by Kieran Scott
Callie sat down so fast, she misjudged where the ground was and collided with it rather ungracefully, but she didn’t care. They’d been walking for hours, and her shoulder muscles were coiled into knots, her feet throbbing. She let her backpack drop off her shoulder and leaned forward, head between her knees. The blisters on her feet felt raw and wet and the very idea of washing them, drying them, medicating them, and rebandaging them exhausted her.
“This is pretty,” Lissa commented offhandedly.
Callie lifted her eyes. The pond was surrounded by bright yellow wildflowers and half covered by floating lily pads. In the waning sunlight, dragonflies flitted from leaf to leaf, their wings beating so fast they were nothing more than a shimmering flicker. A tiny head popped up in the middle of the water—a frog, maybe—sending ripples across the surface, but it was gone before Callie could get a decent look.
Callie thought about how she could work this magical setting into one of her stories. Maybe in that piece about the girl who falls down a storm drain near Millennium Park in Chicago and discovers an underground world of urban faeries …
Jeremy shuffled over to her. Callie stared at the mud-caked toes of his boots. “Can we talk?” he asked quietly.
“Why?” She thought of last night—how beautiful the stars had been, how safe she’d felt with Jeremy, for a few minutes anyway. “So you can lie to me some more?”
“I didn’t lie,” Jeremy said haltingly. “I just—”
“Didn’t tell the truth,” Callie finished.
Callie pulled her book out of her bag and opened it to a random page, hoping Jeremy would get the hint and leave her alone. Now that everyone knew she had Jensen’s Revenge, she didn’t care anymore if they saw her read it.
Ted loped over, a large rock in each hand, and tossed them on the flat stretch of ground nearby, where they thudded and rolled.
“What’s up?” he asked, his eyes glinting. “Are you guys, like, a couple?”
“Back off, man. It’s none of your business,” Jeremy said, his harsh tone surprising Callie. He wasn’t usually so belligerent.
Ted raised his hands, which seemed to be his favorite gesture, and backed up. “Sorry, dude. How about you make yourself useful and help me find some more rocks so we can start a fire? It’s about to get pretty darn cold up in here.”
Jeremy looked down at Callie hopefully. She turned her face away, focusing on the book. She heard him huff.
“Fine,” he answered.
The two guys marched off toward the waterline. Penelope was keeping a safe distance from Callie, as she had all day, setting up the girls’ tent a few yards off.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Lissa murmured, bending at the knee to nudge Callie’s arm. Callie almost grunted. What was with everyone suddenly wanting to explain? If any one of them had done so six months ago, she wouldn’t be miserable right now.
“I don’t really feel like—”
“No. We need to talk.”
Lissa turned and walked down the rocky shoreline in the opposite direction from the guys. Classic Lissa. No arguments allowed. Callie blew out a sigh, then put her book aside, got up, and followed, as Penelope watched forlornly after them. At the water’s edge, Lissa stopped. She bent and plucked an orange wildflower that grew near her feet.
“Listen, Callie, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have found out that way.”
Callie’s throat tightened. “Found out what? I don’t even know what happened.”
Lissa glanced past Callie, who cast a quick look over her shoulder. Ted was toting a few rocks back to the dirt patch, but Jeremy and Penelope were now standing close together, locked in some sort of heated debate. Callie felt her cheeks flush. She’d walked away for two seconds and Pen had made a beeline for Jeremy. If the two of them had something to fight over, then they had something between them.
“They went out for three months last year,” Lissa told Callie.
“Three months?” Callie echoed, shocked. It sounded like a lifetime.
“Yeah, and it didn’t end well,” Lissa said. “He sort of broke her heart. That was why she and her family went to France. She said she had to get out of here. She even missed the last month of school. She had to make up the work over the summer.”
Callie felt like she was going to throw up. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Pen was embarrassed,” Lissa said, plucking a petal from the flower. “She gets like that sometimes. She can be so … frail.” She said it like a judgment, and ripped three petals at once. Callie bit her lip. “I don’t know why Jeremy didn’t tell you. You’d have to ask him.”
Callie hated the warm squirmy feeling of jealousy inside of her chest. This morning she’d trusted Jeremy more than she trusted anyone other than her mom and dad, but now, that had been obliterated.
“If it’s any consolation or whatever, I don’t think Jeremy was as into her as she was into him,” Lissa said. “And it’s obvious he really likes you. Plus she’s clearly over it. If she wasn’t, there’s no way she would have said yes when you asked if Jeremy could come with us.”
Callie took a deep breath, letting this logic permeate the sour force field around her heart.
“But what do you think I should do?” Callie asked. “I can hardly even look at him.”
“We could send his butt home,” Lissa suggested.
“No,” Callie said automatically. Lissa raised her eyebrows. “I don’t want him to have to walk all the way back by himself. It’s getting dark. I’m mad at him, but I don’t want him to, like, get eaten by a bear.”
Plus there was the issue of the laugher, who was still out there somewhere. She watched Ted as he unrolled his sleeping bag out in the open air. They’d decided to trust him, but there was still the inkling of a possibility that it might have been him laughing out there in the woods. And maybe he’d just been messing with them, but did they really want to hang out with a person who would do that—prey on a bunch of lost hikers? The very idea that they were potentially settling in for the night with the enemy made her vision blur. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and steadied herself.
“Besides, we don’t even really know where we are,” she couldn’t help reminding her fearless leader.
Lissa shot her an admonishing glance, but then she smiled. “Well, then you have your answer. If you don’t want him to get eaten by a bear, then you must still like him. Which means this is fixable.”
Callie sighed, looking out across the pond. Another ripple appeared, dead center, but whatever had caused it never came to the surface. “I guess.”
Lissa tore the rest of the petals off the flower and tossed the destroyed stem over her shoulder. “Come on. We’ll make camp and you and your boy can have a chat when you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Lissa.” Callie managed a small smile. Though she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to be ready to speak to Jeremy.
“See? Told ya we needed to talk,” Lissa replied, slinging her arm across Callie’s shoulders.
As they walked back toward the others, Callie saw Jeremy and Penelope suddenly stop their conversation. Of course.
“Hey! What was that?” Penelope asked, looking past Lissa and Callie.
For a second, Callie thought Penelope was just trying to distract her. But then she saw it—a quick flare, like a flashlight going on and off, on the far side of the pond.
“There it was again,” Jeremy said, alert.
“It’s probably just some other hikers,” Ted offered, whipping out a box of matches.
“I thought you said no one ever hikes these trails,” Lissa said.
Ted smirked. “Well, you’re here, and I’m here, so maybe we’re about to have some company.”
“Why does that sound more menacing than comforting?” Callie asked, hugging herself.
Ted held the match to his kindling tepee and sparked the fire, then shook the match out as he rose to his feet.
“Hey. The more the merrier, right?” He walked over t
o Callie and Lissa with a big smile and nudged Lissa’s arm with his, making her blush. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
Callie couldn’t stop staring across the lake. Somehow, she didn’t find that declaration comforting, either.
Callie sat up straight in her tent, dragging in a gasp so violent it stung her throat. For a split second she couldn’t figure out what had awoken her, but then she heard it again.
The laugh.
It was unmistakable. A horrible, evil chuckle that surrounded her.
“You guys!” Callie hissed. “Wake up!”
Her journal—which she’d apparently fallen asleep with—slid off her lap, the thud scaring her, and she tossed it toward the back of the tent, out of sight. Callie grabbed at her friends, catching Lissa’s arm and Penelope’s calf in her grip. Lissa lifted her head, one eye squinted open. Penelope simply rolled over.
“What time is it?” Lissa asked, her voice raspy.
“I have no idea. I just heard—”
The laugh sounded again. It seemed to come from everywhere, from all around them, filling the air.
Lissa pushed herself up. “Pen! Wake up!” she whispered, and reached past Callie to shove Penelope’s shoulder.
“Eeennnnh … what?” Penelope whined.
“That psycho’s out there again, laughing,” Lissa told her, curling her knees up under her chin.
“What?” Penelope was awake now, and sitting. Her hair staticked out around her head and some of it clung to her cheeks.
The laughter came again, this time louder, and Lissa and Penelope inched closer to Callie, sandwiching her between them, reaching for her hands.
“Do you think it’s Ted?” Callie whispered.
“If it’s not, then he’s in trouble,” Lissa whispered back. “He’s out there without a tent.”
Callie could feel it inside her cheekbones and her nose, in her eyes. If Ted was in danger, then so were they. So was Jeremy. These tents weren’t exactly houses made of bricks. Any wolf worth its salt could blow their tents down in two seconds, then have three little girls for breakfast.
Callie, Lissa, and Penelope sat still, holding their collective breath as best they could while clutching hands. They waited. And waited. And waited some more. But the laugher was done. Either he’d gotten bored, or he’d found some other psychotic fun to have.
“What do we do?” Callie whispered.
Lissa released Callie’s hand, leaving Callie’s cold, clammy palm exposed. She crawled over to the tent’s door and reached for the zipper.
“No! Don’t!” Callie cried desperately.
“I’m just checking on Ted,” Lissa hissed back. She unzipped the door half an inch and pressed her eye close to the opening. “He’s fast asleep. It definitely wasn’t him.”
Cold dread pierced Callie’s heart. Somehow, this was worse. An unknown enemy was more terrifying than one they sort of knew.
“So who was it?” Penelope asked, her eyes wide with anxiety in the dark of the tent. “Why are they doing this?”
Silence. No one had a clue.
“We should try to sleep,” Lissa said finally.
“Like that’s gonna be possible,” Penelope said, but she released Callie as well. Callie remembered then that she was still mad at Pen. It had been easy to put that hostility aside when they’d felt that their lives were at risk. Callie sighed as Pen and Lissa lay back down on their sleeping bags, and were both asleep within minutes.
Callie lay down, too, but she couldn’t sleep, even as her heart rate began to slow. Maybe the laugher was just a solo hiker who happened to be enjoying himself. Maybe he was listening to a really funny book on his phone. There could have been a million innocuous explanations for the laughter.
Unfortunately, Callie couldn’t make herself believe a single one.
Sometimes I find it amazing that anyone would ever go to sleep in the presence of another human being. People are completely vulnerable in their sleep. One could do almost anything to a person who is in a truly deep slumber. Tie them down, gag them, blindfold them, even cut them. It can take several seconds before a sleeping mind registers pain, and by that point, it’s too late.
It would have been so easy on that night. So easy to take what I wanted. Two could have been disposed of before the third ever realized what was happening. And that boy. That oblivious boy snoring alone in his tent. He never would have seen it coming.
But that is exactly why I didn’t do it that night. Why I had to control myself. Because the whole thing would have been so pointless, so … unsatisfying. They had to know they were about to die. I needed to look them in the eye while I did it.
I needed them to know why.
Callie scratched at an itch on her face. The sunlight was pink against her eyelids and the air inside the tent was warm and humid, but she didn’t want to open her eyes yet. She felt as if she’d just fallen asleep five minutes ago. Her head was heavy, her arms and legs stiff, and when she lifted her hand to rub another itch on her ear, her fingers were clumsy with sleep.
Her nose prickled. She scratched it and rolled onto her side. Penelope made a noise, pinched and annoyed, and Callie reluctantly opened her eyes.
What she saw wrenched a scream from her very core.
Penelope’s face was covered in spiders.
“What?” Lissa gasped, opening her eyes.
Callie sat up. Her entire sleeping bag was teeming with tiny brown spiders, their legs scrabbling and picking along the material.
No. Nooooo.
Callie jumped to her feet. She could feel them now. On her hair, down the back of her shirt, up her sleeves. She screamed and screamed and screamed, making a high-pitched noise she never would have believed could come from her own throat.
Then Lissa was sitting up and screaming, too.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” Penelope was also wide-awake, swatting spiders off her face, arms, and shoulders. Totally pointless. There were so many of them that as soon as one was gone, another crawled up to take its place.
Lissa dove for the tent door and grabbed the zipper, shaking in a way Callie never would have thought her cool-as-a-cucumber friend could. A spider clung to the lobe of her ear like a gross, hairy earring.
“Open it! Open the door!” Callie screeched, still doing a crazy dance.
“I’m trying!” Lissa wailed.
“Callie!” It was Jeremy, shouting from outside the tent. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Finally Lissa’s trembling hand managed to rip open the door. She stumbled free and stood in the middle of the camp area, flinging her hands over her body again and again. Spiders fell off her and scattered like brown leaves off an autumn tree.
“Get them off me!” she screeched. “Get them off!”
Callie crawled out, quivering from head to toe. Jeremy’s eyes widened at the sight of her. On the far side of the doused campfire from last night, Ted was just rousing inside his sleeping bag.
“Help! Do something!” Callie cried again, jumping around and shaking her arms like a panicked marionette. She didn’t even know what she was doing, what she was saying. She only knew that she couldn’t stop moving. She would have peeled her own skin off if she could have. “What do I do?”
Jeremy grabbed her wrist. “The pond! Get in the water!”
Penelope was out of the tent now, too, also screaming. Lissa sprinted right into the pond, taking a loud, gasping breath and diving under. Callie ran after her. The water was so cold her muscles seized up and her bones seemed to freeze on contact, but she didn’t care. Her whole body went down and she pulled the band from her hair, shaking it out underwater. When her lungs couldn’t take it anymore she surfaced and took in a huge swallow of air. In the water around her and Lissa were hundreds of struggling, drowning spiders.
Lissa looked around. “Where’s … ?”
But at that moment, Penelope surfaced, too.
“What was that?” she demanded, her face red from the cold.
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“Are you guys okay?” Jeremy shouted from the shoreline.
Slowly, Ted meandered up next to him, his eyes heavy with sleep, completely unalarmed as he patted his messy hair.
“We’re fine!” Lissa shouted back, shivering in her wet pajama top. “Just freezing!”
“Not to mention bound for therapy!” Callie added as she and the other girls began to swim back to shore.
“So many spiders,” Penelope said, gazing down at the water and trembling violently. “So. Many. Spiders.”
Then Callie, Lissa, and Penelope looked at one another. Callie felt a bubble burst inside her chest, and before she could stop herself, she was laughing. Penelope and Lissa were laughing, too, doubling over. Callie laughed so hard she had to grab Lissa’s shoulder for support. Tears squeezed from Lissa’s eyes as she pushed her wet blond hair back from her face. Penelope pressed her forehead into Callie’s shoulder and held her stomach, gasping.
Again, in a crisis, Callie had forgotten that she was upset with Penelope. Now, she remembered. But she didn’t want to completely spoil the moment. Callie moved away ever so slightly and wrung out her thick dark hair.
“Did you hear the sound you were making?” Lissa crowed at Callie. “You sounded like a tortured kitten.”
“Me? I think you actually growled,” Callie shot back, splashing at Lissa.
“You guys, I’m not even kidding. I think I might have swallowed one,” Penelope said, sticking her tongue out.
“Gross!” Lissa and Callie shouted at the same time, and Lissa splashed Penelope. They all laughed again.
“Well, at least I’m not the only screamer around here,” Callie said.
Penelope sighed. “No, you’re definitely not.”
“Hey, I was only screaming because you were screaming,” Lissa put in.
“Ugh.” Callie shook her hair back from her face. “I wish I could take a shower right now.”
“Well, we’re already wet. Hey, Jeremy!” Lissa shouted. “Bring us some shampoo and soap!”
Jeremy crossed his arms over his chest. “Do I at least get a please?”
Callie eyed him, not wanting to admit to the fact that he looked so cute with his hair tousled from sleep. She kept silent while Lissa and Pen clasped their hands under their chins and chorused, “Please?”