“Also, what are we going to do with all this crap?” Troy adds.
“Portage it,” says Diana.
“What does that mean?”
“Portage: to carry a boat and its cargo between two navigable waters,” Diana says as if reciting from a teleprompter. “Didn’t any of you guys read the pamphlets they sent?”
“We have to carry all this?” says Will.
“And a canoe,” says Diana. “We have to put the canoes on our shoulders when we’re not using them. That’s why there’s a portage yoke.”
Everyone looks at her.
“I read it in the pamphlet,” she says. “Now, c’mon. Let’s get moving.”
Nobody shouts their agreement, but nobody challenges her either.
You leave the group for a moment and walk back over to the extinguished fire, the last place you saw Silas. You sit down in his spot.
Why was he out here so late?
Why wasn’t he already leaving? What was he planning? And what did he say about the devil? You kick at the stones that make the fire ring and curse yourself for not confronting him when he was being so weird. Just another moment when you failed to act out of simple fear and discomfort.
When you get up, you notice something on the ground. Something very small. A soggy scrap of paper like the kind you used to play Fear in a Hat. At first that’s what you think it is. Aleftover from the game. But when you reach your hand down and unfold the slip of paper, it doesn’t seem like a fear. Instead, it reads, in blue pen, blotched by the rain:
One day. One hour. One minute.
You don’t know what it means, if it’s part of a poem, a song lyric, or something else entirely. You turn around to say something, but everyone is busy packing, and you’re not sure what to say about it. It’s just a soggy scrap of paper. So you put it in your pocket and try to focus on gathering your stuff. Still, while you’re walking back to your tent, you reach your hand in and touch it one more time.
It’s not the first time someone you know has left a paper trail.
FIFTEEN
There was no note after Sean died. He never had the chance to write one. With Sean, all the writing came before. Only a week after he told you about cheating on Diana, you watched as he came home to his room and tore down all the photos of his favorite divers from the corkboard above his desk. He’d been collecting them for years, building a collage of heroes, and they were gone in seconds. In their place, he started tacking up handwritten mantras.
It began with bad self-help clichés, cribbed from social media.Lean toward love! Be your own light!But he soon progressed to the Buddha:One is not called noble who harms living beings. Sean had always been impulsive—going all in on obsessions—but this overnight enlightenment was a lot even for him. Where there were once photos of toned Olympic athletes piking into turquoise swimming pools, there was now a self-help mood board.
You weren’t sure what to think about it. Part of you wanted to give Sean the benefit of the doubt. He was, it seemed, finally waking up to the way he’d gone through life so far, taking what was given—compliments, trophies, girlfriends—without much gratitude or giving in return. He’d been consumed with diving since he was ten, and now that his goal had slipped through his fingers, it was like it had never existed. A clean reset. You wanted to support him. You wanted to encourage him on this newjourney—whatever it was—but you also couldn’t shake the disappointment you felt after what he’d told you.
And you couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant for Diana.
Because it soon became clear that, in spite of all the quotes about love and compassion, he had no intention of telling her what he had done. When you eventually got up the guts to ask him if he was going to confess, it didn’t even seem to occur to him. And this was a problem. Because once you were back home, Diana started coming over again, and you found you could barely look at her. Knowing what you knew, you literally couldn’t make eye contact without turning away. And of course, she instantly noticed how weird you were being.
“What’s with you?” she said one night when she saw you in the hall.
You had been sneaking to the bathroom, trying to avoid just such a chance meeting, when she came coughing out of Sean’s room, reeking like incense. It took her a moment to catch her breath.
“I don’t know what happened to you guys on that road trip, but I am not a fan,” she said. “I understand he’s going through it right now, but if he keeps talking to me about what I’m ‘manifesting,’ I’m seriously going to lose it. And then there’s you…”
“What?”you said.
But even you didn’t believe your attempt at feigning innocence. For once, you tried to look at her, but you were only able to hold your glance for a second. She looked a little different. She’d cut her hair, and now she had bangs that nearly covered her eyebrows. They made her expression hard to read.
“You’re avoiding me,” she said.
“Not true,” you said, with even less conviction.
“Then why don’t you come out of your room when I’m here? Also, we haven’t gone to Perkins in weeks, and I’m going through bottomless-coffeepot withdrawal. Look at my hand. It’s shaking.”
