Cora doesn’t seem to give the idea of a person running between trees watching us a second thought.
I’ve given it a third, fourth and fifth thought.
I know what Ava saw wasn’t really a person the way I know that I won’t be instantly killed the second I turn off my light. But does that stop my imagination from trying to convince me otherwise? Nope.
My eyes dart back to the woods, getting lost in the density of the trees.
Why would anyone be watching us? It could have been someone passing by; we’re close to the camp’s perimeter. Perhaps they veered off course, saw us and realized where they were, then dashed back onto public land.
Cora has switched from small talk with me to singing with the girls. I wish she would stop that and ask me random questions again. I don’t much feel like joining in with their poor rendition of “Alice the Camel.”
They finish the tenth song and Cora takes a breath. “Okay, I don’t think I can do another one,” she says.
She doesn’t need to. The girls start to sing their own, “Baby Bumblebee,” which has to be one of the oddest and grossest camp songs. Why would anyone lick a smashed bee? You deserve to throw up, in all honesty.
“We’re almost to the orienteering point,” I say, glancing at my map. The red trail curls back around, but we’re not going there. We’re going to go off course and find our own way home. Hopefully, we should arrive back at camp in time for lunch. That’s if the girls don’t get us lost.
Five more minutes of walking through shaded heat and we reach a clearing. It’s a man-made area with a firepit. It belongs to the camp and we’ll use it for building dens and cooking later in the summer.
The girls cheer from behind me.
“Thank goodness for that!” Cora says. “Okay, everyone have a drink and then we’ll let small groups of you lead at a time. Make sure you have your map orientated. If you start off wrong, you will never find where you want to be.”
Isabel stops in front of me, her big eyes as worried as the day she had to say goodbye to her mom.
“Esme, was that really a tree Ava saw?”
My heart pounds. “Of course. It’s easy to assume something perfectly innocent is something really scary in situations like this. Don’t worry.”
I smile to load up the reassurance. All the while my mind is going, Killer in the woods.
Isabel smiles, her posture relaxing as she takes a breath. “Okay. Good. Can you help me with my map? I don’t know which way it’s supposed to be.”
“Sure,” I reply, really hoping it will be obvious. With few landmarks, it’s not likely to be straightforward.
Isabel holds out her map. My three other girls shuffle over to us, and I take a look at the map.
“Ah,” I say, pointing to the trail. “This is where we’ve come from, look. We took the red trail to this clearing. Straight ahead is where it continues, but we’re not going to go that way. We want to head directly back, so where would you go to do that?”
I peer up from the map and all four girls are staring at it with matching frowns.
Maisie points. “Well, this would be a straight line back to camp.” She looks up. “I’d go between those two big trees with curly branches.”
“Good, Maisie.”
Cora, hearing us, calls, “Girls, Maisie has figured it out first, so we’re going to let Esme’s team lead for the first part. Make sure you follow on your maps as you’ll all get a chance to take over. Now, the little crosses along the map represent landmarks. Where those crosses are on the map is where red ties will be on trees.”
“Score for the E Team,” Isabel says.
“Let’s rock this,” I cheer.
The other groups walk behind us. We have an hour before lunch. If we don’t go wrong, we should make it back on time.
Kayla and Cora switch places. I think that shows Cora trusts us if she’s willing to fall back and let us little CITs lead. Not that we’re leading, four seven- and eight-year-olds are.
“How’s it going, May-May?” Kayla asks, using my very old nickname.
I think she stopped using it after the last time we were here.
“Feeling pretty good, actually. I can’t wait for tonight.” I’m absolutely not thinking about someone else in the woods.
My group leads us through the forest, and we find each flag shown on the map. They have confidently chosen the correct path. I give each girl a high five as we hand the map reading to Cora’s group.
“You guys did so good,” I tell my group. Four toothy smiles beam at the praise.
I fall in line with Cora, who’s leading now.
“How many of these hikes have you done?” I ask.
“I’m pretty sure I could do this without a map. Well, not this route; I’m usually on the north side. The flags aren’t spaced too far apart, though.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
“The next hike we do, we remove every other flag to make the girls rely more on the map rather than just walking and looking for a colored rag.”
“That’s the all-day hike?”
Cora nods. “They’ll all make their own shelters. Sometimes the shelters even last the whole night.”
Great, I’m going to sleep under the stars and get eaten alive by bugs.
Cora laughs at my expression. I’m sure I look like I want to run home. “You’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not sleeping in a tent without my hair straighteners,” Sophia says. She is in Cora’s group and although she is sweet, she’s high maintenance and kind of a princess. It came as no surprise to learn that she’s an only child and here purely because her parents wanted her to experience something different.
I’m glad the girls in my group don’t mind getting their hands dirty and their hair messy.
“You’ll survive too, Sophia,” Cora replies, laughing.
“Are we doing anything fun this afternoon?” she asks, running her fingers over her long black plait.
“We’re on the lake.”
“Do we have to do anything on the lake?”
Cora’s smile tightens and I can tell she wants to roll her eyes. “No one is going to make you do anything.”
“You might enjoy it if you try,” I tell her. “You can always get out if you don’t.”
Sophia shrugs. “Maybe.”
She has probably lost where we are on the map now.
Cora takes a deep breath. She’s makeup-free and wears shorts and T-shirts exclusively, so I can’t imagine she has a lot in common with Sophia.
The girls ahead stop and look around.
“Where are we, girls?” I ask.
My group turns to me, their foreheads furrowed. “Er…I have no clue,” Audrey says. “There should be a flag here. Look”—she points to the X on the map—“the flag should be right in front of us.”
I walk up to her and look at the cross. She’s right, we should be standing beside a flag on a tree that Kayla is currently scowling at.
“Are we lost?” Isabel asks.
Cora looks up, alarmed. “No, we’ve just gone wrong a step, but don’t worry, we have the map and there are plenty of flags. If we pick up another color flag, that’s fine. We’ll just take that route.”
Cora sounds so sure. She is right to be—I’m sure too. But the girls do not look convinced.
“Hey, it’s fine,” I tell them. “Cora is right. There are plenty of paths out here and they all lead back to camp.”
They nod, satisfied with my answer. For now.
“Okay, we’re going to go east and pick up the other trail,” Kayla says, scanning her map. “It looks like the flag is gone…or we’ve detoured.”
Cora gives her a thumbs-up. “See, girls. We’ll be back on track in a few minutes.”
Cora and I resume leading and take us east.
I lick my lips and take a sip of water.
“You know this new trail?” I ask Cora as we get a few steps ahead of the girls.
“Kind of.”
I frown. Her “kind of” is not at all selling it to me. “Why would the flag not be here?”
All we can see around us are tall trees. The flags are the landmarks.
Cora shrugs. “It probably is. I think it’s most likely that we’ve veered off course. We might see it in a minute and pick up the track again. If not we’ll move to green flags—those are on the trail nearest to us. It doesn’t matter how we get back.”
It only matters that we get back. We’ve been walking deeper into the forest for about an hour now, without knowing where we are on the map. How do we find our way back if we don’t see another flag? We could go in circles until we pass out from the heat.
I swallow the hysteria conjured by my own damn imagination, and push forward.
Our bodies would decompose quickly in this heat.
Shut up!
Kayla is always telling me to calm down. I’m terrible. Whenever someone is late, I assume something bad has happened.
Because sometimes bad things do happen.
Cora’s lips press into a thin line. Her eyebrows knit together.
She’s getting worried.
She is not alone. No one is saying anything negative, but we’re all wondering why we haven’t seen a red or green flag yet.
Kayla, Cora and I don’t want the girls to be alarmed. They’re young and they’re likely to be scared if they knew the truth right now. We don’t know where we are.
Cora has very cleverly started a conversation about Roblox. Most of the girls play it or want to; they chat incessantly about the game, telling each other what they’ve done on it and what they want to do. They swap tips and tricks and it leads them away from our reality.
We are lost in the forest.