The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

  For a second, I’m caught there. In the look in his eyes that I can’t even begin to unravel. It’s ten thousand threads of wanting and desperation and questions and fear and all the knowledge in the universe and the understanding that we are the only two humans on this whole goddamn planet.

  It is not a surprise when he takes my face in his hand

  When the heel of his hand, his palm, his fingers press my ear

  My cheekbone

  My jaw

  When he pulls me toward him with the smallest pressure in the tips of his fingers and kisses me.

  It is so slow that it fucking hurts.

  I think that maybe I’ve never kissed anyone in my life.

  We touch each other, under the black sky and a million stars that shine a million miles away, stars that make up the backdrop of this crucial twenty-four hours, this life-altering turn of a night, and that do not give a single shit about us.

  We are not imprinted in the memory of the stars.

  Anyway, it’s the vastness of the black that’s imprinted in mine.

  We shift back into the cave, inch by inch, toward the warmth of the crackling fire.

  Eventually, we pull apart.

  Jonah adds a few sticks to the fire and I shift back against him.

  He starts to run his fingers over my hair.

  I breathe out a sigh, the smallest, most inexplicable smile touching my mouth.

  His hand carelessly brushes across strands of my hair, and we’re both breathing in smoke and I think, absently, that I bet I’ll go out smelling like a campfire, and then the thought drifts off on the wind.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Tomorrow doesn’t matter; all my ideas and plans for after and speculations and . . . they don’t matter.

  This matters.

  Feeling every single bit, every single pinprick of sensation in my brain and blood and skin right here right now is the only thing that matters.

  Ever.

  I feel.

  Every single bit.

  Every single pinprick.

  When he sucks in the shallowest breath.

  Then he releases it and his arm curls over my torso and he brushes his fingers back and forth over the softness of my stomach.

  I should not feel safe.

  But I do.

  He says into my ear, “Jesus. I’m snuggling you and I’m totally into it. And not even in a horny way.”

  My own laughter is the thing that lulls me into sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE SECOND THING I notice when I wake up is the storm gathering outside the cave. The sky is growling, and rain is pouring down.

  The first is Jonah shaking me and yelling, “Hallie. HALLIE,” in my ear until I nearly haul off and punch him in his beautiful, perfect face.

  “Oh my god,” I groan. It’s still dark outside, for Christ’s sake. And my limbs kind of hurt. One in particular; I must have injured it yesterday—surprise, surprise.

  I’m cold.

  I’m hot.

  I’m annoyed.

  He says, “Hallie, someone’s here.”

  That wakes me up.

  I jump out of the blanket, then realize I’m naked and it’s freezing and quickly burrow under it again, yelling at Jonah to grab my clothes.

  Even under the circumstances, he smirks.

  I blush.

  Then I start yelling again.

  He tosses me everything I discarded last night in a fit of hypothermic passion, and I say, “What makes you think there’s someone here? Not something, right? Not like another killer moose or wandering bear or—”

  “No,” he says, holding out his hand and staring outside. “It’s someone. I swear, I heard—I think I—it sounded like . . .”

  I hug my coat around my shoulders and grab his hand, then tighten my fingers. “Sounded like who, Jonah?”

  “Like—like your cousin. Like Tzipporah.”

  “What?” I say.

  Hope chokes me. I shove it down and grit my teeth. It can’t be her; it can’t be them. That’s just—it’s too much to want. It’s not possible.

  He’s hallucinating, maybe.

  Maybe he’s just that far gone, and this is it for us.

  I shut my eyes tight and brace for the possibility.

  I feel Jonah’s fingers crushing over mine and he tugs me closer.

  “Hallie?” he says.

  I open them.

  “Do you trust me?”

  I blow out a breath. It slides out onto the ice air in a white cloud. “Y-yes,” I say.

  We leave the cave together.

  It’s a full minute of walking, and then I see it: a bobbing flashlight.

  “Oh my god,” I breathe. “Oh my god.”

  My exhausted legs do not leave me the choice of running—I can’t do anything more than walk, but I’m crying. This is it; this is it.

  It’s someone.

  We get closer to the light, and I hear what Jonah heard: “HALLIE.”

  I sob. Immediately.

  “We’re here!” I scream back, but my voice is swallowed by thunder.

  The crash is so massive I can feel it in the ground. Lightning makes the whole sky electric white. I jump.

  I would shrink back against Jonah in service of some kind of evolutionary BIG GUY IS PROTECT kind of instinct, but he jumps harder than I do, so I just keep walking, shouting out that we’re here, we’re here, WE’RE HERE.

  The snowmelt seeps into my jeans, leaks into my fire-dried boots, but it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? We’re found. We’re saved.

  We’re okay.

  I shout again, ignoring the persistent crashes of thunder, the ever-brightening sky, the sharp, freezing rain now pouring from the sky.

  I don’t hear Tzipporah’s voice first; I hear Jolie’s.

  I can’t run to her, but she’s running to me.

  The thunder and lightning are nearly on top of one another now—one massive cascade of sound and light— and I ignore it, it barely even registers, until Jonah screams, “FUCK,” and a tree just yards ahead of us cracks and bursts into flame.

  He shoves an arm out on instinct and I run right into it, screaming, because the tree groans, sparking and smoking and blazing, and every one of us hears the s-p-l-i-t.

  The sky, and the fire before it’s drenched by the rain, are kind enough to illuminate the entire scene as it plays out: the dramatic Homeward Bound limping toward each other breath before the reunion—and the branch of the old, dry, dying tree cracking off and slamming into my favorite cousin.

  Suddenly, I am more than capable of running.

  I sprint off toward her, gritting my teeth past the pain in my leg from whatever irrelevant thing I did to it yesterday, and make it to her just as three of my other cousins catch up.

  I do not have time to ask where the others are.

  To ask why only the older ones are here.

  To contemplate all the horrible reasons it might be that the only ones I see are Tzipporah, Sam, Jaxon, and Jolie.

  I only have time to fix things.

  I snap out, “Where? Where did it hit her?” and Tzipporah swings the flashlight to face Jolie, who’s gasping for breath.

  The massive branch has her thigh pinned to the snow.

  “Jolie?” I say, “are you bleeding?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know, I don’t know, I just—”

  I say, “We have to get her inside,” and stare at Jonah, who immediately rushes to her side and starts looking for a handhold. “Christ, Hal,” he says, eyeing me over the branch. “It’s heavy. I can’t—”

  “Lucky I’ve got these massive guns,” I say, and I pull, but he’s right. I can’t possibly lift it.

  “I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this,” I say.

  “You don’t, dumbasses. There’s five of us.” The other three situate themselves around Jolie. She coughs out a sob.

  Right. Right, it’s not just us.

  God. It’s not just us.r />
  I have to laser in not to cry from the unbelievable relief.

  We count.

  And we all lift as a unit.

  It’s heavy and dense and the tree groans when we pull, but we do, and Jolie scrambles out from under it.

  “We have a cave,” I manage, and as the sky absolutely drenches us and spurs us on with its furious crashes and streaks of lightning cracking in the air, we run.

  Jolie props herself up between Jaxon and Sam, and they do most of the work pulling her along.

  Finally, finally, the mouth of the cave appears, and we all settle in.

  Jaxon gets Jolie in one of those thin heat-holding blankets paramedics give people in all the movies (they’re life-saving little things), and I do a check to make sure she doesn’t have anything worse going on other than some cuts and major bruising. Then Jaxon takes out a lighter and reignites the fire with that and a fire starter kit he also has in his Mary Poppins bag of holding.

  Tzipporah, meanwhile, has handed everyone bottled waters and granola bars, and I meet Jonah’s eyes when I dig into mine; I don’t know which tastes better: the water or the food.

  “How the hell have you all fared so much better than we have? Well. Wait. Wait, where are Lydia and Oliver? Oh my god, are they dead? Oh my god.”

  “Hallie,” says Jaxon, and he clamps his hands around my shoulders. “Hallie. Hold on.”

  “Are they okay?” Tears prick at my eyes and I’m shaking and I’m hot all over. I’m so hot suddenly.

  “They’re fine,” he says.

  I blink.

  Sam says, “We were found a day and a half after you left.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Oh, thank G-d.” I’m relieved for them. And I’m furious. This was all for nothing—why are we so stupid.

  “We tried to find you. They all did—Search and Rescue, everything,” says Jaxon. “But you—” He looks up at Jonah and something passes between them. Something intimate and brotherly and desperate. “—you were just. Fucking gone.”

  “How?” I whisper.

  “Hunter’s field cam,” says Sam. “You tripped it with motion. A hunter caught onto it being weird footage and turned it in. We came up here to find you, but Search and Rescue said no. There was apparently some sort of ‘big storm’ coming or WHATEVER.”

  We all laugh, too hard, too loud, a release of a million kinds of tension.

  “So you just . . . you just came up here? Without them?”

  “You’re family,” says Jaxon, and I . . . I start to cry.

  Despite the fire, I’m absolutely freezing, so I lean back into Jonah and let my eyes shut lazily, open slowly. I’m so suddenly safe. Relaxed.

  The storm is wicked outside and we’ll be here another night, but we are family.

  And we are okay.

  Jonah wraps his arm around me and brushes my hair back from my forehead—a combination of gestures that raises a few eyebrows but no one says anything.

  Then he says, “Jesus, you’re hot.”

  I suck in a breath and move to respond with something cute or snarky, but suddenly my teeth are chattering too hard.

  “You’re clammy.”

  “It’s the rain.”

  He draws his hand back and tightens it around my arm to turn me to face him.

  “Hallie, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. It comes out a little breathier than I intended, but I’m sure I’m fine. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m just weak because of this whole shocking ordeal. Because of surprise and relief. Because . . . I’m still hungry. Dehydrated.

  I say, “I’m fine,” and the breath catches in my lungs. I feel hot and cold and my leg is so hot, it’s so hot, and it hurts.

  I’m so weak?

  When the hell did this happen?

  I was fine last night, and I was fine pulling Jolie to safety and sitting here talking and now . . .

  The adrenaline of everything is beginning to wear off and things are starting to hurt.

  I reach for my leg and pull back like it’s on fire.

  Jaxon furrows a brow. “Are you—is everything okay?”

  “I don’t—” I move to unbutton my pants and say, “Turn around. Don’t look; it’s weird.”

  Jaxon throws his hands in the air and spins.

  I yank my jeans down around my ankles and almost scream when the fabric slides over my shin.

  “JESUS CHRIST,” I yell and Jonah curses.

  “Don’t look,” he says, but it’s too late.

  I’ve looked.

  My shin is swollen. It’s bright pink and shiny red and furious. “Oh my god,” I say.

  “It’s fine.” He says it like he’s desperate.

  “Jonah.”

  “It’s fine; put your pants back on.”

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “Yes you can—you’re going to freeze, Hallie.”

  He’s using my first name and that scares me, or it would scare me under normal circumstances. It should scare me, a lot of things should, but I just feel like I want to crawl into my bed and never come out.

  My leg is infected.

  That’s the long and short of it.

  My leg is infected up here on a mountain and I can’t even put my pants on over it and I’m still starving and still dehydrated and we’re trapped by a storm and this is it.

  This is what does me in, I guess.

  Jonah goes searching for something in his bag.

  “Shit,” Tzipporah breathes.

  I love it when Tzipporah swears, under typical circumstances. Not right now. Right now it scares the hell out of me.

  “Jonah—” I say, and Jonah emerges from his bag with a pocket knife.

  Adrenaline kicks me into awareness. “What. What is that.”

  “It’s infected,” he says.

  “Yes.” I can feel my pulse pounding in my ears.

  The sweat drying on me and the pain on my skin and the infection in my leg that popped up overnight. Who even knows when I got it? It could have been anything that did it. Big or small. I bet it was running from that big, stupid moose.

  “I think—okay listen, don’t look at me like I’m completely nuts, but I think if we try to relieve the pressure . . .”

  “Absolutely not,” I say.

  The thought of anything touching my leg after the jeans about made me leap out of my skin makes me want to die.

  “You can’t cut her open,” Jolie says, and I can hear her voice shaking with my entire body.

  Jaxon says, “Jonah . . .”

  Jonah ignores everyone but me. “Hallie—”

  “No,” I say. “No, you can’t. We can’t.”

  “You can’t walk on that.”

  “Yes I can,” I say. I roll over to my butt and move to stand, and the pain in my leg is astounding.

  My breath leaves my body.

  I crumple.

  “You can’t even put on pants. Hallie, I don’t want to do this, but we’ve got to give it a chance to drain.”

  “I can’t walk or touch my leg with fabric,” I say through tears pricking my eyes, “and you think our best option is to slice it open?”

  He throws his hands in the air. Then he says, “Yes!”

  I stare down at my leg. At the livid, swollen flesh. At the knife glinting in Jonah’s hand. And back at my shin. “I don’t . . . I don’t want you to do that.”

  The water crashes down outside. I swear it’s like living in an air bubble under floodwaters. My absolute horror is punctuated with the thunder.

  “How far away is your truck?” I ask, biting down on tears.

  Tzipporah says, “A couple miles.”

  “I can make that,” I say, and move to stand again, but when I do, I collapse again. The sudden drop in energy, the exertion of the tree on Jolie—everything is coming to a head.

  “You can’t,” says Tzipporah. “None of us can. Those roads are absolute mud now. And we can’t go out in that.” She looks down at my shin. “Jesus, Hal.”

&nb
sp; “What am I supposed to do?” Jonah says. Then, “You’re the EMT. You tell me.” His shoulders drop and the relief on his face is palpable. It’s not on him anymore; it’s on me.

  And everyone has stopped objecting.

  Which means I have to be the one to decide that he needs to slice me open.

  I stare down at my leg. It’s pulsing now, pain pumping through it and fading and spiking again. “Fuck,” I whisper. It comes out with tone, and I squeeze my eyes shut. “Yeah, you’re going to have to do it. Just. Cut me.”

  Jonah sucks on his teeth and the knife starts to shake in his hands. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

  I blow out a breath. I’m shaking. I don’t know if it’s because it hurts or because I’m cold or because I’m scared.

  I almost feel like it’s pointless. Like, who gives a shit; we’re going to die anyway. But I’m also not so committed to death that I can give up because my leg hurts.

  I grit my teeth.

  “Do you—” Jolie starts. “Do you need my help? Do you want me to—” She cuts herself off. She’s still trembling from the pain of her leg, and who honestly knows what damage sustained—and she sees it, I know. The intimacy between Jonah and me. The new intangible thing that says, I trust this boy more than anyone I’ve ever known.

  Of course he’d be the one to do it.

  Why would anyone else?

  Jonah closes his hand over my thigh, each finger pressing into my skin. “Don’t move, okay?”

  I’m trying not to cry. “Okay,” I say. It’s hoarse.

  He breathes. Steadies the knife.

  “Sterilize it!”

  He jumps. “Fuck. Right. Right.”

  Both of us release a wave of tension, like Jonah needing to take a moment to clean his knife means that by the time he’s done, everything will be better. Like the delay will mean he doesn’t have to cut my freaking leg open.

  Jesus.

  He hands it to one of my cousins. I don’t even see who; I don’t care. They come back with a knife that’s dripping with rainwater and hand it back to Jonah.

  I shudder.

  I hug the blanket around me like safety.

  “Hallie,” Jonah says.

  I shut my eyes and clench my jaw.

  “Hallie.”

  “What?”

  His hand is on my shin, clamping down, holding me still.

  “Look at me.”