.
An hour or so later, I noticed a mile marker for exit fourteen and told them to drop me off. The mom and dad exchanged a look, but he pulled the car to the shoulder anyway. I told them thanks and took off running. They called out after me, but that made my feet go faster.
The sounds of camp trickled to my ears, and I knew my sense of direction was dead on; I’d found my camp.
I walked toward the nearest light, and there was Wen rushing to meet me. The rest of camp wasn’t far behind. So, again, I let everyone believe it was true, that the forest was a part of me, and I was a compass.
Now Wen is out there again somewhere, probably on the verge of dying with worry. Maybe it’s because we don’t have anyone except each other, but I feel his anxiety like a phantom limb.
I squeeze my eyes closed and hear him speak as clearly as if he’s beside me: Good night, you thief, you vagabond.
Sleeping here is nothing like sleeping in the forest. The forest is beneath my fingernails, caked on my feet, coursing through my veins. No bar of soap could ever scrub away the wilderness.
New sounds drone all around me. The buzzing of the lights and the hum of the freezer.
The house seems like a living, breathing thing with the creaking and cracking of the foundation settling around me. I don’t want to close my eyes, not with this beast waiting for me to fall asleep, ready to swallow me whole.
CHAPTER 13
“You have to wake up. We gotta go.”
I blink, and Spencer comes into focus, standing over me with the hood of his jacket pulled low, shading his eyes.
Panic sweeps through me as I leap off the futon. The windowless walls feel like they’re closing in around me, and I remember I’m in a markie home, away from camp, and Wen doesn’t know where I am.
A burgundy, hooded sweatshirt with navy piping hangs from Spencer’s fingers. “It’s chilly outside,” he says. I give him a look, but he shrugs. “My mom won’t miss it.”
I take the sweatshirt, even though I don’t need it at all. It’s a simple thing—Spencer caring that I might get cold in the morning air—but as I slip my arms into the sleeves, I can’t help but feel guilty. Again, my conscience has taken human shape in the form of Spencer Sway.
A coursing sound rushes through the walls around us. “What the hell’s that?”
Spencer groans and whips the hood off his head. “Shower. My parents must be awake.”
The maze of hallways is less confusing this time around. Bathed in the bright light of morning, pictures line the downstairs walls, a man and a woman and Spencer and his sister.
It’s the exotic locales behind their shapes that draw me in.
My feet go still against the hardwood floor.
I don’t want to admire the photos, but I can’t help myself. All my pictures live in a shoebox in one of the top cabinets of the trailer.
“Door’s this way.” Spencer reaches for my hand. When I don’t take it, he sighs and points to the pictures of only him, his tongue rolling out the names of cities like he’s speaking another language. “Barcelona, Sevilla, Madrid.” He moves so close I hear him swallow. “I spent junior year in Spain as an exchange student. I want to travel everywhere someday.”
Travel, not wander. That’s not something I’m sure I understand.
“We really have to leave,” he says. “Now.”
“What about the other ones?”
He nods to each of the photographs, moving in a counter-clockwise circle. “That’s London, Paris, Dubai, Moscow”—and the last one—“and Cape Town.”
Cape Town is a name I’ve run my fingertips across an infinite number of times.
“That’s in Africa,” I whisper.
“Yeah.” His mouth twitches. “That’s where they keep Cape Town.” I don’t even react to his teasing. He shuffles his feet against the floorboards. “Okay, come on.”
I bring my hand close to the frames as if there’s a way for me to touch the glass and fall into these other worlds. But I stop a few inches short because I can’t reach through and because I don’t want to smudge the glass and leave behind any more evidence that, for one night, I was a part of Spencer’s life.
A door creaking upstairs breaks my trance.
Go, he mouths, pushing the air with his hands.
We make it to the foyer and tiptoe to the front porch.
I creep outside first and hear a man speak from inside. “Where are you headed so early?”
I hug the siding of the house as Spencer, who’s still inside, pulls the door against his back. There’s an urge to run, but it’s not the law or a gun or a fist I’m afraid of, for a change. It’s Spencer getting caught. Running won’t save me. It will only guarantee his exposure. And I care that my scams are bleeding into his world. I’ve never given a damn about a markie before.
“Dropping some notes off for George,” I hear Spencer say.
“I thought you were having brunch with Bob McAllister today. Your mom told me to tell you she left your slacks and shirt in the closet under the stairs. She had them dry-cleaned.”
“I’ll be back in plenty of time.”
“Bob’s got an in with the admissions committee, Spence. You wouldn’t want to be late.” After a long pause, the man says, “All right. Hurry back.”
“Yeah, ’kay, Dad.”
“Don’t forget to take some cash for the valet at the club.”
“Roger that.”
Spencer shuts the front door, and we hop off the porch. Inside the garage sits a silver sedan, a total family car. I would have expected something different from the Sways. People like them usually buy their sons shiny, new cars to race around town.
As we pull into the road, a white-haired man next door scoops something out of the driveway. He balances it on the blade of the shovel, holding whatever he’s carrying far away from his body as he moves toward his trash can. I crane my neck. Gray feathers fall from the shovel and into the trash.
My breath hitches. Another owl.
Spencer guns it, and now that we’ve driven away, it’s like a dream. I bury this second owl deep in my subconscious. Because I don’t believe. And because the possibility I’m wrong and everything is real—omens and the Spirit of the Falconer—those are thoughts I can’t let haunt me.
“I really need to go home,” I say. “My brother’s probably on edge.”
“Okay. Where’s home?”
Home right now is a patch of land in the forest. “Um, we’re camping.”
We are camping, but not in the recre
ational sense Spencer’s probably imagining. I could ask him to take me to our hideaway, but after my night away from camp, there’s no telling the chaos I’d drag him through.
“Let me out near a pay phone. I’ll call someone to come get me.”
There are few people I could call under any circumstances, not only because my calls would start a free-for-all commotion that would have Lando breathing down my neck, but because most of us don’t have phones. It’s not the Wanderer way. The phones we do own are all prepaid, leaving no paper trail or proof we’re anything other than some urban legend.
Without knowing the story Wen spun for the camp, there’s only one person I trust to call anyway: Rona. And I’d rather pull out my fingernails with pliers.
“Listen,” Spencer says. “Blame it on an overdeveloped sense of chivalry, but there’s something not right about setting a girl out by the side of the road. You can use my cell if you really want to call someone. But how ’bout I drive you wherever you need to go instead?”
I give him a few directions, the rest of the way through town, down the highway, and off the paved roads.
Spencer checks his watch. He’s gonna be late for his meeting—he must know it.
“I’ve heard of people dressing for dinner before,” I say. “Not brunch.”
“What?”
“Your slacks and shirt, all freshly dry-cleaned for that brunch you’re about to be late for.”
“Oh, um, not usually. This is different, I guess. Some defense attorney my mom knows who can get me into the right college.”
“How do you know it’s the right college?”
A smile teases at his lips. “In the Sway household, there’s only one college. It’s Stonewall Jackson University or bust, if you know what I mean.”
I don’t.
Spencer pulls his sedan under the cover of trees, two miles from camp. It’d be stupid to lead him any farther.
“This is close enough.” My hand twists around the door handle as the car slowly rolls to a stop. “I’ll walk the rest of the way in.”
“Close enough?” he says as I open the door. “Wait. You’re camping out here?”
I touch the tip of my sandal to the ground and say, “Thanks for the ride, Spencer Sway.” But with the door half open, the car purring beneath us, I double back. Resting one hand against his cheek and the other on the steering wheel, I kiss him.
As I pull away, he rubs his lips together and opens his mouth to speak, but I shut the passenger door and seal all his words inside.
CHAPTER 14
I’m out of breath from the two-mile hike, tripping over fallen branches and drying pinecones. Through the line of trees, I watch Wen washing his face in a bowl of water under the shade of our tent trailer’s canopy. He’s doing it in his neurotic way—dunking the washcloth, wringing it, wiping his face. Repeat. He only does this when he’s worried.
The RVs parked on each side of us are cracking with footsteps and creaking with doors swinging open. I silently beg Wen to look up and see me there, so we can steal a few moments to make sure our stories jive. I can’t walk into camp like nothing happened, not without agreeing on a cover first.
He towels his face, and as we make eye contact, his shoulders relax. He looks around before ducking under a branch and following me into the thicket of trees.
A ways from camp, Wen paces as I sit on the remains of a fallen tree—most of which we’ve chopped into firewood for our camp. I tell him about how I got free from the cops last night, how I slept over in Spencer’s basement, his whole family walls away.
What I don’t mention is how I kissed Spencer on the deck of Whitney’s house. And I don’t dare tell him about the second kiss in Spencer’s car. That’s the kind of thing I would have shared with Sonia. Since I can’t say those things to her now, I guess I want to save that part of the memory for myself.
Wen’s pacing stops as I finish my story. “I stashed all the money as soon as I got back.”
“How much?”
“Eleven hundred and eighteen.”
“Not bad.” It puts us closer to the bride-price but not close enough. “Nobody asked where I was?”
“Rona did this morning. I told her you were still sleeping. She thought you were depressed or something, sleeping so late. I think I dislocated my shoulder trying to block her from coming inside.” He scrunches his face and rubs at his collarbone. “I can’t believe the markie helped you.”
My fingertips trace the embroidered letters on the hip of the hooded sweatshirt Spencer loaned me—SJU.
“Well, he’s an okay guy.” My voice is bold, that mid-con way I speak. It’s a drastic understatement—Spencer was nothing short of my savior last night.
Wen cocks his head to the side but doesn’t call me out.
He sits beside me and holds his head in his hands. “I was so damn scared, Tal. I stayed up all night and drove to a pay phone first thing this morning and called the police station. When I realized they didn’t have you, I—what if you’d never come home?”
“You should have known that wouldn’t happen. We always find each other.”
I rest my hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, until I feel him take a deep breath.
“Always,” he says.
We walk into camp and pass a bunch of kids crowded around a table. Horatio’s shuffling three upside-down cups and teaching them a street trick that’ll soon line their pockets with money. He waves as I go by, but I keep walking. I can’t forgive him for beating my brother yet.
Wen takes off to help Emil fix the water tank on his RV while I head inside our trailer.
Encyclopedias are strewn everywhere, not stored in plastic bins in the bed of the Chevy where I like him to keep them. I’m gathering the books into a stack beside his bed when I notice the C volume on top.
Propping the book on Wen’s bed, I flip to Cape Town and read the whole entry kneeling there with my elbows sunk into his mattress.
As I read, I think about Spencer and his idea of wanting to be someone who travels but doesn’t wander.
The sounds of clanging and cussing come up through my screens early in the morning. I shake out my bed head and peek over the seam where the canvas meets the screen. Outside, Felix is taking the tires off our Chevy.
I throw open the screen door and plant my hands on my hips. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Felix grins and wipes streaks of grease down the thighs of his jeans. “I’m rotating your tires for you.”
“Leave them. We like it done a certain way.”
Felix steadies the tire between his knees. “Won’t take me long to learn the way you like things, Tal. I’m a fast learner.”
I push past him. “Don’t overestimate yourself.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Swimming.”
“Isn’t it a little cold for that?” He jogs to my side. “You want some company?”
Without turning around, I say, “What do you think?”
I skip rocks across the lake, listening to the faraway sounds of the camp while icy lake water drips from my hair.
I could marry Felix. And it wouldn’t make me weak. In fact, it might be the strongest thing I ever do. I’m practical enough to know that love, if it’s real, isn’t this over-the-moon, can’t-sleep-can’t-eat adventure they show in the movies.
Wanderers all have to marry, at least once. Rona was married long ago to a Wanderer named August, but he died with my father when the trailer they were pulling jack-knifed and dragged August’s truck down an embankment, crushing his head and my father’s chest.
That sounds so brutal, but I don’t see it that way. There are a lot of things worse than dying and being forced to leave your family behind. Like leaving the way Mom did.
I wish for a thought to burn away the memory of Mom. It comes almost immediately: that kiss Spencer and I shared in the car.
The first kiss was a necessity, a means to furthering the scam. I don’t
know why I turned back and kissed Spencer that second time, though. There was no purpose to it, other than pure want. I kissed him because I could. To prove to someone—maybe myself—that nobody owns me.
That kiss was a last act of freedom. It didn’t have a thing to do with Spencer Sway. That’s what I tell myself.
Trees rustle behind me, and a weight builds on my chest. This sense of claustrophobia keeps igniting inside me ever since Felix showed up.
My wet bra has made my T-shirt sheer, so I cross my arms.
It’s only Sonia.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey, yourself.”
She drops into the leaves beside me and picks at her green glitter polish. “I’m sorry Felix is here. I know it’s not what you wanted.”
It’s a simple thing for her to acknowledge, but it makes my throat swell.
“He’s has been hanging around with Emil,” she says. “I know he’s not as smart as you might want, but he’s pretty nice.”
I scoot a few inches down the brush. “There’s a glowing recommendation for you.”
Beside the lake and me, Sonia presses her palm onto her stomach. “Today something happened, Tal, and I wished you were there so I could tell you.” She’s so desperate; her eyes silently begging me to be the way we were before. “The baby kicked really hard, and, for the first time, Emil felt it, too. I realized this is my purpose, bringing life into the world.”
I stand to get some distance from her.
Three little girls from camp are playing on a fresh tree stump at the top of the hill as we walk back. Watching them leaves me with a sadness that’s more like emptiness. I’m homesick for a time I can’t have back.
When Sonia and I were young, we’d run around the woods barefoot and filthy, climbing trees, making swords from sticks, and slaying imaginary dragons.
Sometimes, I wish things were still that way, when Sonia and I were best friends and when it was easy to destroy the dragons. The dragons aren’t easy to see anymore. Sometimes, the people you trust the most are dragons in disguise.
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