The lights from the Bend shone down below us. We’d spotted them a while back and had limped toward them like a beacon calling us home. The sun had long set, but the others were determined to make it back before midnight, and there was no power in the world that could stop them. Georgia had decided she was going to walk the last mile on her own, and I kind of admired that about her.
Jenna let Georgia lean on her as we trudged through the wilderness. “We don’t live that far apart,” Georgia said. “Maybe we could, I don’t know, see each other or whatever.”
“Maybe,” Jenna said.
There hadn’t been much to say when she’d finished her story. I think most of us had guessed what was going on, but hearing her tell it was different. No one should have to go through what she went through, and I kind of wished she’d burned her grandfather’s car with him still in it. But then she would have been in prison instead of with us, and I don’t think she deserved to spend her life in a cage.
“I wish I could have met someone like you at camp,” Georgia went on. “Not like that, I mean. I’m not—”
“Gay,” Jenna finished. “I know; you already said so.”
Georgia shook her head. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. I just meant that I like knowing you.”
Jenna didn’t say anything for a minute. Then “Yeah. I like knowing you, too.”
I fell back to walk near Lucinda and Tino. She hadn’t threatened to punch or castrate him once since she’d told her story and he’d defended her.
“You still with that Jameson guy?” Tino asked.
“Why? Because you think you have a shot?”
Tino shrugged. “Maybe.”
“You don’t.”
“Can’t blame me for trying.”
Lucinda rolled her eyes. “Like hell I can’t.”
I moved between the groups, ignored and unseen. I listened to Jaila and Sunday laughing as Jackie told her the whole story of how she’d got caught stealing from a science-fiction convention. And I heard Jaila tell about how she she’d wound up in the Bend because her best friend Ursula’s older brother, Mauro, who Jaila had been in love with had been found murdered and how her father wouldn’t let her go back to Xalitla Guerrero for the funeral, so she’d run away from home multiple times. She made it all the way to the border crossing on money she’d earned busking before she was caught.
Sunday swore the story she’d told us really had been true, so she talked about her dads instead. It sounded like she had a nice family, and I kind of envied that.
“My sister really did disappear,” David said to Cody as they walked. “And I do think it was aliens that took her.”
Cody didn’t say a whole lot, but there was a strength in his walk that made me think he was channeling those old movie star actresses he loved so much.
“I put nails under Mike’s tires,” he said. “But I think my parents really sent me here because they thought it would make me into a ‘real man.’ ”
Tino had stopped to readjust his pack, and started walking with them. “Being a man isn’t about how you walk or talk. It’s about being you, right? So you swish and glide and do whatever the hell you want. And if people don’t like it, they can fuck right off.”
“Thanks?”
“I’m serious,” Tino said. “My stepdad was always acting macho and talking shit. He thought he was a man. At least he did until I shoved his sorry ass down the stairs.”
“I’m guessing that’s why you’re here,” David said.
“Sometimes there’s only one way to show people you won’t be ignored.”
I thought they were done talking and was about to slip away to eavesdrop elsewhere when Cody said, “But if there was another way, you wouldn’t have done it, right?”
Tino cocked his head to the side. “I’m not saying I’m sorry about what I did, but yeah. If I could have made him stop some other way, I would have.”
“Because we’re not animals.” David took a puff from his inhaler and coughed, and the three boys walked on.
* * *
Jaila started singing in a language I didn’t know as we walked the last quarter mile. A slow, earnest song in a voice that carried the scent of summer and shook the leaves. I’m not sure she was even singing for us or cared that we heard. She just sang, and it was beautiful.
Doug and the other counselors were waiting for us when we finally reached the Bend. Tino carried Georgia to the infirmary while Doug tried to chastise Jaila for not using her flare. But Jackie cut that right off and lit into him about not making sure to give us a flare that actually fucking worked. Eventually, we all went our separate ways to shower and eat and sleep in something resembling a bed.
I wasn’t tired though. I lay on a picnic table and stared at the stars. People spend a lot of time thinking about the planets that might orbit all those stars, but they ignore the worlds inside themselves. We’re all worlds; we’d spent the last three days on nine other planets, orbiting each other. I don’t know how much of what any of them said was the truth, but it doesn’t matter because the truth doesn’t exist in our words but in the spaces between them. You could spend a lifetime exploring the vastness between a person’s words and still never really know them. That’s the only thing that’s really true as far as I can tell.
But I do think Tino was right. Our parents and teachers and all the other adults in our lives might have seen us as animals, as feral youth determined to destroy our lives and the lives of those around us, but we weren’t. We were people, and we would not be ignored anymore.
I didn’t hear Cody come up behind me until he sat on the table near my legs.
“Hungry?” he said.
“Not really.” I sat up and scooted beside him.
“How come you never told a story?”
“Judge doesn’t have to.”
Cody elbowed me in the ribs. “So you’re not even going to tell me why you got sent here?”
“Aren’t we all here for the same reason?”
“No,” Cody said. But then he bit his lip. “Okay, maybe. I don’t know.”
“You’re cute when you smile.”
At the compliment Cody lit up like a neon sign. He smiled again, but it was a little self-conscious. Still cute all the same. “You think so?”
“You should try hooking up with guys your own age.”
“Maybe I will.”
Cody and I lay on the table beside each other for a while, and we watched the stars. When it got late, he said he was going to bed. Before he left he said, “Hey, so you never told us who won the contest.”
“No,” I said. “I guess I didn’t.”
“And?”
“And I’ll tell you later.”
After Cody’s footsteps faded, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a crumpled hundred-dollar bill, and held it in front of my face.
I said I was going to tell the truth, and I did. We were a clusterfuck, but we’d survived. I didn’t have any romantic notions that we were going to remain friends after what we’d been through. I didn’t believe for a second that Lucinda and Tino were going to call each other when they got home and start a long-distance relationship. I didn’t imagine Jaila and Jackie were going to meet up at a science-fiction convention and hound the cast of Space Howl for autographs together or that Jenna was going to fly to L.A. and have coffee with Sunday. We might have tied ourselves to each other for the three days we spent in the woods, but those knots had already started to loosen now that we’d returned.
That’s not the important bit, though. It didn’t matter whether we’d stay bound to one another, only that we’d learned to tie the knot at all and had gained the strength to show the world that we are not animals. We are not the feral youth they believe us to be. We are people. We are real. And we will not be ignored.
Or something like that. You’re going to believe what you want, anyway. I’m just here to tell the truth. Maybe.
I smiled at the hundred-dollar bill in my hand, folded it, and tucked it back into my pocket.