by Stacie Ramey
I hear the stream and another sound that gives me the tiniest bit of hope. It’s the sound of a soda can top being popped.
“Here, drink this. They only had one. Can you believe it?”
Even through my eyesight is blurry I can see it’s a Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew is the best kind of soda, because it has a ton of sugar and the most caffeine you can get in a can. I gulp it down and imagine the caffeine clearing the fog in my brain. I believe I can actually feel it get zingy and tingly, even though it can’t work that fast. But then the effect spreads. My focus sharpens. I can see the blood on the tree I hit. The blood on my hands. I follow Sophie, and I don’t even try to talk. I’m too damned worn out for that.
She helps me lean into the stream, the water turning red and my aching hands screaming at me. I watch the blood swirl away along with my regrets.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know…”
“It’s okay, Dylan. We all feel like going a little wild sometimes. And after what you’ve been through, it makes sense.”
“What have I been through?” I ask, confused. It was my father who died. Not me.
“You lost your dad, Dylan. I know how hard that is.”
I nod, and then I start to cry again. She says softly, “The notes I write are to my mom.”
Something passes between us, a kind of softening of barriers. I want to lean in to her. It’s what any other guy would do in this situation. Kiss the girl. Right? But I’m not any ordinary guy, so I let the moment pass and simply ask, “What do the notes say?”
“A lot of different things, but mostly that I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“The day she was diagnosed, I was pissed that Dad wouldn’t let me go to blink-182. I was a total bitch, and I didn’t even notice that she’d been crying. I yelled at her, which was never okay in my house, but it was definitely not okay that day. So, in one of the notes, I told her I was sorry that I made that awful day even worse. Stuff like that.”
I nod like I understand, but really I’m imagining what I’d say to Dad in speech bubbles now if I could tell him I’m sorry for not saving him. And now I’m also remembering all of the things I overheard Dad say, trying to reassure Mom that I’d be okay. All the times I made her cry, because I was difficult or rigid. The times I knew I was making her life harder, but I didn’t care, because I was mad or stubborn, or just plain right. And I think about writing to Mom like Emily said before and like Sophie told me too.
But then, because I’m me, I focus on the one thing that really gets to me about what Sophie just said. Nobody in her house yelled. I can’t even imagine that. My general noisiness aside, everyone in my house had an opinion, which they happily espoused as soon as it came to them. My father. My mother. My brother. My cousins. My aunt. All of us were a noisy swirl of chaos. And part of me loved that. “You’d never survive in my house. We are a very loud and opinionated family.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
Is she teasing me? I search her face, but it looks sort of dreamy, so I guess she’s being sincere.
“Did you want to tell me about your dad?” Sophie asks.
“He was super cool.”
“No, I mean about…”
“Oh.” I stare out into the forest and back at my hands. “Is it okay if I save that for another day? I’ve already humiliated myself enough for today.”
She nods. “Sure. It’ll give me something to look forward to.”
I laugh. To be out-snarked by a girl is awesome. “Did everything go okay in town?” I ask.
“Mostly. I didn’t get money though, because I thought that was a bad decision.”
“Why?”
She pulls out a piece of paper from her pocket. It’s a missing child poster with my picture on it.
• • •
Sophie gets the ibuprofen out of my bag and gives each of us two. I figure at some point, we are going to have to take out more money. But we’ll do it after we find Rain Man, because that is more important than finishing the trail or hiding out until my eighteenth birthday. Sophie puts some antibiotic ointment on my knuckles and then ties a bandanna over each of my hands. The Mountain Dew is wearing off. Caffeine from soda doesn’t work as long or as well as coffee. Plus the sugar gives me a big crash, which makes the caffeine pointless. But right now, my limbs feel all loose and my veins feel like my blood is cold. It’s weird, but that’s the way my body processes manufactured adrenaline.
“I couldn’t find many supplies,” she apologizes. “They were out of almost everything.”
She hands me some oatmeal and a few bags of peanuts that look like they are really old, based on how wrecked the wrappers are. I don’t check for an expiration date, something I would have done in my old life, but we are desperate, and the worst thing old peanuts will do to a person is taste stale and oily. Which we just won’t eat if they do.
“They didn’t have coffee. I asked. But they did have hot chocolate.”
She holds up packets with a little flourish, so I clap, even though it’s not a viable substitute.
“I wish they had more,” she says. And then. “Oh, wait, they had these.” She reaches into her back pocket and takes out two Tootsie Pops. “Grape or cherry?”
“You choose.” I’m such a gentleman.
“Okay, then I choose cherry.”
And of course, my mind goes back to the hundreds of times Emily and I fought over the last cherry Life Saver. Scheming, smirking, then all out warfare, pushing and running and grasping for it. All in good fun, but enough to make Mom or Aunt Mary shriek at us. One time, Mom brought home a pack of all cherry Life Savers thinking that would make us happy, but it had the opposite effect. Emily and I just rolled our eyes. The fight was half the fun. Mom didn’t get it.
Sophie hands me the grape, and I unwrap it and pop it in my mouth, wanting so much to be able to tell Emily about how flexible I’m being, how I let the girl choose the lollipop flavor. If she were here, I’m sure she’d roll her eyes and make a huge thing out of it. But deep down, I’d know she was proud of me. After loading my pack with the new supplies, we walk the trail, my attention somewhat restored, which sucks, because that means I feel every cut on my hands.
Sophie clears her throat. “Some guys hanging around the store were talking about Rain Man.”
“What’d they say?”
“Just that they think he’s camping in the area where his wife died.”
“Sassafras Gap?”
“Yeah.”
“What are we? Like thirty some miles away?”
“A little less.”
“Great.”
“If we do ten miles a day, we’ll be fine.”
I watch Sophie limp along and flex my hands. Boy, we make a great team. Her ankle. My hands. Both of us winged by our stubbornness. It makes me want to laugh, but I’m not sure Sophie would be up for it after having to take care of me. Plus, I think about how she’s used to quiet and I’m used to noise.
“I think we need to rest,” I say.
“We need to hike a little more today, put some distance between us and town. The forest rangers and all…”
“Yeah.”
We keep moving. We’re silent about our individual suffering, but we move forward, and just because I’m doing something physical, my mind is able to start making connections, which I know sounds weird, but it’s how my brain works best. Maybe moving forward is what my family has been doing this whole time. That’s what they were doing when I got mad at them for getting their hair cut, for buying stuff for the house, or for going on with their lives in general. Going on with their lives like Dad would have wanted. So maybe the trail is teaching me something after all, or Sophie is. Maybe I’m just growing up. Finally. Either way, it’s probably a good way for me to move. Forward.
Chapter 18
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nbsp; I spend a semi-miserable night sleeping in my own tent, because Sophie doesn’t need me to keep her warm. I’m glad though, because I’m really restless (two points, baby… As in the rare Scattergories category: name an emotion you feel when you are camping next to an awesome girl and your hands throb because in a moment of heightened anxiety and upset you punched a tree repeatedly, and your family is so effing pissed at you that you may never be able to go home and there’s this guy you know who is going to try to kill himself unless you get to him in time).
As I lay awake, knowing that sleep is the best way to heal my hands and my heart, I catalog the different types of insects that are probably waiting to walk on me and/or bite me at the slightest perceived provocation (also two points) since I didn’t get a chance to spray my insecticide. Although, I’m running low anyway.
Then I start thinking about what actually provokes insects, which I can only think…nothing. Being an insect, you probably only think about eating and burrowing and finding more food to start the whole cycle again.
My fingers throb, and then I start to worry that, like sharks, blood attracts insects. That doesn’t make it easier to fall asleep. I think about going for a walk, but I’m worried that will wake Sophie, and she definitely needs her sleep. So, I sneak very quietly out of my tent and sit on a log and look at the star-filled sky and think about Dad.
He used to show me the constellations, although sometimes he’d get the names wrong. He gave me a book about them when I was six, and I read it straight through. The sky became my own map. I read about pirates and sailors navigating by the stars, which seemed like the best and coolest way to know where you are in the world.
Looking at the sky, the stars appear to pulse. It makes me anxious like I got when I was little. It used to really bug Mom, and I never understood why.
“You worry more about stars than you do people,” she’d say.
“Two hundred seventy-five million stars die each day, Mom. That’s a lot.”
“People die too, Dylan”
“Great. Now you want me to worry and obsess about everyone dying? People do horrible things every single day. Maybe the planet would be better off with less of them.”
“Well, if someone you loved died, you’d care.”
Dad would say, “We want the boy unhappy now?” and he’d wink at me. “Besides, stars are personal to some people.”
Dad got it. If one of my constellations was compromised by star death, how would I navigate? How would I deal if my world was remapped? Recharted? I couldn’t lose my stars. Sometimes, I’d sneak out in the middle of the night to check to make sure all my favorite stars were still there.
Dad would find me a street away, or at the park, or in our backyard, wherever I could get the best view.
One night I told him, “The thing is, Dad, we don’t know if these stars are still alive. They could be dead already and we wouldn’t know for forty thousand years.”
“So, let’s not worry that for the next 39,999 years, okay?” he said.
This would make me laugh and get me irked at the same time.
He’d gently put his hand on the back of my neck and walk me home. “Let’s not tell Mom about tonight, okay? She wouldn’t understand.”
But maybe if I’d told her about why I was so worried, she would have understood my concern. Maybe I should have given her a chance.
I count my constellations one by one, and then I crawl back into my tent and go to sleep.
• • •
It was almost a year after Dad died that I ran away. I stayed in a lot of different places. I spent a few nights in a shelter. Then I spent a few nights with a guy I met at the gaming store. It all felt aimless and boring, but I figured it was better than going back home and to that awful school Mom and the teachers wanted to send me to. The one thing that no one tells you about running away is how boring it is to have to be nowhere and to have to do nothing. Maybe one day, I’ll write a guide to running away and include crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles in the back. Those would have helped. But as a runaway, I was so bored. To pass the time, I invented games and stories about people I’d see on the streets. This person buying coffee had just found out his wife was cheating on him, and he thought he’d get himself a little cup o’ java to clear his mind. That girl over there totaled her car and is trying to figure out how to tell her boyfriend. Etcetera, etcetera.
I missed Emily. I missed Mom. I even missed Brad, although he had already gone back to Boston University, and my perfect cousin, Abby, was almost done with law school. Even Christian was touring with an acting company. Part of me was freaked the frick out, because I was scared I wasn’t even going to make it through high school. And even if I did make it through high school, I had no idea where or what I was supposed to do after that.
I felt completely lost. If I hadn’t heard about the Appalachian Trail, I probably would have gone back home to the tedium of existing without a purpose, because when I was home, I had no idea where I was heading. Or why. And being in my family, knowing I was the only one who had no plans in a family of planners, Dad included, was sort of crushing. Tedium is one hell of a word of the day, by the way. If only Emily was here to hear it. And just like that, my mood morphs to sour and rotten. I don’t even celebrate the triple-word points I laid out.
Sophie peeks out of her tent, then unzips it and joins me on the log. She limps, her face tight.
“I’ll make us breakfast,” I say.
“How are your hands?”
“They’re better,” I answer, not because they are, but because I’m pretty sure that’s what she needs to hear, considering how empathetic she is.
“I’m worried about the weather.” Her eyes search the sky, which is overcast. The air smells like rain. I hand her my phone. “Yeah. I thought so. The weather looks iffy later. I’m not sure how far we’ll get.”
“Define iffy.”
“It’s going to rain all morning, and it looks like there might be some flooding on the mountain, so the trail will be slick, for sure. But the lightning is an issue too.”
“I guess we should get going then.”
I turn on the stoves and cook two packets of oatmeal and the two hot chocolate pouches. We eat our oatmeal out of the pot, sharing it between us, but we each have our own mug of hot chocolate. I consider starting a conversation about movies (best shark movie ever made or best female lead in a horror movie), because it amuses me, but Sophie doesn’t seem interested. Honestly, I’m starting to get comfortable just breathing in the mountain air, which is starting to turn less cold and more humid.
I worry that Sophie doesn’t like the quiet, that she’s come out here to escape the heavy silence that has fallen on her house now that her mom is gone. But quiet has different moods and feelings. Sometimes quiet is about concentration. Or about being peaceful. Or about planning for the next goal. The in-the-zone kind of quiet might not bother her.
When we’re done eating, I shake out our ibuprofen. There are less than half left, so I decide to skip mine. I figure if I act like I’m taking them, then Sophie won’t know.
When we get on the trail, it’s slick…like she said it would be. She’s got on her shorts and boots, saving the rain pants for later. I wrap my tarp around our backpacks to keep our things dry.
It starts to drizzle. The rain usually chills me out, but I’m a little concerned that Sophie being wet for most of the day will be bad for her.
We’ve got to do at least eight miles today, I figure. Eight miles to Deep Gap. That sounds like a country song. I almost hum a melody and that cracks me up. Me being into country music? So weird. But this trail changes you apparently, and even I’m not immune to change. Apparently.
• • •
The hike to Deep Gap is fairly uneventful if you don’t count Sophie limping like mad, me worrying about her, and the effects of my caffeine withdrawal.
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We get to a steep part of the trail, and I go first. “Hold on.”
Her fingers go around my belt loop, and I reach back to stabilize her so she doesn’t have to put all of her weight on her foot, but I’m going up the hill sideways. From this perspective, I notice the trees more. And Sophie’s right, they are kind of amazing. They’re like pieces of art, bent in different ways. The different barks are brown, white, gray. Green ferns sprout around their roots, moss trails up the sides of the trunks. Even the rocks are covered with green.
My eyes take in the beauty like my body takes in caffeine. I can’t believe I’ve spent all of this time in the forest and haven’t noticed how freakin’ awesome it is. The green fills me with this intense longing, sort of out of nowhere. I start to think of all of the green things I love. Green apples. Jolly Ranchers—sour green apple flavor. Green tomatoes, fried with tangy sauce. Green grass. A football field. That makes me think about how much Dad loved football. It was one of our things.
We’d play a family game of football every year at Thanksgiving at the Cape house when I was little. The lawn would be so green and plush and soft in the summer, but even when it was crackly from recent freeze or snow, I loved how it felt to roll in it. Emily and I would roll down this one hill, and Mom would frown at all of us, me especially, because I was usually the messiest. She’d say, “We were going to take a family picture.”
And Dad would sling his arm around her, super cool and say, “Don’t worry about it, Lily. It’s only dirt. Besides, our pictures should look like us, right? Anyway, our game is about to start.”