by SM Reine
She dumped the remaining food from her tray into a trash can and hurried back to camp. Sunset cast long shadows over the path. Rylie wanted to be back in bed before it got dark so she could hide from the night’s campfire activities.
The cabin’s lights were already on. The sounds of laughter poured out the window. Disappointed she wasn’t the first back, Rylie pushed the door open.
Her four roommates were clustered around a cot by the door. “...but I hope he doesn’t ask me out,” read Patricia in a nasal voice. “I don’t want to reject him and hurt his feelings, but I don’t want to be his girlfriend, either.”
Rylie recognized those words. She had written them herself.
In her diary.
The contents of her backpack were spilled across a bed as her roommates pawed through them. Patricia held out her diary so everyone could see it. None of them had noticed Rylie yet. “I bet she made it all up,” said Kim. “Who would want to go out with her, huh? She wouldn’t even show up for the date!”
“What are you doing?”
The girl with the gold anklet looked up. Amber. She was holding a pair of Rylie’s shorts in one hand and Byron the Destructor, her favorite stuffed cat, in the other. “We noticed you hadn’t unpacked yet. We were just... helping,” she said before bursting into giggles. The other girls followed suit.
Rylie stared at them. Her embarrassment in the mess was nothing in comparison to the numbness spreading through her now.
“Nice teddy bear,” said Kim before dissolving into snickers.
“You guys—you—I can’t...” She didn’t know what to say. Her mouth worked, but no sounds came out. “It’s not a bear. It’s a cat.”
She ripped the backpack off the bed, and they scattered. They had gone through everything, even her underwear. Rylie snatched her diary from Patricia’s hands.
“Way to be grateful,” laughed Amber. “Didn’t you hear me? We were helping!”
Eyes stinging, Rylie backed up until she hit the door. Why were they laughing? What was so funny?
“Of course,” she whispered hoarsely. Helping.
Rylie flew out of the cabin and passed Louise, who was setting pokers and marshmallows on a table by the fire.
“Where are you going?” called Louise. “Rylie? Rylie!”
She ran without looking where she was going. She passed a line of people heading back from the dining hall, and she knew they could all see her crying. Everyone would know what Patricia and Amber did to her. The teasing would only get worse.
Rylie had to stop by the office on the shore of the glistening lake. Her chest felt constricted and she wheezed with every breath. She fumbled for her inhaler and tried to let all the air out of her lungs, but it took a few tries before she could calm down enough to breathe at all.
She sucked down the medication. Wheezed again. Took another puff. Slowly, her air passage relaxed.
“How could they do this to me?” Rylie rasped, fist clutched around her inhaler. “I hate them. I hate them.”
The full moon’s reflection blurred in the water. It was laughing at her too, just like everyone else at the camp.
As if it wasn’t bad enough her parents were divorcing, she had been singled out from everyone else at camp as an outsider. They would make her life miserable for the entire summer if she stayed.
She couldn’t stand to be there a minute longer. Rylie threw her backpack onto her shoulder and plunged into the forest.
She didn’t know how long she walked. The trail grew thinner and twistier. She stumbled over a log in her path and the bark scraped her shin. Blinded by tears, Rylie pushed on. She didn’t know if it was the way back to the parking lot, but it didn’t matter. The buses had been gone for days, so she didn’t have a way home. But she didn’t want to go home. She wanted to get away.
The trees grew so close together that she had to climb over them to keep going. Occasionally, she glimpsed the full moon between the branches, but she could always feel it watching her.
At long last, Rylie came to a cluster of trees she couldn’t pass. Too out of breath to find a way around them, she flung herself onto a mossy boulder to rest.
Her racing heart gradually slowed. All the fury and embarrassment drained out of her, leaving only a small, burning coal of shame in the pit of her belly.
None of this had been in Rylie’s plans. She wanted to go to a summer concert series at the park downtown. She planned on seeing the new exhibit opening next week at the art museum, too. Maybe it wasn’t glamorous, but that was how she liked to have fun: on her own in the city, or with a couple friends from school. Not surrounded by harpies at camp.
Of course, now Rylie wasn’t surrounded by anyone. She had gotten her wish. She was alone.
She was also lost.
Rylie looked around from her perch on the boulder, but there was no sign of a path now, much less humanity. She didn’t even have any light. Fear trickled in at the edges of her mind. She had no maps, no compass, or anything else to help her get around.
Rylie pulled out her cell phone. Still no reception. The GPS didn’t even work.
Something rustled in the bushes nearby. She froze.
“Hello?”
She lifted her cell phone to illuminate her surroundings with the screen. It cast stark shadows on the bushes and trees, but it was too dim to see further than a couple feet.
The soft, rhythmic sound of feet against pine needles whispered around her.
“Who’s there?” she called. Fear made her throat tighten again, and she gripped her inhaler. Rylie crept around a tree, peering into the darkness. Maybe it was a deer or something. “If that’s you, Amber, you better hope I don’t find you. I’ll—I’ll beat you up!” She sounded much braver than she felt.
A bush shook. Rylie turned, but nothing was there.
The only sound she could hear was her own breathing. The entire forest was silent and eerie, as though everything living had vanished. Even the moon was gone now.
Picking a random direction, Rylie started walking, keeping an uneasy eye on the trees around her. She wished she had a flashlight. Even better, she wished for a helicopter so she could fly off the mountain.
The shuffling sound resumed after she started walking.
Every time she hesitated, the footsteps would also pause. When she picked up her pace, clambering over logs and around boulders as quickly as possible, the footsteps also quickened.
She eased around a thick tree. A pair of golden lights flashed in front of her.
Eyes.
Rylie jumped backward, but the lights disappeared instantly. She froze. Her heart pounded.
The eyes had been low to the ground, more like an animal than a human. She could hear it rustling amongst the foliage.
She was being stalked.
Lifting her cell phone a little higher, she stared around for another glimpse of eyes. A twig behind her cracked. Rylie gasped and spun, and her inhaler dropped from her hands.
She bent down to find it, but her fingers only reached dirt and pine needles. Her heart pounded. Her lungs started to ache. The feeling of being watched made her scalp itch, and Rylie decided she didn’t care about her inhaler.
Slowly backtracking toward the trail, she whispered a silent prayer to the black sky. “Please, please just let me get out of here. I’ll never do anything this stupid again. I swear.”
A hulking gray body flashed in front of her. She jerked back and her heel caught a low rock. Rylie lost her footing. Her cell phone flew from her grip. The back popped off, the battery dislodged, and all light vanished.
She fell and hit the ground. Something heavy, hot, and furry struck her body.
Pain ripped across Rylie’s chest. She screamed into the night, but nobody was there to hear her.
Two
The Boy
Daybreak.
Rylie flung a hand over her face to shield her eyes from the sudden sunlight. She must have forgotten to close the curtains in her bedroom before fall
ing asleep. Dragging the sheets over her head, she rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
“Campers! Turn out!”
Campers?
It took a long moment for her thoughts to fall into order, and then she remembered everything: her dad abandoning her at camp, her week in hiding, the horrible dinner, finding the girls looking through her belongings, her flight into the forest...
And the attack.
Gasping, she sat up. Rylie was on her tiny cot in the loft, but she had no idea how she had gotten there, much less survived the beast. “What the...?”
She took inventory of her body. Her arms and legs were fine. Her stomach and chest—why did she remember so much pain in her chest?—were unmarked. She ran her fingers over her face and found nothing. The window by her bed was open to the cool morning air.
Had everything in the forest been a nightmare? It felt so real: the eyes, the furry gray body, the dense trees and dark night.
But how would she have gotten back? Rylie had been hopelessly lost.
She reached under her cot for her backpack and found nothing there. Her other belongings were missing, too. Her clothes, her journal, and her cell phone were nowhere in sight. She must have dropped it all in the forest.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Rylie muttered.
The other girls were getting out of bed to go to the showers. Amber shot a glance up at the loft. “What a freak,” she hissed to Patricia.
Rylie was too upset to care about the insult. Her roommates filed out carrying toothbrushes and towels and shampoo, and she sat on her cot feeling just as lost as she had the night before.
Louise poked her head through the cabin doorway. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t stay inside all day. If you’re feeling good enough to run off in the middle of the night, you’re feeling good enough to shower.”
“But...”
“Yes?”
“I can’t find any of my stuff,” Rylie said. “My backpack. My clothes.”
Louise planted her hands on her hips. “You took them with you last night when you left camp. Did you drop them on the trail?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me where you went and I’ll look for you,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Rylie repeated. When the counselor gave her an incredulous look, she added, “It was dark.” And I don’t even remember how I got back.
“I’ll tell the other counselors to watch for your bag. In the meantime, I’ll get clothes and a towel so you can shower.”
She followed Louise to the office. The woods around camp were so much more alive than the day before. Birds sang in the trees, building nests and swooping after bugs. Chipmunks scurried up and down tree trunks while rabbits burrowed through the underbrush. The earthy, woodsy scent of dirt and cinnamon bark filled her nostrils.
Louise found clothing and a towel for Rylie. “These are unclaimed items from last year’s lost and found,” she said. “You can keep them for now. Get going.”
Rylie turned the clothes over in her hands, trying to suppress her disgust at the idea of secondhand clothes. If she hoped to start blending in with the other girls, this wasn’t the way to do it. Baggy t-shirts branded with the camp logo and too-large shorts were going to make her look shrunken and awkward. Even better for teasing.
The shower water was pumped from the brook and freezing cold. She rinsed off in a half minute and emerged shivering, wrapping the ratty old towel around her body. Rylie stared down her reflection in front of the mirror. Her blonde hair lay limply around her face and shoulders, and her wide eyes looked helpless and prey-like.
She watched everyone leave through the mirror. Several girls whispered and pointed as they passed. Everyone knew about her flight by now, which meant the teasing could only get worse.
Something caught her eye in the mirror: four parallel, silvery gashes across her chest. Old scars. But Rylie didn’t have any scars.
She turned this way and that until the light caught her skin in such a way that she could make out the lines. They looked like claw marks. “It doesn’t make sense,” she murmured. Someone behind her giggled, and Rylie’s cheeks grew hot. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud.
Dressing quickly to hide the scars, she went to the dining room alone. At least there had to be something vegetarian for breakfast, like pancakes or toast.
The forest during the day felt like a completely different world than the forest at night. An early morning sprinkling of rain left lush moss and dewy sparkles on the plants. Golden sunlight filtered through the branches to make shadows dance on the trail.
Rylie was so absorbed in the life and colors of the woods that she didn’t notice she had company until he stepped in front of her. It was the boy from the canoe.
“Hey, hang on a second!”
His voice was deeper than she expected. Seeing him closer than before made her realize he wasn’t just tan and broad-shouldered—he was also really cute. He had a strong nose and full lips, offset by shaggy brown hair slanting over one eye. A single fang hung from his pierced left ear.
“Hi,” she said, her cheeks growing hot. “Are you from the boy’s camp?”
He gave her a long look up and down, face to feet, like he was sizing her up. “Yeah. My name is Seth.”
“I’m Rylie. I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”
Seth shrugged. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a slender book with a pen tucked in the pages. “Is this yours?”
She snatched it from his hands. “My journal! Where did you find that?”
Rylie flipped through the pages, afraid something would be missing, but everything looked intact. The corners were a little dirty, and there was a deep gash across the cover, but it was otherwise fine.
“I was hiking out past the boy’s camp and saw it by the trail.” Seth jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Was there anything else? An inhaler? A backpack?”
“I didn’t see anything,” he said. His dark eyes burned right through her. Rylie wished she could shrink away so he wouldn’t see her in the clothes from the lost and found. “Are you okay?”
The question startled her so much that Rylie responded honestly. “No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Rylie meant to leave it at that, but once she started it talking, she couldn’t stop. It all came spilling out at once. “I hate it here. My parents dumped me off so they could forget about me for the summer. The other girls tease me, and I didn’t do anything to deserve it. All my stuff is gone and I think I’m going crazy. Plus, I hate the outdoors.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Sorry.”
She flushed. “But it’s better now I have my journal.”
“I’m glad.” Voices approached. It sounded like one of the other groups had finished showering and was going to breakfast. “I should go. I’ll see you later.”
“Thanks for my journal,” she said, but he had already vanished.
The archery range was set up in a field by the lake. Louise ignored Rylie’s complaints of a stomach ache and made her come along, but didn’t try to make her pick out a bow. Rylie found a bench and sat down facing the water, trying to make out the boy’s camp on the other side. Louise shook her head, but left Rylie alone.
“Bull’s eye!” crowed Amber. Her little group of friends laughed and high-fived in congratulations. Rylie shot her a nasty look before returning her attention to the water.
There were no canoes today. No sign of Seth at all. She wanted to see him again, even though thinking about him was enough to make her blush. How had he known the journal was hers? Rylie needed to see him again so she could ask.
Pulling her journal out of her pocket, Rylie gazed across the water. She chewed on the end of her pen while she decided what to say. She couldn’t begin to describe her hazy memories of the previous night, nor could she explain her mysterious new scars. And all that was shadowed by the urge to write about Seth and his stunn
ing eyes.
She prepared to write, but Rylie froze before she could lay pen to paper. Her last entry wasn’t the only thing on the open page.
A line had been written at the bottom in sharp, slanted handwriting which didn’t belong to her. Rylie was mortified at the thought of Seth reading her journal until she read what he had written:
Be careful. You’re in danger now.
