“You can’t eat that.”
“Watch me.” She opened her mouth, moving the handful of green stuff toward it.
The website for the national forest—which I’d spent tons of time on for my project—had mentioned poisonous plants other than poison ivy, oak, and sumac. Hemlock—the weed, not the tree—grows all over the state, and it’s toxic to people.
“That plant could kill you! It could be poison hemlock! Do you want to die like Socrates?”
“Socrates?” She pulled her hand away from her mouth. “You mean Nolan’s stuffed sock monkey?” That was its name.
“No, I don’t mean his stuffed sock monkey! I mean a real person! The philosopher! He drank a cup of hemlock, and then he died.” At least, I thought Socrates was real and not a character. Sometimes, with ancient figures like him, it gets confusing.
Alex dropped the green stuff. “Fine. But there has to be something we can eat in here. Fruits of the forest are a thing, right? We’ll gather berries. I think it’s just the bright red ones you have to worry about.”
I shook my head, exasperated. “No, there are other ones too. Deadly nightshade berries can be dark.” I’d read that in one of my mom’s gardening books.
Alex turned to me, crossing her arms. “You know everything, don’t you? And I’m the village idiot. Or forest idiot. Well, fine. If you don’t want me to eat the next berry I find in here—no matter what color it is—then I need my portion of the energy bar. Now.”
Slowly, I worked my backpack off one shoulder and unzipped the front pocket. I pulled out the wrapper, folded neatly over what was left of the smushed bar. It had been cold and shady enough that the bar had re-hardened, and now it broke easily into two. I held out half to Alex, who snatched it and pushed it into her mouth immediately.
She made the same kind of face she used to make when the waitress would set the plate of doughnuts in front of us at Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty. Or when she’d take that first bite of a Buttercup Lake s’more.
I shoved my half into my mouth too, trying to eat slowly and savor it, but I couldn’t help myself. I was too hungry. The bar tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten. Better than a Michael’s turtle sundae. And in seconds, it was gone—leaving us all out of food.
Twelve
For a while after we ate the bar, navigating the forest felt easier. Alex and I were sort of getting along, or at least not snapping at each other for every little thing. The sun finally peeked out as we walked into an area that was like a clearing, although there were still tons of trees around. I had the idea that we should lay down the tube and rest for a few minutes, letting the sunshine warm us. I even took off my dew-dampened towel skirt, to let it air dry by hanging it on a nearby branch.
As I stretched out onto the tube, next to Alex, I had a weird flash of déjà vu. It was just like when we’d been at the pool party, lying on the lounge chairs. Except there was no oldies-playing DJ, no shade from umbrellas, no grown-ups in the grill area frying up burgers and dogs and restocking the coolers with ice cream sundae cups, the kind you eat with a tiny, flat wooden spoon. The only thing that was the same, really, was that Alex was stretched out next to me, so close I could hear her breathe, yet we weren’t really interacting. I turned on my side, facing her back. Something else had changed between the two scenes—the bloody scratches, bug-bite welts, fresh bruises, and blistering rash all over her body, and the tangles of burrs and pine pitch in her hair. Last night she’d abandoned her ponytail; she said wearing her hair down felt warmer.
I kind of wished we could go back to the pool party. Not just so we wouldn’t be trapped in the forest, starving and slightly injured. But because I think I’d act differently than I had. When she asked to go over and say hi to those girls—Laura’s friends—I’d suck it up and do it, even though they intimidated me and I wasn’t sure I had anything to say to them. And when Alex told me about her crush from camp—Kelvin—I’d be more encouraging. Like a supportive friend. I’d just freaked out a little when she’d brought him up. I was nowhere near having a boyfriend. I wasn’t sure I even wanted one. If Alex was sure—she had leapfrogged ahead of me, and maybe I wasn’t going to be able to catch up. What was going to happen to us? If she became one of those girls: the cool ones, with their fancy clothes and their boyfriends? I’d wanted to ignore what she was telling me and hope that all her new interests would fizzle away. Sometimes I’d even snarked about them, to make myself feel better. If I actually wanted to stay best friends, though, I at least needed to stop judging. And try to meet her halfway. It was sort of on me that so far, I really hadn’t.
“Alex?” I whispered. She didn’t answer, and from her deep and relaxed breathing, I could tell she’d fallen asleep in the few minutes we’d been lying down. I understood. I was exhausted too. Whatever sleep I’d stolen the night before hadn’t been enough, and we were still so hungry and thirsty.
I let my eyes close. Yes, we needed to cover a lot of ground, but being well rested would only help us walk faster—and safely. Plus, the sun felt so good on my chilled skin. Maybe it would finally dry my hair, or my towel. Just a catnap…
I have no idea how long it had been when I woke with a start. The noise, still faraway, was the first human-made sound we’d heard since we’d left the river. The familiar hum of a plane’s engine. You don’t hear that much up in the Northwoods, and it was getting louder, closer. People looking for us? It had to be. We’d been missing for a full day. What had started as a tubing mishap had turned into something serious, scary, a crisis. By now, our parents would’ve started a rescue effort, like the kind you hear about on the news. We might already have been on the news, which was strange to think about.
“Alex! Wake up!” I nudged her arm, careful to touch only the covered-up part and not her painful-looking bare skin. “Do you hear that?”
“Wha—?” She blinked and sat up, looking confused about where we were.
“A plane! It must be people searching for us! It could even be your dad!” He didn’t have a plane, but he was a pilot.
I’ve never seen her move faster, and that includes all the times we were sitting in her backyard and heard the passing jingle of the ice-cream truck slowly driving down the street in the front of her house.
“Help us!” she screamed, her voice raspy. “Help us! We’re lost! Here we are!” Birds in the trees, who maybe had been enjoying a midmorning (or late morning, I had no idea what time it actually was) nap, cawed angrily and flapped away from the racket she was making.
People up in a plane wouldn’t be able to hear us, but I didn’t think yelling could hurt, either. “Here! We’re here!” I waved my arms and tried to bounce on my toes, but my feet hurt too much from the water shoes digging into the backs of my heels again. I tugged them off and threw them onto the inner tube. I started doing a move like jumping jacks—my bare heels still stung, but I ignored the pain. Anything I could do to get the pilot up there to notice our movement. Wait… Maybe some of the useless stuff in Alex’s bag isn’t totally useless.
“Get out your phone! Whatever’s shiny!” I shouted. Alex fumbled around in her tote bag and pulled out her sparkly mirror compact and dead phone.
“Why?”
“We’ll use them to flash the plane!”
She tossed me the phone, and we waved both objects around, catching the sunlight.
We still couldn’t see anything up in the sky, but any moment, the plane would pop out above the tree line and the pilot would spot us in the clearing. I knew it. I kept jumping and waving the phone, even though every part of me ached. I rejoined Alex in screaming at the sky.
The buzz of the engine grew even stronger, like it was just beyond the treetops. I held my breath for a moment, preparing for the loudest shout yet, the biggest jumping jack. But the sky above remained still. Only the rows of light, puffy passing clouds like cotton balls drifted toward us, then away.
&nbs
p; The engine’s drone softened. It became faint. Then I couldn’t hear it over Alex’s continued shouts. “Shh, for just a minute.” When she stopped jumping and screaming and waving, she doubled over to catch her breath. I strained to listen.
The plane was gone.
The pilot hadn’t even flown overhead. Rescuers hadn’t seen us. They wouldn’t know we were here.
Alex stood again, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Come back,” she croaked, waving her mirror at the empty sky. Then she started to cry.
I wanted to cry too. It had been so close. But I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to focus on the positive. “Hey, at least we know they’re looking for us. Next time, they’ll spot us.”
“Next time? What if there isn’t a next time?” Her voice was panicked again.
“They’re not going to give up.” At least, I hoped not.
We both sank to the inner tube, which had grown hot in the sun while we’d been jumping around. It felt good to be warm again, but now my skin was tight and itchy, like it was being stretched too thin. My lips were chapped and dry. Either from dehydration or all the sun exposure.
“Are you thirsty?” I asked Alex, turning for my backpack.
“Dying,” she said.
“Maybe don’t use that word.” I meant it as a joke, but it fell completely flat.
There was only a quarter of the water left in the bottle. I took a tiny sip, which tasted as good as an Oreo shake, or strawberry lemonade, or hot chocolate when you come inside from sledding.
I passed the bottle to Alex. “Slake yourself.”
“Huh? Is there a snake?” She pulled her knees toward her chest.
“No, slake—it means to quench your thirst. It was a dictionary word…”
Alex frowned, and I trailed off. Looking up weird words in the dictionary had once been our rainy-day-at-the-cabin activity.
She took a sip—only a small one, not enough to slake at all. When she pulled the bottle away from her lips, I noticed that they were more swollen than earlier and really chapped too. Her lower lip even had the start of a painful-looking split. I scanned Alex’s arms and legs. Her rashy skin was swollen tight and bleeding wherever she’d been scratching, which was pretty much everywhere.
Being exposed in the clearing was only going to make it worse, especially because we were all out of sunscreen. “We should get back in the forest, where it’s shadier.”
“But it’s so cold in there, and if the plane comes back, nobody is going to see us through all the trees.” She had a point.
“We can’t just wait here and hope they do another flyover. We need to keep walking. We’re going to run out of water soon, and we need to find something, maybe berries, for food.”
I wobbled to standing and, as soon as Alex reluctantly joined me, rolled up the tube. I wished it were any color other than pine green, especially something neon. Blaze orange, a color that people might spot through the tree canopy. Instead, except for Alex’s bright cover-up, we camouflaged perfectly. Even our towels were muted forest colors. I almost forgot mine, still hanging to dry on the branch. I pulled it off and wrapped it around my lower half again. For whatever reason, the bugs had mostly left us alone in the clearing. Maybe we were all out of unbitten skin for them to feast on. Do mosquitoes double-dip?
The worst part was when I had to squeeze my feet back into the water shoes. It hurt so much when the elastic met my heels that tears formed at the corners of my eyes, and I gasped.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“My water shoes are too tight now that they’re dry, and they’re cutting into my heels—it really stings.” I carefully pulled the backs of the shoes away from my feet and folded them down so I could step on the heel pad. It wasn’t a great solution because the shoes didn’t want to stay on my feet that way. They were like too-small house slippers. Also, the open wounds on my heels were at risk for getting dirty and infected. But it would have to do.
Alex raised an eyebrow. “Guess flip-flops aren’t so dumb after all.”
“Did I ever say that?”
“Maybe not, but you sure side-eyed them.”
Fair enough. “Your feet are covered in scratches. I think we can call it a draw.”
She nodded. “Now which way?” She pointed left, then right.
My stomach sank. I didn’t know. I hadn’t remembered to pick out a landmark when we walked into the clearing, so we’d know which direction we’d come from. The trees didn’t all look the same, so I could trick myself into thinking that yes, we’d definitely walked past that tilted pine before, or around that scraggly tree that had knots in the shape of a scowling face.
I didn’t want to tell Alex that I wasn’t sure, though. “This way,” I said, pointing in the direction the plane’s noise had come from. Why not walk toward wherever it had flown from?
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I thought…” She scratched at her arm and stared into the trees.
Alex hadn’t been paying attention to anything. Not since we’d gotten lost, and not on the trip till that point. She was the one who walked us right off a trail. The only thing that captured her eye was her still-dead phone and her now-destroyed pedicure. So I thought nothing of telling her, “Yeah, I’m positive.” Then we started walking again.
* * *
With the backs of my water shoes folded down, the cuts on my heels stopped slicing deeper. Unfortunately, it meant the shoes slipped off about every four steps, and their footbeds became covered in pine needles, which tickled my arches and occasionally stabbed the bottoms of my feet. As a result, I was walking painfully slow.
Even though we’d dried off while resting in the clearing, it didn’t take long before we began to shiver again, once we were deep in the woods. They still hadn’t dried off from last night’s storm. Everything glistened with moisture, from the mushrooms dotting the forest floor to the leaves dangling from trees. I wrapped my towel tighter around me. Alex had hers rolled around herself like a strapless maxi dress, her cover-up still on beneath it. We both looked ridiculous.
To force myself to raise and lower my feet for each step, I pictured the things I hoped we were walking toward. First I focused on the things I most craved: a can of bug spray. A bottle of fresh, clean water. Fried cheese curds from Culver’s. Band-Aids and socks and thick-soled shoes to protect my feet. Then I started picturing the people I wanted to walk toward, in the most loving scenes I could imagine: My mom with her sweaty arm hugging my shoulder as we gazed at our finished hard work in the garden. My dad, leaning down to plant a kiss on the top of my head and gently pry the book from my hand, after I’d fallen asleep reading (and he always knows to mark my place). Nolan giving me one of his drive-by hugs, when he practically collides with my stomach and squeezes tight while his legs never stop moving. Alex and I lacing our fingers together and stretching our arms overhead, whooping and smiling as we jumped off the pier and tucked our knees to cannonball into Buttercup Lake together.
It was so weird to be longing for Alex while she was right beside me. It didn’t feel that way, though: She was a million miles away. If the person grunting next to me was even still Alex at all. Maybe she’d left the chrysalis of her childhood self and had been transformed into a butterfly, a creature totally new. Maybe now she was Lexie all the time.
My stomach panged from hunger. I’d never been this hungry, not even the time I tried to join Alex in fasting on Ash Wednesday, for solidarity. Even then, I’d eaten a good breakfast, had plenty of water to drink, and planned on an early dinner. I’d gone without food for maybe ten hours, most of which I’d spent sitting like a lump in my desk at school. I hadn’t even had to run around during gym period since it was a library day. Now we’d been tramping through the forest for over twenty-four hours, and except for the energy bars, we’d eaten nothing since bagels yesterday morning. Why didn’t I glob on more peanut butter? I
wanted to throttle Past Jocelyn and tell her to take a second bagel, why not, you’re on vacation? But Alex had been so picky about “healthy” eating, nibbling on whole-grain toast and some fruit, only after she’d confirmed it was organic. I’d felt conspicuous going for seconds. Like she’d judge me for that too.
Our hunger made me anxious. At some point, we’d run out of energy to keep moving. We’d be at risk of fainting—which Alex had done once, during music class in third grade, when we were singing while standing on the risers. It was because she’d locked her knees, according to our teacher, Mrs. George, who made sure Alex hadn’t hit her head and still called the nurse so Alex could get checked out afterward. What would I do if Alex passed out again? What would she do if I did? What if we both fainted?
All the worrying only made my stomach feel tighter and emptier, and my head lighter and foggier. I focused on taking slow, calming breaths. Sometimes my dad listens to nature sounds while he’s trying to meditate, like recordings of babbling brooks or gentle rainstorms or birdcalls. He only started meditating last year, when he got downsized and was suddenly home all the time, on the computer searching for a new job. I didn’t really get why he seemed so much more stressed out than when he had been at work late every night—until I found the stash of bill statements that Mom was keeping in the cupboard. It was thick as a chapter book. I flipped through them, and while none of the bills warned that it was a “final notice” or anything, several were past due and had late fees tacked on.
Anyway, the nature sounds seemed to help Dad relax and think clearly and deal with the situation. Eventually, he got a new job. It wasn’t permanent, and it paid less, but his contract was already renewed and he seemed to like it. At least, he was happy when he came home from work. And the bill stack shrank. The last time I was in that cupboard hunting for a binder clip, there were only two unpaid statements and neither was overdue.
Alone in the Woods Page 13
