Matt had never built anything in his life, except maybe for Lego sets. A castle. A fire station. The Millennium Falcon. But he’d always followed the instructions, never deviating or getting creative. But he was going to have to get creative now. He tromped some distance away in the snowshoes, eyes out for decent-size branches and rocks. He worked fast, but was awkward in the snowshoes and his bare fingers were clumsy with cold. He knew it was bad when he smashed his thumb with the edge of a rock, but only noticed the injury when a dark smear of blood appeared on his palm. He jogged back and forth, collecting as much as he could carry, using the rocks as a base support for the biggest branches, which he stood upright like tent poles. He packed the wet snow around them to cement them in place. Finished with the frame, he ran the length of rope around the poles to make a lopsided rectangle, and using the back of the fallen log as a wall, he draped the tarp over. It was wide and long enough to reach the ground on the other side.
It was small, but big enough. After he unrolled his sleeping bag under the tarp, he helped Leah crawl in, pulling his pack behind him to block the opening. Already, it was warmer.
“Feeling better?” Matt asked. They were packed in tight and despite his numb feet and face, he was almost on the verge of breaking a sweat. But his hands were wretched, bloody, and practically paralyzed. He tucked them under his sweatshirt and shuddered. His fingers felt like ice cubes against the heat of his stomach.
Leah trembled, still silent, so Matt touched her face with his hands, not feeling any difference in temperature. She kept her eyes squinted shut, then suddenly muttered, “Don’t.”
“Leah?”
“D-d-don’t t-t-touch me.” A violent spasm vibrated through her, like she was being electrocuted, jerking her arms and legs. Her feet kicked his shins. Her fists punched his face.
“Ow! Stop!”
“Don’t!”
“It’s okay!” he yelled, which was the opposite of being okay, but he didn’t know what else to say. “It’s okay! I won’t touch you.”
Her eyes opened—a small whine hummed in her throat as she balled her fists under her chin.
“You might have hypothermia,” he said slowly, hoping she understood and didn’t try to punch his teeth in. He didn’t need to lose another one. “It can make you get weird.” He didn’t really know this, but Leah was acting like someone having a really bad drug-induced fit.
“W-where’s Sid?”
“He’s with Tony and Carter, remember?”
“Carter!” Her voice cracked. “I w-want Carter!”
“Carter’s not here,” he said, trying to soothe her. “I’m here. It’s me. Matt. I’m trying to help you.”
“F-f-fuck off.”
She was obviously delirious. He couldn’t see her face in the dark, but heard the tears in her voice. And the panic. “Okay.” He tried to think of something else that might calm her down. “Are you hungry?”
That was probably the stupidest question he’d ever asked—so stupid Leah didn’t answer. Suddenly feeling witless, Matt began to babble, talking as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did. He needed to distract her from the cold. He needed to distract himself. Food, he thought. It always seemed to come back to food. “Well, I’m hungry. I’m starving. Back at home in Des Moines, I used to go to this restaurant called Goobers. They had the best cheeseburgers ever. Thick quarter pounders. Fresh Angus beef. I always ordered mine with bacon. And it wasn’t this skinny little crap bacon either, but the good stuff. Thick-cut pepper bacon. Applewood smoked. Extra onions. Sharp cheddar cheese. Homemade buns. I think they were called brioche or something. They buttered and grilled them.” His mouth puddled with saliva on butter. “And the french fries. Oh my God. Just the best french fries in the universe. Crispy. Salty. Steaming hot. But I never dipped mine in ketchup,” he continued. “I hate ketchup. I dipped them in my chocolate malt. Salty fries and chocolate ice cream.” He could easily picture the table in front of him, hot and waiting for him, like a centerfold porno of food, and he vaguely wondered if talking about it at a time like this constituted a version of torture. Probably.
“K-k-ketchup?” Leah interrupted, shuddering the word like a curse.
“Huh?”
“W-who the h-h-hell doesn’t like k-ketchup?”
“Me,” he answered, hoping this meant she wasn’t going to punch him in the face again. “I hate it. It’s disgusting.”
“D-d-do you h-hate tomatoes?”
“No.”
“V-vinegar?”
“No.”
“Sh-shugar? Salt?”
“No.”
“Tha-that’s k-ketchup,” she blurted triumphantly, as if to prove some point he wasn’t aware of.
“I know what ketchup is.”
“Th-then yuh-yer w-weird.”
“I’m weird?”
She was quiet for a second, trembling against him in such a way that he realized his groin wasn’t as frozen dead as he thought. Things below the belt started to stir. His pulse rose from a half to four-four time. “Wha-what about mu-mu-mustard?”
He exhaled slowly, trying to turn his mind back to food. “I don’t like mustard either.”
“B-b-but there’s a h-hundred ka-kinds.”
“So?”
“De-Dijon m-mustard?”
“Nope.”
“You ever t-try it?”
“No.”
When she answered again, he heard the smile in her voice. “Then y-you d-don’t know t-till you t-try.”
“My mom says that,” he replied immediately. “But I don’t agree. Maybe I don’t know what I like, but I’m pretty sure about what I don’t.”
“Nuh-uh. Y-your m-mom s-sounds-s-smart.”
“Yeah,” he had to admit. “She is.” He suddenly thought of her, wondered what she was doing at this exact moment. It was evening; she might be watching the news, maybe she was even waiting for him to call, not being able to go to sleep until he checked in. She’d always been like that, needing reassurance from him that he would be fine but never believing him until she got confirmation, and he wondered if that was how all mothers were. Or was it just his? And now he could see why she did worry; he could see how she believed something innocent and fun could turn on a dime. How things could change in an instant. Because they had. “My mom is probably wondering what I’m doing right now.”
“C-camping?”
Even Matt had to laugh. “This is the worst camping trip I’ve ever been on.”
“The t-tent is n-n-not so h-hot either.”
She was making jokes; that was a good sign. “Yeah, maybe I should update my Facebook post. Having a great time in Colorado! Enjoying nature and the wildlife!”
She pressed closer against him, convulsing with laughter, and he had the desperate urge to put his arms around her, and not just to keep her warm. “F-Facebook is s-s-stupid.”
“That’s what everyone says.” He rested his hand on her shoulder, needing to touch her, if only a little. “But everyone’s on it.”
“N-not me.”
“Really?” Now he was surprised. “I thought every female was on Facebook. Or at least Instagram. Twenty selfies a day.” He knew people who did this—most of them girls in his high school. Posing with that same acidic look—tilted chin, angling for a mood crossed between bored, sly, and pissed off, a calculated gaze bordering on confusion.
“G-guys d-do it t-t-too,” Leah stuttered, still shaking. He needed to keep her talking, keep her awake, and keep his mind off her body, which was downright impossible. He’d never been this close to a girl before, and though he had imagined more than a hundred times (maybe closer to a thousand) what it would be like to actually get naked with one, he could honestly say he’d never imagined this particular scenario.
“I guess so.” Matt discerned that there was a certain subset of people who didn’t have profiles on the Internet. Types of people you just couldn’t find. And as far as he knew, he could think of six.
1. Old people who thought the interwebs were something to do with technologically advanced spiders.
2. Prison inmates or mental patients (although they might get computer privileges).
3. Criminals hiding from the police and/or mafia.
4. Undercover agents working for the police and/or mafia.
5. People who lived in third world countries with no access and/or people who didn’t own a computer.
6. People who had a secret and didn’t want to be found.
Out of these six options, Matt thought only numbers three and six could be true, and he highly doubted a person could be much of a criminal or police informant by the ripe old age of seventeen.
So he went with number six.
“Leah?”
Quiet.
“Leah, wake up.”
“N-no,” she murmured. “I’m tired. I need to sleep.” At least she had almost stopped shaking, but he was suddenly afraid that was a bad thing.
His hand slid down, dropping from her shoulder to the soft curve of her stomach. He pulled her toward him and she curled into him with a soft sigh. “I don’t want you to fall asleep,” he whispered into her hair. She smelled like the river, fresh and bright and cold and a scent that made him think of the color green. Green. She smelled green.
“I have to. S-so do you.”
“I know.” Fatigue settled in his bones like a lead weight; it was now painful to keep his eyes open. “How do you feel?”
“Like sh-shit,” she mumbled. “Like I almost d-drowned in a r-river.”
“True.”
“Th-thank you, by the way.”
“Well, I owed you one.”
“Yeah. M-maybe.” More quiet. “I g-guess we’re even.”
That was a weird way of putting it, Matt thought, but it made him feel better. Not as useless and annoying as he did this morning. “I’ve never met a girl like you,” he professed into the dark. Who was he kidding? He’d never met anyone, male or female, like her before.
“Is that g-good?”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“Thanks.”
She was quiet then, breathing softly, evenly, and he wondered why it was easier to say what he thought now, although this small, dark space did resemble a confessional booth.
Leah’s breathing was soft and wispy, her body snug against his own, and he pulled the extra flap of sleeping bag over them. He didn’t know how long they’d been lying there; his thoughts ran on and time seemed to lose meaning. But he knew he couldn’t stay awake all night listening for her breath, checking for her heartbeat.
“Please don’t die,” he whispered. Matt closed his eyes and thought about praying, but knew it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what he believed, or if he believed anything at all. Based both on his limited experience and pure rational observation, he knew things didn’t happen for a reason, there was no cosmic scorecard, no judgment day balance sheet, and that a lot of good people had horrible things happen to them, and bad people did sometimes get away with murder. Right now he could pray all he wanted. He could beg and bargain and plead. But it didn’t matter. The universe didn’t care about him any more than he cared about a grain of sand on a beach a thousand miles away. No one was listening.
He knew this.
But he still prayed.
He prayed because he was afraid of being alone.
“Don’t die, Leah,” he repeated with the fervor of a saint. “Don’t die. Okay?”
“Okay,” she finally mumbled back. “I won’t.” She slipped one hand into his (still cold but not as icy) and gave a determined squeeze.
He believed her; he had to believe in something. And so he tucked his chin down, pressing his face against her damp hair with a releasing breath, and waited to stop thinking, waited for things to shut down, go silent and blank.
Sometimes Matt thought falling asleep must be exactly like dying. You don’t really notice it when it happens to you.