The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

  I do what he says.

  He stares at me, and I can feel the cool of the blade on my leg.

  I gasp from the gentle contact, but he doesn’t look away. He holds me there in his solid gaze. I can’t look away and I don’t want to.

  We are the only ones in this cave. It is only us. Just him and me.

  Nothing else exists.

  I can feel my breath speed, my pulse spike.

  My fingers rub threads of the blanket and I just—I don’t think. I give him the tiniest, non-committal nod.

  And he cuts.

  I fucking scream.

  “GOD,” I yell, and my back arches and I curl down over my stomach, hugging my leg to me. I’m sobbing, it hurts so intensely and coldly and Jesus I can’t breathe.

  Jonah grabs my leg and straightens it and wipes away the infection with a small piece of cloth Jaxon hands him. He applies a little pressure and I choke on how badly it hurts, on the crying. It’s getting the infection out as much as it can, it’s necessary it’s necessary it’s—

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Hal, sshhh.”

  He grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me into him, pressing me into his chest while I cry. Eventually, the throbbing dies down and I can’t feel blood and whatever else running down my leg, and that’s what Jonah says, “We need to sterilize the wound.”

  I mumble into his chest, “I didn’t bring a first aid kit because I’m stupid.”

  He says, “No shit.”

  I furrow my brow where he can’t see and he backpedals. He says, “Not that you’re stupid. That you didn’t bring a first aid kit.”

  “Mmm, likely story.”

  I shiver again.

  Now that the immediate terror of the leg slice has worn off, I can feel the wreck that my body has become again. I burrow deeper into his chest, like he can fix it.

  That’s when he says, “Listen, we can’t just let that sit there wide open.”

  I shrug. I’m so tired.

  He says, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Excuse me,” says someone.

  I think Jonah is done speaking so I open my mouth to say something exhausted and he continues, “Urine is sterile. It works as a disinfectant.”

  “What?” I say into the fabric of his shirt. It comes out, Whhbbb.

  “EXCUSE ME,” says someone.

  I hear the telltale thwwppp of a zipper and I say, “JONAH!”

  I recoil and he says, “WHAT. What else am I SUPPOSED to do?”

  I say, “WELL DON’T JUST FREAK OUT AND PEE ON ME!”

  He blusters.

  “PINE SAP,” I say. “Pine sap oh my god.”

  Jonah raises an eyebrow.

  “You’re the Boy Scout; you should know this. Put your dick away.”

  “My dick isn’t out, Jesus Chr—”

  “Pine sap functions as a disinfectant.”

  “Oh,” he say. “Oh, thank god.”

  “You sure? You weren’t set on peeing on me?”

  “No,” he says. “That’s white people shit.”

  I choke and laugh. Then choke again on the pain. “It’s antiseptic. And anti-inflammatory. And it legit closes wounds up; seriously, what did they teach you in wilderness survival?”

  “EXCUSE. ME.”

  We both blink.

  Sam throws her hands in the air. “Not trying to kink shame here, but of course we brought first aid? You absolute idiots?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Oh. Oh right.”

  I don’t know how I keep literally forgetting they’re here. They’re here, they came into the mountains to rescue us, but it’s like I don’t know how to rely on anyone but myself anymore.

  As though I was ever great at that in the first place.

  But they feel fake, like hallucinations. I keep instinctively falling back on us being completely alone.

  “So not. Not pine sap then,” I say.

  Sam says, “Or piss.”

  I laugh, and for a second, I forget how much everything hurts.

  Then my breathing slows and Jonah’s smirk disappears.

  I stretch when Sam pulls out a first aid kit—antiseptic, bandages, whatever else. I stare up at the smoke-stained cave ceiling while she works on me, focus on the divots and changes in color and texture in the stone.

  If I think about that, I can think past the searing pain in my leg and the worry in my chest that I’m so hot even in this cold. That I’m shivery and weak and am having a hard time thinking clearly.

  That I’m so desperately avoiding looking at my leg because I do not want to see those telltale red lines traveling up from the wounds.

  I hate that I know, in my silent heart of hearts, that what I am showing are signs of sepsis.

  When Sam pours something over my leg, I start giggling.

  “Hallie?” It’s Jaxon. Haha.

  “It kickles.” I frown. “Kickles.”

  I feel Jonah’s hand on my back.

  “Tickles,” I say, then I burst into harder laughter.

  “Hal?” says Jonah.

  “Mmmhmm?” The world starts to swim, just a little.

  Jonah does a double take, staring down at my shin. “You’re—oh. Oh shit.”

  I shut my eyes tight and force them to blink open. “What?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A little weird. Cold. Ha.”

  “Hallie,” he says, and he grabs my shoulders and runs his thumb over my shoulder blade. “Focus, yeah? How do you feel?”

  I shake my head. “I’m okay. I’m just kind of hot and sweaty. And tired; I think I’m just tired.”

  He purses his lips and his gaze tracks from my eyes down to my leg. “Don’t freak out.”

  “Lines?” I say.

  He swallows. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Listen to me, Jacob. You’re—we’re. We’re going to be fine.”

  I say, “Okay,” and I shiver and shake through slipping my jeans back on.

  The cousins are all quiet.

  No one says anything all night.

  Jonah lets me stay under this blanket with him near the dead ashes of the fire and fall asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I SLEEP FITFULLY.

  I shouldn’t be asleep.

  I should be moving.

  But everything hurts.

  I’m hungry and I’m thirsty, and by hungry, I mean my stomach is twisting in on itself.

  By thirsty, I mean my mouth is so dry I can barely swallow. I mean it’s literally painful to open it to talk. I mean my lips are dry and cracking and I cannot believe that I am drenched in sweat.

  How much more.

  Can I possibly sweat.

  I drain a water bottle and still, I’m freaking dying.

  I’m fresh out of energy and I can’t stop shuddering and I think it’s the shuddering that keeps waking me up.

  Sometimes I wake to Jonah holding me so tight that I can’t really shake, and I think I’ve fallen still. I think I am warm because of him and that the worst has passed.

  But then I can feel his heart beat against my back and I should be getting warmer; his body heat, even through his clothes, should be helping. But I’m so cold.

  Then I’m on fire again.

  I can’t even think right to remember what’s a good sign and what’s bad.

  My jaw hurts from clenching my teeth and I’m so.

  Tired.

  Snow begins to fall in place of last night’s rain storm and I don’t know if it started when I was sleeping or if I was staring out at the great white nothing and just . . . failed to notice it.

  Sharp flakes fall from the deep gray and I say, “We should move.”

  Jonah says, “What?”

  Sam says, “What?”

  I say, “We should—we should walk. We should go. We should . . . we should . . . the truck . . . we . . .”

  He moves very close to me, and I can see that his eyes are laced with violent red.
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  “Are you okay?” I say.

  “Am I okay? Jesus, Hallie.”

  “I like it when you call me Jacob,” I hear myself say, and I curl up against him and drift into darkness.

  The next time I’m conscious, I don’t know how long it’s been. The sky is still that milky gray, and the snow is falling, but it’s doing so with purpose. With fury. There were hours of peace in the early morning between the thunder and the snow, but the temperature has dropped by degrees and the world outside doesn’t look peaceful anymore.

  It looks scary.

  I can’t feel the fear, not really. Not as deeply as I should, I don’t think.

  But the sky looks violent.

  I hear shuffling deep in the cave. Then something smacks against the cave wall and I hear a loud stream of swears.

  “Jonah?”

  SWEAR SWEAR SWEAR SWEARING SWEARER SWEARING SWEAR.

  “I can’t—FUCK, I’m sorry; it’s this wind. I can’t get a fire going; are you cold? Are you cold, Jacob?”

  There’s a flurry of activity—multiple cousins moving at once and everyone freaking out and—

  “We have to get her out of here.”

  “She can’t stay any longer; I don’t care if it’s snowing. We have to get to the truck. Someone’s gotta contact Search and Rescue.”

  “Jolie has to stay.”

  Jonah’s voice: “Jolie can stay with her. I’m fast; let me and Jaxon go—”

  “Stay,” I say. “Jonah.” I’ve never done this before in my life. Needed someone enough to beg them to stay with me.

  I say it again: “Stay.”

  Jonah moves so fast; one second he’s far away cursing at the darkness and the other he has my face in his hands.

  There is nothing complex about the way he looks at me.

  Jonah Ramirez is afraid.

  The wind kicks up.

  Sam, Tzipporah, and Jaxon leave.

  They’ve been gone for a few minutes as a new storm— or the colder, more wicked piece of the last one—builds outside.

  Then it breaks.

  The whole entire sky is a dam and it releases with fury.

  Jonah is shaking and I can feel myself slip.

  I can feel it all just . . . slip away. Breath by breath.

  The snow is a wall outside. But—

  It’s not the cold of everything around us that gets to me in these last five minutes—it’s the heat building in me.

  The way my mind races hot and fast, knowing there’s no way out of this cave.

  The warmth that spreads through my body against the furious wind outside, the rock and ice walls of this cave— warmth that feels a whole lot like those last hazy seconds before sleep.

  The smoke and red in Jonah Ramirez’s eyes when he grabs my jaw and says through clenched teeth, “Don’t. Hallie Jacob, if you give up on me now, if you leave me alone up here, I will never fucking forgive you.”

  I blink.

  Slow.

  Breathe.

  One Mississippi.

  Snow and wind beating against the trees, the ground, everything, everything.

  Two Mississippi.

  Lightning, flash against a tree, snap and crackle and the clean stench of burning wood. They call it thundersnow, not that that matters now.

  Three.

  Three.

  I breathe the cold into my lungs.

  It all feels like ice. But touch it long enough, and ice starts to feel like fire.

  I brush my hand over Jonah’s knuckles on my jaw.

  The world lights up like a flare.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I HAVE SECONDS TO feel it

  before the world goes gray

  Two more

  Three

  and

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I WANT TO TELL everyone to stop touching me, stop touching me, my skin hurts, everything hurts.

  I’m so thirsty.

  I’m on fire.

  Stop touching me, stop talking to me.

  I try to talk but I can’t. I’m just being jostled everywhere and how am I supposed to focus through this?

  I say, “No no,” and that’s about all I can manage.

  There are hands on my torso and my legs and people are being so loud.

  So loud.

  I think: Where is Jonah?

  I think: I will never fucking forgive you

  I think: STOP TOUCHING ME

  I stop thinking.

  When I do wake up, for real, it is to fluorescents and an IV in my arm.

  There is a persistent beeping beside me and there are thin sheets over me and I feel like I can breathe.

  I blink up at the ceiling, at the sterile flicker of the lights, and close my eyes again, listening to the shuffle of feet and the murmured conversations and . . . and what that means is that I am in a hospital.

  I am . . . I am off the mountain.

  And I am in a hospital.

  Oh my god.

  Oh my god.

  My heart rate spikes and quick fear clutches at my chest. “Where’s Jonah?” I say.

  There’s a gasp at my bedside, and my mother falls on top of me.

  She’s hugging me so hard and she’s crying, sobbing in a way I’ve never seen her do.

  “Hallie?” My dad’s voice is low and strained. He’s never been less than totally composed and controlled, but when he says my name, I hear only the raw.

  He lets out one monstrous sob and catches it, then kneels by my bedside, his head touching the edge of the bed, touching my side.

  “Oh my god,” he says.

  And then I’m crying because it’s over. It’s over and I’m alive and it is remarkable how quickly it all starts to feel like a dream.

  I wait. I wait for what feels like forever but what is probably not more than sixty seconds, then I say: “Where is Jonah?”

  My dad tenses just the slightest bit beside me; it’s instinct, I guess. A tiny piece of me is mad, but I just don’t have the room in my body for that feeling. I don’t have the energy.

  My mom says, “Jonah’s okay.”

  I nod and clench my jaw.

  And then I cry.

  My cousins come visit me, too. Everyone does. I haven’t gotten to see Jonah yet, but it’s okay; I guess it’s okay. Because I am dying to see everyone else. They saved us. They risked their lives to save us. Because we are family. Of course, we were complete morons for leaving like that, but Jaxon is so quiet and gentle about all of it, like I’ll break.

  Now that we are out of crisis, everyone can release their emotions in a flood.

  Jolie vacillates between desperately relieved, crying and hugging me, and furious. She’s not worried about the storm and her leg and our lives and now, so she’s just letting everything go.

  She’s so mad that she had to process me dying.

  That they all had to deal with the likelihood that we were gone forever.

  I get it.

  I get it.

  But we weep into each other’s shoulders at the end of everything because she saved us. They saved us. Despite everything. We’re okay.

  It’s all normal.

  It feels . . . normal?

  It all feels . . . wrong.

  It feels good to wake up in a bed, to be hydrated, to get shitty hospital food that tastes like it was made by a Michelin-starred chef.

  To have my family again.

  It feels good.

  It also just feels . . . off. Strange. Maybe to be separated from Jonah by people and walls and wires and normalcy.

  It feels off and I feel so far removed from all of it— almost numb. Like it never happened, like it isn’t real, but also like it’s the only real thing that’s ever happened in my life, and this has got to be what’s fake. Hasn’t it?

  I think about these things when I am granted a few moments of quiet.

  When I am alone, I consider the depth of apathy about everything and the deep dark of the mountain sky and the questions of
what the hell happened to me. For minutes at a time.

  I am not disappointed to be off the mountain. I am breathlessly relieved.

  But I also know that I have no idea how to be here.

  I have no idea how to talk and function normally and wake up and brush my teeth and order food and . . . I have no idea.

  I have no idea what comes next.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WEEKS PASS.

  They pass strangely; compared to the few days on the mountain, everything moves too quickly. Twenty-four hours feel like twelve. Ten. At first, everything moves on fast forward. There are too many voices and too many visitors and too much talk about what happened to me.

  But then it’s like it stops altogether.

  Everyone begins to slide back into normalcy. We take turns sitting with Zayde and bringing food to him and staying the night. I start classes at school and everyone has heard about what happened over break to the new girl, but no one knows me, and so every time someone asks me if it’s okay, it doesn’t feel like concern; it feels like voyeurism.

  No one slows down to rubberneck when they pass a big accident on the highway because they’re concerned. They do it because they’re curious.

  I hang out with Jolie, mostly, and she and the arts crowd protect me from assholes dying for a little drama that can’t affect them.

  It’s normal, anyway.

  I’m back to the daily grind.

  And so is everyone else.

  Little by little, hour by hour, we all start to forget.

  At first, my parents were extra attentive, coming into my room to check on me all the time, going out of their way to bring me stuff, even being super cool with Uncle Reuben and all of them.

  But now, well. Well, it’s been a couple weeks and no one is afraid that I’m going to disappear in the snow, a body to be found years later, frozen at seventeen in the headlines.

  I sit at the kitchen table, scrolling through my phone, and find myself on Jonah’s Instagram. He hardly ever updates it so I’m just mindlessly thumbing through the same old stuff I do every morning.

  Every evening.

  The pattern, I guess, is comforting.

  Or something.

  I don’t know, but I know that when my mom says, “No phones at the table, Hallie,” the urge to snap at her is instant and overwhelming.

  I clench my teeth.