IT’S GOING TO be much, much harder to survive because I’m injured, but sitting here with the drugs kicking through my system and my stomach cramping over my tiny breakfast, I realize that it’s helped me, too. Because I was injured, I met Will. And because I met Will, I know Will’s Important True Things, which was a silly name for what were really just ways of getting me to think right, so that I’d be able to get better.

One of Will’s Important True Things is that you should always know the goal. I have two goals, always: to survive, and to get rescued.

Another of the Important True Things is that you should always have a plan, even if it is only one small thing that you will do first while you come up with a plan. You should always be doing something, even if it’s thinking, even if it’s relaxing (Will says knowing when to rest is as important as knowing when to work).

You have to learn to assume that you will fail and assume that you will succeed at the same time. This is the only way to stay smart and careful and stay moving and motivated. You cannot give up and you cannot let up.

I have a third goal, too, I realize. I tell myself I shouldn’t. I try not to think about it, because thinking about it means thinking about that day. About what happened.

Nothing is ever going to put it right. That’s what I tell myself. I need to stay alive. To survive. Anything else is a distraction. Anything else is impossible, and surviving probably is, too.

I rest the rifle over my lap. My fingertip traces the curve of the trigger. My dad told me when you fire a bullet from a rifle, it can go faster than the speed of sound. Aimed right, and you’re dead before you hear it. You never know it’s coming.

One single second, that’s all it takes.

I try not to think about it.

I think about Will instead. What would Will tell me to do? He’d tell me to make a plan, step by step, moment by moment. Which isn’t so different from what my dad told me, not so long ago. If you want a thing, make it happen, he said. Days ago, a lifetime ago.

I want to stay alive. And no one’s going to make that happen but me.

So I plan.