by Andy Kaiser
“Oh good,” my mom said. “So you'll be in the cabin with us tonight?”
My dad looked confused. “No. I'm setting up so I can sleep outside tonight. I did this really impressive natural tent setup. Got a good branch to flex as a blanket backbone and I dug the perfect nest for heat retention.”
As usual, I didn't have any idea what he was talking about. I looked over at Zack again, but he was paying more attention to his hot dog than the conversation. I figured I'd do the same.
My parents continued to discuss why my dad had to sleep outside in his homemade camp area just outside our cabin and Zack and I continued to eat in silence. It was another loving family dinner. Finally I got full and threw out my trash. Zack followed.
“So,” he said as we moved away from the table and headed outside. “Tonight! Our big escape! Wanna plan it out?”
“I guess.”
“You don't sound too thrilled.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you should be.” He grabbed my shoulders and turned me to point at the woods, in the direction of Eena's Camp Nyhill. “Over there is a girl, Ty, who wants to see us. At night. Alone! On a beach! Do you realize what this could mean?”
“Yeah, I know. I just...”
“Just what?”
“Well, I'm feeling guilty. And besides, Eena didn't ask us. She asked me.”
Zack took a moment to think, then shook his head.
“That doesn't make a difference if you aren't going to go. Why are you feeling guilty?”
“Well, there's Emily.”
“Emily Dowers? But...” Zack looked perplexed. “You've never even talked to her. Not for real. There was that one phone call where you hung up on her-”
“Thanks for bringing that up.”
“And Eena wants to meet us. But if you don't want to, I'll just meet her alone.”
“I don't know. It's just... I'm not good at this. I don't know what to do.”
“Okay,” Zack's expression softened. “I'll help you. We'll get this figured out. First thing is we gotta handle the Emily Dowers situation. Come on.”
Zack moved and I followed. He ran at a jog he knew I could match, but I was still puffing when we got back to our cabin. He ran inside as I leaned against the door frame, holding my side. Too many hot dogs mixed with exercise: I had a major stomach cramp. But I forgot about that when Zack came back out and I saw what he was holding.
It was his cellphone.
“You brought your cellphone?” I said.
Zack grinned. “You didn't?”
“Dad said to leave them at home! You know, so we can 'fully appreciate nature without technology blocking out nature's beauty'.”
“Did he really say that? It sounds like something he'd say.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well,” Zack shrugged, not caring. “I brought mine. I didn't want to miss any messages.”
“Mine's at home.”
“Here,” he said. He shoved his phone at me. I took a step back, like the thing might bite.
“Look, Ty. Just call Emily. Talk to her. Find out if she's interested in you. If she is, great! You can sit on the ground and wait until it's time to go back to school and you can see her. If she's not interested, then, well, at least you know. And you can start doing fun things again! I'm your brother. I want to see you happy.”
“You lie. You just want to see Eena.”
He grinned. “You got me.”
I took the offered phone and stared at it. Zack had Emily's number already loaded. Just like last time, hitting 'Send' was all I needed to do. I wished I hadn't eaten so much dinner, because I was starting to feel sick.
“I'm not sure I can do this.”
Before I could stop him, Zack reached over and pressed 'Send' while I was holding the phone. He stepped back and gave a salute. “You're welcome.”
Numbly, I held the phone to my face. I couldn't believe this was happening. Now I felt sick and my heart was pounding so hard it was about to burst out of my chest.
Two rings.
Someone answered.
“Hello?”
A man's voice.Her dad?
“Hello. I'm calling for Emily, please?”
There was a rustling on the other end. Then it stopped.
“Hello?”
Emily.
Chapter 4
I tried to keep calm. My goal was to be able to talk without my voice sounding shaky. Any time I got nervous or scared – like if I had to stand up and give a presentation in class – my voice would shake and everyone could tell. I hated that. It's like my own body was betraying me.
“Hi, Emily. It's Ty Ford. Tyler.”
My voice was shake-free. So good so far.
“Who?”
That's bad.
Zack was watching. I turned away so he couldn't see my face. I needed to focus on the call.
“It's Tyler Ford. From school.”
“Oh right! Sorry, Ty. It's summer, you know?” She laughed. “I forgot. I never think about school on summer break.”
“Right, sure.”
We both listened to the silence for a moment before I realized I was the one who should be talking. I pushed out more words.
“So, I'm calling. Just to see if there's something or anything you wanted to do. If you ever wanted to do something together. At the same time. Like on a date. Or just go out together.”
More silence.
Zack circled around to get in front of me. He gave a thumbs-up with a questioning look on his face. I waved him away and turned my back to him again.
I tried more words. “I think you're pretty. And you're pretty cool.”
I sound like an idiot.
“Well, thank you. That's very sweet and very true.” She laughed again, though this time it sounded uncomfortable to me. Forced.
“Ty,” she sighed. “I just don't think we have a lot in common... I mean, you're a nice guy. But, well, my uncle is a nice guy, you know?”
“What?”
“Maybe if you cut your hair different.Or did sports.”
I barely knew how to respond. This conversation was a car ride, and the road led straight towards a steep, rocky cliff.
“Cut... My hair?”
“I don't know. But yeah, something would have to change.”
Even more silence.
Get off the phone. I didn't know whose voice that was. Maybe my own intuition, or maybe I was reading Emily's mind. Probably both.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, thanks for talking. I hope your summer goes-”
“Sure, okay. Bye!”
The call ended.
I slowly handed the phone back to Zack. He looked at me with a painful grimace, which is what I figured my own face looked like.
“That bad?” he said.
“Yeah.That bad.”
He shook his head and looked away. “Sorry, Ty.”
“I'll tell you one thing, though,” I said.
The tone in my voice made him look back at me.
“We are definitely going to see Eena tonight.”
Chapter 5
I didn't want to sleep. I couldn't sleep. I was ready to just stay up the couple hours it would take to get to midnight.
Zack, on the other hand, loved to sleep. He slept in at home and napped on the couch any chance he could get. He was just fine setting an alarm tonight to wake us up ahead of time. All we had to do after that was to keep quiet, avoid our parents as we sneaked out of our small cabin, and meet a girl at a lake at midnight. Simple, right?
Zack and I shared a room. It was big enough for two beds and a dresser. My mom was in another room, just on the other side of the short hallway. Her door was open. Whatever we did had to be quiet. My dad was a couple dozen feet from the cabin, sleeping outside in what he called an “enviro-friendly insulated nest”. I called it a “hole in the ground covered in leaves”.
There were no lights at the Lodge except for the main office, but a thin crescent of moon floated h
igh in the nighttime sky. It should be enough to light our way. Given all that, it would probably take about ten minutes for us to sneak over to the lake.
Zack had turned the volume on his phone way down and had set the alarm. All we had to do was to sleep and wait for the alarm to wake us up.
I stayed wide awake, eyes open and staring into the darkness, thinking about what was going to happen. As for sleeping: Not possible.
Why did Eena want to meet us so late? How could she escape from her camp so easily? Wasn't she worried about getting through a half-mile of forest so late at night? What did she want to do when she met us? What would I do if I ended up alone with her?
...And how did she know my name?
Those were the questions that bubbled around in my brain. After I'd thought about them multiple times each, I replayed my meeting with Eena. I saw her round, freckled face looking up at me through dark locks of hair. I looked down into her brown eyes. I saw her smile and her dimples. I saw her body barely covered by the pale green swimsuit. She looked both soft and strong. I wondered what her skin felt like.
Yeah, it was pretty hard to go to sleep.
Zack, however, had no problem knocking out. Either that, or he was really good at pretending to snore.
I turned over and adjusted my pillow, trying to find a cool spot. After a while I found a good position and started to doze off. I moved from dozing to dreaming to real, official sleeping, settling down into that super-comfortable, heavy, brain-blanketing sleep that you know will take you through the next ten hours at least.
Minutes later, Zack's alarm tweeted quietly and woke us up.
I sat up in bed immediately.
Zack groaned. He reached over to grab the phone, and being so sleepy, missed. The phone spun off the bedside table and clattered to the floor, peeping like an insane parakeet.
“Stupid thing,” he muttered. He rolled away and put his pillow over his head.
My body was vibrating with a buzz of adrenaline and dread. It's a feeling I get when I wake up and I assume immediately that something's wrong. My heart pounded as I stared around blearily. It was a few seconds before I realized where I was and that the phone was on the floor. I leaned halfway out of bed to reach for it, then I lost my balance and fell. I landed with a painful grunt. The phone continued to tweet, muffled, underneath me.
Zack and I didn't wake up very well.
Three minutes later, our bodies had finally rebooted and we were ready for action. We'd both dressed in our darkest clothes, figuring that since we were sneaking around at night, anything dark would help us blend in.
I'd seen plenty of movies, and you're supposed to tiptoe when you want to walk quietly. Zack and I found out pretty quickly that wasn't really true. You can be quiet and still walk like a normal person. So we did.
We moved past my mom's room. I heard slow, deep breathing coming from inside. We moved down the hallway, past the kitchen and towards the front door of the cabin.
Zack put a hand on the door handle and met my eye. He gave me a questioning glance, a raised-eyebrow look of are-you-sure-you're-ready-for-this?
That worried me. My dad usually didn't care what Zack or I did, and my mom cared but would forget quickly, but this was way beyond anything we'd done before. I stopped and wondered just how much trouble we'd get in if my parents found out we left the cabin so late, especially to meet a girl.
Actually, it would probably be worse for me. If anyone would get in trouble, it would be me. Zack was older and he got to do way more than I could. Besides worrying about my parents, I thought the Lodge had a curfew. I was sure midnight was way past any time for kids to be out. I shouldn't be doing this. I should sneak back into my warm bed, get under the covers and dream.
And dream about what? I thought. Emily Dowers?
I remembered my phone call only a few hours ago, when my hopes of being with Emily were crushed because of something as stupid as the way I looked.
“Maybe if you cut your hair... Or did sports... Something would have to change...”
My face burned with embarrassment.
I got angry.
At least Eena, for whatever reason, wanted to see me. I gave Zack a firm nod. We were going. Right now.
He pulled open the door and we both stepped out into the black night.
Chapter 6
We moved away from the cabin, still remembering to keep quiet because of our dad. We needed to go through the woods to get to the lake, but our dad was also camped out somewhere nearby, so we needed to keep as silent as possible.
The moon was indeed glowing in the sky. I looked up. It was pretty cool. A mass of stars spread above our heads, hundreds or thousands of tiny suns glowing from so far away. I could see plenty of the popular nighttime markers: The Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Dog Star. I took a moment and kept looking upwards. For a moment, as my eyes adjusted and my night vision grew strong, I almost thought I could see the Milky Way galaxy. It looked like a faint spill of milk, a barely-visible fuzzy line spread from one side of the sky to the other. It grew more distinct the longer I stared.
If each star was part of a solar system the size of ours, then the Universe was huge and anything could happen. I always loved looking at the stars. I know it sounds weird, but looking up at the sky made me feel better.
Then Zack yanked on my sleeve and we were off. The entire Lodge – all the surrounding cabins - were silent. Everyone except us must have been sleeping. We kept as quiet as possible.
We angled to the edge of the forest, then stepped a few paces underneath the trees.
That was our first problem. It was really dark here.
The moon, while providing enough light when we were out in the open, dropped to almost nothing when we moved under cover of the forest. Leaves and branches thirty feet above blocked the weak moonlight. Zack and I were left in almost complete darkness.
We moved ahead anyway. Progress was much slower, but we had a general idea of where we were heading.
I was getting creeped out, though. Every step we took, I heard noises under our feet: Step. Leaves crunched. Step. A twig snapped with a quiet crackle. Step. Thin branches – invisible in this lack of light – slapped me in the face. Movement was slow. We didn't want to make too much sound and it was hard because we couldn't really see where we were going. The trees around us were hazy shapes, black upon black, and I had to stick my hands in front of me and feel around like I was wearing a blindfold. I must have looked ridiculous.
Zack was in front of me. I flinched away as a light appeared in front of him. He turned towards me and his face glowed.
I blinked and looked at him again. He nodded and grinned and held up his cellphone in slow motion, acting cool about it. The screen displayed a blank white screen. It wasn't a great flashlight, but was powerful enough for us to move further into the woods without bumping into anything.
Zack shone the light ahead of us, leading the way. I followed about ten feet behind. All we had to do was keep moving in this direction. Just a few minutes more and we'd be at the lake. With Eena.
“Hey!”
The voice was strong and authoritative and adult. Zack killed his own light and we froze.
It was our dad. He had his own flashlight. He approached from the side and angled towards Zack. I instinctively crouched down and froze.
Zack looked as guilty as I'd ever seen him, which was not guilty at all. He just gave his usual casual smile.
“Hey, Dad,” he said.
“Now you need to tell me,” my Dad said, “just what you think you're doing out here so late!”
“Well, I was just... you know, exploring. Like, checking out the wonders of nature at night.”
That was a completely made-up lie. Zack had picked the words to appeal to my dad's weirdness.
Zack knew exactly what he was doing. He also didn't mention or look at me. I stayed as frozen as an ice cube. I felt like one, too. I had no idea what my dad would do to us, but the cold sweat tickling
down my back did not make me feel very good about this situation.
“Exploring, huh?” My dad stopped and thought. I looked at him more closely in the ambient light of his flashlight. It was midnight, but he wasn't dressed for sleeping. He was still wearing the shirt and dirty jeans from before. He had a long walking stick in one hand. If it wasn't so late, I would've thought he was out for a nice stroll through the woods.
“Yeah, Dad. I just couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd look around outside.”
Now that was the mark of a good brother. With me hiding nearby, Zack was keeping me completely out of this. For all my dad knew, I was dreaming inside the cabin.
My dad nodded.
“Well, then. What we should do is go,” he pointed at Zack. “And we'll tour the camp! Come on this way, I'll show you where I built my nest. And the stars are excellent tonight. Did you see Saturn rising? Let's get out of the woods so we can actually see the sky. You'll love it.”
I liked that kind of stuff, but Zack hated it and thought it was boring. He'd told my dad that before, but Dad didn't notice or care. And now Dad was in his usual excited-over-nothing mode, where he would just talk and talk and never stop. He beckoned to Zack.
Zack didn't have any choice. Dejected, he trudged towards our dad, who turned away and moved back towards the edge of the woods at a quick pace. I saw Zack scanning for me, but he couldn't find me in my hiding place. I didn't want to move since my dad might turn back and see me. Shrugging, Zack gave a wave in my general direction, then he turned and followed Dad.
With a thrill of anticipation and dread, I realized something huge.
I was going to meet Eena. I was going to meet her alone.
Then I realized something else.
I was in the middle of a pitch black forest with no light, and no one to tell me which way to go.
I heard my dad and Zack crunch and move through the underbrush away from me. As their sound faded and their light completely disappeared, I was left in the darkness, completely alone, completely blind.
I hope it makes sense that I started to panic. At the time, it definitely made sense to me.