As they carried the toolbox and the mason jars back to the lakeshore, Claire forced her brain to focus on calculating how much water they’d need instead of how thirsty she was. She wished she knew exactly how long a hike it would be. Three days? Four? Five? If she estimated the average distance between trees and counted the number of trees on the stretch of lake they could see from the dock...
Wind blew in a gust through the branches, and the leaves rustled. Claire tensed.
“I can literally see you worrying,” Reyva said behind her. “It’s like you’ve got a cartoon bubble over your head with a black squiggly line in it.”
“Sorry,” she said automatically. “Just... thinking about how much water we’ll need.”
“We’ll boil as much as we can and carry as much as we can.Maybe Ms. Overpacker here can part with a few more outfits.”
Mariana had already ditched her two suitcases by the shore and stuffed just what she’d deemed essential into her backpack, but her pack still dwarfed Reyva’s and Claire’s. “That’s Dr. Overpacker to you,” she answered. “I earned my PhD in excess.”
“If we have to, we’ll boil more,” Reyva said. “There’s an entire lake out there. And if it rains, we can catch rainwater. That’ll be fresh and safe to drink. We’re going to be okay.”
Claire wished she felt half as certain as Reyva sounded. “I’m not going to hope for rain. We don’t have any way to stay dry. And it’ll be a thousand times harder to light a fire if it rains.” She looked up at the strips of sky between the pine trees and was relieved to see cloudless blue. It was remarkable—and more than a bit alarming—how quickly the weather changed here. She wondered if that was typical of Maine. “You can die of exposure in summer too, especially if you’re soaking wet when the temperature drops at night.”
“You’re full of fun facts,” Reyva said.
Claire winced. Once, in kindergarten, she’d had the brilliant idea to tell her classmates about the dangers of carbon monoxide after her parents had installed a sensor. The entire class freaked out and her parents were called to the school. Just last month, at Driver’s Ed, when someone had asked how likely it was they’d die in a car crash, the statistics had spilled out of her mouth before she could stop them. The other students had definitely not appreciated that. “I just... thought it was something we should all know.”
“It is,” Mariana said earnestly. “Ignore her.”
“If we’re going to get through this, I think we need to maintain a positive attitude,” Reyva said. “My parents’ favorite saying—and I cannotbelieve I’m quoting them, but here we are—is that attitude is what makes you a winner or a loser.”
“Which explains why you’re such a ray of sunshine?” Mariana asked.
Narrowing her eyes, Reyva glared at her. “I’m trying something new. There’s a poster in my parents’ studio: ‘You can overcome anything if you believe you can.’ Cheesy, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” She paused, then added, “Let’s not tell them I said that.”
“Itisn’ttrue,” Claire couldn’t help saying. “Positivity can’t help if you’re hit by a car. It can’t stop an earthquake. Or a volcano. Or an asteroid. It can’t cure cancer, or make an old person young again. Or heal a gunshot wound.”
Stop talking, she told herself.Just stop.
“But itcankeep you from giving up,” Mariana said. “I think Reyva’s right. We improve our chances if we stay positive. Totally believe that. Go, us!”
“Yeah, not doing a cheer,” Reyva said. “And I prefer to flavor my positivity more as determination than perkiness, but whatever. I believe we’ll succeed if we focus on succeeding.”
“Of course. Yes. Sorry,” Claire said. She clamped her mouth shut.
God. Why did she automatically jump to imagining the worst-case scenario in every instance? There was no formative childhood trauma that she could point to. It was just the way she was wired. In fifth grade, she’d lost her best friend, Angie, whenshe’d overshared. Angie’s mom had ducked out to run errands, and she’d shouted upstairs to them some kind of garbled be-back-soon. Claire had been shocked that Angie hadn’t asked her mom to repeat what she said. When Angie asked why it mattered, Claire had told her that she always made a point to memorize the last thing her parents said before they walked out the door, in case they died while they were out. She then detailed all the ways a parent could die: heart attack, brain aneurysm, traffic accident, drunk driver, accidental homicide... She’d scared Angie so badly she’d cried, and Claire hadn’t been allowed back. So she’d learned to hide her pessimism from friends, family, everyone—but it still slipped out even under the best of circumstances.And these are definitely not the best of circumstances, she thought.
A stick snapped in the woods.
All of them froze.
Claire didn’t breathe. She listened, trying to separate the sounds of birds from other sounds. She heard one three-note birdcall, then a two-note descent. Whoever had made the noise hadn’t startled the birds.
She reminded herself that it was far more likely that the murderer/arsonist was miles away from the scene of the crime. He’d have no reason to stick around. She had to chill. Reyva was right—if she was convinced every second that they were going to die, she’d be an exhausted pile of twitching nerves by sundown.
Except that doesn’t change the fact that any second, wecoulddie, she thought.
Quit it, Claire.Go, us, remember?
After a few long seconds, they resumed their trek down to the lakeshore. None of them spoke again until they saw the blue peeking through the trees.
The lake surface rolled with waves. Reflecting the clouds that had cropped up during their walk, the water looked grayer than it had at dawn. All along the shore, pines, hemlocks, and maples swayed. She wondered what had happened to her blue cloudless sky from only a couple of minutes ago. The wind and clouds had sprung up fast. “The wind will make this trickier,” Claire said.
“Oh, yay,” Reyva said.
“We can do it,” Mariana cheerleaded.
