by Stacie Ramey
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll write her later.” I hand her back the notebook. “Are you able to hike?” I ask.
“Can we leave tomorrow morning?”
“Sure.”
“Then I’ll be ready.” She points to my pack. “So what did you bring me?”
I start picking through the bag, naming items as I take them out, like I freakin’ foraged (two points) in the forest and made all of our supplies appear. “I found oatmeal raisin cookies, but not the ones you like.”
She puts her hands out like a little kid doing a “gimme, gimme.” “Wild Thing,” she says, “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
• • •
The next morning, I’m up before Sophie, packing my stuff, when she unzips her tent. “Oh, sorry. I’ll get ready.”
“It’s early. I couldn’t sleep.”
“I’ll get the water,” she slips off before I can stop her.
I watch her go. Her foot is better, but she’s still got a limp. Flip-flopping will definitely buy us time, but she’s going to slow us down, for sure.
We eat the peaches-and-cream oatmeal I got yesterday. It’s really sweet, and I picture Emily loving it. Of all the flavors, it would definitely be her favorite. That thought sits in my stomach, and I wish I could talk to her again, but she said we were done. So that’s it.
“We’ll go back the way we came,” I say. “It’s the shortest route to a town.”
“No. You’ll get caught. We keep going north.” She points. “It’s only five miles to the next town.” She shows me on the map. “Tesnatee Gap. This is where we go.”
“No. We go back past Neels Gap to Blood Mountain. It’s half the distance. And it’s the other direction.”
“It’ll be harder to find a ride up north from farther south.”
“We’ll do the best we can.”
Sophie shrugs. “Up to you.” Then she goes into her tent to change. When she comes out, she’s got on shorts and a different shirt, one of those half shirts with a flannel over top and boots. The look is startlingly sexy. I stare at her a little too long.
She looks past me. “It’ll help us get a ride if I don’t smell all nasty.”
Before I can stop myself, I throw my hands in the air and say, “Preach it.”
For two terrifying seconds, she stares at me, and I feel like I’ve totally blown it. But instead of yelling or backing away, Sophie punches me in the arm. “Don’t be a pig.”
“Can’t help it.”
I take the lead as we start to hike. Sophie is making these soft grunts, and I wonder if she should have rested another day. Or two. We come to a big incline so I stop. “Put your hand on my back.”
She does and I can smell the lotion she put on to cover her hiker smell. It smells like a peach. Like that Kiss My Face brand Em used to use. I concentrate on the scent and not on the sounds that make me worry about Sophie.
“You okay?”
She breathes out. “Yeah. Fine.”
I know she’s lying even without seeing how her body braces. Her voice says it all. We go like this for as long as we can, then I hear her grunt, and I sit on a log and take out my map. I pat the log next to me.
“Nah. I’ll stand.”
“Your leg is hurting. We need to stop.”
She wipes her brow and looks away. She can’t look me in the eyes. “I’m fine. Just gotta keep moving. Stopping makes it worse.”
“Okay.”
She puts out her hand. Lifts me. I let her. Before I start walking, I shrug out from under my pack.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’ve got something for you.”
“I don’t want to take Advil until we stop hiking.”
“No. It’s not that. Wait.” I dig through my pack to get to the bottom. My phone. In the front pocket, the wire is all wound up with my headphones. I cue up sacred drums.
She stands in front of me, her arms by her side like a child. So trusting and sweet. I don’t think she trusts many people, gauging by what Rain Man said about her and what I’ve noticed myself. So it feels really nice to have her trust me. I lean forward, my hands so close to her cheeks. She holds her breath while I put in the headphones for her. I hand her the phone. I watch her face.
I can hear the percussion leaking out of the headphones, and her eyes go from wide open with surprise to slits, like Dad’s did when he was pleased. She nods to the beat, and I pick up my pack and we start hiking again.
It’s midday and we’re almost to Mountain Crossing/Neels Gap, which means alarms are firing in my mind. Will my mother be there with the National Guard? Maybe that’s too extreme. Did Emily actually betray me? Is turning me in a betrayal? Maybe I’ve asked too much of Em to keep my secret. And then it hits me. The credit card with the money on it. Em can trace that shit. Damn. Damn. Damn.
I ball up my hands into fists and hit my leg hard, over and over again. I should have known.
Sophie gets in front of me. Her face is tight. “Hey, take it easy. What’s wrong?”
I put my hands over my ears and pace. “I’m so stupid. Stupid. So effing stupid.”
“What?” She stands there, her hands in the air, then lowers them, like she’s trying to get me to calm down. She balances on one foot, so I know the other one is hurting her. She looks around. “I can’t get us a ride if you’re acting like this.”
Tears stream down my face. “I screwed up. Emily has the info for my credit card. We have no money. And my phone. She knows this number.”
“It’s okay. We don’t need money. Trail angels will help us find a way.”
“I have like, fifty bucks. Maybe a little less. Those cookies cost a fortune.”
She laughs.
I do too.
“We’ll be fine,” she says.
There’s that word again. We. But I still feel like an idiot. Like I keep making these big mistakes, and they are starting to hurt people I care about.
“Why don’t you stand over here? I’ll work on getting us a ride.”
“Sure. But I’ve got to ditch the phone.”
“Aww. I was really loving those tracks.”
“No worries. We can keep those going. Just have to ditch the SIM card.”
I stick my finger nail in the slot on the side and remove the card, then I smash it with my foot. I pick up the garbage and pack it out. Leave no trace. I’m still shaking my head, annoyed at myself for being so reckless.
She smiles at me, and I didn’t really think she was watching. “We’ll be fine, Wild Thing. Just fine.”
A feeling of warmth fills me, like it used to when Emily and I were working on something together. It’s good to have someone with me. A partner in crime, so to speak.
She hikes her pack high on her shoulder, then aims herself at the road. She twists around one last time and shines a smile on me that makes me know that she’s just as happy with our new partnership as I am.
Chapter 15
It takes less than half an hour until we’re snuggled into the cab of a big-ass pickup truck. Sophie sits next to one of the Trail Angels, Nicholas Granger, who will give us a ride up to Wilmington, North Carolina.
“We were planning to do the whole trail, but then I hurt my leg,” Sophie explains. “I told him to go without me, but Wild Thing wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Good man, Wild Thing.”
“What’s your trail name?” Sophie asks.
Nicholas turns a slight shade of pink. “Don’t have one.”
“We should call you Saint Nick then.”
The guy chuckles and she shoots me a smile, like she knows Nick is putty in her hands, which surprises me because Sophie doesn’t seem like a flirty girl, but I guess it’s cool to give this guy some props for helping us.
“What do you guys like to listen to?
”
“Anything’s fine,” Sophie answers for both of us.
“Then rock it is.” Nicholas switches the station and Nickelback is finishing How You Remind Me, which is definitely not rock enough for my taste and has me wishing I had my chants or my drums or could reach my Dramamine, because riding with a stranger makes me anxious. Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” comes on next and I lean back a little, my breathing settling.
“I hiked part of the trail, years ago,” Nicholas says.
“Really?”
“Yeah. There’s this guy in my hometown who’s an old trail legend. He and his wife used to hike the whole thing every year.”
The droning of their conversation and the sound of the highway make me sleepy. I lean my head against the window.
“Gary and Mary Lunsford. We always laughed at that. Gary and Mary.”
“They still hike?”
“I think he does. She died last year.”
We drive for a while with Rascal Flatts blaring in the background. I shove my tongue to the roof of my mouth, pressing the tip there. It makes me less nauseous. Country music is not my thing. It’s too twangy and without a reliable drum beat or guitar riff for me to attach my mind to, The motion of the truck makes me sick. I think about what Nicholas said about the old couple. There’s something weird about the story that makes me want to focus super hard on it. Either that or my car sickness is now making me paranoid in addition to queasy.
Saint Nick continues, “Gary had a strange trail name, which didn’t make sense to me, but trail names don’t always. Hey, do you have trail names?”
“They call me Ghost.” It surprises me that Sophie shares that with him, given how private she is.
He slaps the steering wheel, which makes me jump. “Rain Man. That’s what they called him.”
My head snaps to attention. “Rain Man?”
“He hiked the trail for years. Sometimes his wife came with him for parts of it. Once she did the entire thing with him. But not usually. Then, apparently out of nowhere, she decided to hike alone last year. Got lost on the trail. They never did find her. Until it was too late.”
“Wow,” I say. Understatement of the year.
“Yeah. Gary searched and searched. We all did. It was almost about the same time last year as a matter of fact. The beginning of May, it was. May 5. There were all of those Cinco de Mayo parties. I was at one when I heard the news. Weird how time flies.”
For some reason, everything Nick says produces pictures in my mind. I hadn’t heard Rain Man’s wife’s story before, but now I imagine newspaper headlines. Photos of people on the mountain carrying someone in a stretcher. Mom is always telling me I have to start thinking about how other people would react to things. So now I try. Rain Man’s wife died a year ago, almost to this day. That means something. It has to. But what?
I think about how I feel it’s my fault that my dad died. Does Rain Man feel the same kind of guilt? I think of Rain Man giving away his wife’s things. Maybe that’s what you do, but I don’t see it. Not the way he’s doing it. It’s like he over-packed his pack to give away her trail things. That doesn’t make sense. Unless…
“Oh my God. Rain Man. We have to go back. Now. Can you get us to the trail?”
“Huh? Sure. I mean, I guess. I can drop you anywhere you want.”
“What’s going on?” Sophie asks.
“I have to go back.” I scramble through my pack, looking for my map, despite how dizzy reading in a moving car makes me. My eyes are blurry and the map shakes in my hand. Sophie puts her hand over mine.
“Why do we have to get back?”
“We just do.” I look to the side of the road for mile markers. “Where are we?” The disorientation that comes with riding in a truck, trying to read, and building panic makes it even harder to read the map.
“We’re about ten minutes from the Albert Mountain bypass. I can drop you there. That’s as close to the trail as I can get you by car.”
I stare at the map. Where would Rain Man be?
“Where did Rain Man’s wife disappear?” I ask.
“She went off trail. Got lost a few miles from it. Very sad.”
“But where?” I thrust the map toward him even though he can’t possibly look at it while driving.
Sophie intercepts the map. “Take it easy, Wild Thing.”
Nick scratches his head. “I think it was around…Sassafras Gap.”
“That’s like forty miles from here,” Sophie says.
“Four days,” I say mostly to myself.
Sophie folds the map. She looks at me. “I can’t hike that fast.”
“Seven days, then.”
“Dylan, we don’t have enough food for that.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
Sophie sits, hands fisted, so I’m guessing she’s pissed. I have no idea why she’s pissed at me, but for once, I don’t care. I have to find Rain Man. This is not a want or an arbitrary fixation. This is a must. I recognized the pattern. This time I recognized the pattern. He spoke of his wife like he was still with her, said how much he missed her, and didn’t care that he was running out of food. He was giving away her things—and his own belongings.
Nick pulls into a parking lot where a bunch of people have gathered. “You guys sure about this?”
I’m already out of the truck. Sophie shoots me an annoyed look, so I double back. “Thanks, Nick,” I yell into the cab of the truck.
Sophie turns to him. “Thanks for everything.” Then she slides out. I catch her so she doesn’t land on her hurt ankle. She pulls away.
We watch as Nick drives away. She sits on a bench next to the path leading to the trail. “What are you thinking?”
“I think Rain Man is going to hurt himself. I have to stop him.”
Sophie looks at me like I’ve got two heads. “You don’t know that. You don’t even know him. You only know what you think you know.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.” I put my hands to my head to block out the sounds of people around me. “It’s his movements. I’m looking at what he’s doing. It’s a pattern. He’s giving his things away.”
“His wife’s things. She’s dead. Maybe he doesn’t want them around anymore.”
“His things too.” I lift the hem of my pants to show her my socks and realize it doesn’t make as compelling an argument as I think it will. “He stayed in my bunk at Neels Gap. He said it would be the last time he slept in a bed.”
“He probably meant until he got back from the trail.”
“He didn’t. I knew it was weird the way he said it, but I was trying to get to you, so I let it go.”
“It doesn’t have to mean…”
“It does. I know.”
“Okay. So we call ahead. Anonymously. We put in a call and tell the police what we think.”
“They won’t listen.” I turn around. And around again. I realize I look like I’m losing it. I guess I am.
“Dylan, you’re scaring me.”
I’m scaring her. I’m. Scaring. Her. I force myself to stop. I face her. “You know how I came after you? How I knew something was wrong with you? That you needed help?”
She nods.
“It’s like that. But this time it’s Rain Man.”
Her eyes focus and she reaches into her pack. “Okay,” she says. She pulls out the map and opens it. “Okay. So we find Rain Man…” Sophie points to an area on the map. “We are here, right?”
“Right.”
“So we have to hike back to get to Rain Man, assuming you are even right about this.”
“I am.”
“I said assuming.” She points to Neels Gap on the map. “This is where your family is going to start looking for you. And here is where you think Rain Man is.”
“Yeah.”
“Y
ou don’t see the problem? We are going to be hiking toward your family.” She points on the map, “There might be forest rangers at any of these points.” She bats at the map again.
“We’ll find a way.”
“Don’t you think the forest rangers would be looking for us in those places? Your cousin knows about me now too, so if they are looking for you, they’ll be looking for both of us. Neither of us can safely go into town now. You get that, right?”
I do. I’m still making mistakes. For all of her talk of “we,” I can’t drag Sophie through the woods with her foot like this. Not with people looking for us, because of me. I can’t make her chase after Rain Man.
“Me, they’ll be looking for me.” I throw my pack on the ground and rifle through it until I get to my wallet. “Here.” I hand her twenty dollars and my credit card. “Use this and go north. It’ll throw them off.”
She shakes her head. “They won’t let me use your credit card.”
“The code is 2625. Use it as a debit card. They won’t check ID that way.”
“You’ve thought of everything, huh?”
“There’s almost eight hundred dollars left on the card. You’ll be fine.”
“And what do I do when your family shows up, and I am arrested for stealing your card?”
I hadn’t thought of that. Damn. I am getting sloppy. I think of all of those phony missions with Emily. All those pretend capers. Those sure didn’t get me ready for real life on the run. Even the time I hid away in the city, I never screwed up like this. “Only use it in places where they don’t have cameras over the ATM. Withdraw a hundred dollars, and then give it to someone hiking north. Tell them it’s from a trail angel. So if they follow anyone, they’ll follow them.”
“Dylan, you can’t decide my choices for me.” Sophie says.
“On this, I do. I’m going without you. You won’t keep up. And I won’t have you getting found because of my family drama.”
“What makes you think I don’t want to be found? I told you my dad knows I’m here.”