“Wait here,” Mick said. “I got rolling papers in my pack.” We all wondered, as he crawled into his tent, what else he had stashed in that sparsely packed bag. Within a minute he emerged from the tent and rolled a few deer moss cigarettes, then passed one around in each direction. Everybody puffed and coughed: Charlie, Sam, Lori, and Meredith.
“I wonder who they’re planning to have sex with,” Natalia whispered. “Do they think they’re going to lose their virginity to the movie star?”
I felt tempted to tell her about the Amish guys, but I didn’t. I thought it was kind of touching—the way Lori fluttered around Brendan. Meredith just stood back, as if there were some sort of agreement between the two that Lori was the prettier one. Thinking of this, I felt a stab of indignation on Meredith’s behalf, her rosy cheeks and silky braids.
When Brendan passed the cigarette to me I took a deep, lung-filling puff. It crackled as I inhaled, too moist, tasting sweet and ashy. My chest contracted and sputtered in protest. I might have wondered what kind of effect it would have on my pregnancy if I believed for a single second that the deer moss would work.
I coughed out my hit. Brendan thumped me companionably on the back. “This stuff probably causes pregnancy more than anything else,” I said, “if people really think it works for seven years.”
“Never hurts to have a backup,” said Mick, inhaling deeply.
Natalia patted my knee, and I grabbed her hand. Ever since the afternoon, I had been waiting for her to say something about the hooded merganser—how that bird was so fiercely devoted to her baby, and here I was, planning to flush mine. I had formulated all these arguments in my head about how the duck had been rescuing a chick, not an egg. Having an abortion wasn’t like leaving a chick upstream. It was more like breaking or abandoning an egg, something that ducks probably did all the time. But I didn’t have to use any arguments, because Natalia didn’t say a word.
Later on we lay inside our tent, working on questions for Margit by the light of the solar lamp. Were you the one who named me? she wrote. Was the father Jewish? Did you breast-feed me at all, or just hand me straight over to Mom? Did you love the father? Do you know where he is now? Did you plan on ever telling me? Did you ever wish I knew? Wasn’t it hard, seeing me all the time with Mom and Dad? Didn’t you want to tell me? Were you ever going to tell me?
I lay next to her in the muted light, blinking at her yellow pad, trying to think of more questions for her to ask.
chapter eight
truth or dare
One night toward the end of our first week, a fishing boat motored past our campsite. Its broad spotlight shone on the water, the largest artificial light we’d seen since leaving base camp. Mick sprang up from his log and ran down to the edge of the lake.
“Hey,” he yelled, his hands cupped around his lips. “What time is it?”
The fisherman’s voice came echoing back to us across the water, its sound bounding like a skipped rock. “Nine thirty-five,” he said, which surprised me. I would have guessed ten thirty, or maybe even eleven.
Mick trotted back. He, Natalia, Brendan, and I had been playing Truth or Dare. Everyone else had gone to sleep. The four of us stared at one another through the smoky darkness, trying to figure out if knowing the time made us feel any different. Earlier today, when we all stopped for lunch, I’d had the distinct impression that it was only about ten o’clock in the morning. Now, in this small moment of knowing, I thought about the meaninglessness of the numbers. Nine thirty-five. Who cared? What was time, anyway, but some random code a bunch of Romans had invented? What did it matter to the likes of us, fearlessly riding our natural rhythms through the North American wilderness?
“Sydney,” Mick said, returning to the game. “Truth or dare?”
“Dare,” I said.
This was my third turn, and also the third time I’d chosen dare. Usually when I played this game I always chose truth—much less afraid of confessions than failing some fake-dangerous task. But now there was too much I couldn’t risk revealing. So far Brendan had made me climb to the top of a scraggy pine tree and Natalia had sent me into the lake wearing all my clothes. Before the fishing boat appeared, I had changed out of my wet things and tied Mick’s bandanna around my still damp hair.
Now Mick looked at me with the same tense/excited expression he’d had before chasing after the hooded merganser. “Take off your shirt,” he said. I blushed and looked away from his handsome, disturbing face. I had brought a couple of jogging bras on the trip, but they remained buried in my pack in favor of my bikini top—which I’d hung out to dry before dinner.
“Shut up,” Natalia said to Mick. “Haven’t you seen enough tits for one day?” All week Jane had kept up her topless swims. We never knew when she would peel off her shirt, stand up in the canoe, and dive into the water. Charlie and Sam—not to mention Lori and Meredith—had stopped looking her in the eye altogether, though interestingly, the former two seemed to be puppy-dogging around Jane more than Natalia, which showed what a little nudity could do for a girl. Brendan and Silas were the only guys who seemed completely unaffected by Jane’s toplessness. I assumed Silas saw them on an even more regular basis, but I didn’t know what Brendan’s story was.
“Who said anything about tits?” Mick said. “It’s a dare.” His eyes looked wide and ultrafocused, like a predator or a sociopath. “I want her to stand topless and let the mosquitoes go at her. One full minute. And you can’t slap at them.”
“I’ll do thirty seconds,” I said.
“Sydney,” Natalia objected.
“You can’t negotiate a dare,” said Mick. “You have to just do it.”
“Fine.”
I stood up and pulled off my fleece jacket. Then I stepped back from the fire, out of the light, and took off my shirt. I twirled it over my head like a lasso, then threw it back into the circle so that it landed on top of Mick’s head. He laughed, pulled it off his face, and began a loud, slow countdown from sixty.
What bug repellent I’d applied was on my hands and around my face. The mosquitoes attacked immediately, beginning their stinging, itchy feast. Clear, wintry air closed in around my skin, goose bumps rising along with the bug bites, and I battled the urge to close my eyes. I had a clear view of my three friends, sitting around the fire and peering at me through the smoke. I felt sure that the most they could see was my silhouette, and I liked this image: the gesture of revealing without the exposure. Most of my energy went to not slapping the bugs, which I wanted to do more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.
“Come on,” Natalia said when Mick got to thirty. “That’s enough.”
“It’s all right,” I called from the darkness. “I can do it.”
“You’re such an asshole,” Natalia said to Mick, who counted more loudly.
“Looking good, Syd,” Mick called. I shivered and hugged myself so that my arms covered my breasts.
“I know you can’t see me,” I yelled. Mick laughed. By now I’d grown used to his very particular laugh, a mean and sneering bark. It made me hate him, and at the same time, strangely, it made me long for his approval.
Finally the countdown ended. Natalia snatched my T-shirt from Mick and tossed it back to me. I pulled it over my head, then trotted back to the fire, clawing at the hundred welts across my stomach. “I hope somebody brought calamine,” I said, struggling back into my jacket. For some perverse reason I sat down next to Mick. He put his arm around me and pulled me close, a friendly attempt to warm me up. It worked: A nice heat pulsed from his skin, the chemistry of testosterone and cheerful cruelty.
Something strange had been happening over the past few days. Although at first I’d been sure he was in love with Natalia, Mick had started alternating between us in his taunts. I thought maybe this meant he didn’t know how to communicate with girls, other than by sexual jeering. The fact that he’d barely said a single word to Meredith or Lori either confirmed this theory or showed actual sensitivity. Maybe he
realized they were still terrified of him and he was trying to be considerate by keeping his distance. At different times he seemed capable of both or either possibility.
As for Natalia and me, something stopped us from being afraid of him, even when we felt we maybe should. He seemed so clearly eager to be our friend. It was a little like having a wild animal—a wolf or a tiger—for a pet.
“Your turn to choose, Syd,” Mick said.
“Mick,” I answered.
“Big surprise there,” he said.
“Truth or dare?” I asked him.
“Truth.”
“That’s kind of girly, isn’t it?” I said. “Shouldn’t a tough guy like you be willing to do a dare?” I had planned to make him unzip Jane and Silas’s tent and peek inside. We had a running debate over whether they were having sex in there.
“That depends on the question,” said Mick.
I dropped my chin into my hands. Honestly, there was a lot I wanted to know about Mick. He’d told us he came from Pittsburgh and that he lived with his mom—which had been a surprise, because we’d assumed he was a Yout at Risk kid. He’d mentioned a brother, so we knew he had at least one sibling. But that was all we knew. I wondered what he’d done to become a Youth at Risk, if the title referred to his financial status, or the place he lived, or trouble he’d gotten into. I thought of asking whether he’d ever committed a crime, but that seemed too vague. And oddly, I thought it could insult him: not that I’d assumed he was a criminal, but that it would occur to me he might not have committed a crime.
“Come on,” Mick said. “Isn’t there a time limit on this?”
I decided to avoid the word “crime” altogether. “What’s the worst thing you ever did?” I asked him.
“Worst in what way?”
“You know,” I said. “Most illegal.”
“That’s easy,” said Mick. He took his arm off my shoulders. Until then, I hadn’t realized he’d still been holding me. “I killed a guy.”
There was a moment of silence, the pop and crackle of the fire. Then we all burst out laughing. “You are so full of shit,” Natalia said. Brendan picked up a stick and turned over some of the reddest embers. We watched a new, thin line of smoke spiral up toward the sky.
“I’m not,” Mick said. “It’s true. I killed a guy. It was a nigger.”
For a moment the world around us halted. Insects stopped buzzing. My mosquito bites stopped itching. None of us moved. We heard no loons, no frogs, no crickets, no sound.
It seems strange to say it. But truthfully, in some weird, instinctive way, Mick’s using the N word shocked me much more than his confession of murder—maybe because I didn’t quite believe the latter. But I had never heard anyone say that word in real life. It was the biggest language taboo I knew, maybe the only one. The word echoed in the dark woods. It hung all around us, marking Mick—one of us only a second ago—a strange and ominous other.
“You shouldn’t say that,” Natalia whispered. “You shouldn’t say nigger.” She gave the word a shaky, unaccustomed lilt, sounding almost like her parents with their musical, pidgin English.
“Yeah,” Mick said. “You’re not supposed to kill them either.”
“That’s not funny,” I said.
“Who said it was funny?” Mick asked. Sitting beside him, his elbow hovering next to mine, I wished I could see his face straight on.
“Nobody, man,” said Brendan. “Nobody’s saying it’s funny.” I thought his voice sounded a little too cool, like he’d been cast as Best Friend in some gangsta movie. All around us, the night had gone back to its usual chorus of wind and wildlife, but everything had turned surreal, artificial. We were all of us suddenly characters. Mick played the hardened criminal, Natalia the delicately aghast hottie. And me, not needing to pretend I wasn’t afraid of Mick—because I wasn’t—but pretending as usual to be only myself, one person, sitting there among the others.
Mick told us the story. It had happened at the end of last summer. He was walking through Bedford Dwellings in Pittsburgh, late one night with his brother. They had just bought an ounce of pot—“sticky green bud”—when a man stopped them beneath the Cannon Road underpass.
“There were no streetlights,” Mick said. “Totally dark. We could barely see the guy’s face, but we knew he must have followed us from the score. It cost us almost three hundred bucks for that weed. We weren’t going to part with it easy.”
Mick said that the guy grabbed his brother, who had the bag of pot in the inside pocket of his jacket. He ignored Mick and pressed his brother up against the damp cement wall, holding a knife to his throat.
“My brother kept fighting. I told him to quit it, that it wasn’t worth getting killed over pot. But he was crazed, fighting back, protecting the stuff, and I knew he was going to get his throat slit. Meanwhile I was just standing there.”
The guy had started beating Mick’s brother with his fist, hard blows directly to his face, so Mick sprang forward and jumped onto his back. I could imagine Mick’s face perfectly in that moment, the taut, electric predator taking the professional criminal by surprise. “I was riding the guy like a horse,” Mick said.
He tried to get the knife away by reaching down over his shoulder, but the guy bucked backward, and the two of them landed on the ground. For a second they were both lying there on the concrete, the wind knocked out of them, face-to-face. “Like we’d been cuddling,” he said. Mick got his breath back first. He grabbed the guy’s head and smashed it on the ground. It sounded, he said, like he’d dropped a bowling ball. I imagined the loud, jarring thwack of it.
“I didn’t mean to hit his head that hard,” Mick said, his voice suddenly more dreamy than proud. “I guess I didn’t know how hard the concrete was. I wasn’t really thinking. I was just trying to protect myself and my brother. He still had the knife; I was scared he would stab me if I didn’t do something. Then his eyes kind of rolled back, and blood started pouring out of his ear.”
For a second it felt like we were all four standing in that dark tunnel with Mick—the kid he’d been last summer. I could see the adrenaline pulsing through his jumpy, sixteen-year-old self as he stood over that not-supposed-to-be-dead body.
“The guy just lay there gurgling,” Mick said. “His feet kicked a couple times and then just stopped. My brother and me got out of there fast as we could.”
“So you really don’t even know that he died,” said Brendan.
“Oh, he died.” Mick picked a slim stick up off the ground and put it in his mouth like a cigar. He removed it and blew imaginary smoke rings into the air.
“Maybe somebody found him and called an ambulance,” Natalia said.
“Yeah,” said Mick. “Or maybe he sprouted wings and flew up to nigger heaven.”
We had all listened to the cracking head part without flinching, but at the repetition of the N word Natalia put her hands over her ears and whispered, “Shh, shh, shh.”
“Anyway,” Brendan said. “It wasn’t your fault. It was obviously self-defense.”
Mick shrugged. “I don’t lose much sleep over it. Me or him, who else am I supposed to choose?”
Natalia took her hands away from her ears and lay them in her lap. Her cheeks looked red and streaky, almost as if she’d started crying.
“You could have just given him the pot,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky and small, not like herself. I felt Mick stiffen beside me. His elbows went tense, and I saw a vein pop in his neck.
“What does that mean?” he said.
“You could have just given it to him, and none of that would have happened.”
“But his brother had the pot,” I said. I didn’t blame Natalia for her reaction. At the same time, I thought she was missing the heroism in the story. Mick could have just run away from that guy, and instead he stepped forward and saved his brother’s life. “Mick couldn’t have given him the pot even if he’d wanted to,” I said.
“And why the fuck should I give him my pot?�
�� Mick said. “My brother and me worked all August washing Mack trucks for Glosky’s Construction. Why should we just hand it all over?”
Mick’s eyes looked dark and agitated in the firelight. I could feel his bandanna, wrapped tightly around my head, a strange, tingling warmth knowing that it belonged to him, that it usually clung to his own bare skin. He might have been wearing it the night that this happened. If it had really happened at all.
“I’m just saying,” Natalia said, “I don’t think I would kill someone over a bag of pot.”
“Let’s just hope you never have to, little sister,” Mick growled. He leaned across me, toward Natalia. His tense body crouched over my lap, but he wasn’t aware of me any more than the thug in the tunnel had been of him. His nose was inches away from Natalia’s, and I could hear her squeaky little intake of breath. In that moment I felt a strange kind of allegiance with Mick. I was tired of Natalia’s Jiminy Cricket routine, and I wished she could learn to keep her self-righteous mouth shut.
But I hated the menacing way Mick—confessed killer—was facing off with her. So I brought up my arm and elbowed him hard in the solar plexus. He pulled back, away from Natalia, and doubled over for a second. And even though he jumped to his knees and drew back his hand as if he wanted to hit me, I felt acutely aware of two things: one, that Mick wouldn’t hurt me. Two, that I didn’t care if he did.
Be careful. All my life I had heard those words, about everything. From the time I was a little girl: Be careful, Sydney, when I tiptoed across the low stone wall surrounding the first farm where my father worked. Leaning too close to the flame when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. Walking out the door for a date with Greg. Be careful, be careful, be careful.
I hadn’t realized until just then: I was sick to death of careful.
“You’re a fucking animal,” Natalia yelled at Mick.
Every Little Thing in the World Page 11