The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

  I furrow my brow. “I don’t think I’d phrase it that way.”

  “Oh, too crass for your delicate ears?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You really take pleasure in plans, don’t you?”

  “Jesus, dude, that’s worse.”

  He laughs.

  “I’m not that obsessed with plans.”

  “HA. Okay.”

  “Well, what about you, Mr. Devil May Care? I bet you have college mapped out. I bet you get off on it.”

  His eyes brighten again and I can feel it down to my toes this time. “No, nerd. I don’t get off on college, but yeah, I’d sure as hell better have a map. I’m a sophomore.”

  “Right,” I say. I don’t know why I’d forgotten that. He’s two years older than I am. He both seems totally experienced like that and totally like he’s still in high school. Like he’s my age. I don’t know, it’s hard to parse out and harder to explain.

  “I’m on track. I’ve switched majors three times, but I got my gen eds first. I’m actually double majoring. Not just in anthro. Finally getting into what I care about.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Poli sci.”

  “Seriously?” I say, blinking. I don’t know why that’s a surprise. Honestly, I don’t know what he could have said that wouldn’t have been surprising.

  “Yeah, seriously. I don’t know what I want to do with it yet. Maybe international relations. Maybe I want to get more into activism, really fuck up all the Nazis in Denver, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say, even though I don’t know. Not really.

  Normally, I’d let that slide. Pretend I knew more than I did and google it, but suddenly I feel naked. Without my smartphone, without access to the knowledge of the whole world at my fingertips.

  And I feel like . . . like for once, pretending is wasting time.

  I blink at the snowy ground in front of me, realizing just now that my toes have gone numb. That . . . can’t be good.

  But it’s not like there’s anywhere good to stop.

  Not like there’s anything here but more snow, more snow, more snow.

  So I say—even though asking a question of another human being, a question I could have found the answer to myself under normal circumstances, feels shockingly, startlingly vulnerable—“I didn’t . . . I thought Denver was, like, this liberal paradise.”

  It’s silent for a second, and then Jonah laughs out loud. “Yeah, you want progressive, let me just point you at a city with a fuck-ton of white people in it.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Huh. Yeah, good point.”

  Jonah runs a hand back over his hair. He wears it big and natural, and the snow dots it with little white freckles before it melts. His fingers are chapped already—they’re flaking and a little pale. I don’t even want to know what mine look like. They’re probably cracked. Thankfully, they’re under the gloves that halfway dried overnight. If I see them bleeding, it will only make it worse.

  “Let me just . . . let me put it this way. Denver votes blue. It’s liberal. It’s liberal. It’s not progressive. Denver votes to let people do whatever the hell they want to do, so they can shut up about it and live their lives and not worry about you after election day.”

  I don’t say anything. I wait. I walk. I don’t want to say a thing because, for the first time, maybe in forever, I’m listening to Jonah be passionate about something. Getting a glimpse into what he really cares about, what he’s majoring in, something beyond him bullshitting tough and hitting on me.

  I listen.

  He says, “Because they vote for Democrats and whatever the fuck. And then the city passes legislation that bans homeless people from sleeping in public, and no one but a couple activists cares. They vote to let people smoke weed, but let every Black dude who’s been locked up for weed in the city stay locked away in jail for shit white people can do legally now. They fake like they’re progressive and then write up profiles on Nazis like what matters is their haircuts. Do you even fucking know how many Nazis there are here?”

  I swallow. “I should, I guess. Nazis all over in Massachusetts too and, like, welcome to Whiteville. I’ve gone to protests and seen my cemeteries vandalized. I know about Nazis, man.”

  He says, “Yeah. I guess you would, huh.”

  I shrug. “Comes with the Tribe. But I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think it would be worse here than a million other places.”

  “It’s just that—no one cares here. No one cares. Even though all the Denver patriot militias are taking over the goddamn city. Because that would require getting up off their asses and caring about people who aren’t rich and straight and abled and white. That would require being impolite. It would require not being Apathy, the City™. Anyway,” he says, clearing his throat. “Sorry, yeah, anyway. It just gets me so furious that people think Portland and Seattle and Denver are the least racist places in the country, like it’s even physically possible for totally white-ass places to somehow be the least racist. Jesus. Anyway. Anyway. Poli sci.” Another clearing of the throat. “I’m kind of . . . I kind of get a little overly passionate. Or whatever.”

  Now I bet my eyes look like a She-Ra character’s. All sparkles and sunshine. Like his did a second ago. Because my gosh, I’ve never seen him . . . never seen him care. Like this. Enough to get lost in his own head yelling about something.

  It’s not what I ever expected of him.

  I guess that’s not fair, because how can either of us really know enough about the other to have any expectations?

  But here I am.

  Surprised.

  I say, “No. It’s good. To care.”

  He shrugs.

  “Especially when it’s something like that. That matters.”

  He just kind of grunts and keeps walking.

  And the snow continues to fall.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHEN THE SKY CLEARS and the exhaustion sets in, we find a copse of trees to sink into and eat lunch.

  Lunch is a total feast: granola! Jerky! Some cheese. I feel a little weird eating the beef and cheese together because it’s not kosher, and even though my parents don’t keep it anymore, that’s something I never felt right about. There’s a lot of mitzvot I don’t keep, like, a lot, but the kashrut stuff was too drilled into me as a little kid, I think, living near my grandparents out here. So yeah, I feel weird. Weird enough to hesitate. But preservation of life is like, NUMBER ONE and supersedes almost everything when it comes down to it, so that matters a whole lot more than not eating milk and meat together. This feels pretty preservation-of-lifey, so I tear into both.

  My stomach hurts.

  I twist open the last water bottle in our bag and take a long drink. “Fuck,” I whisper.

  Jonah glances at it grimly and takes a swallow, Adam’s apple shifting with the effort.

  His eyes linger on the water level.

  I follow his gaze and say, “We could just . . . we’re surrounded by snow, right?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “But it’s—we can’t just eat it.”

  “Why not?” It comes out defensive, angry almost. I blink at myself. “Right. Sorry. Right, the hypothermia. We’ll die.” I don’t say anything else. I just take another swallow, smaller this time. Less than I want to. Less than my throat is begging me for.

  Neither of us speaks for a minute, and I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: that neither of us had said that word yet: die.

  And suddenly it’s a real possibility.

  After taking a moment to breathe, I glance up at him and offer him the bottle.

  His pupils dilate right in front of me, looking at it.

  We used to play a game like that back in middle school, back when one of us learned that your pupils dilate when you look at something you want. We’d say the name of someone cute and watch everyone’s eyes. Or, if someone didn’t know about the science, we’d troll him by having him look at whoever it was we wanted to know about.

  Of c
ourse, we’d always just accuse whoever we wanted of the appropriate level of pupil dilation, because like that would have ever actually worked. Like we could have actually seen the tiny physical response like that with the naked eye.

  The point is, this time, I see it.

  He shakes his head and stands, shaking his hands out.

  “Get up,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get up.”

  I scoff at being told what to do but ultimately stand like he says to.

  He’s moving from foot to foot, and I don’t know how he has the energy but I guess he does. Probably the burst from that whole ninety calories coursing through him.

  “It’ll warm you up, man—move.”

  “I’m tired,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes and says, “Christ, you whiner.”

  I rub my hands together and hop in place to get my blood moving. “You’re an asshole.”

  He smiles, baring his teeth.

  “Now listen,” he says. “I told you I was gonna teach you some mountain lion protection techniques.”

  “Ah right, yes. Lest a wild animal attack us.” I say that like it’s not a real possibility, like this whole thing is fake and I’m watching it on a screen.

  “Yeeeessss,” he says. “There’s animals here; it’s the woods.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Thanks, did the Boy Scouts teach you that?”

  He flips his middle finger at me and says, “Listen, smartass.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “A mountain lion comes at you, you’re gonna want to run. Don’t do that.”

  “O-okay.”

  “You want to start by looking tough. Which . . . good luck.”

  I groan and close the distance between us to shove him. He stumbles back on his heels and laughs. “Make yourself big and back up.”

  “I thought you said earlier that I should stand my ground?”

  “Yeah, but you stand still, you get eaten. You run, you get eaten.”

  “Not leaving me with a whole lot of options here, slick.”

  “Be big. Back slowly away.”

  I blow out a breath. “Bigger than a mountain lion?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You’re probably bigger than a lion, dude.”

  “What?”

  “I was on a hunt a couple years back and the guy bagged a really big cat. Just short of the books. You know how big he was? Like a buck fifty.”

  Oh. Well. Alright then.

  I entallen myself. I hold my arms so that it really looks like I have biceps. I do have biceps, as a matter of fact; you want to be a firefighter, you lift heavy. But I exaggerate the stance. I puff out my chest.

  Jonah smiles. “Nice. So you back off. Slow. And you yell. Huge, loud noises. Make yourself totally terrifying. Hopefully he doesn’t touch you.”

  I nod. It’s still a game when we’re playing it this way, still not real. It’s dress rehearsal, not the show.

  “What happens if he attacks anyway?”

  Jonah chews on the inside of his cheek.

  “I’m dead?” I take that to mean.

  “Not necessarily. You hear about that dude who got attacked by a lion while he was out running in Colorado? Choked the thing out?”

  “Holy shit,” I say.

  “Yeah. Someone’s never hurting for a blow job again.”

  I snort.

  “Priority,” he says, “is to protect yourself.”

  “Duh.”

  He takes a step closer to me, and a cold breeze whispers its way into my coat, a couple errant snowflakes riding on it. It’s not even really snowing; it’s just like the world is existing in the middle of a floating drift. Lazy flakes deciding to form here and there and melt any place your skin had started to acclimate.

  “So,” he says, “a lion attacks you, he’s going to go for your neck. Protect it. No matter what.”

  My own hand instinctively slips up toward my throat, and he says, “No. Like this,” and grabs my wrist, then yanks it away from my jugular. He takes my left wrist in his other hand, and god, his hands are so big that he can loop his index finger all the way around my bones until it overlaps his whole thumb. I swallow hard as he presses into my pulse and shoves my hands so they’re around the back of my neck, elbows coming together in front of my throat.

  “Like this,” he says.

  His chest is pressed against mine, and I can feel him shift, even under the coat. I can see the pulse pounding in the veins of his throat, make out every little hair on his face that he hasn’t shaved in days.

  My pulse is jumping all over the place; I can’t breathe.

  “You got it?” he says, staring down at me.

  I’m so cold, and I’m so tired, and I’m so . . . I can’t stop looking at his mouth.

  He is breathing my air.

  I watch his breath cloud out into the cold and disappear when I inhale.

  “I—yeah,” I say.

  He drops my hands and I only have a heartbeat to recover before he’s backing up and crouching, circling like he’s going to attack me.

  My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline and he lunges.

  I forget everything.

  I forget what to protect, I forget my hand placement, I forget.

  Until he’s chest to chest with me again, huge hand digging into the back of my neck like jaws.

  “Game over,” he whispers.

  I fucking shudder.

  He doesn’t let go.

  I can’t stop looking at him, can’t stop breathing in the cool scent of the mountain snow combined with sweat, can’t tell the difference between the adrenaline running because of potential mountain lion attack versus the intolerable closeness of Jonah freaking Ramirez. I am overwhelmed.

  The points of his fingertips are digging into the muscles of my neck.

  They’re going to bruise.

  He says, voice low, “Protect yourself.”

  I shake him off and back up.

  If just . . . to be able to breathe, Jesus.

  He cocks his head. “You ready?”

  I open my mouth to say yes and he comes at me, and this time, I bring my arms up around my neck, elbows at my throat.

  He grabs for my arm and I shove him off.

  He comes at my back, and I whirl around in time for him to grab at my neck again. But my arms are in the way.

  He clamps down on my forearm and spins me so my back is pressed to his chest.

  “Not bad,” he says into my ear.

  I feel myself lean, relaxing back into him.

  I feel him breathe.

  I feel him smile against my ear.

  And I elbow him in the stomach.

  “Fuck, goddamn, shit—”

  He coughs and I prance forward. “Protect yourself.”

  I face him, hand on my hip, and he’s doubled over, breathing.

  After a minute, in which I am only slightly concerned that I took it too far, he pushes up with his hands on his knees.

  Then he manages to stand.

  He coughs out a laugh.

  “Well,” he says, “lesson learned.”

  “You think I can survive a cougar?”

  He shrugs. “Beats me, but I’m sure as hell not going through another drill.”

  I laugh and he breathes jaggedly for another minute before glancing up at the sky that’s going gray.

  “Come on,” he says. “We should keeping moving.”

  Yeah.

  Yeah, I guess we should.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE PRIORITY, WE HAVE decided, has to be finding water, and not just water but drinking water. It wasn’t something either of us thought of earlier even though it should have been; it should have been the very first thing. Because when you’re surrounded by water, even if it’s in the wrong form, it’s so easy to forget that you might die.

  I guess the priority was water to begin with: rivers leading to civilization and all that. But now it’s urgent.

  Now that our water bottl
es are gone, it’s necessary.

  We’ve both filled our water bottles with snow and keep shaking them and wrapping them in our coats and breathing on them and doing whatever we can to get them to melt into something drinkable, something that won’t make either of us freeze to death.

  We’ve been walking all day and at least we seem to be descending, when it comes to altitude, which? I guess is good? But I feel like we’re getting nowhere.

  I feel like we’re complete idiots.

  How many stories have both of us read of hikers who left the vehicle and died in the desert, you know? This is like Getting Lost 101—you don’t do this.

  But I keep thinking about Sam.

  I keep thinking about Lydia

  Someone had to do something for them, right?

  They had to—they had to.

  I hug my arms around me as my breath clouds and my lips actually feel blue.

  If I tell myself this was the right decision over and over, it will somehow change things. Like the principle of the matter will save my life.

  Our lives.

  I watch Jonah, trudging along, hands shoved deep down into his pockets, head down, and see him shiver.

  For some reason, that’s so fucking terrifying.

  Like that really confirms it’s cold.

  I wonder how everyone is, and then I shut my eyes tight and block it out. I can’t think about that—they’re fine. Everyone is fine, and we have to press on like they’re okay, and we are their last hope.

  The sun falls fast when it falls.

  The sky goes from light to dark in a heartbeat; it’s almost eerie.

  But there’s nowhere to sleep and we both know it. We can’t hunker down until we find something that doesn’t mean lying on the snow under a pine tree again. I don’t know about Jonah, but my significantly in-shape muscles are screaming and my back is screaming and the idea of shivering on the ground with the complete lack of cover we have right now, just us and the coyotes howling, makes me want to die.

  I can’t.

  We can’t.

  Neither of us says anything.

  We just both understand—and keep walking.

  Eventually, trees appear again, yay hooray.

  The night gets darker and colder and, I swear to god, I’m about to just start crying and I probably already would have if I wasn’t so deeply conscientious of keeping all possible water inside me right now.