“Troy, listen to me. You don’t have to do anything else but listen right now. Can you do that for me?”
Troy nods, and you take a second to look around at the others, half in their sleeping bags, a safe distance from the fray. You want to tell Diana everything that just happened with her bag, but she’s too far away. And when you turn back, Silas is looking directly into Troy’s eyes.
“I need you to understand that you are with friends,” he says. “And there is nothing to be afraid of. Your body is just going through a series of checks to see if you’re in danger. But you’re not. So now we’re going to breathe. Can you breathe with me?”
You look down and see that your hands are shaking. Troy takes a full breath. A bead of sweat runs right down the middle of his nose and drops onto his lip. Then he says one word.
“Turbo.”
“What’s that, brother?” says Silas.
“He needs to take his heart pills.”
“Who?” says Silas.
“My parents aren’t going to remember,” Troy says. “And thenhe’s going to get sick again. It happened before and he was super dehydrated. I thought he was going to die.”
“I’m sorry,” says Silas. “I just don’t…”
“HIS DOG!” yells Diana. “TURBO IS HIS DOG, MAN! WAKE UP!”
Everyone turns to look at her. She has a T-shirt on. A faded red shirt that you recognize instantly as Sean’s. It’s from the ice cream place where he worked one summer and was fired from for giving away free cones to just about anyone who knew who he was (and some people who didn’t). You’re staring at it, but everything is hitting the fan with the Troy situation and you have to look back.
“He got sick before,” he says. “He has heart disease, so he has to take the pills. But my parents won’t remember…”
“That’s not going to happen,” says Silas. “Turbo is fine. Turbo is cool. Everything else is just the anxiety. Don’t let the anxiety decide what’s happening.”
Then Silas is full-on holding Troy’s hand. And he’s doing it super comfortably. You’re not sure you’ve held another man’s hand since you were six years old. And you’re wondering why that is… Why don’t people just hold hands? It’s very comforting. You are so impressed by this that you almost forget what you saw earlier.
Almost.
Because that is when you look at Silas’s face and find him not looking at Troy as you assumed he would be, but staring right at you. It’s not for long. Probably just a glance in the scheme of things, but you know in that moment that he saw you. He saw you watching him with the bag. It’s clear.
What is not clear is what it means.
So you take this opportunity to edge your phone gently out of your pocket.It wouldn’t be hard to call your parents.That’s the thought that pulses through your brain. Your contacts are right there, glowing from your pocket. Your thumb hovers over the number for the landline your parents refuse to get rid of. You’re ready to tell them this didn’t take. Come get you. They might be disappointed, but you’re sure they won’t be surprised.
Your dad has been laser focused on fixing you since your brother’s death. He’ll probably just find somewhere else to send you. But your mom, who thinks that nothing bad will ever happen again if she can just keep things perfectly organized and in her field of vision, will be happy to have you safe in the car.
You inch your thumb down, but when you finally press the number, nothing happens. You stare at the phone, waiting for the screen to show the call going through. It’s only when you press the call button again that you think to look in the right-hand corner where those tiny, all-important bars—the ones that signify the possibility of contact with the outside world—remain as hollow and dim as your prospects for escape.
“Okay,” says Troy, sniffling. “I think everything’s okay.”
SIX
There’s only one dream you remember from your restless sleep that night. You and Diana walking by an ocean, arguing over the color of the water. “Blue-gray,” she says. “Green,” you say. She shakes her head. “We need a tiebreaker,” she says, and then you both go quiet because even in this dream, you know who the tiebreaker should be. Who it’s always been.
Under your feet, the ground is crunching whenever you take a step. For a moment, you’re sure you’re walking on bones, and you can feel a sense of horror creeping through your body, but when you look closely, they’re just seashells, all broken and fragmented, like the serrated teeth of some prehistoric creature. Diana is walking in front of you, but every once in a while, she turns back to see if you’re still there. The waves crash and foam. You try to catch up. You finally make it to her, but when you reach out to take her hand, you open your eyes instead.
“Up! Up! Everybody up!” says Silas in a faux-cheerful voice. “Day one starts in fifteen minutes! Gather your gear and roll out!”
You look up through unfocused eyes and see him cupping his hands over his mouth. He starts making trumpet noises.
“Day one of what exactly?” says Fran from somewhere inside the depths of her sleeping bag. “You haven’t told us freaking anything. We could be going on a death march, for all we know!”
Silas ignores this comment. He throws open the doors to the lodge and slips through them without a sound. He does this before you can make eye contact to see where things stand, so you look around the room instead. You can’t make out much except the twisted cocoons of sleeping bags until you finally catch some motion to your right where someone’s doing push-ups with the syncopated motion of a piston.
It’s Will, of course. His form is impeccable, and he’s counting them off in what you assume is Korean, his face bright red. “Hana. Dul. Set. Net.” He just keeps going. Past ten. Twenty. Thirty. They look like they’re never going to end. But, finally, he transitions into a handstand, his body perfectly perpendicular to the ground, before launching himself back onto his feet, where he dips down and rolls up his sleeping bag with precision.
