For reasons we never discussed, Nigel and I hadn't said anything to the others about the articles he'd found or Violet May Martinez, though when we were alone, he hashed them over incessantly. True tales of unsolved vanishings tended to hang around the darkest confines of one's mind long after one read about them—doubtlessly the reason why Conrad Hiller's poorly written and scrappily researched 2002 account of two teenage kidnappings in Massachusetts, The Beautiful Ones, hung around the New York Times Best-seller List for sixty-two weeks. Such stories were as pervasive as bats, flying around at the slightest provocation, circling over your head, and though you knew they had nothing to do with you, that your fate would probably not be like theirs, you still felt a mixture of fear and fascination.
"Everyone have what they need?" sang Hannah as she retied the bright red laces on her leather boots. "We can't come back to the truck, so make sure you have your backpacks and maps—do not forget the maps I gave you. It's very important you know where we are as we hike. We're following Bald Creek Trail, past Abram's Peak to Sugartop Summit. It moves northeast and the campground's four miles away from Newfound Gap Road, U.S. 441, that thick red line. See it on the map?"
"Yep," said Lu.
"The first aid kit. Who has it?"
"Me," said Jade.
"Fantastic." Hannah smiled, her hands on her hips. She was dressed for the occasion: khaki pants, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, a puffy green vest, mirrored sunglasses. There was an enthusiasm in her voice I hadn't heard since Fall Term. During Sunday dinners of late, we were all aware she wasn't herself. Something very slight had shifted within her, a change difficult to pinpoint; it was as if a painting in one's house had secretly been moved an inch to the right of where it'd hung for years. She listened to us as she always did, took the same interest in our lives, talked about her volunteer work at the animal shelter, a parrot she was hoping to adopt—but she didn't seem to laugh anymore, that girlish giggle like a kick through pebbles. (As Nigel said, that haircut was an "eternal rain on her parade.") She was prone to silent nods and abstracted stares, and I couldn't tell if she simply couldn't help this new reticence, if it was born of some unaccountable grief, which had rooted and spread inside of her like leafy liverwort, or if it was deliberate, so we'd all worry about what was troubling her. Certain June Bugs, I knew, willed themselves into abnormal moods that ranged from dour to delicate, simply so Dad would ask them, in tormented tones, if there was anything in the world he could do. (Dad's actual response to such calculated behavior was to comment she looked tired and suggest making it an early night.)
After dinner, Hannah no longer put on Billie Holiday's "No Regrets," singing along in her low, bashful, tone-deaf voice, but sat meditatively on the couch, stroking Lana and Turner, not saying a word while the rest of us hashed over college, or Headmaster Havermeyer's wife, Gloria, who was expecting twins and hauled her great stomach around campus with the same pleasure of Sisyphus with his boulder, or the outrageous story that broke in early March, that Ms. Sturds had been secretly engaged to Mr. Butters since Christmas (a pairing as dubious as an American Bison with a Grass Snake).
Efforts, both stealthy and obvious, to have Hannah join our conversations was like playing volleyball with a shot put. And she hardly ate the dinner she'd so painstakingly prepared, just pushed the food around her plate like an uninspired painter with a palette of dreary oils.
Now, for the first time in months, she was in a grand mood. She moved with the bright quickness of a sparrow.
"Are we ready?" she asked.
"For what?" asked Charles.
"Forty-eight hours of hell," said Jade.
"For being at one with nature. Everyone have their maps?"
"For the twentieth time, we have the goddamn maps" said Charles, slamming the doors at the back of the van.
"Perfect," Hannah said cheerfully and, making sure the doors were locked, she hoisted her enormous blue backpack onto her shoulders and began to walk away, briskly heading toward the woods at the opposite end of the parking lot. "And they're off!" she shouted over her shoulder. "Old Schneider's first out of the gate and holds the lead. Milton Black moves up on the outside. Leulah Maloney is coming up from fifth place. On the final turn it will be Jade and Blue battling it to the finish line." She laughed.
"What's she talking about?" asked Nigel staring after her.
"Who the hell knows," said Jade.
"Get going, thoroughbreds! We have to get there in the next four hours, otherwise we'll be hiking in the dark!"
"Great," said Jade, rolling her eyes. "She's finally lost it. And she couldn't lose it when we were buoyed by civilization. No, she had to lose it now, when we're in the middle of nowhere, when it's all snakes and trees and no one to come to our rescue but a fleet of friggin' rabbits."
Nigel and I looked at each other. He shrugged. "What the hell?" he said. Flashing his tiny smile, a pocket mirror catching light, he started after her.
I held back, watching the others. For some reason, I didn't want to go. I felt, not dread or apprehension, only an awareness that something grueling was looming in front of me, something so vast I couldn't see all of it, and I didn't know if I had the strength to take it on (see Nothing but a Compass and an Electrometer: The Story of Captain Scott and the Great Race to Claim Antarctica, Walsh, 1972).
Tightening the straps of my backpack, I headed after them. A few yards in front of me, at the opening of the trail, Jade tripped on a root. "Oh, stunning. Simply stunning," she said.
The northwest passage of Bald Creek Trail (a dotted black line on Hannah's map) started out amiably enough, broad-shouldered as Mrs. Rowley, my second-grade teacher at Wadsworth Elementary, puffy with mulch and late afternoon sunshine, and fine, wispy, flyaway pines like the hair loosened from her ponytail at the end of the day. (Mrs. Rowley possessed the enviable knack for turning all "frowns upside down," and all "snuffles into smiles.")
"Maybe this isn't so bad," said Jade, turning around and grinning as she trudged along in front of me. "I mean it is kind of fun."
An hour later, however, after Hannah's yell for us to "keep right at the fork," the road revealed its true character; it resembled not Mrs. Rowley, but the prickly Ms. Dewelhearst of Howard Country Day who dressed in dirt browns, with a posture taking cues from an umbrella handle and a face so withered she looked more walnut than human. The trail shriveled, forcing us to proceed single file and in relative silence as we skirted past
painful brambles and weeds. ("Not a twitter during the examination or I'll hold you back a grade and your life will be in ruins forevermore," said Ms. Dewelhearst.)
"This freaking hurts," said Jade. "I need a local anesthetic for my legs."
"Stop complaining/' said Charles.
"How's everyone doing?" shouted Hannah at the front, walking backward up the hill. "Marvelous, marvelous. This is fucking Candy Land." "Only a half hour to the first lookout point!" "I'm going to throw myself off," said Jade. We trudged on. In the woods, with its endless procession of malnourished pines and lop-eared rhododendrons and wan gray rocks, time seemed to speed up and slow down without provocation. I fell into a strange lull as I lumbered along in the very back, staring for minutes at a time at Jade's red knee-socks (hiked up over her jeans; some precaution against rattlesnakes), the thick brown roots caterpillaring through the trail, the splotches of fading gold light staining the ground. The seven of us seemed to be the only things alive for miles (apart from a few invisible birds and a gray squirrel skittering up a tree's torso) and one couldn't help but wonder if Hannah was right, if this experience she'd forced us into was, in fact, a gateway to something else, some brave new understanding of the world. Pines frothed, imitating the ocean. A bird fluttered up, up, swiftly, like an air bubble, to the sky.
Oddly enough, the only person who appeared not to have fallen under this plodding spell was Hannah. Whenever the path stiffened into a straight line, I could see she'd hung back to walk with Leulah and talked animatedly—a little too ani
matedly—nodding and looking over at Lu's face as if to memorize her expressions. And every now and then, she laughed, an abrupt and harsh sound, puncturing the bland peace of everything.
"Wonder what they're gossiping about," said Jade.
I shrugged.
We reached the first vista, Abram's Peak, around 6:15 P.M. It was a large rock promontory off to the right of the trail that opened up, like a stage, to reveal a grand expanse of mountains.
"That's Tennessee," Hannah said, shading her eyes.
We stood next to her in a line, staring at Tennessee. The only immediate sound was Nigel unwrapping the blueberry Pop-Tart he'd removed from his backpack. (As fish are impervious to drowning, Nigel was impervious to all Quietly Profound Moments.) The cold air tightened my throat, my lungs. The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed out against the horizon, were so pale, you couldn't see where their backs ended and the sky began.
The view made me sad, but I suppose everyone, when happening upon a sprawling expanse of earth, all light and mist, all breathlessness and infinity, felt sad —"the enduring gloom of man," Dad called it. You couldn't help but think, not only about shortages of food, safe water, shockingly low averages of adult literacy and life expectancy in various developing nations, but also that shopworn thought about how many people were, at this precise moment, being born, and how many were dying, and that you, like some 6.2 billion others, were simply between these two ho-hum milestones, milestones that felt earth shattering while they were happening, but in the context of Hichraker's 2003 edition of the World Geographical Factbook, or M. C. Howard's Finding the Cosmos in a Grain of Sand: The Nativity of the Universe (2004) they were ordinary, run-of-the-mill. It made one feel as if one's life was no more imperative than a pine needle.
"Fuck you!" Hannah screamed.
The sound didn't echo, as it would in a Looney Tune, but was swallowed immediately, like a thimble hurled at the sea. Charles turned and stared at her. The look on his face clearly indicated he thought she was crazy. The rest of us shifted like nervous cattle in a boxcar.
"F-Fuck you!" she shouted again, her voice hoarse.
She turned to us. "You should all say something." She took another deep breath, tipped her head back and closed her eyes in the manner of someone preparing to sunbathe on a deck chair. Her eyelids trembled, her lips too.
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments!" she screamed.
"You okay?" Milton asked her, laughing.
"There's nothing funny about this," Hannah said with a serious face. "Put some muscle into it. Pretend you're a bassoon. And then say something. Something that comes from your soul." She took a deep breath. "Henry David Thoreau!"
"Don't be afraid to be afraid!" Leulah gasped rather abruptly, sticking out her chin like a child in a spitting contest.
"Nice," said Hannah. Jade huffed. "Oh, God. I guess we're going to be born again from this ex
perience?" "I can't hear you," Hannah said. "This is fucking ridiculous!" Jade shouted. "Better." "Dang," said Milton. "Wimpy."
"Dang!"
"Jenna Jameson?" shouted Charles. "Is it a question or an answer?" said Hannah.
"Janet Jacme!" "Get me the fuck out of here!" screamed Jade. "Set limits and goals with equal precision!" "I want to fucking go home!" "Say hello to my leetle friend!" yelled Nigel, his face red. "Sir William Shakespeare!" shouted Milton. "He wasn't a sir," said Charles. "Yes, he was." "He wasn't knighted." "Let it go," said Hannah.
"Jenna Jameson!"
"Blue?" Hannah asked.
I didn't know why I hadn't shouted anything. I felt like a person who couldn't unstick their stutter. I believe I was trying to think of someone with a decent last name, someone who deserved this privilege of being sent into the wind. Chekhov, I'd been about to say him, but he seemed too stilted, even if I added the first name. Dostoevsky was too long. Plato seemed irritating, as if I were trying to one-up everyone by choosing the Very Root of Western Civilization and Thought. Nabokov, Dad would have approved, but no one, Dad included, seemed certain of the pronunciation. ("NA-bo-kov" was incorrect, the pronunciation of amateurs who bought Lolita under the impression it was a bodice ripper; yet "Na-BO-kov" fired like a defunct pistol.) It was even worse with Goethe. Molière was an interesting choice (no one had yet mentioned a Frenchman) but there was a problem shouting the guttural R. Racine was too obscure, Hemingway too macho, Fitzgerald fine, but in the end it was unforgivable what he did to Zelda. Homer was a good choice, though Dad said The Simpsons had bastardized his reputation.
"Be-be true to yourself." shouted Leulah. "Scorsese!" "Behave yourself." said Milton. "That's not a good one," said Hannah. "Never behave yourself."
"Never behave yourself" "]ust do it!" "Be all that you can be!"
"Don't rely on the sound-bites of American advertising to tell you how you feel/' said Hannah. "Use your own words. What you have to say, what's in your heart, is always powerful."
"Full-sleevedtattoos!" shouted Jade. Jade's face was now screwed up with
emotion like a ringing out washcloth. "Blue, you're thinking too much," said Hannah, turning to me. "I —uh —" I said.
"The Canterbury Tales!" "Mrs. Eugenia Sturds! May she live happily ever after with Mr. Mark Butters but may they not procreate and terrorize the world with their offspring!"
"Say the first thing that comes into your head — " "Blue van Meer!" I blurted. It slipped out like a big catfish. I froze. I prayed no one had heard me,
that it'd swum into the air, far ahead of everyone's ears. "Hannah Schneider!" shouted Hannah. "Nigel Creech!" "Jade Churchill Whitestone!" "Milton Black!" "Leulah Jane Maloney!" "Doris Richards my fifth-grade teacher with the incredible tits!" "Hell yeah!"
"You don't have to be lewd to be passionate. Dare to be real. To be serious."
"Never listen to the awful things people say about you because they're jealous!" Leulah pushed her hair out of her tiny, demure face. She had tears in her eyes. "One—one must persevere despite great adversity! One can never give up!"
"Don't just be that way here," Hannah said to us. She pointed at the mountains. "Be that way down there."
The remaining hike to Sugartop Summit (now a disturbing dotted line on our keyless map) took another two hours and Hannah told us we needed to pick up the pace if we wanted to get there before dark.
As we walked, the light weakening, bony pines crowding closer and closer around us, Hannah again became engrossed in a private conversation, this time with Milton. She walked very close to him (so close that, at certain moments, she with her great blue backpack and he with his red one, collided at the shoulders like bumper cars). He nodded at something she said, his large frame hunched down on the side where she walked, as if she was causing him to erode.
I knew how complimentary it could feel when Hannah talked to you, when she singled you out—opened your meek cover, boldly creased the spine, stared inside at your pages, searching for the point at which she'd stopped reading, anxious to find out what happens next. (She always read with great concentration, so you thought you were her favorite paperback until she abruptly put you down and started to read another with the same intensity.)
Twenty minutes later, Hannah was talking to Charles. They broke into screechy seagull laughter; she touched his shoulder, pulling him to her, their arms and hands for a moment entwined.
"Aren't they the happy couple," said Jade.
Not fifteen minutes later, Hannah was walking next to Nigel (I could tell from his lowered head and sideways glances, he was listening to her a little uneasily), and soon, she was in front of me talking to Jade.
Naturally, I assumed she'd eventually move back to talk to me, that this was a Hannah-Student Conference, and I, bringing up the rear, was the last on the list. But when they finished their conversation —Hannah was encouraging Jade to apply for a
summer internship at The Washington Post ("Remember to be kind to yourself," I also heard her say)—she whispered something more, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and then hurried to the front of our procession without so much as a glance in my direction.
"Okay! Don't worry, guys!" she shouted. "We're almost there!"
I was a mixture of indignation and melancholy by the time we reached Sugartop Summit. One tries not to pay attention to blatant favoritism ("Not everyone can be a member of the Van Meer Fan Club," noted Dad), but when it is so unashamedly flung in one's face, one can't help but feel hurt, as if everyone else gets to be pine needles, but one is forced to be sap. Mercifully, the others didn't realize she hadn't talked to me, and so when Jade threw her backpack to the ground, stretched her arms over her head, a big smile sunseting her face and said, "She really knows what to say, you know what I mean? Amazing" I admit I lied; I nodded in emphatic agreement and said, "She does."
"Let's try to get the tents up first," Hannah said. "I'll help with the first one. But go take a look at that view! You'll be speechless!"
Despite Hannah's patent enthusiasm, this campground I found dreary and anticlimactic, especially after the sprawling majesty of Abram's Peak. Sugartop Summit comprised a circular dirt clearing flanked by mangy pines, and a blackened campfire where a few logs had recently burned, soft and gray around their edges like the muzzles of old dogs. Off to the right, beyond a cluster of boulders, was a bald rock ledge, narrow as a nearly closed door, where one could sit and spy on a naked, purplish mountain range sleeping under a shabby bedspread of fog. By now, the sun had drained away. Runny oranges and yellows clogged the horizon.
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