Distress Signal

by Mary E. Lambert

  And just when she thought she could not be any more shocked by a turn of events, Rachelle was first to dash to Lavender’s side.

  “Are you okay?” Rachelle asked, grabbing Lavender by the cheeks and looking in her eyes.

  Lavender tried to nod, which was difficult with Rachelle’s death grip on her cheeks. “I think so. Are you?” Lavender managed to ask.

  Rachelle let go of Lavender with a nervous chuckle. “I doubt I’ll ever be okay again after this field trip.”

  “No kidding?” Lavender heard herself laugh back. “I think we got the science campout from the bad place.”

  “Is everyone all right?” Marisol flung herself at the two of them, giving Rachelle and Lavender no choice but to join her in a group hug.

  John reached them next, still glancing over his shoulder toward the tree the bear had climbed. “That was awesome!” he said. “But I really think we should—”

  Marisol interrupted him, leaping up to give him a quick hug, too.

  “John, you saved us,” she said. Marisol looked at Lavender, who was still on the ground next to Rachelle. “You were probably too distracted by the bear to hear him, but it was his idea to make ourselves look bigger and try to scare it, and it worked. Can you believe it? We actually worked together to scare off a bear? We did that. We scared off a bear.”

  “Everyone helped,” John said with a quick smile, before looking over at the bear tree. “Don’t you guys think we should keep moving? Before it comes back down.”

  Lavender nodded. As shaken as she was, Lavender still wanted to put as much distance between them and the bear as humanly possible.

  “What about finding cactus?” Marisol asked.

  “Right this second, I’d say getting away from that bear is more important,” John said.

  “Good point,” Marisol said.

  Rachelle stood and offered Lavender a hand. Lavender took it.

  “Let’s hurry,” John said.

  No one was going to argue with that. Together, the four began walking uphill toward the mountain, as fast and far away from the black bear as their legs could carry them.

  As they hurried away from the bear, John sounded like his old self. He was jumping around and gesturing, and his voice was full of expression. “Did you see those teeth?” he asked. “They were huge!”

  “The better to eat you with,” Rachelle said.

  Marisol laughed and said, “I think John was more scared of the bug than the bear.”

  It was fine for the others to joke, but Lavender didn’t feel up to it. She could still feel the gust of hot air and smell the stench of rotten meat from its breath.

  “And its eyes …” John ignored their teasing about the night before. “I could see the red lines, like, all those blood vessels.”

  “He’s not a monster,” said Marisol.

  “You can say that,” Lavender said, “because it didn’t almost eat your face. It looked like a monster to me.”

  “I thought he was actually really cute,” Marisol said. “And it’s not the bear’s fault we were in his space. He was here first.”

  “When did we even decide the bear was a he?” Rachelle asked.

  “Right?” Lavender said. “I thought it might be a she. Maybe she was so aggressive because there were cubs nearby.”

  “Yeah,” said Rachelle, “and we accidentally got between her and her babies.”

  “If there were babies, I wish we could have seen them. I bet they’re adorable,” Marisol said.

  John snorted. “We’re lucky we didn’t see the cubs. If we’d gotten that close, we’d be dead.”

  Lavender put a hand on the trunk of a pine tree. It trembled. They hadn’t been walking for that long. She would have guessed that they’d gone maybe twenty minutes or so, but they had gone fast enough that she was sure there was a good distance between them and the bear. Either way, Lavender was still shaky and maybe in shock. “We’ve got to be pretty far from the bear now. How about a break, guys?”

  “I could use a short rest,” Rachelle agreed. Lavender did a double take. Being on the same page with Rachelle was almost as scary as the bear attack.

  Marisol and John also stopped, but John refused to come any closer to the tree. “Doesn’t it give you the heebie-jeebies?” he asked.

  “What?” Lavender asked.

  “Standing that close to a tree when you know a bear could be up any one of them?”

  “Ugh, I didn’t think of that,” Lavender said, hopping away from the trunk.

  Marisol and Rachelle followed her. Rachelle was in fits of laughter, saying, “Ew! Gross. I just had a thought. What if a bear was up there and went to the bathroom? Can you imagine getting hit with that?”

  “It would be like a bomb went off,” John said.

  “Sick!” said Marisol.

  “Bear bomb!” said John. He tossed a handful of pine cones high in the air. They soared in a steady parabola and rained down between the girls. Lavender and Rachelle scattered to avoid the pine cones, but Marisol’s attention was on the hillside a few feet away.

  “Look!” Marisol pointed to a massive prickly pear growing out of the dirt.

  “Oh, that looks perfect,” Lavender said. “But how do we eat one of these without stabbing ourselves?”

  Marisol bit her bottom lip. “I’ve been thinking about that, but to be honest, I’ve never had one from the wild. We always just buy nopales from the grocery store.”

  “I have seen those at Fry’s before,” said Rachelle as she joined them to study the cactus. “But Marisol is right. They didn’t have any thorns.”

  “I think the ones in the grocery store are a different variety,” Marisol said.

  “If we’re careful, I guess we can scrape the thorns off with my knife,” John said. “It’ll be like peeling potatoes. Only with a bunch of spikes.”

  “What?” Rachelle asked him, voice full of shock. “You have a knife? On a school trip?”

  “How come you didn’t show us that when we did the inventory?” Marisol asked indignantly.

  “For the same reason I didn’t mention that I also have a lighter,” John said. “I didn’t want to hear you freak out about it.”

  “It’s worth freaking out over. It’s not safe,” Rachelle snapped. “You’re gonna get expelled.”

  Lavender snorted. “Who’s going to expel him? The bear?”

  John shrugged. “I’ll worry about it if we get back. I mean when we get back,” he corrected himself.

  Marisol held out a hand. “I’ll skin the prickly pear if you’ll start a fire. That way we can grill them.”

  “Do we really have time for that?” Rachelle asked with an impatient glance toward the mountain.

  Marisol bit her lip, looking uncertain.

  “It’s still early in the day,” Lavender said. “We’ve been up since sunrise. It was probably like five a.m.” At the same time her empty stomach let out a huge, rumbling growl.

  “Sounds like we’d better make time,” John said. “I can make a fire fast.”

  “It’ll taste better,” Marisol said. “Plus it would be nice to warm up.”

  “You know what else helps you stay warm? Walking.”

  “Cooking it might help kill germs,” Marisol added with a shrewd look. “We don’t have a way to wash them.”

  Rachelle bit her lip. “Fine.”

  Lavender blinked in surprise at how well Marisol knew Rachelle. Marisol had said the exact right things to convince Rachelle.

  “But we have to work fast,” Rachelle said. “John and Lavender can get firewood. I’ll help Marisol with peeling the cactus.”

  “You will?” Marisol sounded surprised.

  “Yeah.” Rachelle shrugged. “If we could survive tweezing our eyebrows for the first time, we can handle cactus needles.”

  What? Since when was Marisol getting her eyebrows done?

  Even worse, for the first time, Lavender thought that maybe there was something real about Marisol’s friendship with
Rachelle. All along Lavender had assumed it was just shallow, some kind of warped alliance to punish her … for—for something. Lavender had always known that Rachelle had it out for her, and somehow Rachelle had sucked Marisol into her orbit of sixth-grade drama. Lavender had thought she just needed to separate them and things would snap back to normal.

  Now Lavender wondered if showing Rachelle’s true colors wouldn’t work. In fact, it felt like Marisol already saw the real Rachelle, and Lavender was the one who’d misunderstood all along. Watching them help each other as they started using sticks to knock pieces of the cactus to the ground before skinning them left Lavender reeling. It transformed the gnawing hunger in Lavender’s gut into something sharper and more painful: Marisol and Rachelle were acting like friends. Real friends.

  John chose a little clearing away from any of the shrubs and with no tree branches directly overhead where they could have a fire. As a safety precaution, he kicked the fallen leaves and pine needles out of the way.

  Lavender followed after him, feeling strangely subdued. There were times when she felt like Marisol was just growing up faster than her. And as they got older, their interests were getting more and more different … and there was nothing Lavender could do about it.

  “Are you going to help, or are you just going to stand there?”

  “Sorry,” Lavender said as she realized that she had been just staring while John did all the work. This was not the time to obsess over friend problems. She had even more important issues to work through … like how to not die. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she told John. “Let’s split up to look for wood. We need any bigger branches or pieces of wood that are on the ground, but don’t forget to check trees. We might be able to break a low branch off one of these pine trees.”

  Lavender headed in one direction, expecting John to go in the opposite direction. She knew her plan was perfectly logical, so she jerked back in surprise when he was suddenly striding alongside her.

  “We’re splitting up, remember?” she said.

  “You’ve never played basketball, have you?”

  What?

  “Can we talk basketball later?” she asked.

  “Just answer my question.”

  She glanced up toward the sky in exasperation and huffed. But John’s mouth was a straight line and his eyebrows were drawn low and narrowed. He looked stubborn, and Lavender decided it would be faster to answer him than to argue with him.

  “We’re in the same class. You know I’ve played basketball in PE.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, like, on an actual team.”

  “Oh,” said Lavender. “No.”

  If anything, his eyebrows drew even closer together. “What about soccer or softball or volleyball?”

  Lavender shook her head. She didn’t know where he was going with this, but she was impatient with the waste of time.

  “Have you ever played on any team sport?”

  “You’ve seen me in PE, right? I’m not very athletic.” The words were short and sharp, and Lavender felt her mouth pinch together. She hated to admit she wasn’t the best at anything. She wished she could catch a ball as effortlessly as she could multiply by fourteen. Lavender was the only sixth grader who had her times table memorized through the seventeens. She was working on the eighteens when even Mrs. Henderson used a calculator after the twelves.

  John’s stubborn look vanished, replaced by faint surprise. “It’s not about being athletic.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  A smile flashed across his face before he looked serious again. “It’s about learning to be on a team. You know, letting people take turns doing what they’re best at. If you always miss three-point shots and someone who is good at them is standing next to you, you pass the ball. If you’re guarding number seven, you don’t try to guard number fourteen. That’s someone else’s job. You have to let them do it.”

  Lavender’s stomach rumbled. The empty ache reminded her that she’d only eaten trail mix and protein bars in the last twenty-four hours.

  “Can we talk about this later?” Lavender asked. “If you’d just done what I said, we’d both have some firewood by now.”

  “No, what we’d have is some smoky wood that wouldn’t burn and no kindling. We don’t want green wood—nothing from a tree. We want really dry branches, so we should only get things from the ground, and we need dry pine needles and twigs, too. That’s how we get the fire started.”

  “Oh.” Lavender was both embarrassed and annoyed.

  “And if you ask my opinion, we should stick together. Last time we split up, you found a bear. It might have mauled you if your backup wasn’t there to save your butt.”

  She couldn’t really argue with that. “I guess if you put it like that, maybe we should do it your way.”

  They walked in a big circle, sweeping the space around the makeshift firepit for twigs and dried pine needles and any fallen sticks or branches. Before long, they had a good size pile. Lavender brushed her hands together and looked at their handiwork with a smile.

  “Not too bad,” she said to John.

  “It’s a start.”

  “A start?”

  “Yeah, it won’t last that long.”

  “Aren’t we kind of in a hurry?” Lavender reminded him.

  He nodded. “From the sound of it, we have time to get more firewood.”

  Lavender shot a look toward Marisol and Rachelle and the pitifully small amount of cactus they’d skinned so far. It seemed like the prickly pear was fighting back, and it might even be winning.

  Lavender sighed and turned to John. “We might as well,” she said. If nothing else, at least moving around kept her from shivering. They walked in a wider circle. This time, they had even better luck. They found one huge branch. Since John didn’t have an ax in his backpack, they took turns jumping on the dry wood and trying to snap it in pieces by holding one end while stomping on the other. Little shards of dried wood and sawdust flew in the air as they broke the bigger branch into more manageable pieces. Lavender only got one splinter. Unfortunately, it was the size of a railroad spike.

  She studied the sliver of wood embedded in her palm. It throbbed painfully. She knew that was nothing compared to the sharp, stinging pain she would feel when she pulled it out.

  “You don’t have tweezers in your backpack, do you?”

  “No, I didn’t think of tweezers.”

  Lavender waved her hand and talked fast, trying to distract herself from the pain. “Go figure that you didn’t bring tweezers. You have everything else. But I don’t get it. Why did you bring all of it? Even the stuff that could get you in trouble with the teachers?”

  “I guess I thought I might need it?”

  “For what?” She waved her hand around more desperately. Not that it was really helping with the pain and suffering. At least this new, sharp pain meant she wasn’t thinking about her dry throat or empty stomach anymore.

  “If you let me see your hand, I’ll tell you.”

  Lavender held out her hand and looked away, too squeamish to examine the massive chunk of wood protruding from her palm any closer.

  John let out a low whistle. “Yikes, that is a bad one.”

  “I know that.”

  “The good thing is, it’s big enough that I can just pull it out for you even without tweezers.”

  “No, don’t.” Lavender tried to yank her palm away, but John held tight, refusing to let her break free. “It’s going to hurt,” she said.

  “It’ll hurt worse if we leave it in there and it gets caught on something and rips.”

  “Okay.” Lavender bit her lip, and after another quick glance at the splinter, she focused on a distant tree. “Just distract me. Tell me …” She tried to flash back to a time before the flood. “Tell me who you think stole the telescope money.”

  She felt John’s hand tighten around hers. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.

  “Fine, then something else.
Like why you packed an entire Walmart store in your backpack.”

  “I will, but it’s a secret.” He spoke slowly as he shifted his hand into another position. Lavender fought to hold still. Her arm tensed as she imagined the tearing pain she was about to feel.

  “Promise you won’t tell,” John said.

  “I promise,” Lavender said automatically. Any second now, he would grip the splinter and twist it out of her hand. Fire would shoot through her hand, her arm. Don’t think about how it’s going to hurt, she ordered herself. But it didn’t work. The only thing she could think of was the pain.

  John’s fingers brushed over the palm of her hand.

  He was about to pull it loose.

  “Ready?” he said.

  Lavender squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I’m running away,” he said.

  When he pinched the piece of wood and ripped the splinter free from her flesh, she almost didn’t feel it.

  A pool of red blood blossomed on Lavender’s hand in the hole left where the splinter used to be. Lavender pressed it against the front of her shirt, using her clothes to stem the blood flow. Already the pain was fading. It hurt but less intensely than seconds before. Dazedly, she stood there with the injured hand cradled to her chest. Had she heard John correctly?

  “Did you say you’re running away?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “From us?” Was he planning to desert her and Rachelle and Marisol? What about all that stuff he’d just said about teamwork?

  This time, he shook his head.

  “You mean … you were running away from …” Her brain tried to put together the pieces. They were supposed to be on a field trip. Most people ran away from home, but was he saying he planned to run away from school? From the class? “Were you going to run away from science camp?”

  His eyes darted to the side for a moment, as if he was trying to decide how to answer.

  Lavender’s hand throbbed. Her feet and throat and stomach ached. She didn’t have the energy for games. “Just tell me the truth.”

  John shrugged, took a deep breath, and seemed to reach a decision. He spoke quickly and in a low voice. “I just thought that if I was going to run away from home, science camp would be the best place to do it.”