Pretty Is

We knocked on the door of the camp office, heard Mr. Haywood say, “Come on in,” and stepped into the miraculous chill put out by a whirring air conditioner that blocked most of the single window.

Mr. Haywood pointed out the phone, half hidden under scattered papers on a dirty-gray metal desk, and handed me a piece of paper with the number for Mama’s hospital room.

“I’ll be back in a little while, girls,” Mr. Haywood said. “Make sure you close the door when you leave—gotta keep the cool in.”

Daddy answered right away, and even though Monica didn’t say a lot, it was easy to tell from her expression and her words that nothing was wrong. After a couple of minutes she handed the phone over to me.

“Yep. Kind of groggy from the anesthesia, but the operation went real well.” He sounded a little tired but cheerful.

“Well . . .” He spoke away from the phone. “Sue, you up to a conversation?” A moment later I heard a quiet “hello.”

“Yes, honey... You talk to Daddy now. Love you.” I worried through several seconds of bumpy fumbling noises as she handed the phone back to Daddy.

“No, she’s fine,” he answered calmly. “She’s just sleepy from all the medicine they gave her to keep her out of pain.”

“I wish I hadn’t talked to her,” I said sulkily, mad that the happy feeling of relief had been dimmed, and wanting someone to baby me.

It surprised me a little that Daddy seemed to understand. “Don’t you worry, honey,” he said in a comforting voice. “Mama’s fine. Next time you see her she’ll be wide-awake and give you a big hug.”

“Mmm, I don’t think so, punkin. Best to let your mama rest and me get some work done, and we’ll pick you up on Sunday. Least I will, maybe Mama too, if she feels up to a drive.”

“Aww,” I whined, but then remembered something. “Guess what? Friday we’re going to hike all the way up Mount Franklin and camp out.”

I’d never been to Mount Franklin, though I knew it was the highest peak anywhere near Gilead. We were going to drive to a parking area at the base, eat an early lunch, hike all afternoon, and spend the night at a campground near the top. The next day we’d hike down again and drive back to camp.

I told Daddy the whole plan for the trip. The time between now and Sunday, I realized, was going to go flying.

Friday morning we piled into two vans—all four boys in the one Jeff was driving, all four girls in the one with Amy at the wheel. The back sections of both vans were crammed with backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, and food. I didn’t see how we were going to carry all that stuff up a mountain, even if we did eat some of the food before we started.

But I wasn’t worried about it. As I bounced into the middle seat between Isabel and Jasmine, I felt strong enough to carry just about anything. It was a beautiful sunny day, we were off on an adventure, and Mama was fine.

The chatter of the girls in Amy’s van, the hum of the motor, the cozy feeling of traveling with the sun on my legs—all came to a halt with a sudden, rapid whump whump whump, from somewhere outside but strangely close to us. As Amy pulled over to the side of the highway, we were all saying, “What’s that? What’s going on?”

One by one we jumped out the big side door of the van and looked at the squashed tire, then gazed around. There wasn’t a single house or barn in sight.

Amy stared down the highway, where heat shimmers hovered above the asphalt. “Jeff was right in front of us,” she muttered. “You’d think he might have noticed we disappeared.”

Very soon it was obvious that Amy had never changed a tire. There were long moments when she stared, frowning, at the directions in the owner’s manual.

The rest of us sat on the hillside, fiddling with grass and clover, plucking the blue petals off chicory blossoms. An occasional car sped past in a wave of sound that gathered toward us, then whipped past and was gone.

Finally I heard a car slowing and looked up to see Jeff’s van coast by, then do a hard U-turn to pull up behind ours. All four of us suddenly came to life, cheering and dashing down the slope to meet the rescuers.

Amy had just managed to get the flat tire off, and Jeff did the rest. By the time we got going again, we’d lost nearly an hour.

Besides tire changing, there was something else Amy had never done, and neither had Jeff: drive from Gilead to Mount Franklin. A wrong turn on the curving, always rising back roads cost us almost another hour. By the time we made it to the small parking area at the base of the mountain, the early lunch we’d planned had turned into a late one.

We climbed out of the vans into air that was noticeably cooler. Aside from the gray road and the gravel under our feet, everything around us was green. But it wasn’t all the same. There was forest green, yellow green, jungle green, kelly green, gray green—all shifting and rustling in a light breeze. The woods were alive, waiting for us to plunge in.

Amy and Jeff conferred while we munched on sandwiches and chips. They decided that we could make it to the top before dark, if we kept up a good pace.

We finished eating, used the Porta Pottis that stood at one end of the parking area, and put on our backpacks. Most of us had fairly small packs with our sleeping bags tied underneath. But then the counselors started adding things. They strapped tents and cooking pots on people’s backpacks. They put boxes of pasta and bags of raisins and peanuts into other packs. Each of us already had a good-size water bottle, so the packs weren’t light to begin with. There was some arguing over who was being made to carry too much.

Jasmine winced as Amy strapped a tent onto her pack. “I just don’t think I can do this. Like, all the way up that mountain? I’m not a mule.”

“I can handle it,” said Leo. He squared his shoulders and stepped briskly up to Amy like a soldier volunteering for hazardous duty. “No problem. Just put it on me.” With a shrug Amy took the tent off Jasmine and attached it to Leo’s pack, which already held a lot of food.

Finally we were off, with Tommy singing, “A mule is an animal with long funny ears, he kicks up at everything he hears.”

For a while everything went well. Walking felt good after a morning in the van, and the trail was pretty, with wild-flowers all around and the familiar, earthy smell of the woods. When we stopped for a rest and a drink from our water bottles, Jeff said we were making good time.

Later, though, I caught up with the leaders, sitting on a long, half-rotten log beside the path. “I thought we might be getting too spread out,” Amy said when I asked what was going on. “We’re waiting for the rest of the group.”

Isabel soon came up behind me, and I counted: seven of the ten of us were there. It must have been ten or fifteen more minutes before the last three caught up.

Zach was panting, his heavy body dripping sweat. He was obviously not in shape for a climb like this. Jasmine looked really tired. Jeff, it turned out, was carrying much of her load.

An hour later we stopped for the third time. The sun was low and orange. Jeff and Amy weren’t sure how far we were from the top. “Can’t be more than an hour, even at this pace,” Jeff said.

“It’ll be dark before we get there,” Amy said, “but I don’t see anywhere to camp around here. The woods are so dense.”

The word dusk had always made me think of dust and hush, but never so much as it did that day. On the way up Mount Franklin, dusk filtered in among us like a fine powdery dust, blurring my vision, ever so slightly at first, then more and more. I had to look hard at the trail to avoid tripping on rocks and roots. When I glanced up, there was Leo walking in front of me, as he had been for the last half hour, but I couldn’t be sure anymore whether it was Isabel or Jasmine in front of him.

There were no voices to give me a clue. We were all tired, too tired to talk, except for Tommy and Amy, who were in the lead; now and then their voices drifted back to me. The only other sounds came from crickets and mosquitoes and footsteps—soft thumps on dirt and the occasional scrape of a shoe on rocks.

An oddly shaped tree or boulder, a matted clump of laurel, the exposed roots of a fallen tree began to look scary. I thought of the mysterious forests of The Lord of the Rings. There was the Old Forest, where the shrubs and trees somehow steered the hobbits off their course and toward the evil willow that would trap them. There was Fangorn, dense and smothering. But Frodo and his friends were all right, protected in the Old Forest by Tom Bombadil, in Fangorn by the treelike Ents.

I began pretending to be Frodo, heading safely out of the forest under the care of Tom Bombadil. It was good to think of Tom’s huge energy and kindness, and the funny way his talk and his singing ran together. On the rough trail my feet would be as sure as a hobbit’s, and . . .

It was no use. I couldn’t think myself into the dream of being Frodo. But not because my thoughts were overwhelmed by the real world pushing in, poking holes in the dream. That had happened lots of times before, like when Mrs. Winsted caught me dreaming and told me to sit down. This was something different. This was myself interfering. Pretending just didn’t feel satisfying or interesting enough for me to lose myself in it. I was, I realized suddenly, too old for it.

In fact, I hadn’t done it in a long time. Hardly ever since the night I cut Kayla’s hair. That night I hadn’t just changed someone’s hairstyle; I’d changed my whole summer. Maybe even my whole self.

Ever so slowly at first, then faster, the dusk deepened, colors faded, shapes wavered and blended into one another. The sun was long gone, but the sky still held a little of its light, so the first stars shone against indigo, not yet black. There was a sliver of moon, too thin to light our way.

Most of us had our flashlights out, though the counselors warned us to use them sparingly; we’d need them to find firewood, cook, eat, and set up tents. The solid barrel of mine, with its heavy D batteries, felt good in my hand. I kept a finger on the switch.

We hiked in a tighter group now, not so strung out along the trail. We were all tired and hungry, but I heard only a few complaints, and they were spoken quietly, as though our voices had dimmed along with the light. Even Tommy, who had hardly stopped yakking and singing all day, had gone silent, somewhere up in front.

I kept in the middle of the group, again behind Leo, and tried not to think about the little boy who was lost in the laurel hells and never found. But it was hard not to think of him, with laurel and twining honeysuckle and leathery rhododendron surrounding us. The shrubs were dense even by daylight, and now the dark blurred and packed them into solid, impenetrable mounds.

Anything could be hidden in there. Branches leaned over the trail as if to snare me. I jumped when my arm brushed one I hadn’t seen. The shapes of the bushes could look like a bear or a crouching man, but I was afraid even when they looked like nothing but bushes. What would that little boy have felt, with night coming on, no parents near, and no way out of the laurel maze?

And so, when something large leaped from the bushes onto the trail right in front of me, I was primed to scream, and the sound out of my mouth was like nothing I’d ever heard before.