by Stacie Ramey
Except the ink has run and the words are illegible. I can pick out only a few letters. E K W O I hold the paper up to the light, but that doesn’t help. Next time I won’t wait so long before I dig up her notes. The next-time thought should be enough to scare me straight, but I’m pretty sure it won’t. Not once my mind is committed to a course. I roll the paper up and put it in my pocket, careful not to rip it anymore. Maybe when it dries, I’ll be able to figure out more letters or words.
I stare at my dirty hands. The soil caked on my fingers, drying and making them feel weird and horrible. And for what? Tiny strips of torn paper. Damp and smeared. I wipe my hands on my pants. Wipe them some more. But it’s not enough. I rush to the stream and plunge my hands in the water, scrubbing them clean. The funny thing is that in addition to my being a complete stalker, I’m also more committed to finding out about this strange girl than anyone else I’ve met. Mom would be so proud, I’m taking an interest in my peers. That makes me laugh. Then my phone makes a noise. By some miracle, I’m getting service.
So proud of you. Keep going. It’s Emily. Then, Also don’t get eaten by a bear bc then I’ll be in so much trouble.
I cover my mouth with my hand like Emily does when she’s trying to hold in a laugh. I go to answer her, but it’s such a perfect line, I want to leave it alone for now.
I put my phone in my pocket and head back to my camp. Coffee is waiting in that plastic bag, practically begging to be brewed. Along with my self-respect and dignity, I hope.
I start up my stove. Heat the water for coffee. Instant is not my favorite, but it’ll do. I pour in sugar and fake creamer and stir, stir, stir. The water has to be superhot in order for the powder to mix in. One speck of unmixed powder and I’d be gagging like a mofo. It’s nowhere near as good as the real stuff, but it still wakes up my brain enough that, as I’m stirring my oatmeal, I’m wondering about what I just did with that girl’s notes, and how awful I would feel if someone did that to me. That does not stop me from pulling out the papers and trying to make sense of the letters I can see. I can guess at one word, “know,” but that’s all I’ve got.
I look at my phone again. It’s 8:00 a.m. Being out in the wilderness has got me all “early to bed, early to rise.” Like when I was on swim team. Man, those swim practices started at the crack of dawn. But that was me and Dad time, so I didn’t care. While I was in the pool, he’d get coffee and doughnuts or some of those awesome cheese Danishes from that bakery near the rec center, so I’d get to chow before school without Mom yelling at either of us for eating junk.
“When you swim one hundred laps before school, you can eat whatever you like, am I right?” my dad would say, his mouth full of doughnut.
I’d always answer, “You’re right.” I was so happy being with Dad, I wouldn’t even point out that he was eating the same stuff and hadn’t done any of the swimming.
It was always hard to go back to school and life after the dreamy feeling of being underwater. Alone. In complete silence. It was perfection. But as Dad pulled up in front of my school, he’d say the same thing to me every day. “Man, Dylan, you really killed it at practice today, but now you’re a little zoned out, huh?” Then he’d laugh. Shake my arm a little bit. “Wake up for school, though, okay? We don’t want to answer to Mom if your teachers tell her you’re having problems staying awake. She’ll yank you off the swim team, and we’d have to give up our male-bonding mornings.”
And I’d say, “Scattergories. Double score for double letters.”
And he’d chuckle and say. “You and your games.” But he’d say it like it was cool, like I was cool.
Alone in the forest, I shake my head. Drink more coffee. Take down my tent. Stash my gear. Pack out my trash. The snapping of twigs should rouse me from my focused fog, but it doesn’t. So, it’s a big surprise when I notice an actual bear in the woods behind me.
All of a sudden Emily’s don’t-get-eaten text is less funny, which makes it even more funny, in my head, at least. I’m not stupid enough to think the bear will be amused, though. My mind searches through all of the bear facts I read before embarking on this nice, long stroll in the woods. I’ve got at least ten website pages, memorized in full, displaying themselves in my head, ready for me to focus on. Great. He died while choosing a page to read. Perfect epitaph for my tombstone.
The bear stands to full height. He doesn’t look too tall. Maybe, like, four feet. The image of those height markings on the door of banks comes to me. That’s the way my brain works, making these strange pairings.
The bear stands taller. Ruh roh. That eliminates some of the research about harmless meetings in the wild, when bear and human exchange a bit of eye contact, then each go on their ways. Great.
This isn’t going to be one of those stories. Obviously.
One of the websites talked about there being safety in numbers. Not helpful, since I’m on my own here. One site talked about not running. Fear has my feet planted in place, so I’m not going anywhere.
Twigs snap behind me, and for one terrifying second, I’m convinced that I’m surrounded by a family of bears. Or a gang of them. Which is actually called a sleuth of bears. A fun fact that would normally entertain the hell out of me, but right now I’m thinking, like bullies at school, they’ll pants me and then kick me, then tear me open. Okay, so that happened before I was on the swim team and became built from all that training. Not the “tear me open” part, but the rest. Still, the bear in front of me doesn’t seem to be wowed by my swimmer’s V, and I’m guessing the bear behind me doesn’t care either. I turn my head the tiniest bit to confirm my suspicion, and my jaw drops.
The blond girl is behind me, waving two big sticks over her head. She starts yelling. “Hey, bear! Go away! You don’t want a piece of this!”
That triggers me to remember the internet page that talked about looking bigger, waving things like humans do, and making noises to scare off bears. This girl is definitely on top of her bear de-escalation strategy. Who am I to argue? I grab my backpack and wave it over my head. “Yeah, bear! Go back to your bear world!” Bear world? God, I sound ridiculous.
The bear stares at both of us. Ten seconds pass. Twelve. Sweat is rolling down my face, my neck, my back. The bear drops down to all fours and lumbers off.
His back to us, I freeze. Terrified. Grateful. Embarrassed. One day into my trip, and I needed a girl to save me from a bear.
“You gotta use the bear bags or poles.” She sounds annoyed. “You could’ve gotten yourself and that bear killed.”
I dry swallow, which makes my chest tighten and cramp. For once words fail me. I nod.
“Okay, then,” she says and walks away.
The feeling in my legs return. I jog over to her. “Hey, thanks. You know, for um…”
“Saving your ass?” she offers.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t make me do it again.” She points back to where my stuff is. “Like now. You just saw a bear and you leave your stuff to thank me? You ever camped or hiked before?”
“Um…”
She holds up her hand like a stop sign. “Save it. Obviously you haven’t, which means I’m hoping you’re doing a couple of day hikes and will be done. Don’t make me run into you again, or I may just give you a trail name you’ll never live down.”
My eyes go to my gear. I don’t want to fight off a bear again, but I also don’t want to look like an idiot in front of this girl. “What kind of nickname?” I ask.
“Like stupid-newbie or dumb-as-shit.” With that she stalks off.
I’ve never met anyone who has left me verbally defenseless. This girl is a big ball of enigma. She buries slips of paper that she cries over. She can fend off bear attacks and brainstorm trail names, but she wears cotton on a big hike. Cotton? The no-cotton rule is the first one in every single trail book out there.
I trudge back to my campsite, grate
ful the bear hasn’t come back and made off with my stuff. More than anything, I wish I could talk to Em about this girl. She wouldn’t believe I’m actually interested in someone. Not just someone. A girl.
Chapter 7
I make decent time through a very hilly part of the trail. My shoulders are a little sore from yesterday, but my quads, my calves, and the rest of me are purring. Almost like they’ve craved this level of exercise.
Every step I take, I feel my muscles building like when I was swimming.
I think of the last time I swam with the team. Like most things with me, everything was cool until it wasn’t. Then it really wasn’t. We’d practiced pretty hard that summer, and Taylor and Sam and I had all upped our games. Junior year was going to be our year.
The trouble started the first day of school, when I came home and Max didn’t greet me. He always hated when we went back to school. Over the summer he’d get used to me hanging around the house all day. So, usually every year when I came home after the first day of school, he would take his frustration out on my room. He’d trash my bed. Throw my stuff on the floor. Raid my hamper. Every year, he made his misery known. After school, I’d always scratch him behind the ears and try to make up for it with treats, but I knew he was hurt.
But when I got home that day, not only didn’t he come find me, he wasn’t in my room. And everything was as I’d left it that morning, even though I’d forgotten to put the extra lock on it that Dad devised to keep him out.
“Mom?” I called, since she’d come home early from work that day. “Mom, have you seen Max?”
“No, honey,” she answered from the kitchen.
“Max!” I cried going from room to room. “Max!”
Mom joined in the hunt.
“Oh, honey…”
Those two words made me feel like I’d swallowed boulders. My legs lost their coordination. He’d collapsed in the laundry room. I stroked his muzzle. “It’s okay, Max. It’s okay.”
The vet came to the house, because Max couldn’t move and we couldn’t lift him to the car. They took blood and Max didn’t even notice. The vet found the tumors near his heart and under his ribs. They were so large they didn’t even need an X-ray. By then, Emily was there. Mom talked to the vet about possible treatments, but I knew that would be horrible for him so I shook my head. The vet agreed. We kissed Max goodbye.
Dad told me that I didn’t have to go to swim practice the next day, but that made no sense to me. Staying home wouldn’t bring back Max. Wouldn’t change that we hadn’t noticed Max was sick, that he was getting lumps on his body. He had been slowing down. We had chalked it up to his getting older. If only I’d paid attention, at least I could’ve stayed home with him on his last day. But I hadn’t. And swim practice wasn’t going to change that.
But Dad was right about staying home, and I should have listened.
The swimmers shared the locker room with the wrestlers, and there was this guy Charlie who would never leave me alone. He was always like, “Hey, Dylan, swimmers are wimps. I could out-wrestle you any time.”
I’d usually answer, “So what, dipshit. I can out-swim you.”
“Wrestling is a man’s sport. Why don’t you have daisies on your cap for your synchronized swimming?”
I could’ve made fun of what wrestlers wore. That would have been easy enough, but that day I didn’t feel like talking. I felt like shutting him the eff up, so I said, “Let’s do it, Charlie. Let’s wrestle.”
He clapped hands with one of the other wrestlers. “Hell, yeah.”
“In the pool,” I added.
“I’ll wrestle you anywhere you like, you little pussy.”
Sam put his hand on my shoulder. “Easy, Dylan…”
“You gonna let your mom talk you out of a contest?”
Taylor got in front of me. “Let it go.”
“Look, his friends are scared for him. They know what’s what.”
I pushed Taylor back softly. Just enough so he’d know he couldn’t stop me. Taylor tried to catch my eye, but I was focused.
I left the locker room, walked straight to the pool, and jumped in. “Let’s go.”
The wrestlers and swimmers all gathered around the deck. My guys were motioning for me to get out of the pool, but the wrestlers were all hyped up. Some were yelling jeers at me. My eyes hurt from crying the day before. They felt dry and scratchy like they’d been rubbed down with sandpaper. So when I looked at my audience, they were blurry. In some way, this whole scene didn’t seem real, like we were in one of those cheesy high-schooler-being-bullied movies.
Sam and Taylor stood at the side of the pool. Sam’s arms were crossed over his chest. Taylor had his hands on his hips. I knew both of them well enough to realize they were pissed at me. They didn’t know about Max, and if they had known they probably would have tried to stop me. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. Like the cancer that spread through my dog, I was being infected with anger. And Charlie was just begging for me to erupt on him.
“We’ll start in the shallow end,” I said and pointed.
“Whatever you say, Chief.” Charlie jumped in the pool right in his wrestling clothes as if that made him all badass.
He put his hands in the air, and his teammates cheered for him. The swim team didn’t, because Sam and Taylor would’ve beat their asses if they had. My team stood silently on the pool deck. Sam and Taylor and Gabe and Derek. Even Eddie was there. Sam shook his head, and Taylor looked around. I couldn’t tell if they were hoping someone would stop this or if they were just really nervous. A vein in Sam’s neck stood out and Taylor’s jaw was clenched. They looked like they were ready to jump in and help me if it came to that.
There was still time to call this off, but my heart and mind were set on this course of action. I nodded to the little weasel.
Someone on deck blew a whistle, the one Coach usually used, the one he left on a hook on the side of the pool. It started us off. I pretended to let him take me down into the water. His hand around my neck, the other around my waist. We both went under.
He pushed up to get a breath, but as he did, I pulled him from the three-foot to the four-foot depth. His feet scrambled for the bottom of the pool, but I kicked them out from under him and pushed him back under the water. He wrapped himself up with me again in one of his wrestling moves, but I dragged him into the deeper part of the pool. I wrapped my legs around his chest and held his head under water. He was struggling really hard, but I held him down.
I started counting, or at least I thought I had. I hadn’t even gotten to thirty, I was sure it was only twenty or twenty-five, but I must have gotten sort of lost, spaced out, because before I knew it, there was a lot of splashing behind me. Sam and Taylor and half the wrestling team were swimming around me, pulling me off him.
It was like my eyes weren’t even seeing anymore. I held my hands over my head and walked around the pool like an Olympic champion, oblivious to the coaches who were now on the pool deck. The wrestling coaches, the swimming coaches, and the principal were all screaming at me. Charlie was on the side of the pool coughing and gasping for breath.
Obviously, I was kicked off the team. I was also suspended for ten days. Ten days of staying home without Max was the worst punishment of all.
Chapter 8
I’ve only seen a few hikers this morning, which means following the advice to leave after April 1 to avoid crowds was a good idea. I’m in a groove and doing at least ten miles a day. Could maybe do more, but I figure I’ve got no reason to push myself. No real place to go. Part of me wonders where that hiker—the one who saved me from the bear—is currently, but if I can’t force myself to use socially expected behaviors around her (like not spying on her and not digging up her secret notes), it’s probably good that we’re not on the same stretch of trail.
The weather catches up to me today, though. I race for cove
r under one of the shelters that the guidebooks mentioned. The Tray Mountain shelter is painted this blend-into-the-background green, making it look less sheltering than it would if it didn’t look like part of its surroundings, but it does have a roof. That alone makes it worth investigating. As the rain pours down and lightning and thunder explode all around me, I sit, knees pulled up into my chest, my pack stowed on the floor, protected from the mud by its elevation. The shelter itself is this slanted wooden thing that doesn’t exactly seem sound or well designed. As I listen intently, if not obsessively, for sounds that indicate rodent infestation, I’m surprised to hear footsteps. Definitely human. Sharing a small space with someone, especially someone I don’t know, is not exactly exciting times for me, but I’m not about to give up protection from the storm, no matter how random the person is.
I look up as a face appears in the doorway, lightning flashes behind him. Him. My disappointment registers in my gut.
The man gives a stiff wave, kind of like I do. “Hey. I’m Rain Man.”
I am stunned by this fortyish man. His face is covered with gray hair, which matches the gray mop on the top of his head. Creases paint his face, but they’re soft, and even the scraggly gray-and-black eyebrows that would normally be scary to me look soft and nice because he smiles the kind of smile that lights up his eyes. I’m sort of at a loss for what to say in this situation and I wonder what my social skills teacher would say about my how to work myself into a conversation with a total stranger on the Appalachian Trail.