Mom was right. We haven’t been eaten by bears.

But I came close!

I am sure that I was almost bear food on the Night That Would Not End, otherwise known as the night my new friends thought it would be fun to invite me camping in the woods behind Fee’s farm to celebrate-slash-mourn the end of our first summer together.

Nobody told me that throwing a piece of apple pie as hard as I could into the woods when nobody was looking might attract bears. I would have just sucked it up and eaten the thing if I’d known that. I don’t care if apple pie is the official town snack of Trepan’s Grove, I think it’s the most disgusting dessert ever created. But I didn’t have the heart to tell my pie-loving friends that. Hence, the pie flinging. It wasn’t until we were all tucked into our sleeping bags and Fee was zipping up the tent that I realized I’d basically flung a COME EAT US sign outside the tent. Fee had said, “You guys don’t have any food, right?” Then she said in a funny voice, “Cuz this is BEAR COUNTRY!” and everyone laughed. Except me. Because even if I didn’t have food in the tent, I knew there was some in close proximity because the truth is, I’m not super athletic, so throwing something as hard as I can means it’s not going to go very far. And that’s why, as soon as Fee had gotten into her sleeping bag, I announced I had to pee, and bravely said I was going to go in the woods because, you know, it’s part of the experience, instead of walking the fifty yards back to Fee’s farmhouse to use actual indoor plumbing.

Using a flashlight to search for apple pie in a dark forest is a terrifying experience. Actually, that part wasn’t so bad. What was truly terrifying was that, once I saw the piece of smooshed pie on the ground, I was suddenly gripped with a frantic urgency and grabbed the slimy mess, clutched it to my heart, and then ran as fast and as far as I possibly could into the dark forest, my pulse thumping in my ears, my flashlight beam bouncing and shaking on the ground in front of me, until I could go no farther, and I heroically flung the piece of pie away from me into the darkness, into the inky maw of the forest. As my breath slowed and the sweat cooled on my skin, I raised a victory fist in the air. And then I turned to follow the lights of Fee’s farmhouse back toward the tent but discovered the lights were gone.

Here’s what I was taught to do if I ever got separated from my parents in Brooklyn. If I got off the subway and they didn’t, then I was to stand on the platform and wait for them to get off at the next stop, get on another train, and come back for me. Same thing goes with elevators. If we got separated in a crowd, I was to stay in one place for a few minutes, and then if they didn’t come back, find some lady with kids and ask to use her phone. Though the few times it happened to me, someone always noticed the panicked look on my face before I even had a chance to ask for help, and then stood there with me until Mom or Dad pushed through the crowd with panicked looks of their own.

But Mom and Dad never went over What to Do When Lost in a Deep Dark Forest Full of Bears.

I took a step and then thought maybe I should stay in one place, and then I took a step back to exactly where I’d been. And then … I’m not going to say that nature and I “had a moment.” It’s not that standing there in the cool summer darkness, I fell in love with the great outdoors and all it has to offer and now I’m going to be outside all the time on purpose … It’s just that, all of a sudden, I understood two things: darkness and silence—and that there really was no such thing as either one in the forest. You just have to stand still for a minute and you’ll hear and see all sorts of things.

The best thing I saw were pinpricks of light sweeping back and forth, flickering between the tree trunks, and the faint sounds of my friends’ voices. “Hattie! Hattie!”

I screamed out, louder than I ever had before, my voice powered by fear and relief and self-preservation, “I’M HERE!”

Which is when I was suddenly engulfed in a beam of light from the back porch of Fee’s next-door neighbors, in whose wooded yard it turned out I was standing and onto whose back porch I had flung my piece of pie. The neighbor lady stepped in it with her bare feet when she came out to investigate why there was a screaming kid in her backyard, and I think she thought it was dog poop because as she stepped in it, she yelled out, “UGH!” and then sort of shook her foot at the same time that she was saying, “Are you okay?” And then she yelled, “AAAHHHH!” because all of my friends came tearing out of the forest at that very moment, screaming their heads off and tackling me with hugs so hard we fell into her kids’ sandbox, a tangle of pajama pants and headgear. I ended up with a sleeping bag over my face (“We brought it because what if we found you and you were hypothermic?”), half a bottle of Gatorade down my front (“Because you might have been dehydrated!”), and Celeste’s knee on top of my right ankle, making it bend in a new and painful way. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d kneecapped my ankle, so I kind of pretended I’d twisted it in the woods.

The Goodys’ neighbor grumbled and washed off her pie-coated foot with the garden hose as my friends sat on the wooden rim of the sandbox and watched, with the giddy giggles that come post-adrenaline-rush, as Mr. Goody tenderly felt around my ankle and declared it probably sprained but not broken. With a stern look, he silenced my friends’ request to let them carry me using the three-person stretcher technique they’d learned in Girl Scouts, and instead carefully picked me up himself and accepted the neighbor’s offer of a lift back to the farm.

It was that night, gathered at the Goodys’ farmhouse table, cracking up as we relived our adventure, that something in our new friendship slid into place. My ankle was propped on the chair next to me, resting on an apple-shaped pillow and covered with a growing mound of the frozen vegetable packages that Piper kept disappearing to fetch from the freezer, returning each time to place them carefully upon my ankle, and laughing so hard, tears streamed down her cheeks. We took turns reenacting my desperate cry in the woods—“I’M HERE!”—and I laughed tearfully as my friends explained just how scared they were when I didn’t come back from peeing in the woods.

The Goodys had me call my parents and tell them what had happened, and then Mom and Dad talked to Mrs. Goody, who assured them I was okay and welcome to stay. By that time, it was past three in the morning, and we were all one hundred percent awake. So Mr. Goody made us middle-of-the-night pancakes and bacon and hot chocolate. But before I had any of that, my friends, who had disappeared from the table, solemnly reentered the room. Piper was in the lead, holding a plate high in front of her, and it took me a moment to realize that a lit birthday candle was on top.

“In honor of the fact that you were not eaten by a bear and that you didn’t fall off a cliff into the gully—”

“I didn’t even know that was a possibility!” I yelped.

Piper giggled, then continued. “Or get stung to death by hornets or trapped between a rock and a hard place or—”

Fee snorted, “Come on, Pipes.”

Piper set the plate in front of me. “We present you with this We’re Glad You’re Alive, Hattie, Pie. Please eat!”

“Oh, um … ” I faltered, looking at the plate-size slice of apple pie, a pink glob of candle wax pooling in its center. “I love it!”