Pretty Is

Every week at Gilead, there was a campout on Friday night. I liked camping, and one of the good things about it this year was that I wouldn’t catch even a glimpse of Monica, whose group would be camping at a different site, miles away.

My group hiked about five miles from Gilead, to a campsite called Crow’s Nest, on a hilltop in a state forest. Hot and tired, we dropped our heavy backpacks in the clearing and looked around. It was about six in the evening, and we still had a lot to do if we were going to cook dinner over an open fire and sleep in tents that night.

Right away, Amy and Jeff sent every last one of us out to gather firewood. The woods were still slightly damp from the hard rain two nights ago, and it wasn’t easy to find dry tinder and kindling.

When most of us had come back with an armload, Jeff told me to fetch a bucket of water from the creek at the bottom of the hill, and assigned other kids to start on the tents and the fire.

I went off swinging my bucket. It wasn’t far to the creek, but here in the state forest the woods were dense, much thicker than the woods around Gilead. I hadn’t gotten ten feet beyond the edge of the clearing before I felt, with a shiver that was part pleasure and part fear, that I was alone in deep wilderness.

The path down to the creek was rough, studded with rocks and tree roots. Little carpets of moss, soft as velvet, grew beside the path, nestled around the base of the trees. There were huge oaks and maples, and tiny baby ones underneath, leggy and starving for light. Mountain laurel and rhododendron grew everywhere in thickets.

To shake off that slight nervousness about being alone here, I tried to think of these woods as Lothlorien, the magical forest of the elves, where the good and powerful spirits of Galadriel and Celeborn ruled. I was Frodo, small beneath the trees but safe, so perfectly safe. I had been permitted, because of my all-important quest, to take refuge in this magnificent forest that few besides elves were ever allowed to enter.

The mountain laurel, though, kept getting in the way of my dreamy thoughts. Something had happened four years ago, and I still couldn’t see a laurel thicket without remembering.

I was seven, and Monica told me she’d read in the newspaper about a seven-year-old boy being lost in the mountains. He’d gone off playing in the woods while his family had a picnic in some little roadside park. The article said the mountain laurel was so dense and mazelike around there, and the laurel thickets were so vast, that even a grown-up could easily get lost. Those thickets, the worst ones, were called laurel hells by mountain people.

I had never heard the term laurel hells until Monica read this to me, and it sounded horrible; it haunted me. A familiar big green bush, with clusters of pretty flowers, turned into something monstrous, something a child my age could disappear into and never come back. And that boy was never found. For days the newspapers were full of stories about the search—I’d begun reading the paper myself, despite all the hard words—but the stories got shorter and shorter, and finally vanished altogether.

I had nightmares about being trapped in a laurel hell, stems twining around my wrists, branches tripping my feet. Faraway voices were calling me anxiously, but I couldn’t raise my own voice above a hoarse whisper, and no one could find me.

I shuddered, remembering those nightmares, but managed to put them out of my mind. There was still plenty of daylight left. The path was plain and I would not leave it. I could hear the creek splashing, not far ahead.

When I got back to the clearing and set down the heavy bucket, Zoe was dragging herself in from the opposite side, holding a few sticks. Everyone else was working on tents or food or the fire. It figured that Zoe would be the last one back. We’d been on three hikes, counting the trek out here, and every time she lagged behind the group. Kevin started calling her “Zoe Slowy.”

I stood precariously on a boulder, arms out for balance, watching the three boys hovering around the sputtering little fire they’d just managed to start.

“No, man, that’s no good. Leaves’ll just smoke up the place,” Kevin was saying. “Don’t you know better?”

“Ah, I was just fooling around,” said Rashad. He was a small boy, a head shorter than the others, with skin like dark chocolate. “I wasn’t going to put them in the fire.” For a second he looked down at a handful of last year’s oak leaves. Suddenly he tossed them up in the air, and they came whirling down all over the place.

Rashad was about to put those leaves on the fire, I was sure. He lived in the middle of Charlotte, and this was the first time he’d ever been to camp.

Nearby, Isabel and Tina had finished setting up one of the two girls’ tents, but they were still struggling with the other one. On the far side of the clearing, the boys’ tents were already standing, though one sagged in the middle and the other leaned to one side.

The flames, gnawing at twigs under a tepee of small branches, seemed to be faltering. Tommy was on his knees, blowing on them.

“Put some of this on,” said Kevin, prodding Tommy’s back with a handful of twigs. “Come on, try some of this.”

Tommy ignored him and sat back on his heels. “It’s this tepee thing,” he pronounced. “You guys made it with too-big branches.”

“Tell you what,” Jeff said, walking over to the boys. “How about Amy and I help you guys out a little? We’ll scout around and see if we can find some really dry stuff, something that’ll burn better than this.”

Isabel elbowed my side. When Amy and Jeff walked off, down a path into the woods, she raised her eyebrows and whispered. “Off to be alone together.”

It was totally annoying to have our secret, mine and Isabel’s, revealed to the entire world. Especially since it was a grown-up kind of secret, a secret about adult lives, about romance. “Tommy, you are so gross,” I said. “Why do you have to go blabbing?”

Tommy shrugged. “Farewell, then.” With knee-high, tiptoeing steps, like a cartoon villain, he crossed the clearing and disappeared down the narrow path.

“That’s mean,” said Tina. She was a small, thin girl with a chirpy little voice. Kevin called her Tiny Tina.

“Why do boys have to act like idiots?” I complained. “Because they are idiots,” Tina answered, at exactly the same time that Isabel said, “Because they’re boys.”

Rashad said, “Ah, y’all are just dumb girls. You probably like that yucky stuff. I bet you go on the Internet and find pictures. Sex dot-com.”

“Ignore him, Zoe,” advised Isabel in her loftiest tone. “Remarks like that don’t deserve an answer.”

Some balance of power had shifted, now that there were twice as many girls as boys. Isabel seemed to feel it too, because instead of walking away, she folded her arms and stared disapprovingly at Rashad. He just grinned back, then sat down on a big log near the fire, watching Kevin take random pokes at it with a long stick.

“Can’t count on lovebirds to bring back any fuel,” Kevin said, to no one in particular. “If they find any dry twigs, they’ll just make themselves a nest.”

A look of outraged disbelief spread over Kevin’s freckled face. “We had it going. It was starting to catch. Then it just went and died. Stupid thing.” He kicked the blackened tepee sticks halfway across the clearing.

“Oops, you did it again,” Isabel sang softly into an imaginary microphone. “You messed up your fie-yer. Oops, you did it again.”

“Shut. Up.” With an exasperated sigh Kevin stared around the area, then spoke to Rashad. “What it needs is something that’ll really burn fast. We got any more pine needles?”

Kevin reddened, twisting a stick in his hands. It was too green to break. “Least I know better than to put a bunch of old leaves on the fire. Right, raisin?”

This was trouble. I looked around for Amy and Jeff, but they hadn’t returned, and neither had Tommy. The other girls, alerted by Rashad’s tone, stopped talking and watched.

“Nothing, nothing, man,” Kevin protested, giving the smaller boy a friendly punch to the shoulder. At least I guess it was friendly. I never understood why boys whacked each other all the time.

Tossing the stick aside, Kevin raised both hands. “Just kidding around. Don’t take it personal.” But he didn’t sound apologetic. More like annoyed.

He started to turn away, but then in one unbelievably quick motion Rashad crouched, grabbed a rock, and hurled it. It caught Kevin on the side of the head and he staggered for a second, then gave a strange little yelp and stood still. Another second and blood was matting his hair. Slowly he raised a hand to his head, brought it down, and stared at the red that covered it.

“Where’s the first-aid kit?” cried Zoe in a frightened voice. She looked wildly around, and so did Isabel and I. It was nowhere in sight. Kevin sank down and sat on the ground, sobbing.

“It must be in Amy’s pack, or Jeff’s,” I said, and ran over to a heap of backpacks. My heart was pounding so hard, my chest hurt.

“I’m going to find them!” Tina cried, and ran off down the path Amy and Jeff had taken, and Tommy too, what seemed like a long time ago. Before she was out of sight, she was yelling, “Amy! Jeff!” Her voice drifted away on the breeze that had sprung up, rustling the trees. She kept calling every few seconds, but the calls became faint and fainter, and died away.

The counselors’ packs were easy to spot because they were so much bigger than the ones the kids carried. I rummaged through Amy’s, scattering some of her things on the ground. Flashlight, sweatshirt, lotion, underwear. No kit. I finally found it in Jeff’s pack, a white plastic box with a red cross on top.

When I stood, holding up the kit, relieved that I’d done something at least, I took in the scene: Zoe and Isabel bending over Kevin, the scattered sticks of the failed campfire at their feet, the green backdrop of trees behind them. Nothing and nobody else. Rashad was gone.