Alone in the Woods

by Rebecca Behrens

  “Good! I don’t want to get burned.” She held the tube out to me. “Here. Coat yourself.”

  I shook my head, refusing to reach for the tube even though she was shaking it at me. “I’m good.”

  “Please tell me you’re not trying to turn yourself orange like some people.”

  I knew who she was talking about. “Jocelyn! Laura’s skin is not orange. That’s mean.”

  She mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear, other than “tangerine.” Then she pulled on a swim shirt with a zebralike print. It really clashed with her old turquoise suit. At least she wasn’t covering up with her wolf sweatshirt, though.

  We settled into our chairs. I flipped through a clothes catalog. “Hey, what do you think of this tank top?”

  Joss nodded at it with barely a glance. “Isn’t that brand pretty expensive?”

  I folded down the edge of the page. “Yeah, but it’s something I could wear on a date. Maybe with Kelvin.” We’d been texting since camp, with increasing frequency. Laura was coaching my responses, and she was sure he was going to ask me to go out.

  “Um, who’s Kelvin?”

  “Wait, I didn’t tell you about him?” Joss shook her head, biting her lip. I guess there was a lot about Tierra de los Lagos I’d never talked about because it all involved Laura, and I didn’t want to rub that in Joss’s face. “Oh. Well, we went to the camp dance together. Or, we danced together at it. He held my hand.” I smiled at the memory, even though his palm had been sweaty in a mildly gross way. “Anyway, we’ve been texting, and Laura thinks…” Oops. I’d brought her up again.

  “She thinks what?” Jocelyn’s tone was completely neutral, which was weird, because normally if your friend tells you that a guy might be interested in her, you act, like, excited for her. Or at least show some kind of happy feeling.

  “That he might ask if I want to go out.” I couldn’t hold back my grin. Even if “going out” was not a literal term, considering he lived all the way in Minneapolis. Still.

  Jocelyn blinked next to me. “Um, wow? You never told me you had a crush.”

  Have I really not told her any of this? I nodded. “He’s so cool. He plays soccer, and he’s really good at Spanish. And he spent half of camp flicking french fries at me, which sounds annoying, but it was actually supercute, and it sort of became our thing.” That was true. He gave me a cup of fries at the dance. Or, handed them to me while he tried to win the limbo contest. Same difference.

  Jocelyn looked skeptical.

  “Maybe you had to be there,” I explained.

  “Probably.” She nodded, looking away.

  Our conversation stalled after that. There was a lot I wanted to talk about with Jocelyn, like how cool it would be to start eighth grade with a boyfriend—even if it was long distance—but the way Joss was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest, and a hat pulled low to shade her eyes, it seemed like maybe she didn’t really want to talk. As if to make that even clearer, she pulled a huge hardcover book onto her lap.

  “What is that, a dictionary?” I laughed.

  She sighed. “Haven’t you ever heard of a ‘beach read’?”

  “Aren’t those usually lighter? Like, literally.” That got me a half smile from her. “You know, we’re going to be up to our eyeballs in books once school starts. Now’s the time to relax.” I glanced toward Laura’s friends, still huddled near the high-schoolers and the DJ. None were reading.

  A few minutes later, the crackly speakers started blasting oldies. “I love this song!” Joss exclaimed. The music seemed to ease the bad mood she was in. She closed the book, hopped up from her lounge chair, and began dancing as she pulled her goggles around her neck. “Let’s get in the water! It’s too hot not to.” She waved her arms over her head frenetically. The only place I’d ever seen dancing like that was my mom’s Zumba class. Maybe I’d been lucky when Joss had refused to do anything other than sulkily sway at Walden’s end-of-the-year dance.

  “Joss, please.” My eyes flitted toward the cluster of kids by the DJ, who were too cool to dance to this cheesy music. I glanced back at Jocelyn. “Stop doing whatever that move is.”

  “You mean the ‘Electric Slide’? My dad taught me at my uncle’s wedding.”

  “Just, no.”

  She lowered her arms. “Don’t you at least want to get in the water?” she asked quietly. “I can’t take another minute on deck.”

  The pavement was sweltering—if my toes touched it for even a second, they burned. Cooling off did sound nice. “Sure, fine, whatever.” I pulled myself up from my chair, adjusting my bikini to make sure everything was covered. Then I plopped down at the edge of the pool, dipping in a toe. “Never mind, it’s too cold!”

  “Whatever, it’ll feel great once you get in.” Next to me, Joss leaped off the edge of the pool, cannonball-style, shrieking as she hit the water. Her huge splash drenched me. “Argh! It is cold!” she yelled upon surfacing.

  “Joss! You got me all wet.” I huffed as I wiped the beads of water off my goose-bumpy arms and legs. She’d even splashed my hair. So much for my perfect styling. “Stop flailing around!”

  She swam to the edge. “What’s your problem? It’s only water. And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re at the pool.” Then she swam a few feet away to practice our old water-ballet moves. Ballet leg, pinwheel, clamshell. I sat on the edge, dangling my legs in the water while twiddling the strings of my bikini bottom and glancing around the pool deck warily. My gaze lingered on the group by the DJ. They’d never noticed us. Maybe that was for the best.

  “Aren’t you going to get in?” Joss paddled in front of me, splashing like an otter.

  “Nah. I’m going back to the chairs.” I sprung up and hurried back to our spot, where I lay down in the sun. When Jocelyn came back a few minutes later, I pretended to be asleep. I think she knew I was still kinda mad.

  The DJ announced the start of the contests, first the penny dive. Prizes were stuff like logo towels, last year’s swim-team shirts, and six-packs of can soda. Jocelyn and I always worked as a pair—good ol’ Team Alexelyn—and split all our prizes. I peeked an eye open to see if Laura’s friends were going to participate. They were still just sitting around on their towels. I turned my head the other way and went back to pretending to nap, so Joss wouldn’t ask if I wanted to.

  Eventually I had to sit up because I could tell I was getting too fried on that side, and I needed water. I glanced over at the Walden group, who were beginning to pack up their stuff. Now or never. I cleared my throat. “Hey. So…let’s go say hi to them, before they leave?” I motioned to Laura’s friends.

  Joss started biting her bottom lip. “Let me just finish this chapter.” Which meant she really didn’t want to. Joss twisted a stray curl around her index finger, the way she always does when she’s scared. “Four pages left.” They were already slinging backpacks over their shoulders. In two pages, they’d be gone. She knew that. Jocelyn tucked her chin and turned her attention back to the huge tome in her lap. She is a fast reader, but those four pages seemed to be taking her an eternity.

  Maybe it was for the best. If we’d gone over there, and she was feeling nervous, Joss probably would’ve clammed up. Like at the dance—when she’d tried to dash out as soon as we got inside the gym.

  I sat back in my lounge chair and studied my best friend, with her (slightly dorky) swim shirt and her faded turquoise suit’s saggy butt and a small swipe of un-rubbed-in sunscreen smeared across her cheek and that humongous “beach read.”

  Then I looked away from her and down at my shiny pink toes, which still matched Laura’s. In that moment, I realized that no part of me matched Jocelyn, which gave me the same kind of melancholy feeling as the day the swimming pool closes for the season.

  She sneaked up a glance to see that Laura’s friends were already walking toward the exit. “Okay, I’m done.”


  “It’s too late. They’re all heading out.”

  “Oh, sorry. Next time, I guess…”

  I think we both knew that sounded hollow.

  We didn’t stay at the party much longer. When Jocelyn’s mom picked us up on her way home from work, we climbed into the back seat without a word.

  “Too much fun in the sun?” Ms. Allard asked.

  “Something like that,” I replied.

  The ride to my house was super quiet, like we’d had a fight. Or worse—like we were strangers in a car.

  Eleven

  Without the beach towels, I think we would’ve died.

  I’d actually debated leaving mine behind. We’d be getting wet on the river (that was kind of the whole point), so I wouldn’t need a towel until we were done tubing and on our way back to the cabin. Also, my dad is very picky about getting the seats in the car wet, which I understand because they do start to smell funky—like a wet dog—after a summer of riding home from the pool with a damp suit. So I would need a dry towel after our river adventure. But at the last second I’d shoved mine into my backpack and reminded Alex to bring hers along too, which she grudgingly did.

  If my towel were still in the car, I would have been eaten alive by mosquitoes and/or tortured to death by the flies. Even with the towels protecting our bare skin, the bugs were awful. Tiny gnats swarmed our heads, buzzing our ears and hovering in front of our eyes and even getting dangerously close to flying up our noses. Three times I had to spit out something that flew into or onto my lips. I kept my mouth shut in a tight line and narrowed my eyes to a squint. It was hard to keep swatting away the pests while using one hand to keep my towel-skirt fastened together and the other to hold on to the rolled-up inner tube. Yesterday, I’d wondered whether we should leave the tube behind. Now it was our only shelter—our house, portable like a turtle’s shell.

  The towels protected us in another way: from the cold. I’d bet it was only in the low fifties. Fifty-five degrees, tops. Even for hardy Wisconsin kids, that’s not “shorts weather.” (Everybody knows that sixty degrees is the cutoff for shorts weather. It’s probably in the Wisconsin Constitution. As soon as the red line of the thermometer outside my kitchen window hits the sixty-degree mark, Nolan and I flip out, immediately change into our favorite pairs of shorts, and yell, “It’s shorts weather!” That’s what happens to a kid after a long, cold Wisconsin winter, I guess.) Though I had my wolf sweatshirt on, it was old and thin, and my legs were bare but for my soccer shorts. Alex, with that tissue-thin cover-up over her bikini, was in worse shape. Even with our dirty, damp towels wrapped tight, and even though we were walking as fast as we possibly could, we both shivered uncontrollably. My skin looked mottled and shriveled. I’d never fully dried off, even though it had been almost a day since we’d left the river.

  “Hang on,” Alex called from behind.

  I stopped, immediately having to shoo away bugs. That was the other benefit to fast walking—insects didn’t swarm us quite so much while we were on the move.

  Alex, panting lightly, caught up to me. “You don’t have any bandages left, do you?”

  I shook my head. The last one, Alex had already reapplied to her stabbed toe. And if I had any others, they’d be protecting my shredded heels. “Nope.”

  “I’m bleeding all over from these bug bites.” As if to make her point, she scratched hard at her elbow, leaving behind an ominous red trickle when she took her hand away.

  “You have to stop scratching,” I said. “It’ll only make them worse.”

  “I don’t understand why they don’t like you as much as me.” She shuddered from another involuntary shiver.

  Maybe they’re friends of Laura. I caught a whiff of mango as she moved her arm to swat something. “Did you put on more of your body spray?”

  “I thought rubbing it in would make me feel warmer, and that it might help with the itching.”

  I sighed. “Alex. You’re attracting bugs with that stuff. It smells like sugar—no wonder the flies are tormenting you.” And also me, because the scent of mango—even fake mango—made me even hungrier.

  She swatted frantically at something by her shoulder. “Or maybe it’s because I’m not wearing that sweatshirt.”

  I felt like I’d been stung, and not on my right leg, where I definitely had just been bitten by something. Did Alex mean “that sweatshirt” because without one, she was more exposed than I was? Or did she mean “that sweatshirt” because it was…dorky? Therefore making even insects reject me?

  I pushed those thoughts out of my head and followed her. Alex was walking with a purpose again, and I didn’t want to get separated. Although sometimes I wondered if being alone in the woods would actually be better than being lost with her, the way she was acting. The way things had been all summer.

  Walking behind Alex, I could clearly see the damage on her arms and legs. Her bites had started out as small, pink spots on her skin, but they’d grown into large, raised, swollen circles. Most were topped with a smear of dried blood—whether from scratching or from the bite itself, I didn’t know. But even the parts of her that weren’t bitten up looked much worse. Her skin was covered in a fiery rash, especially from her feet to her calves. Gross little blisters had formed all over.

  I knew what that rash was from: poison ivy. I’d seen pictures of it before, both what the plant looks like and what your skin looks like after you come into contact with it. Poison ivy has three green, almond-shaped leaves, and it grows all over the place in forests, as a shrub and even sometimes a vine. You have to be really careful to watch out for it while hiking. When we first took a break yesterday, Alex had grabbed a bunch of leaves and underbrush and made that little throne for herself to sit on. I hadn’t thought to check the plants she was collecting or the area she’d dumped her leaf pile onto. If poison ivy had been in the mix, she’d basically coated her whole lower body in it.

  She reached a hand to scratch furiously at the backs of her legs. When she stopped, the streaks looked even redder and angrier. Yup. Poison ivy. In a few places, her skin had even broken open and was weeping.

  “You have to stop scratching,” I said again. “You’re starting to bleed.”

  “Seriously?” Alex stopped, stretching around to check out her poor, suffering legs. “What the heck kind of bug bites are these? I’m covered in them.”

  I shook my head sadly. “That’s not just from bug bites. I think you sat in poison ivy.”

  “How could you let me do that?” she wailed.

  “I didn’t know!” Exasperated, I threw up my hands, causing my towel-skirt to drop to my feet. I bent to pick it up from the dirt, seeing that in addition to my own bites, I had several deep, bloody scratches. But at least no blistery rash. “And it’s not like you were even speaking to me when you sat on that pile of leaves.”

  Alex didn’t apologize, but she also didn’t seem mad at me anymore. She stared anxiously at her oozing legs and rubbed at a spot of dried blood. “I’m bleeding, and we don’t even have bandages.” She began to whimper. “Bears can smell the blood. They’ll come for us!” Her breathing was becoming loud and rapid, like she was getting hysterical.

  “Um, I don’t think that’s true,” I said, even though I wasn’t entirely sure. “Anyway, your body spray is probably masking the smell of blood. Let’s just hope bears don’t want mangoes.” I reached out a hand to pat her shoulder, out of friendship muscle memory. How many times had Alex started sniffling about something and I’d been there to give her a hug? Like the time that Laura had gotten our whole class to start calling Alex “A ledge” after the substitute messed up her name during attendance. Alex had acted like she didn’t care, but as soon as the bell had rung, she’d bolted for the bathroom. When she came out of the stall, her nose and eyes were telltale red. I never liked Laura after that.

  Memories like that are why I just didn’t understan
d how, no matter how popular Laura might be, Alex abandoned Team Alexelyn for Team…Laurex, or whatever. (That sounds like a name for toilet-bowl cleaner.) The only explanation was that something was very wrong with me. Or at least that’s what Alex thought.

  Alex stiffened under my touch. “You know what would make me feel better?”

  It was my turn to tense up. “What?”

  “The rest of that energy bar. I’m starving.” She paused. “You know being hungry always makes me super emotional.”

  “You mean hangry.” That was true. When we were little and Alex would start crying about something, the first thing her mom would always ask is, “Are you hungry?” And Alex would say no, but then her mom would offer a snack, Alex would eat it up, and pretty quickly afterward stop her meltdown.

  That half of a bar was all we had left. If I gave it to Alex, we’d be out of food. But if I didn’t give it her, she’d probably get even hangrier. It was a tough call.

  “No, we need to save it. We don’t know when our next meal will be—”

  “Just give me my half-of-a-half, please!” she begged, reaching for my backpack.

  I took a step backward, shaking my head. “Let’s wait until midday, at least.”

  She grumbled something I couldn’t quite hear and then stomped away from me, into the forest. I followed.

  It didn’t take long before she stopped at a patch of green plants and started ripping the leaves off their long stems.

  “What are you doing?” I dropped the inner tube to the ground and kneeled on it, wary of rubbing against anything that might be rash-causing.

  “Getting my own food,” Alex muttered, clutching a handful of greens. They didn’t look that different than the lettuces and herbs sold at the farmers’ market on the capitol square in Madison—some of the market’s bagged salad greens look an awful lot like the weeds I help Mom dig out of her garden. The difference between what they sell, though, and what Alex had in her hand was that the farmers know what their plants are. And that they’re safe as food.