Diana popped up out of the water and kicked her way to the shore. She climbed up on a rock and lay back to sun herself like a lizard. You both stared like idiots. She was beautiful. That was obvious. But she was also just so wholly herself sometimes that you always felt steadier being around her. You knew that Sean did too.
“Sean,” you said. “You have to tell her.”
You could feel his shoulders tense under your legs. He stood absolutely still for a couple of seconds. You thought maybe he was going to drop you on the rocks. Or maybe just yell at you. But he didn’t drop you. And he didn’t say a word. He ducked down into the water, submerging himself slowly like a submarine.
For a moment, you were still attached. And you thought of the way he would always escape during your old games, no matter how tight you tied him up. He could always seem to wriggle free from the hardest knots or the trickiest toy handcuffs. Now, in the cold water of the quarry, you kept your legs clenched over his shoulders, trying to hang on to him. But he went deeper. Then deeper. And instead of pulling you down with him, he just kind of slipped your grasp.
And was free.
TWENTY
It’s almost daybreak when you hear the scritching sound. There’s a dim blue light in the tent that’s not quite the full darkness of night, but not morning either. At some point, you actually fell asleep, but now you’re awake and your anxiety is spiking. You’ve woken up in the middle of a panic attack before, and by comparison, this one isn’t so bad. Still, you really wish you had a Xanax to clear out the spiders. Instead, as you strain to listen for whatever you first heard, it feels like an elephant is sitting on your chest, only making possible the smallest sips of air.
The sound disappears for a moment. You close your eyes and try for a long exhalation, and just when you manage a full breath, it comes back and sends another boost of adrenaline coursing through your blood. There are a few more noises in these woods as it gets closer to dawn—small moving and chirping things you can’t begin to identify—but this one stands out because it’s so close.
You shuffle out of your sleeping bag and sit up. You think about waking someone, but Will and Troy are still fast asleep, and they don’t move a muscle even when you climb over them. Your only option at this point seems to be to peer out of the tent and see what has invaded your space. Ideally, it will be something benign and obvious and you can relax the old-fashioned way: by knowing you’re out of danger.
Somehow you make it to the zipper without knocking the whole drooping tent down. But before you pull on the tab, you wait one last time, just in case all of this wants to go away. It’s something you do at night, before another day has started and everything becomes painfully real: You pretend that your life has reset. Sean is across the hall, unharmed. Diana is in your doorway, talking about nothing. And, in this case, there are no woods. No disappeared counselor. None of this at all.
You stop.
You breathe.
Then you hear it again.
So, like the painful easing off of a Band-Aid, you slowly open the flap of the tent and wait for your eyes to adjust to the light. When they do, you see a large black shadow against the backdrop of the moonlit lake. This is not nothing. It’s something. And it’s nosing at the ground nearby. As your focus sharpens, you start to see various items scattered around the campsite, and the first thing you realize is that you’re looking at food.
An animal has gotten into your food.
The food that you should have hung up in a tree.
The only food you have.
You can’t help it then: You climb out of the tent. And when you do, a fuzzy head slowly emerges from a bag and stares directly at you. You know you should wake the others at this point, or at least make some kind of noise, but it’s the size of the thing that keeps you quiet. Because, yes, there is definitely a bear ten feet away from you, but it’s too small, you think, to be a full-grown one. It’s a cub. And it looks more like an overgrown teddy bear.
An overgrown teddy bear who is eating all your food.
The cub has somehow nudged the cooler open, but there must still be food in it because it’s trying to get at something with its snout. The cooler is not empty. Not yet. Along with a tidal wave of new anxiety, you feel a jolt of something foreign to you. Your competitive instinct.
On every bad team you ever played on (before you realized you were not destined to be an athlete), the coaches said the same thing: “Who wants it more? It all comes down to who wants it more!” You never understood this because you never wanted it more. You didn’t care if the soccer ball went in the net or the ball went in the hoop. You always,alwayswanted it less.
Until now.
The problem is, you’re still not an athlete and wanting is not the same as getting. You are not an athlete, but you know someone who is.
“Will,” you whisper-shout. “Will!”
You hear the shuffle of his sleeping bag, and after a few seconds, you feel his presence behind you.
“Case, man, I do not like being woken up… HOLY SH—”
You put a hand over his mouth.
The bear has returned to sniffing something in the cooler.
“Will,” you whisper, just audible enough for him to hear. “What’s your sport?”
“What?” he whispers.
