17
There are few worse words to hear right now. All I want to know is (A) How “wrong way” are we, and (B) how do we get back on track?
Lennon whips out his phone to study the book he’s saved. His eyes flick over the screen, and then he whimpers softly. “I knew it. This isn’t the right exit. We got turned around somehow. I knew it felt like we were going up. I just . . .”
“Where are we?”
“We’re at the eastern exit. We need to be south, which is lower in elevation. A lot lower.”
Do not panic.
“Is there a map of the cave?” I ask.
“If there were a map of the cave, we wouldn’t be standing here, would we?”
Jeez. No need to get snippy. I’m the one with the snake bite. And speaking of snakes, I glance back at the dark, spiderwebbed exit. “I’m not going back in there. Forget it.”
“I don’t think we have to,” he says, flipping to another screen to reread a passage. “This cliff goes all the way around to the exit we should have used. It’s just . . .”
“Just what?”
He takes his compass out of his pocket. “It’s roundabout. The other exit was a straight shot to the path in the valley. It’s about a mile down from here to the northern exit, as a crow flies. But that’s more like two or three miles, hiking around this cliff. Then another mile down into the valley.”
“So, we’re talking, what?”
“Two hours. A little longer. It won’t be an easy descent. It’s not an actual trail.” Lennon looks down at my bloody ankle. It’s starting to swell.
I glance around the cliff. How could a place that’s so beautiful make me miserable?
“Hey, look,” I say, spotting something dark on the mountain wall, several meters away from where we exited. Maybe Lennon’s wrong. Maybe we are in the right place. That could be the southern exit there.
But as I hobble toward it, and Lennon shines his headlamp inside, I lose hope. It’s another cave entrance, yes, but not to the network of tunnels we were just hiking. It’s just a big, wide single cave. As though nature used a melon baller and scooped out a hole in the side of the mountain.
“This isn’t an animal cave, is it?” I say, imagining us waking up some hibernating family of bears.
“It looks clear,” Lennon reports.
We have to duck to enter the mouth of the cave, but once we’re in, the ceiling is high, so we can stand and walk around. It’s maybe a dozen feet wide and twice as deep. There are no hibernating animals. No stream. Not much of anything at all, except a dip in the rocky floor near the mouth that cradles the remnants of burned firewood.
“People have camped here,” Lennon says, bending down to inspect it. “Not recently, I don’t think. But look.” He kicks a discarded, empty can of food in the corner. It’s covered in dirt and bone-dry, so it’s been here a while. “Bastards. What about ‘leave no trace’ don’t people understand?”
I’m having trouble caring about that right now. I turn toward the half-moon mouth of the tiny cave and look toward the valley of trees. It’s like gazing into a framed painting.
“Look, it’s not what I’d planned, but I think we should camp here,” Lennon says. “It’s flat and protected. Seems reasonably safe—it’s obviously been used as a site by other hikers. There’s room enough for us to erect both of our tents inside this cave and build a fire.”
“What about water?” I say.
“I’ve only taken a swig out of my bottle. How much do you have left?”
The entire bottle. I haven’t touched it since we filled up at lunch.
“It’s enough,” he assures me. “I mean, we won’t be washing our hair or anything, but if we’re careful, we can make it until we can hike down to the creek. Or, if you feel up to it, we can hike down there now.” He checks the time on one of the compass dials. “It’s almost six. It will get dark at nine. That should be enough time, but we’ll be cutting it close. And this isn’t a big trail, so it might be a little rough walking it during dusk. We also need to take care of your ankle.”
I debate this. I’d like fresh water. It worries me that all we have is the precious little in our bottles. But I look at my ankle, and suddenly the weight of my backpack seems to double.
I’m tired and hungry and injured.
I want to stop.
“Let’s just stay here,” Lennon says encouragingly.
“What about your map? This wasn’t the plan.”
“No, but it’s workable. The map was just a general guideline. Things happen out here, and you adapt.”
I’m not good at adapting.
“This little cave is pretty sweet,” he says. “And I’ll bet you can see a thousand stars from this cliff.”
He’s probably right. I look at the clear sky above the mountains.
“Come on, take off your pack,” he tells me. “Let’s get you fixed up, okay? One thing at a time.”
Maybe he’s right.
Following his suggestion, I unbuckle my backpack and plop down on a boulder near the entrance of our little clifftop cave while he digs out the first aid kit. I spy my blue Nalgene bottle, and it makes me realize that I’m dying of thirst, but I resist the urge to drink. Must save it. Now I’m wondering if we need to spare water for cleaning my wounds, but Lennon has broken out alcohol swabs, and he squats at my feet to use one.
“Cold,” I say, flinching. “Oww!”
“Hold still and let me clean it,” he says.
“It stings.”
“That’s how you know it’s working.” He cradles my heel in one hand and cleans off the bite. “I once got bitten by an emerald tree boa. Beautiful snakes, but boy, do they have a mean bite.” He holds up his hand and twists it around to show me. A U-shaped line of scars arches around his wrist and the heel of his palm.
“Holy crap. When did that happen?”
“About six months ago. She was eight feet long and this big around.” He shows me with his hands. “I had to go the emergency room and get a couple stiches. The snake was upset about being moved into a new habitat. She was old and set in her ways. I get a lot of little bites at work, but they usually don’t hurt. This one scared me. I was so shaken up by the whole thing, I was scared to pick up another snake for a couple of days.”
“I don’t ever want to see one again, much less pick one up. If I’d known to expect snakes in those caves, I wouldn’t have agreed to go inside.”
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Don’t quote Monty Python to me right now. I’m mad at you.”
He snorts a laugh. “No, you’re not. You’re just grouchy because you’re in pain.”
“I’m grouchy because you led me into an evil serpent’s nest!”
“Snakes get a bad rap,” he says. “They only attack when they’re scared or hungry. We’re monsters in their eyes. And that snake that bit you shouldn’t have been in that cave. The temperature is too low for a kingsnake. I’m thinking it must have gotten lost in there somehow. I hope it finds its way out.”
“As long as it’s not through some tiny crack in the walls here. This is our cave, you hear me, snake?” I call out. “I wonder how this cave formed. You know, thousands of years ago, or whatever.”
“I don’t know, but it reminds me of The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, Miss Everhart, I’m glad you asked,” he says, jolly. “See, it’s this Japanese horror manga story—”
“Oh, lord,” I grumble.
“—in which thousands of human-shaped holes appear in the side of a mountain after an earthquake. People soon discover that there’s a perfect hole for each person, made just for them, and when they find their own hole, they become crazed, trying to climb inside of it.”
“That sounds . . . weird. What happens when they get inside?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
I shake my head. “I really, really don’t. No more creepy stories. Especially if we have to sleep here tonight.”
He chuckles. “My work here is done. And yes, I think we should definitely stay here tonight. So I’m declaring that the official new plan. Agreed?”
“All right.” I lean back on my palms as he finishes cleaning my wound. It’s pretty swollen, I think. He says it will be fine by tomorrow. He finds a couple of Band-Aids to keep the puncture marks covered, so they won’t get infected.
“We’re not, by the way,” he says quietly, pulling the paper backing off a bandage.
“Excuse me?”
“Jovana and I aren’t dating. We broke up before summer break. Well, she broke up with me.”
Oh.
This is unexpected, his bringing this back up now. I’m also a little embarrassed about how relieved I am to know it. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I mean, if you were upset.”
What a stupid thing to say. Of course he—
“I wasn’t,” he says, surprising me. His eyes are on my ankle as he adheres the bandage. “It was cool at first, me and Jovana. But we never really . . . clicked. I tried. I really did. It just felt like something was missing. She said I was distant and distracted, and that I was hung up on someone else.”
My heart thumps rapidly inside my chest. “Were you?”
“Yes.”
I hold my breath, unsure of what this means. Part of me would like to pass him a note that reads Do you like me? Check YES or NO. But I’m too much of a coward to say it aloud. Too afraid that he’ll laugh. And then it will be awkward between us for the rest of the trip.
“Were you and Andre serious?” he asks.
It takes me a long time to answer. “I was hung up on someone else.”
It takes him an even longer time to say, “Are you still?”
Does he know it’s him? Or does he think it’s Brett? I can’t tell if he’s just curious about my personal life, trying to make idle conversation. Being polite. I can’t tell anything from his blank expression and monotone rumble. Whether he’s talking to me strictly friend to friend, like when he had a crush on Yolanda Harris when we were fourteen, and I had to endure his ramblings about how cool she was, and would I help him talk to her?
But there’s that hope again, poking its head up when I don’t want it to.
Say something.
But I don’t. And he doesn’t. He just packs up the remnants of the bandage paper and stands up. “Don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Let’s make camp.”
He spends the next half hour assembling both of our tents inside the cave while I find a place for our bear canisters outside, and farther around the cliff, find a few hidden places behind shrubs appropriate for an outdoor toilet. The cliff is narrow, but it’s long—miles long—and now that I see the distance with my own eyes, I’m thankful we’re not hiking it, because my ankle is starting to complain.
I find a few pieces of dry wood and carry them back to the cave. Lennon has set up our tents side by side, and he’s pulling out these twist-top LED lights that fit in the palm of his hand. He shows me how to use the light’s handle on top to hook it to a loop on the ceiling of my tent. The tiny lanterns thoroughly illuminate the insides of our tents, which makes me feel better about the encroaching darkness as twilight falls.
While I unroll my sleeping bag and dig through my pack, Lennon gathers more wood and kindling. He finds some small rocks and uses them to ring the old fire pit, to ensure that the fire stays contained. Then he teaches me how to set up his pyramid-shaped fire, which seems complex, because he has a million little rules about the tinder and how thick the wood should be. But I like that he’s so detailed and precise. I do the honors of lighting the tinder, and after a couple false starts—it needs more oxygen—I finally get the campfire going. Which feels . . . satisfying.
Once the wood settles into place, Lennon sets up his little portable grill and pan over the flames and we carefully measure out the exact amount of water we’ll need to rehydrate a couple freeze-dried meals. I’ve never been so excited about beef Stroganoff. Scratch that, I’ve never been excited whatsoever about beef Stroganoff, but when we pour the boiling water into the pouches, it smells amazing.
We don’t have any big boulders to sit on like we did back at the waterfall, so we spread out the rainflies from our tents on the ground near the fire and utilize our bear barrels as tables. And when we’re done eating, we use a wet wipe to clean our sporks in order to conserve water. Lennon adds more wood to the fire and we sit and watch the sunset. Stars are already visible, and I’m so glad Lennon suggested we stay here.
“How does it feel now?” he asks, glancing at my leg, which is stretched out in front of me. It’s hard to get comfortable on the ground.
“Still swollen. And sore,” I say.
He waves my foot toward his lap. “Put it up here and let me look at it.”
Hesitant, I prop the heel of my shoe on his thigh, and he inspects the bandages on my ankle. “I think it’s going to be fine. Just leave it here,” he says, stopping me from moving away with a gentle hand on my knee. “Keeping it elevated will help with the swelling.”
“Or force germy snake saliva to make its way up into my bloodstream.”
“That’s already happened.”
“Oh, good.”
“Actually, that’s the biggest worry with nonvenomous bites. Bad bacteria. You don’t know when his last meal was, and he could have chowed down on something rotten or diseased.”
“Are you trying to freak me out?”
He smiles. “Sort of. I like watching your face twist into horrified expressions. Everything shows on your face. You know that, right?”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. I can read you like a book.”
This embarrasses me a little, and why is his hand still on my knee? Not that I’m complaining. It feels . . . nice. “Well, I can’t read you at all, because you’re expressionless.”
“That’s my poker face.”
This makes me laugh. “You’re a terrible poker player. Remember when your dad taught us to play? You lost so many Oreos to me that night.” I haven’t spent a lot of time with Lennon’s dad, Adam, because Lennon mostly went to visit him in San Francisco instead of Adam coming to Melita Hills. But every once in a while, his father would come into town to visit, and last summer he brought playing cards and a supersize pack of Oreos to use for bets. We sat around Mac and Sunny’s dining room table playing Texas Hold’em until past midnight. My mom had to cross the street and come get me because I’d turned my phone’s ringer off and hadn’t realized it was so late. Then she’d ended up playing a few poker hands—until my dad called at two a.m., and Mom and I both got in trouble.
Lennon smiles. “That was so fun. I remember laughing so hard, I sprained my side.”
“It made us laugh even harder.”
“Your mom cleaned up, didn’t she? She took the entire pot. Who knew she was such a vicious poker player.”
That surprised me, too. She was so loud when she won. Probably woke half the neighborhood with her victory shouts. “Your dad was hilarious, showing up in that casino poker dealer outfit with the green visor. When he does something, he goes all out, doesn’t he?”
A wrinkle appears in his forehead. “Yeah,” he says softly.
Sunny and Mac have framed photos in their hallway of Lennon and Adam dressed up for Halloween in superdetailed complementary costumes. Milk carton and cookie. Batman and Robin. Mario and Luigi. Surfer and shark. Luke Skywalker and Yoda. This went on from the time Lennon was a baby until the year I moved to Mission Street, actually. Lennon was too old to go trick-or-treating, and Adam went on some punk reunion tour.
“I never figured out where he got that giant package of Oreos. There were hundreds.”
“I think he stole it from work. Or ‘borrowed,’ according to him,” Lennon says, one side of his mouth turning up. “Mac gave him hell for it later when she found out. You know how she feels about stealing.”
She has zero tolerance for it. I think it has something to do with her being homeless when she was a teen. May God have mercy on anyone who tries to shoplift vibrators from Toys in the Attic, because they will end up getting a tough-love speech from her while she calls the cops.
Now Lennon seems bluesy. I’m not sure what I said that made his mood go downhill, but before I can ask, he shoos away a moth that’s flying around our fire, attracted to the light, and grabs my knee harder, shaking my leg to get my attention. “Hey. I just remembered. I have cards in my backpack. For Solitaire. You want to play poker?”
“With what? We have no cookies. And Joy would kill me if I bet the emergency money she gave me for the trip.”
Lennon thinks for a moment. “We could use the M&M’s in your trail mix.”
We could.
“Just a couple of games before it’s black out here,” he says. “Then you can break out your telescope and do some stargazing.”
I chuckle. “All right. You’re on, buddy. Prepare to lose!”
It’s getting too dark to see all that well by the fire, and the bear canisters aren’t big enough to play on. So we decide to shove both of our packs in Lennon’s tent and play cards inside mine—it’s the bigger of the two—where we can spread out the cards. The palm-size LED light Lennon loaned me provides illumination, and we open the outer door flap and zip up the mesh screen to allow airflow while keeping away the bugs. It takes a while to pick out all the M&M’s from the trail mix, and then takes a couple of hands to remember how to play. I keep getting a straight flush confused with a full house, and Lennon forgets half of the rules. We’re probably still playing wrong, but neither of us cares. We’re too busy laughing.
And it feels natural and good. Easy.
We play until the moon rises outside and stars dot the black sky. The campfire nearly burns out. I even forget about my snake bite until he accidentally bumps into my ankle, apologizing profusely when I cry out. Then he rubs my leg, asking about my hives. I took a mild antihistamine at dinner, so they aren’t bothering me too badly at the moment, or maybe it’s just that his warm palm gliding over my bare skin is distracting me from the itching. It’s definitely making me forget about the snake bite all over again. I forget about everything, actually, including my current hand of poker. He wins the entire pot of M&M’s.
Despite the leg rub ending, I’m still happy. I smile to myself as I gather up the cards and stack them neatly in a single deck. “This is so not fair, you know.” I was distracted.
“Totally fair,” he says, carefully bagging all the M&M’s to put them back in the bear canister. “Tomorrow you’re going to be eating boring nuts-and-fruit trail mix, and you’ll think, Self, why did I go crazy with all those ridiculous bets? Sure wish I had some chocolate. And I will just laugh like an evil overlord.” He demonstrates said laugh in his deep voice.
“Okay, okay,” I say, pushing his shoulder. “Your dad will be proud that you lived up to your poker potential. You’ll have to tell him that you finally won next time you see him.”
Lennon sniffles and rubs his nose, dark eyelashes fluttering. He keeps his eyes on the deck of cards as I’m sliding it over to him. “Yeah, that will be difficult.”
“Why is that?”
His eyes lift to meet mine. “Because he’s dead.”