Chapter Three
Mira
Present day
A light breeze whips a lock of dark hair straight into my eye, because that’s how my day is going.
I rub the sting and glance with my uninjured eye at the trees on the right, then the ones on the left.
Am I lost? The trunks all look the same. Your basic Tahoe forest range: miles of tall, straight pines, the reddish-brown bark, fissured like puzzle pieces, nearly black in the twilight. It’s getting dark and the overgrown road is sketchy under the best of conditions.
The cabin my mom lives in is located in the densest forest that’s relatively easy to get to. Which means I have to abandon my beater mini-truck and hike for forty-five minutes along a paved road too overgrown to navigate with a car.
So tired of this. I should listen to Lewis and stop helping my mom, but I haven’t wanted to lose the last shred of family I have. Now that I’m out here on another fool’s errand to give her money for what I fear might be drugs—though she says no—I regret not doing something sooner about the situation.
I flick off a bright green worm that landed on my jacket and rub my temples. My mom has done this before—squatting while she “picks up her life.” She never remains clean for long. I’m aware of it, but it’s difficult to let go. Lewis is pulling away now that he has a girlfriend, which is what I feared and why I’ve held on so tightly. I lose everyone eventually.
My mom abandoned me a long time ago. I don’t know why I see space from her and the dangerous lifestyle she lives as another loss. You can’t lose the same person twice, can you?
Glancing around, I recognize a tree split down the middle. It’s supposed to be way off to the right. Definitely should have turned left back there. This would go more smoothly if I didn’t get lost.
I joke with Lewis and Zach that I know the Tahoe Basin like the back of my hand, given I’m full-blooded Washoe while they’re only half, but I totally don’t. Our native knowledge died a few generations ago when burly frontiersmen kicked us off our land. It doesn’t stop me from rubbing it in that both my parents are Washoe.
And that’s all I have to brag about when it comes to my parents. I never knew my dad, and the Sallees took me in after Lewis and his father found me by myself at the age of three, living off stale cereal and water in my mom’s cinderblock house on the reservation.
I sigh loudly. If I cut through the bushes to the left, it should get me back to that fork.
I walk around a boulder and squeeze through the bushes, but since this is a fool’s errand and I’ve messed it up thus far, I immediately trip over a random root and catch myself before I faceplant.
I dust off the pant knee that sports a new dime-sized hole.
Dammit, these were my good jeans. Pines have deep roots. This one—the one in the middle of my path—decides to reach for the stars? It belongs in the ground.
A whistle sounds in the distance.
What the hell is going on around here? I’m lost. I nearly ate it over a tree root. And now someone’s whistling in an isolated forest?
Long ago, my mom used to call me in from playing in the yard by whistling. It’s one of the few memories I have of living with her as a young child.
Am I closer to her cabin than I thought? Is she worried about me? My mother’s more focused on getting her money than anything else these days, but I was supposed to be there an hour ago…
Huh, maybe she is concerned. She said she was off drugs. And it’s not like cell phones work in the woods, even if she owned one.
Strange warmth blooms in my chest. I shouldn’t get my hopes up. Shouldn’t still want my mother’s love. And yet I jog to make up the lost time.
Another whistle sounds, halting me in my tracks.
Okay, both whistles can’t be from her. They came from opposite directions.
A cold sensation sweeps my spine. It’s getting darker and I’ve never come across anyone out here.
Well—except for him.
Of course I ran into Tyler Morgan in the middle of nowhere. As if everything weren’t going downhill in my life, I run into the one guy I never got over. Just to spear the knife in my chest a little deeper, and wiggle it around for good measure.
I didn’t intend to have a relationship with Tyler after Holly’s party, but leaving him that night was torture. For a few days, I imagined we could make it work. Even after I returned home from the party, and Lewis’s parents told me my mother was in the hospital with a cocaine overdose.
I lived in a nice house with Lewis and his parents, but my mom and the druggie friends she treated like family were a part of my life too. I didn’t call Tyler back that weekend because I was afraid he’d learn the truth. I couldn’t handle the rejection. Not from him.
