“Well, obviously this chili does,” I snapped.
Daphne turned to Randolph. “E-death’s probably faking. Just trying to get attention.”
“Definitely!” said Randolph.
Edie was lying on the ground now. Her eyes and lips were swelling up, and her breathing made a high-pitched whistling noise. Only a lunatic could think she was faking.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Everything will be okay.”
Aaron came running up, looking worried.
“Where’s Jare?” I asked.
“He’s coming. I think.”
“You think?” I stood up. “Did you tell him we have an emergency here?”
Aaron nodded, fast. “I did! But he, uh, didn’t believe me at first.”
“He thought you were lying?”
“I don’t know. More like he thought Edie was? Or something?”
I grabbed Aaron’s sleeve. “Aaron! What did he say?”
“He said that he knew all about Edie’s allergy. He said he’d put together the menu for the entire camp, personally, with Edie’s allergy in mind. So she couldn’t be having a reaction.”
“Told you!” said Daphne.
I tugged Aaron’s sleeve so hard he almost lost his balance. I knew he was doing his best, but frankly I was getting frantic. “But she is having one!” I shouted.
“I know! That’s what I told him. So he said he’d come.”
We all looked in the direction of Jare’s tent, and sure enough, there he was, coming. But he wasn’t exactly in a rush. He wasn’t even walking his usual fast-Sasquatch walk. He was strolling, one hand in his pocket, like he’d just decided to take a nice turn around the campsite on this lovely evening. If he’d broken into casual whistling, it would not have surprised me.
“Hurry!” I yelled. “She needs her shot!”
Jare shook his head and waved his hand dismissively. “She’s fine.” But I could tell he was faking his nonchalance now, maybe because he’d heard the fear in my voice. He picked up the pace, but only slightly, a shift from strolling to sauntering.
My face got hot. My hands balled into fists.
“Now!” I yelled. “She needs it right now! Run!”
And, amazingly, he ran.
After it was all over and Edie was asleep in her tent, breathing normally, Aaron asked, “Hey, does anyone know what she’s allergic to?”
“Fish,” said Kate.
A light dawned on Aaron’s face. “Worcestershire sauce is made with anchovies.”
“You should tell that to Jare,” said Louis.
Aaron glanced nervously at the path to Jare’s tent. After Jare had given Edie her shot, with one sudden jab that made all of us flinch except for Edie, he’d been in a black mood, yelling at us and barking out commands before he’d stomped away, seething.
“Uh, I will,” said Aaron with a sheepish grin. “But maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow.”
“Told you he was a psycho,” I said.
“According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly known as the DSM, an individual with narcissistic personality disorder—”
“Aaron! Edie could have died. What kind of person is so full of himself that he’d risk someone’s life because he didn’t want to admit that he’d made a mistake?”
“Well, according to the—”
I narrowed my eyes at him menacingly. “What kind of person, Aaron?”
Aaron’s eyes met mine, and his face broke into a smile. He shrugged. “A psycho. What else?”
Heaven
That night, after we were all in our tents, I heard Kate crying again, the same doleful, lost, continuous, undramatic crying as before, as if sorrow didn’t take hold of her as much as it simply leaked out of her. It wasn’t the middle of the night this time, though, so none of us was asleep yet. I wanted to go to her, try to comfort her, but I knew that this was exactly the kind of act that binds people together, turns them into friends, so I stopped myself. But finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. She was just so sad.
As quietly as I could, I unzipped my tent and got out, and as I did, I saw two other people emerge from the darkness, their faces pale ovals in the moonlight. Aaron and Louis. We all walked to the door of Kate’s tent and just stood there, looking helplessly at each other, unsure of what to do, and listening to the awful sound of Kate’s crying. After a while, it started to slow down and get hiccupy, and then it stopped abruptly, and there was Kate’s familiar, dry little voice, saying, “Well, are you going to stand out there all night or come in?” Which made us all smile with relief.
“In?” said Louis doubtfully, eyeing Kate’s one-person tent.
“Right,” said Kate. “Go sit in Louis’s tent. I’ll be there in a second.”
We obeyed. Louis’s tent wasn’t so big, really, not for people who were used to rooms. But for us, sitting there, it felt as spacious and high ceilinged as a cathedral.
“Wow,” said Aaron, looking around. “This is great.”
“I have this thing about walls closing in on me,” said Louis, shuddering, and I flashed back to his hiking through the narrow gully in the rock, singing “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” as if his life depended on it, which maybe it had, or almost. He smiled a lopsided smile. “I guess I have a lot of ‘things.’”
The tent flap opened, and Kate came inside. In the light of the flashlight we’d set on the ground between us, she looked tired and puffy eyed, but not the least bit embarrassed, which I admired. Whenever I cried in public, I wanted the ground to swallow me.
“I wanted to explain,” she said, “because—” She paused, thinking, her beautiful hands lying perfectly still on her crossed knees. “Well, I don’t really know why.”
We sat in silence, being patient. With the four of us sitting there, so close together, time somehow didn’t matter; if we had to wait all night, we would. Even Aaron seemed okay with the quiet. Then Kate looked up at us. I could see her black eyes shining in the dark.
“I guess I don’t want you guys to think I’m this depressed person.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say “You aren’t?” when Louis said it for me.
“You aren’t? I mean, you seem happy sometimes, and you’re, like, really nice and all, but I thought maybe you were . . . depressed.”
Kate sighed. “That’s what my parents think too. Well, what they say is that I’m ‘in a funk’ or ‘in the doldrums’ or ‘moping’ or ‘brooding.’”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say any of those things,” said Louis quickly. “I don’t even know what some of them mean.”
I watched Aaron open his mouth, no doubt to fill us in on the dictionary definitions of all those words, with maybe some history about how they came to be (I myself recognized the Doldrums from The Phantom Tollbooth, which I spent fifth grade being obsessed with), but then he closed it again. He caught my eyes and smiled. It occurred to me that he was getting better at knowing when to keep his total recall to himself. It also occurred to me that he had a nice smile.
“Basically, they all mean the same thing: I’m going around sad for no good reason,” said Kate. “They also mean I’m starting to get on everyone’s nerves.”
“Well, what do you think you are?” I asked.
Kate lifted her chin. “Sad. My grandmother lived with us for a year and a half, and then she died.” Her chin started trembling, but she didn’t start crying.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Right before you came here?”
Kate shook her head. “That’s the problem. It was five months ago, and according to my parents, that’s like four and a half months too long.”
“Aren’t they sad too?” asked Aaron.
“No!” said Kate bitterly. “Not even my mom, and Granny was her mother!”
But I heard the lie, and right afterward, Kate scratched her elbow. A Poison Ivy Liar.
“Okay,” she said, shrugging. “My mom was sad, a little, at first. The thing is that my grandmother was kind of . .
. difficult.”
Truth. And a hard one for Kate to tell.
“She’d had a rough life. I never knew my grandfather because he left when my mom was a baby, so my grandmother raised her on her own. She worked in a chair factory and then, when the factory closed, she cleaned houses. And she never got to go to college, even though she was really smart, and I guess in a lot of ways, she wasn’t a very nice mom. She wasn’t abusive or anything, but she was tough and didn’t talk much and had a bad temper. My mom said she was a cold fish. She said she was like a person who’d had all the love wrung out of her when she was a young woman, so she didn’t have any left for her daughter.”
“What do you think?” I asked gently.
Kate faltered. “I think she was probably not the nicest mom.” Tears filled her eyes. “She felt bad about it, though, later. She told me that.”
“Did she tell your mom?” asked Louis.
“I don’t think so. She had trouble saying stuff like that to most people.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes, then moved them away. “But she said it to me. She loved me! And I loved her. I took care of her. I always tried to put myself in her place, think about what she’d like best. I read her books out loud and sat and watched TV with her, even though she loved really, really, really bad reality shows, and when she got super sick at the end, I helped her eat and massaged her hands and feet to distract her from the pain. She said I did a better job than the home health lady. I loved her!”
Truth, truth, truth, raw and painful, almost too much truth to bear. I scooted closer to Kate and put my arm around her small shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Kate,” said Aaron.
“Same here,” said Louis.
“But the worst thing is that no one ever talks about her,” said Kate. “After she’d been gone for a while, I would try to tell some of the stories she’d told me or just say how much I missed her and how it hurt to see her empty room, and my parents and my sisters just acted exasperated. They’d say I needed to get over it, but how am I supposed to get over being sad if no one lets me be sad?”
“Is that why they sent you here?” asked Louis. “To get over it?”
“Yes, but those, those . . . layers!” wailed Kate.
Layers? Louis and I looked at each other questioningly, but Aaron had the answer, as usual. The thing is, it wasn’t his usual kind of answer at all.
“In the rock face, you mean,” he said.
“Yes!” said Kate.
“The way it makes human life feel infinitesimally small,” said Aaron.
I stared at him.
“Exactly,” said Kate, tears falling down her cheeks. “My grandmother isn’t even a hair-sized line. She’s too tiny to leave any kind of mark on those rocks. And no one wants to even talk about her. She’s been dead five months, and all anyone wants to do is forget her. Soon it will be like she was never here at all.”
A hush fell over us, and I wondered if Louis and Aaron were doing what I was doing: trying to think of a way to comfort Kate, to tell her she was wrong about her grandmother and time and the rocks, without lying to her.
“But Kate,” ventured Aaron at last, shyly, “does knowing about those rocks make you not, um, love her?”
“No! Of course not. I’d never not love her.”
“Right,” said Aaron, getting more and more embarrassed. “You came here and saw the rocks and realized how small your grandmother is compared to, you know, the history of the Earth or whatever, and you love her anyway. Which is maybe the whole point.”
We all just looked at Aaron, who looked down at his lap. I puzzled over what he’d just said: “the whole point.” The whole point of what?
“Oh!” I said. “I get it. You mean the anyway.”
Without looking up, Aaron nodded.
“The anyway is the whole point,” I said, and Aaron nodded again.
“I’m confused,” said Louis.
“The anyway is the whole point of—” I broke off, as embarrassed as Aaron.
“Love,” said Kate, amazed. “Even if no one cares, even if no one else remembers her, even if she could be not so nice, even if time lasts forever and those rocks tower over everything, and my grandmother isn’t even a speck, I love her anyway.”
“And that’s the whole point,” said Aaron. Then he groaned and fell backward, hitting the ground with a bump. “Sheesh. Thinking is a lot harder than knowing. Why didn’t anyone warn me?”
We all laughed, especially Kate. Louis, the person who didn’t touch people, lifted his hand and hesitated only a second before he slapped Aaron on the shoulder.
“Good job, man,” he said.
Lying in my tent at night, dividing my days into hells and heavens, I could see how nothing was tidy, how the hells had some pretty sweet parts, how the heavens were a mixed bag too, which is maybe how it goes in the desert. Or maybe it’s how it goes anywhere, although back home, good and bad sure seemed a lot easier to tell apart.
I also saw that I was coming dangerously close to forgetting my resolution to not have friends. Some outside observer might even have said that when it came to sticking to that resolution, I was failing dismally. But I didn’t panic. I knew it was all temporary. We would go home and never see each other again. If these people ended up lying and betraying me like Janie had, well, I wouldn’t know them for long, anyway.
And come on, those rocks? Those trees? That sunset? The Milky Way trailing down the sky every night like spilled glitter? It was all so beautiful, but it also felt unreal, otherworldly. And if this wasn’t the real world, nothing that happened in it was real, was it? No matter how real it felt.
CHAPTER TEN
Aaron Archer
El Viaje a la Confianza
ONE MORNING WHILE ENOD’S TEAM was scraping the last of the oatmeal off the breakfast dishes with handfuls of dried creosote leaves, which got the dishes clean but made all our food taste like railroad crossties, Jare took a seat on a rock in the shade of an abandoned ranch house beside the trail, got a funny look on his face, felt around on top of his head, and pointed to three columns of stone looming like watchmen in the faraway desert. He said, “Your second el Viaje character-building challenge is to bring me my hat. I left it on one of those hoodoos.” Then he ducked into his tent. “Let’s hope you do better than you did capturing that flag.”
“What are hoodoos?” asked Kevin Larkspur.
“Those,” said Jare, ducking back out to point at the stones, “are hoodoos.” He disappeared into his tent again, and we could hear him throwing his things around.
“Those stupid rock fingers that stick up in the desert,” said Daphne, rolling her eyes.
“Thanks, that clears things up,” said Audrey.
“Actually, a hoodoo, tent rock, or fairy chimney is a spire of stone that protrudes from the bottom of an arid basin. Ranging from the height of a human being to the height of a skyscraper, hoodoos consist of soft rock capped by harder, less easily eroded stone that protects each column from the elements,” I supplied. After all, I’d spent a whole afternoon studying geology to get ready for Quiz Masters season.
Jare stuck his head through the tent flap again. “Could you just,” he asked from between gritted teeth, “go?”
“I don’t want to,” Daphne announced.
“Yes,” said Jare, climbing impatiently back out. “You do.”
“No,” said Daphne, “I don’t.”
“Yes,” hissed Jare, “you do!” He raised one eyebrow.
Daphne thought his assertion over for a second, and then, to our surprise, she shrugged and said, “Okay. You win, Jare. I do want to. By the way, does this field trip have a catchy name, like the other one?”
“I’ve got more important things to think about right now, Daphne,” muttered Jare, jabbing his thumb toward his tent. “And it’s a challenge, not a field trip.”
“Are there clues to help us get there?” asked Edie.
“Good question, E-death,” said Daphne, clapping silently.
“Very good question.” She turned to Jare. “Jare, are there clues?”
“Yeah. Here’s your clue. Look over there. See the hoodoos? That’s where the hoodoos are. Now get going.”
“This one seems kind of thrown together, Jare,” observed Daphne. He glared at her.
“Um,” said Louis, “before we go, could you tell us the purpose of this challenge? I mean, what is it supposed to teach us?” He must’ve figured if he knew what Jare was trying to do to us, he might be able to guess what shocks to expect. “Are we team building?”
“Or problem solving?” tossed in Enod.
“Or improving our cross-country navigational skills?” asked Kevin.
“Yes!” said Jare, glancing impatiently at the rising sun. “You are doing all of that! Now get going!”
“How much do we need to pack?” asked Kate.
“Everything!” cried Jare. “Plus . . . an extra gallon of water. Be prepared! And you better not forget your railroad spike, Little Miss Sunshine! Now vamoose!”
“What’s the prize?” asked Kate.
“Prize? Prize?” burst out Jare, coming back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “I don’t know. What do you clowns want for a prize?”
“The air mattress,” said Kate.
“Are you still fixated on that stupid air mattress? Fine. The prize is a nice, comfy, brand-new air mattress, ’cause nobody managed to win it the first time. Now get lost!”
Which didn’t seem like such a great way for Jare to put it, given how much time he’d spent rounding up lost and injured people during the capture-the-flag challenge, but even I knew better than to point this out.
We grabbed our packs and started toward the hoodoos. There wasn’t really a trail, so after we’d wound through the agave, lechuguilla, candelilla, cholla, and ocotillo for five minutes, the groups had scattered far and wide.
“We have to hurry,” said Kate. “Or Daphne and Randolph will beat us again.”
“Hold on,” I said. “First, let’s hike up to a high spot to have a look around. I know Jare must have some kind of surprise waiting between here and the hoodoos.”