As they hurried away from the bear, John sounded like his old self. He was jumping around and gesturing, and his voice was full of expression. “Did you see those teeth?” he asked. “They were huge!”

“The better to eat you with,” Rachelle said.

Marisol laughed and said, “I think John was more scared of the bug than the bear.”

It was fine for the others to joke, but Lavender didn’t feel up to it. She could still feel the gust of hot air and smell the stench of rotten meat from its breath.

“And its eyes …” John ignored their teasing about the night before. “I could see the red lines, like, all those blood vessels.”

“He’s not a monster,” said Marisol.

“You can say that,” Lavender said, “because it didn’t almost eat your face. It looked like a monster to me.”

“I thought he was actually really cute,” Marisol said. “And it’s not the bear’s fault we were in his space. He was here first.”

“When did we even decide the bear was a he?” Rachelle asked.

“Right?” Lavender said. “I thought it might be a she. Maybe she was so aggressive because there were cubs nearby.”

“Yeah,” said Rachelle, “and we accidentally got between her and her babies.”

“If there were babies, I wish we could have seen them. I bet they’re adorable,” Marisol said.

John snorted. “We’re lucky we didn’t see the cubs. If we’d gotten that close, we’d be dead.”

Lavender put a hand on the trunk of a pine tree. It trembled. They hadn’t been walking for that long. She would have guessed that they’d gone maybe twenty minutes or so, but they had gone fast enough that she was sure there was a good distance between them and the bear. Either way, Lavender was still shaky and maybe in shock. “We’ve got to be pretty far from the bear now. How about a break, guys?”

“I could use a short rest,” Rachelle agreed. Lavender did a double take. Being on the same page with Rachelle was almost as scary as the bear attack.

Marisol and John also stopped, but John refused to come any closer to the tree. “Doesn’t it give you the heebie-jeebies?” he asked.

“What?” Lavender asked.

“Standing that close to a tree when you know a bear could be up any one of them?”

“Ugh, I didn’t think of that,” Lavender said, hopping away from the trunk.

Marisol and Rachelle followed her. Rachelle was in fits of laughter, saying, “Ew! Gross. I just had a thought. What if a bear was up there and went to the bathroom? Can you imagine getting hit with that?”

“It would be like a bomb went off,” John said.

“Sick!” said Marisol.

“Bear bomb!” said John. He tossed a handful of pine cones high in the air. They soared in a steady parabola and rained down between the girls. Lavender and Rachelle scattered to avoid the pine cones, but Marisol’s attention was on the hillside a few feet away.

“Look!” Marisol pointed to a massive prickly pear growing out of the dirt.

“Oh, that looks perfect,” Lavender said. “But how do we eat one of these without stabbing ourselves?”

Marisol bit her bottom lip. “I’ve been thinking about that, but to be honest, I’ve never had one from the wild. We always just buy nopales from the grocery store.”

“I have seen those at Fry’s before,” said Rachelle as she joined them to study the cactus. “But Marisol is right. They didn’t have any thorns.”

“I think the ones in the grocery store are a different variety,” Marisol said.

“If we’re careful, I guess we can scrape the thorns off with my knife,” John said. “It’ll be like peeling potatoes. Only with a bunch of spikes.”

“What?” Rachelle asked him, voice full of shock. “You have a knife? On a school trip?”

“How come you didn’t show us that when we did the inventory?” Marisol asked indignantly.

“For the same reason I didn’t mention that I also have a lighter,” John said. “I didn’t want to hear you freak out about it.”

“It’s worth freaking out over. It’s not safe,” Rachelle snapped. “You’re gonna get expelled.”

Lavender snorted. “Who’s going to expel him? The bear?”

John shrugged. “I’ll worry about it if we get back. I mean when we get back,” he corrected himself.

Marisol held out a hand. “I’ll skin the prickly pear if you’ll start a fire. That way we can grill them.”

“Do we really have time for that?” Rachelle asked with an impatient glance toward the mountain.

Marisol bit her lip, looking uncertain.

“It’s still early in the day,” Lavender said. “We’ve been up since sunrise. It was probably like five a.m.” At the same time her empty stomach let out a huge, rumbling growl.

“Sounds like we’d better make time,” John said. “I can make a fire fast.”

“It’ll taste better,” Marisol said. “Plus it would be nice to warm up.”

“You know what else helps you stay warm? Walking.”

“Cooking it might help kill germs,” Marisol added with a shrewd look. “We don’t have a way to wash them.”

Rachelle bit her lip. “Fine.”

Lavender blinked in surprise at how well Marisol knew Rachelle. Marisol had said the exact right things to convince Rachelle.

“But we have to work fast,” Rachelle said. “John and Lavender can get firewood. I’ll help Marisol with peeling the cactus.”

“You will?” Marisol sounded surprised.

“Yeah.” Rachelle shrugged. “If we could survive tweezing our eyebrows for the first time, we can handle cactus needles.”

What? Since when was Marisol getting her eyebrows done?

Even worse, for the first time, Lavender thought that maybe there was something real about Marisol’s friendship with Rachelle. All along Lavender had assumed it was just shallow, some kind of warped alliance to punish her … for—for something. Lavender had always known that Rachelle had it out for her, and somehow Rachelle had sucked Marisol into her orbit of sixth-grade drama. Lavender had thought she just needed to separate them and things would snap back to normal.

Now Lavender wondered if showing Rachelle’s true colors wouldn’t work. In fact, it felt like Marisol already saw the real Rachelle, and Lavender was the one who’d misunderstood all along. Watching them help each other as they started using sticks to knock pieces of the cactus to the ground before skinning them left Lavender reeling. It transformed the gnawing hunger in Lavender’s gut into something sharper and more painful: Marisol and Rachelle were acting like friends. Real friends.