John chose a little clearing away from any of the shrubs and with no tree branches directly overhead where they could have a fire. As a safety precaution, he kicked the fallen leaves and pine needles out of the way.

Lavender followed after him, feeling strangely subdued. There were times when she felt like Marisol was just growing up faster than her. And as they got older, their interests were getting more and more different … and there was nothing Lavender could do about it.

“Are you going to help, or are you just going to stand there?”

“Sorry,” Lavender said as she realized that she had been just staring while John did all the work. This was not the time to obsess over friend problems. She had even more important issues to work through … like how to not die. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she told John. “Let’s split up to look for wood. We need any bigger branches or pieces of wood that are on the ground, but don’t forget to check trees. We might be able to break a low branch off one of these pine trees.”

Lavender headed in one direction, expecting John to go in the opposite direction. She knew her plan was perfectly logical, so she jerked back in surprise when he was suddenly striding alongside her.

“We’re splitting up, remember?” she said.

“You’ve never played basketball, have you?”

What?

“Can we talk basketball later?” she asked.

“Just answer my question.”

She glanced up toward the sky in exasperation and huffed. But John’s mouth was a straight line and his eyebrows were drawn low and narrowed. He looked stubborn, and Lavender decided it would be faster to answer him than to argue with him.

“We’re in the same class. You know I’ve played basketball in PE.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, like, on an actual team.”

“Oh,” said Lavender. “No.”

If anything, his eyebrows drew even closer together. “What about soccer or softball or volleyball?”

Lavender shook her head. She didn’t know where he was going with this, but she was impatient with the waste of time.

“Have you ever played on any team sport?”

“You’ve seen me in PE, right? I’m not very athletic.” The words were short and sharp, and Lavender felt her mouth pinch together. She hated to admit she wasn’t the best at anything. She wished she could catch a ball as effortlessly as she could multiply by fourteen. Lavender was the only sixth grader who had her times table memorized through the seventeens. She was working on the eighteens when even Mrs. Henderson used a calculator after the twelves.

John’s stubborn look vanished, replaced by faint surprise. “It’s not about being athletic.”

“Easy for you to say.”

A smile flashed across his face before he looked serious again. “It’s about learning to be on a team. You know, letting people take turns doing what they’re best at. If you always miss three-point shots and someone who is good at them is standing next to you, you pass the ball. If you’re guarding number seven, you don’t try to guard number fourteen. That’s someone else’s job. You have to let them do it.”

Lavender’s stomach rumbled. The empty ache reminded her that she’d only eaten trail mix and protein bars in the last twenty-four hours.

“Can we talk about this later?” Lavender asked. “If you’d just done what I said, we’d both have some firewood by now.”

“No, what we’d have is some smoky wood that wouldn’t burn and no kindling. We don’t want green wood—nothing from a tree. We want really dry branches, so we should only get things from the ground, and we need dry pine needles and twigs, too. That’s how we get the fire started.”

“Oh.” Lavender was both embarrassed and annoyed.

“And if you ask my opinion, we should stick together. Last time we split up, you found a bear. It might have mauled you if your backup wasn’t there to save your butt.”

She couldn’t really argue with that. “I guess if you put it like that, maybe we should do it your way.”

They walked in a big circle, sweeping the space around the makeshift firepit for twigs and dried pine needles and any fallen sticks or branches. Before long, they had a good size pile. Lavender brushed her hands together and looked at their handiwork with a smile.

“Not too bad,” she said to John.

“It’s a start.”

“A start?”

“Yeah, it won’t last that long.”

“Aren’t we kind of in a hurry?” Lavender reminded him.

He nodded. “From the sound of it, we have time to get more firewood.”

Lavender shot a look toward Marisol and Rachelle and the pitifully small amount of cactus they’d skinned so far. It seemed like the prickly pear was fighting back, and it might even be winning.

Lavender sighed and turned to John. “We might as well,” she said. If nothing else, at least moving around kept her from shivering. They walked in a wider circle. This time, they had even better luck. They found one huge branch. Since John didn’t have an ax in his backpack, they took turns jumping on the dry wood and trying to snap it in pieces by holding one end while stomping on the other. Little shards of dried wood and sawdust flew in the air as they broke the bigger branch into more manageable pieces. Lavender only got one splinter. Unfortunately, it was the size of a railroad spike.

She studied the sliver of wood embedded in her palm. It throbbed painfully. She knew that was nothing compared to the sharp, stinging pain she would feel when she pulled it out.

“You don’t have tweezers in your backpack, do you?”

“No, I didn’t think of tweezers.”

Lavender waved her hand and talked fast, trying to distract herself from the pain. “Go figure that you didn’t bring tweezers. You have everything else. But I don’t get it. Why did you bring all of it? Even the stuff that could get you in trouble with the teachers?”

“I guess I thought I might need it?”

“For what?” She waved her hand around more desperately. Not that it was really helping with the pain and suffering. At least this new, sharp pain meant she wasn’t thinking about her dry throat or empty stomach anymore.

“If you let me see your hand, I’ll tell you.”

Lavender held out her hand and looked away, too squeamish to examine the massive chunk of wood protruding from her palm any closer.

John let out a low whistle. “Yikes, that is a bad one.”

“I know that.”

“The good thing is, it’s big enough that I can just pull it out for you even without tweezers.”

“No, don’t.” Lavender tried to yank her palm away, but John held tight, refusing to let her break free. “It’s going to hurt,” she said.

“It’ll hurt worse if we leave it in there and it gets caught on something and rips.”

“Okay.” Lavender bit her lip, and after another quick glance at the splinter, she focused on a distant tree. “Just distract me. Tell me …” She tried to flash back to a time before the flood. “Tell me who you think stole the telescope money.”

She felt John’s hand tighten around hers. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.

“Fine, then something else. Like why you packed an entire Walmart store in your backpack.”

“I will, but it’s a secret.” He spoke slowly as he shifted his hand into another position. Lavender fought to hold still. Her arm tensed as she imagined the tearing pain she was about to feel.

“Promise you won’t tell,” John said.

“I promise,” Lavender said automatically. Any second now, he would grip the splinter and twist it out of her hand. Fire would shoot through her hand, her arm. Don’t think about how it’s going to hurt, she ordered herself. But it didn’t work. The only thing she could think of was the pain.

John’s fingers brushed over the palm of her hand.

He was about to pull it loose.

“Ready?” he said.

Lavender squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’m running away,” he said.

When he pinched the piece of wood and ripped the splinter free from her flesh, she almost didn’t feel it.