The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

  A noise of frustration bubbles up in my throat and I stare at the ground. “I don’t want to stop,” I whisper.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” I say, “we have to make it to the top. That’s the plan, Jonah. That’s what we’ve been working toward all day.”

  “So?”

  I look back up into his dark eyes and then pointedly at my own wrist.

  He follows my gaze down and drops me like he’s just touched fire.

  “So? So, if we don’t make it there . . .”

  I can’t finish the sentences because I know I’m being crazy. I know he’ll look at me like I’m being nuts, because there’s no reason I should need this.

  Surprise, surprise. I am crazy, but only according to, you know, medical records.

  Sweet, sweet anxiety.

  Of course I’m being crazy! I’m being me.

  He says, even and low, voice like a meditation, “If we don’t make it there tonight, we can make it there tomorrow. Or reroute.”

  I blow out a shaky breath. “I hate this.”

  “You’ll hate dying worse.”

  “That’s so fucking dramatic.”

  He shrugs a shoulder and says, “Listen. Follow me. We’re heading into those trees. We’re finding some semblance of shelter, and we’re parking for the night. You need to rest, man. I’m not bullshitting you, okay?”

  Goddammit.

  I purse my lips.

  I don’t say Okay. I don’t acknowledge the failure verbally at all.

  I just follow him into the shadows and let myself be led.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JONAH REFUSES TO LET me help gather kindling.

  He insists that I lie on the pine-needled ground, focusing on getting my shit together, focusing on breathing and not dying, however the hell I’m supposed to do that.

  So I’m . . . doing that, I guess.

  I try to think myself into hydration, my pulse into submission. I try very pointedly not to be dizzy.

  I stare up through the pine boughs at the sky, streaked with blood and citrus.

  I’ve collected my extremities in this big coat, as much as I can, and I’ve been horizontal for twenty minutes.

  I’m getting cold, lying still, but Jonah said not moving was the best thing for me right now, and I guess I believe him. I kind of have to.

  He’s crouched over a pile of pine needles and dead aspen leaves—all this detritus he’s gathered—trying to get it to catch. Jonah came with that lighter, thankfully, so the real struggle here is not the initial flame; it’s just getting this not-optimally-dry tinder to light.

  I can hear him blowing and crackling his way through the stuff, coaxing it into keeping us warm. My teeth are chattering, and I wonder if Jonah can hear them, if it’s spurring him further into action.

  “EUREKA,” he says, and I see him jump up and pump a fist in the air. The flame is small at first, but as the smell of smoke fills the air, so does the light from the fire. I will myself up and push past the pins and needles in my arms and legs. Then I draw myself toward the warmth.

  It all hurts a little, the heat interacting with my frigid skin that’s half asleep from the way I was lying, from the cold.

  I shudder, and Jonah goes to my pack and pulls out a fluffy blanket.

  “Look at you,” he says, “all prepared.”

  I try to say, “That’s my middle name,” but it comes out garbled from my chattering teeth. I doubt he even knows what I was saying; I probably sound completely out of it. But I’m too exhausted and freezing to be embarrassed.

  He drapes the blanket over my shoulders and I try, I try to focus on the warmth it provides. To will myself into existing like a human.

  “Better?” he says.

  “Sure,” I lie.

  “Why don’t you have something to drink?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve taken enough of our water.”

  “No,” he says, “you haven’t. Not if you’re battling altitude sickness. You get dehydrated, you’re only going to make things worse.”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m fine, Jonah.”

  His voice shifts so fast it makes my head spin. “No, dumbass.” I blink at him. “If you get sicker because you’re trying to be noble, it’s going to slow us both down tomorrow. Then I cover less ground. Then you get us both killed.”

  “O-oh,” I say.

  “Drink the water.”

  I swallow. My mouth is tacky, and forming the necessary saliva is an effort, so maybe he has a point.

  I open one of the water bottles we brought and take slow sips.

  “Happy now?” I say.

  He shrugs and stares at the fire, then rips into a big hunk of beef jerky.

  He’s staring so intently away from me, so deeply disaffected by it all, that it almost circles around to affected. That’s probably me wishfully thinking. Wishing I was stranded in the mountains with someone who gave a shit about me, not someone who’s going to bully me into drinking water when I’m sick instead of gently, like, caressing my check and whispering that I need to take care of myself.

  “Shit,” he says when he bites off another chunk, “this tastes good.”

  Yeah. It was just me.

  “The water,” I admit, “does not suck.”

  I glance up at the sky again, the utter artwork of the sunset. A Colorado sunset has always been hard to beat, and in the isolated silence, trees cutting into it like they were drawn this way, it’s pretty breathtaking.

  Jonah draws closer to me and I tense.

  He says, “Body heat.”

  I say, “If you’re trying to get me naked right now . . .”

  Jonah rolls his eyes. “Trust me, Jacob, if I wanted to get you naked, you’d know.”

  My face goes bright red and, for the first time this trip, I’m thankful for the cold that disguises the reason.

  We sit in quiet as the sun dips below the horizon and the sky darkens.

  I can’t decide if the silence is unnerving or if it feels right.

  It feels almost familiar after the full day of it.

  But it feels . . . lonely, almost, too.

  I get a pang, missing my cousins. Wishing I could use Jolie as a buffer, tease her about the girl she likes, get pelted in the face with a snowball by Jaxon and yell at him when there was a little too much ice razored through it.

  “Do you think . . .” I start.

  “Do I think what?”

  “Do you think they’re alright?”

  Jonah doesn’t answer right away. He measures his words when he’s worried about honesty, I think.

  “Yeah, Hallie. I think they’re okay.”

  I blink at the fire and shift closer. To the flame, to Jonah. My blanket brushes his coat. “Do you think we were stupid to do this?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says.

  My breath shakes when I draw it into my lungs.

  “You want any of this?” he asks me, wagging some trail mix in my face.

  I instinctively jerk back and open my mouth to turn it down, and he says, “Oh wait. You’re allergic to peanuts, right?”

  I say, “Yup,” then pause. “How did you know that?”

  He furrows his brow. “I don’t know if you know this, but we’ve kind of been doing these vacations for years.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But it’s not like we’ve ever hung out.”

  “Not like we’ve ever been allowed to.” There’s a note of resentment in his voice that is so freaking pleasing.

  “So how . . .”

  “I pay attention,” he says.

  I glance over at him, but he’s staring at the fire again. His arms are draped over his knees but his biceps are the littlest bit tense.

  Tiny sparks flick off the flames, bright orange against white smoke.

  It is a strange time, maybe, to think about anything but the cold. Anything but the dark.

  But the fire itself is so . . . bizarrely comforting. Not just because it’s warm.
r />   Because it’s fire. Because I’m a Jew.

  I haven’t practiced Judaism much at home in a long time; my parents haven’t practiced in years and years, so it feels . . . awkward to, like, light candles on my own. But every trip we make to my cousins’, I look forward to Shabbos, to Havdalah, like they’re literal gifts. I feel the yearning in my blood, the desire for connection to a people, to my childhood, to . . . I couldn’t even really say what. I’m Jewish no matter what I do. Whether I keep kosher or light candles or believe in G-d or don’t.

  I know that.

  Judaism is a people and a culture and a religion and a thousand different things, and it’s me, either way. But when I’m with them, it’s not something I know. It something that—well, it feels like the people and the practice are mine.

  So much of Jewish ritual is kindled in fire. It’s in Havdalah, in Shabbos, in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Black fire on white fire and day after day after holy day; I don’t get to kindle flame for tradition, really, outside Uncle Reuben and Aunt Adah’s, and every time I do, it’s almost painful to acknowledge that I miss it—that I really miss something from when I was five years old.

  Fire is so deeply a part of our tradition that looking at it, now, of all times, in the lonely, dangerous dark, feels like wrapping a six-thousand-year-old blanket around me.

  I keep these thoughts to myself and curl deeper into them.

  This is too deeply private, too deeply mine.

  The fire cracks, pops, hisses as it consumes the dead things we fed it, and darkness falls.

  In the dark, every noise feels louder.

  The fact that we don’t have a tent or a cave or any cover that isn’t trees becomes so much more evident tonight— alone, in the dark.

  Somewhere far off, or I hope it’s far off, a howl slices through the quiet, and I shrink against Jonah. He casually slides an arm over my shoulder and pulls me into him, and it’s so solid, so comforting, it doesn’t even feel sexual.

  It doesn’t feel like A Move.

  It feels necessary. It feels like human connection in the dark.

  I can feel the strength in his arms, the solid rise of his chest when he hugs me close to him and rests his chin on my head.

  It’s too intimate, but it’s not close enough.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “No, it’s not,” I say.

  We might as well be strangers.

  But he presses his mouth into my hair.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I AM AWAKE FOR the ninth time.

  In the deep, fathomless dark.

  Again when the stars have shifted in the sky.

  One more time when the black turns to gray.

  The sun rises and I lie there tucked against his chest, shuddering. He curls his arms around me and I push back into him because maybe I can get warm. Maybe I can trick my body into thinking this tiny increase in body temperature passes for heat.

  Maybe the points of my spine that press into his chest will catch fire.

  If I imagine it hard enough, I can pretend well enough that it’s real.

  I blow out through my mouth, and the moisture clouds on the gray-dark air.

  His breath feathers my hair, warm on the back of my neck, and I can’t even appreciate being this close to this cute a boy, can’t really relish the musculature of his arms around me, the feel of his mouth so close to my skin.

  All I can think of is the warmth, the most basic desire for temperature, for something that passes for shelter.

  I can’t stop thinking about how the air prickles my skin, how it seeps down through my big, fluffy coat to whisper over each little hair and bleed deep into my veins. And thinking about it makes me colder.

  I shiver. Violently.

  Jonah jumps and says, “What, what, what is—” Then his voice, rough with sleep, fades. I can feel him slow behind me. Stretching and groaning.

  He says, “Sorry. You okay?”

  “Mmhmm,” I say.

  He leans forward, just the smallest bit, and rests his forehead on the back of my neck. It prickles where his longish kinks and curls brush against me.

  “We should get up,” he mutters.

  “But this ground is so comfortable.”

  I don’t hear the laugh so much as I feel it.

  He presses his fingertips, the smallest bits of pressure, into my shoulder, and I roll over to face him. My breath probably sucks. I don’t think either of us cares.

  He says, “How’s that heart rate?”

  I say, “Okay,” and impossibly, given the situation in the most macrocosmic and microcosmic ways, I’m telling the truth.

  “Your head?” He presses his knuckles to my forehead, which is no longer clammy.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I feel a lot better. Seriously.”

  He searches me for just a minute longer, then decides to be satisfied. “Okay. Okay, you tell me if that changes today.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I snuggle back into him, like I can shut out the day looming ahead if I just use the large boy I barely know to keep me warm and safe.

  “Come on,” he says. He stands slowly. “Goddamn, my all of me.”

  “Ugh, oh no.”

  “Is this what it feels like to be thirty?”

  I laugh, even though I know I’m about to be in a world of hurt. I curl up on myself just for a moment, to experience a half a second before reality sinks in, and then I stand.

  “Fuck,” I say. I wiggle my limbs and it comes out like this frantic dance. Half-growling, half-crying, trying to rid all my bones and muscles of the aftereffects of sleeping all night on the frozen ground.

  “It’s okay. Shake it off.”

  “I am shaking it off.”

  “Jesus, my back,” he groans.

  “Dude, are you thirty?”

  He rolls his eyes and stretches up on his tiptoes, lengthening every muscle, reaching his fists to the sky in this wishbone of a position, and silhouetted against the blue-pink dark, he’s fucking gorgeous.

  My lips part watching him.

  He settles back down on the balls of his feet and glances over at me, and I snap my mouth shut.

  “Ready to get this party started?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I snag a small pack of Oreos out of his backpack and say, “Breakfast of champions.”

  He doesn’t reach for his own bag of Oreos; he picks out of mine, and I know that’s the right call. We need to conserve food. But my stomach twists when he does; I want to snarl and yank it back. The Oreos are the precious.

  I don’t. I keep a smile plastered on my face and watch while he consumes my calories.

  “Let’s formulate a plan,” I say when the crunching subsides and we have both eaten enough to actually think.

  “Well,” he says, “that peak is out.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I mean . . . I don’t really know if there’s a plan to be had—”

  “Downhill then,” I say.

  He purses his lips. “Why?”

  “We can’t go uphill.”

  “So that’s it—that’s the brilliant plot?”

  I fold my arms across my chest. “Tell me if you’ve got something better.”

  “I don’t. How could I? Your thing isn’t exactly ironclad.”

  “But it’s something.”

  He growls. “How about west?”

  “West?” I say.

  He points in the opposite direction of the sun. “Yes. West is back toward New Snowy Ridge.”

  I follow his finger and say, “That’s where we were headed all day yesterday anyway. I say we keep an eye on the sun and work on heading downhill. We should find water.”

  “Hm,” he says. “Well. You might have a point.”

  “I know.”

  “If we can find water, we can follow it down, at least to a drainage. Probably to a town or something.”

  I feel my posture straighten with pride. Look at me; I suggested something right. East Coast cit
y girl does know something. Well, I mean, I knew the human body needed water to survive. That counts for . . . something.

  I say, “I’m not arguing with you agreeing with me, but why does down equal town?”

  “It doesn’t exactly; it’s just that that’s where you’re gonna find rivers. And people tend to have built up around rivers. Historically. Follow a river far enough, you’ll stumble upon them eventually.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Cool.”

  He starts walking, and I walk beside him, and when I see him out of the corner of my eye, he’s hunched and tense. His expression has changed.

  It changed the moment he said it.

  I don’t say what we’re both thinking: how long is eventually? And how much eventually can we survive?

  It’s so quiet, for so long.

  All I can hear is the quiet of the snowfall, the crunch of the snow under our feet.

  The fear.

  It should be quiet, a feeling like that. But it’s not. It’s all I can hear running through my head.

  I think, as we walk, that it shouldn’t be like this between us. Quiet, odd. Jonah has never been exuberantly talkative. But it’s not like . . . it’s not like with Jaxon and Jolie, he’s a man of few words. He’s expressive and fun and witty and relaxed. Even with Tzipporah! With Sam!

  It’s not that he’s just the strong, silent type.

  It’s that he’s with me.

  I chew my lip and run through the last seventeen years. I wonder what I’ve been kept from because my parents can’t get their shit together.

  I’ve been kept from a hundred Instagram conversations that I can’t seem to break into, can’t seem to understand, because I don’t get my cousins’ inside jokes.

  From dances and talent shows and shopping and hiking and birthdays, because my parents decided to move to the other side of the country and to make sure everyone knew we were separate from all of them.

  Some people have hard family, is the thing.

  Some people have drama and toxicity and backstabbing.

  They have people worth getting away from.

  But I don’t know. Walking with Jonah, I just . . . cannot stop thinking about the time I was twelve.

  We were out here visiting, not for the annual ski trip for once, and I was at Jaxon and Jolie’s house. They had no idea how hard I had to beg, to plead, to get my parents to let me go.