Page 29 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“Them too.” Big Pete nodded to the long-haired guide behind the grill. “Thor is something of a reptile whisperer.”

“Shake out your sleeping bag before you hop in if you don’t want a bed buddy,” Thor said. Imogen made a face, but Thor grinned back at her. “You’re all about honesty, right? This is honest living, plain and simple.”

“You’ll be glad not to have a tent clogging your view at night.” Big Pete spread his arms wide. “Welcome to the million-star motel.”

“I was expecting four stars at least,” Imogen huffed.

“I’d settle for two stars and a flush toilet,” Fiona said.

Big Pete looked around at the group. “Our guides will do everything we can to make this a safe and enjoyable experience for you, but we’re a team out here. The more you can pitch in, stay clean, and act smart, the easier this will be for everyone.”

Liv followed his eyes around the circle. Mandy and Lucinda looked excited. Fiona and Charlie looked stressed. Everyone else seemed incapable of pulling their eyes away from Thor and Katy flipping steaks on the grill.

For the next week, this was Liv’s community. Big Pete, Thor, and Katy. Devon and Charlie. Imogen and Lucinda. PK, Stefan, Fiona. And Mandy.

Liv was by no means superstitious, but she knew there was powerful magic in bringing together a group in an unfamiliar context and applying pressure. It happened in disasters and tribal initiations, in stuck elevators and music festivals. When you leave normal life, there’s a brief window of possibility to rethink agreements—to form a new collective identity. Sometimes that leads to greater deviance. People who wouldn’t normally do drugs or shoplift might do so in untested environments. Groups in isolation could unlock unprecedented levels of openness and vulnerability. Or, if things went wrong, aggression and fear.

There was a new social contract forming out here, held together by paddle high fives, poop buckets, and the implied promise to protect each other from the worst of the whitewater. They’d hiked deep into the canyon and rafted through its rushing artery. They’d made themselves small under the vastness of the desert sky. Liv thought back to earlier in the day, when Charlie and Devon had tumbled into the river and Charlie had blamed his absent sister for his fall. How could Babette Sauvage find them, let alone wield power over them here? Wherever she was, it was miles and worlds away.

Her sister hardly felt closer. Mandy barely acknowledged Liv during dinner, zipping through the food line before roping Stefan, Fiona, and Thor into a tight cluster of camping chairs, where they were now playing poker on an overturned milk crate. Every few minutes, Mandy’s bubbly laugh rose into the air. Her sister was always touching someone—a hand on a forearm, a punch in the shoulder, a high five with Thor after she took a big swallow from a bottle of bourbon they were passing around.

“Can I talk to you?”

Charlie had snuck up on Liv as she slid a second piece of chocolate cake onto her plate. She couldn’t decide how she felt about Babette’s CFO. Charlie radiated stress, with an unappealing undercurrent of arrogance. That said, at least he wanted to talk to her. Which was more than she could say for her sister.

Liv turned to him. “What’s on your mind?”

He was still wearing his muddy Babette ball cap, despite the twilit sky. He beckoned to her to follow him up away from the beach, beyond the pool of bright light cast by the lanterns in the dinner area.

“I hear you’re a secret agent.”

Liv flashed a glare back toward Mandy, who appeared to be teaching Stefan how to do-si-do. Her sister was unreachable. Impossible.

She faced Charlie again. “I work for the State Department as an analyst and a profiler. I have a security clearance, but there’s nothing top secret about it.”

“So you’re not a spy?”

“Not a spy.” But she knew there was no surefire way to convince him. It was exactly the kind of thing that was impossible to prove: that she wasn’t something.

“But you work for the government,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And I can trust you.”

Another impossible statement. If she disagreed, she was setting herself up for an argument. If she agreed, she was open to whatever it was he wanted. But Charlie sounded hopeful, desperate even. And here she was in this burgeoning new society, Liv not-a-spy Chisholm, sister to Mandy life-of-the-party Chisholm, face-to-face with Charlie possibly-paranoid Sauvage.

She couldn’t control what others thought of her. But she could choose how she would behave, how much generosity she was willing to extend to a fellow traveler.

“How can I help?” she said.

“I have something I need your advice on. Discreetly.”

He removed the muddied ball cap from his head.

“This is my hat.”

Liv didn’t feel this statement merited a response.