This time, the call really does drop.
I’m so screwed.
28SADIE
I didn’t hear everything that went down in the cave, but I heard more than enough.Everyoneheard.
Thorn hasn’t been the same since.
All afternoon, he’s been brooding and distant. He’s had a couple of chats with Trey off to the side, and spent a bit of time on the phone—with his boss, he told us before he stepped away—but has otherwise kept to himself.
His mood has been pervasive throughout camp; all of us seem a little shell-shocked by what happened. Usually at this time of day, as the sun dips low on the horizon, the air is thick with laughter and the sounds of lively conversation around the campfire.
Today, it’s nothing but whispers. If that.
Emma is still a bit on edge after her rappelling experience, and who can blame her? I had a panic attack even with a smooth, untangled rope—I can’t imagine how much harder it was for her. Fear has a way of clinging to your bones even after you’re safely through whatever sparked it—it’s the what-if that shakes you up the most.
My life motto has always been that it’s easiest to just avoid risk altogether.
Which is why I’m so proud of what I accomplished today. I was as terrified as Emma—but I trusted Thorn, trusted the process. It was scary, but I did it.
Tonight, that sense of accomplishment has been muted by the dramatic turn of events with Matteo and Zoe and Joshua.
“I never meant for him to do something so stupid,” Zoe confesses to me now, the two of us roasting a pair of lonely marshmallows over the fire.
“Who, Joshua?” I ask.
She gapes at me. “Yes, Joshua.”
I didn’t think the answer wasthatobvious—he and Matteo both did stupid things today—but apparently only one of them is living rent-free in her head.
“I don’t regret it,” she goes on.
Regret…what? I wait for her to clarify, because it feels as ambiguous as her last comment, but she just turns her marshmallow over, letting it burn. Does she realize she’s talkingto meand not just having this conversation in her head?
“Kissing Matteo?” I venture.
“What?” she says, gaze drifting to meet mine. “Oh, right. No, I don’t regret that, either. I was still talking about Joshua—I don’t regret breaking up with him.” She tilts her head thoughtfully. “Though maybe I should have thought twice before trying to make him jealous. I didn’t expect it to turn out likethis.”
I’m not sure she thought atallabout the potential fallout from her actions, but I don’t say so.
Zoe and Joshua are like a cautionary tale of everything I could have been going through if Caden had actually come on this trip. Doing thisexperience together wouldn’t have brought us back together—it most definitely would have driven us apart.
I turn my marshmallow over in the fire, try to imagine him here.
Caden likes to think of himself as chill and unbothered, but I think he would have hated the bugs and the fact that he couldn’t wash off the sweat and the dirt in a hot shower at the end of every day. He would have been good at the rappelling, though. Probably the kayaking, too. But the two of us out here together—yikes. I shudder to think about how he might have treated me. I’m pretty sure I would have suffered a crisis of confidence by this point, at best, barely holding myself together under his myriad little jabs about my heavy backpack, my shoes, how not-cut-out-for-any-of-this I am.
Without him here, I’ve been able to stretch my wings instead of having them pinned down at every turn.
The breeze picks up, and all of a sudden Zoe’s fiery marshmallow blooms into a small inferno at the end of her stick.
“Zoe!” I exclaim. “Your marshmallow!”
She shrieks, panicked, and attempts to shake the flames out. It only makes things worse—she comes dangerously close to setting Thorn’s shirt on fire when he rushes over to help.
Swiftly, he swipes Zoe’s stick from her hands, then dumps out a generous pour from his canteen. The flames sizzle out, leaving only a soggy, charred marshmallow corpse.
“You, uh…might want to start a new one,” Thorn says, handing the sad stick back to Zoe.
