AFTER WE CHECKED AND RECHECKED all the cabins, we headed into the black woods toward the lake that would be no problem for an adult to swim across and even less of a problem for a lost child to drown in.
The exhaustion was starting to set in. None of us talked if we didn’t have to. We looked where we had to look, which was anywhere except each other.
The first place we came to was the rope wall.
Nothing.
We kept moving and nobody said anything for a couple of minutes until we got to the archery range. We did our best to not talk about the weird itching that we were all feeling in the backs of our guts. That distant, nagging, dreadfully slow sense that somewhere, at some point, a joke had stopped being a joke.
The archery range was devoid of all children, but the bull’s-eye targets were still set up against the hay bales. While they were discussing where we should look next, I ran my hand along the rough burlap edge of one of the targets.
Michael hugged Matty from behind and said, “We’re not going to find her because we’re going to be out here looking everywhere and freezing our collective tits off while she sneaks back to her cabin. She’s probably back there now. Matty, it’s going to be all right.”
She was holding his coat sleeve between her thumb and forefinger but she was looking off into the night, not smiling or saying anything back.
I was thinking about pressure and how it ends up defining a relationship when I looked over at Faisal who was craning his head down to the target next to him. Whatever he was reading was written at hero-child level in small hero-child handwriting. I pushed off the target I was leaning on and dropped next to him.
It said:
6225 59 7315 56 2211 55 91226 32226
And it was glowing green.
“You think she wrote it?” he asked.
It was the same type of numerical grouping as the text I’d gotten.
“Yeah. It was her. That’s my marker.”
I took my phone out and brought up the text she’d sent. “Look at the 55. Look how the rest of them are grouped together. They’re similar.”
“Dude.”
“Yeah.”
“She wrote another one?” Michael asked. They crowded around us to read it. “What does it say?”
“Lump!” Matty whisper-called.
We waited but the only response we got was nighttime camp ambiance and Matty saying “shitshitshit” under her breath.
“I don’t know,” I said, even though I felt like I should know—knowing how to think through something, how to figure it all out, that’s what I was always good at. And even though I’d only known them a couple of days, I could tell they thought so as well. For some stupid goddamn reason they had that look in their eyes like I was the hero who knew what should be done or what the hidden message was because I was supposed to be smart and the more I looked at it and the more I didn’t understand what she was trying to say, the more I wanted to say, “We aren’t even friends! Why did you have to start treating me like one of your friends?” but instead I just stared at the string of numbers that might have been able to tell us exactly where she was while that itching, scratching feeling in the pit of my stomach worked its way higher through my back like it was slithering around the rungs of my spine, clawing its way up and up and up.
* * *
We headed for the icy maintenance roads that would wind us around the small lake.
“If you could invent anything, what would it be?” Michael asked, using his second wind to try to make light of the situation.
As much as I appreciated the idea in theory, I appreciated it more when Matty said, “Not right now, Mike,” without looking at him.
He persisted. “Because me, I would invent a media player that had a shuffle kind of function. Like you would play a movie and it would shuffle around a hundred different endings and a hundred different outcomes for each character. It would revolutionize movies.”
“Lump!” Matty called into the woods.
Every twenty or thirty feet we would pass a clearing where we could see tiny frozen ponds. You could tell that they were only a few inches deep by the sticks poking out of them but something about them made my stomach bunch up.25
“Because what’s the worst part of any horror movie?” Michael went on. “Or action movie. Really, just about any movie. Any time you see James Bond getting lowered into a tank of sharks, you know he’s going to get out of it somehow. Any time Bruce Willis is trapped and surrounded by terrorists, all you have to do is think about how far into the movie you are. Oh, I’ve still got forty-five minutes left? There is absolutely nothing for me to worry about.”
“Mike, shut up,” Matty said, holding a hand out and facing the dark line of trees. Something in the woods cracked. It sounded like the thin white ice on the small ponds cracking underfoot.
Their tension was familiar territory for me. It had usually been Charlie who I’d gotten mad at, until he made enough jokes that we’d both moved on. Nothing was ever really brought out into the open. Not enough.
Michael was chewing on the inside of his lip. “Moses, you try. She probably thinks she’s in trouble.” And for a second it all made sense; of course we couldn’t find her. She was hiding. She was a kid out after lights-out and now the adults were looking for her.
And I tried to make it sound like I believed that when I said, “Lump?” into the dark. “Lump, it’s us. It’s Moses. Come on, it’s okay, come out. You’re not in trouble.”
For a few moments, while our bodies pumped gallons of adrenaline, we stopped being cold. Our veins gushed neon.
“Lump?” I said again.
There was this feeling like we were standing in front of a jury—like there was some huge, cosmic coin flip happening just past our line of sight. Heads: Lump comes out of the dark, pushing branches out of her way, dirty and cold and frustrated that we stopped her from finding Harriet Tubman the deer. Or, better: she comes out of the tree line leading the small, lost animal.
Tails: nothing.
Tails: we wait and wait and eventually we silently decide that whatever we heard was just the wind or the woods or some animal we couldn’t see and that we have to keep moving. Keep looking. Keep ignoring the terrible suspicion that nothing is right.
The coin landed. We moved on.