Paul grinned. “Come on, let’s give it some space.”
We moved a few feet off the trail to make a wide circumference around the porcupine, which was watching us with a blank look.
“It looks angry,” Lisette whispered. “This is the moment in the horror film where it all seems quiet before it leaps into action.”
Paul glanced between us. “I can’t believe the girl from Brooklyn is less scared right now than you are.”
“Technically I’m from Troy, New York,” I offered. “It’s about half the size of St. John’s.”
Lisette glared at me. “You’ve been lying to us this whole time? I thought you were cool.”
“Will it ruin your opinion of me if I tell you that as a girl, I had to chase off feral raccoons in my backyard with my sister’s hairspray bottle?”
“We can never be friends again,” Lisette replied.
There was a noise in the branches. “Paul! It’s moving!” Lisette ducked behind him, leaving Paul as a buffer against the dreaded assassin who was gently chewing on a branch fifteen feet up a conifer tree.
“Pathetic,” Paul said. “That was pathetic of both of you.”
I laughed and ran ahead with Lisette. “We don’t have to outrun the porcupine!” I called. “We just have to outrun you!” Lisette and I began to dash down the trail.
A few moments later we stopped for breath.
“He really likes you,” she said.
“Paul? He is carefully avoiding me,” I responded. “He didn’t even seem to want to come today, right? You had to talk him into it.”
“He’s avoiding you because he likes you.”
“He told me he just wants to be friends.”
Lisette gave me a funny look. “That’s what he said about you.”
Paul appeared around a turn of the road, grinning when he spotted us.
“I killed it!” Paul called to us. “I wrestled the porcupine to the ground for you, put it down like John Wick. No big deal. Chivalry and all that. Barely broke a sweat. Just don’t look up in the trees when we’re walking back.”
“Well done, Paul!” Lisette called.
“Look, a moose!” Paul pointed off the trail where a view had opened up, and for a moment we thought he was kidding. Then we walked to where he stood, and through a break in the trees we could see a distant lake where a tiny, antlered creature was visible as a dot.
“They’re real,” I whispered.
“It’s not the Loch Ness Monster, Abby,” Paul said, grinning.
“Let’s do a photo with it!” Lisette posed us in a selfie, with the brown dot barely visible behind us. Paul was pressed to my side. I felt a little giddy as I looked at him. This was even weirder than a crush, I realized. Walking through the woods with Paul and Lisette was strange precisely because of how normal it felt. After three weeks, it felt like we had known each other foreveralready. We already had our inside jokes. We had a rhythm and rapport. That never happened back home; my New York friends were all people I had known since we were in our twenties, back when we were malleable and optimistic and still thought fruit-flavored vodka was a sign of sophistication. You didn’t just pick up random strangers in your late thirties and go hiking with them. You could get killed that way, or forced to appear in TikTok videos.
I wondered if my Canadian friendships felt so effortless because they knew I was going to leave. Lisette had joked about being a stray dog, but I felt like the real rescue. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal that I was broken and cynical because they weren’t making a long-term commitment to me. They could ferry me around and listen to my snarky American humor, knowing that in another few weeks they would be free of me for good. My rental was up at the end of August; I was temporary.
Then Lisette threw her arms around my neck and said, “If you want to stay in Canada, I’ll marry you,” and my heart warmed. I watched Paul glance at us and then turn away to reorganize his hiking backpack.
After the hike, the three of us went home to shower and then met up again at Lisette’s place because she wanted to get a ride from Paul to do some shopping for items for her new apartment. Calling it an apartment was a bit of a stretch, because it was clearly a very illegal sublet in someone’s basement with a couple of wobbly temporary walls and a thin rug rolled atop a poured concrete basement floor. In one corner was a small refrigerator and hot plate, and behind a half-wall was a toilet and sink. The shower was a hose adjacent to the sink that ran straight into a drain in the floor.
“My beautiful sanctuary,” she said to us when we came in. “Gives that Count of Monte Cristo vibe.”
“Does that mean someone will scratch through your wall and start giving life advice?” I ask.
“As long as it comes with a huge pile of money, I’ll take it.”
