The forest changed swiftly to match our unease, once we became aware of our predicament. The gentle breeze, which had felt so refreshing, slinked away, and the air became still, stifling, and muggy. The trees leaned in, crowding us, watching to see how we’d deal now that we’d realized we weren’t on a path at all but just standing in some random spot in the middle of the deep Northwoods. I don’t think I ever understood all those ominous fairy tales about kids being lost in the forest until I realized that I’d become one of those kids. And the vibe shifted immediately. You know how sometimes it looks like the knots in tree bark are faces? Suddenly they were all sneering and laughing at us.
I shook my head back and forth to release some tension. I told myself: Stay calm. Five minutes ago, you weren’t worried about being in here. There’s no reason to be worried now. We’d walked only a short distance from the river. It couldn’t be that hard to find our way back there, even if we’d lost the trail. We just had to march in the direction from which we’d come. We’d probably catch up with the path right away.
Well, I wanted an adventure to bring Alex and me closer together…
Alex, though, freaked out.
“What do you mean we’re lost?” Her voice was high and tinny, practically a helium voice, and she sucked in air before and after speaking like she was about to do the penny dive at the pool party. Not that she’d participated in that this year. “How can we be lost? I don’t want to be stuck in the woods.” As if to make her point, she frantically slapped at a fly. The big deer- and horseflies in this part of the forest had proven just as persistent as the littler blackflies by the river, and their bites stung harder. Alex gave up trying to shoo the fly away, snatched her tote and the now-empty ziplock dry bag, and started running in the opposite direction from me.
“Alex, wait! Where are you going?” I scrambled to gather my stuff and readjust my water shoes on my feet. The shoes were shrinking as they dried, becoming uncomfortably tight and scratchy where the elastic met my ankles.
“Out of here! I want to get out of here!” Her flip-flops slapped madly against the ground.
“I don’t think you’re heading the way we came!” I called after her.
Alex jerked to a sudden stop.
I jogged to catch up, the totally deflated inner tube slapping one of my sides and my half-on backpack flapping against the other. After we’d stopped, when Alex had scraped her toe, we’d turned around several times. Before that, I thought we’d been heading in the direction of a gnarled tree that was now a few feet to my left. But I wasn’t positive. Maybe I’d noticed the tree when I’d scanned the area for signs of the river. Or maybe when I’d turned to look behind me. Or maybe I hadn’t noticed the tree at all, and I was misremembering that now, only because it was one thing around us with a very distinctive look.
“Do you see the trail anywhere?” I asked, stopping next to her, panting.
Her eyes flitted nervously around the forest. “No,” she said, her voice managing to be both angry and quietly ashamed.
I took a deep breath. “Okay.” I took another breath, slower. “Don’t freak out. This is not a huge deal. We can’t be too far from it”—depending on how far you marched us away while you were in the lead for some reason—“so let’s just calmly walk back.”
“But which way?” she asked, hugging her bag to her chest like it was a stuffed animal.
“Um…” I squinted through the treetops, trying to figure out where the sun was. After noon, it tracks west in the sky till it finally sets. Had we exited the river on the east or west bank? I had no idea. I should’ve paid attention to that, except how was I to know that we wouldn’t be getting right back on our tube and floating away?
Next to me, Alex breathed faster and faster, like she was working herself up into hyperventilating. I had to make a decision, and walking in the direction of the sun just seemed right. “That way.” I pointed. “Let’s try walking that way.”
Alex nodded. “Okay.” As she stood up straight, I spotted a big mosquito on a bare patch of her shoulder, above the neckline of her cover-up. I slapped it, leaving a smear of Alex’s blood on her skin and my palm. At least, I assumed it was her blood. The mosquito could’ve already bitten me.
“Ouch!” She whirled to face me, furious. “What the heck was that for?”
I raised my palm to show her. “I got him? But too late, unfortunately.”
The old Alex would’ve laughed at that or thanked me. This Alex just glared and wiped the gross remnants of the mosquito off her neck. “I hope at least you’re happy. Being trapped in the forest like this. It’s probably your dream come true.”
My stomach flipped as I thought about how I had, honestly, been longing for one-on-one time with Alex on this trip. Without her phone and the constant Laura texts. Now we were alone in the woods. I had actually gotten exactly what I’d hoped for. Just maybe not quite like this.
* * *
We weren’t trying to walk quietly through the forest, and that was a good thing, because flip-flops and water shoes make a ton of noise, slapping and squeaking with every step. We also weren’t moving carefully at all, blazing our own trail of snapped branches and jostled leaf piles and crunched wildflowers behind us. I felt really bad about those crunched flowers—thinking of all the “Please protect plants and wildlife by staying on the trails” signs I’d seen on hikes in the university arboretum back home, at Devil’s Lake State Park, and every other natural place I’d ever visited. Now I was in the national forest—a superspecial and protected environment—and I was stomping all over it.
I was also slightly wary of the green leaves and plant tendrils that brushed against our limbs as we moved, because the forests of the Northwoods are home to plenty of dangerous and irritating plants, like poison ivy, poison sumac, and wild parsnip—which sounds like something you might even want to eat, but it actually creates severe blisters if it so much as touches your skin. I wondered why the person who named that plant didn’t go with poison parsnip or something even more descriptive, like DANGER DANGER BLISTER WEED, to make it abundantly clear that you should look, not touch. Unless you’re wearing thick gloves and long pants.
There’s a reason the hiking-clothes section at sporting goods stores is full of shoes with thick treads, quick-drying pants, and breathable layers. They don’t sell slippery thin soccer shorts and regular swimsuits, and definitely not skimpy two-pieces and loose caftans like Alex was wearing. We were reminded of this as soon as we started hiking in search of the river.
I tried to maneuver around the branches and twigs, but it was hard to avoid them in the overgrown, untouched forest. They tickled and poked my arms and legs, which soon became covered in a pattern of angry red scratches. At least my clothes stayed pretty close to my body, though. Alex’s flowy cover-up was like a magnet for bare branches.
“Ow!” she squealed.
I turned to see her stopped short, her body still leaning forward into a stride but her cover-up holding her back. She tugged to pull it loose, but it wasn’t budging. “I’m caught on this stupid pine tree!”
I dropped the inner tube—gladly, because it was starting to feel really heavy, and gripping the handles made my palms sore and sweaty. I bent next to the branch where the cover-up’s thin fabric had caught. “I have no idea how this is so stuck in here,” I said. Gentle tugs did nothing to loosen it. The fabric was covered in bead patterns, and one beaded flower was snared in the branch. “Is it okay if I rip it? Otherwise, I think the only way you’re going to get free is by wiggling out and leaving it here.” To be honest, the cover-up was so flimsy that I don’t know how much protection it was really giving Alex from the elements. If it was only going to keep getting caught, she might be better off without it. “You could wear your beach towel,” I suggested.
“I’m not leaving this in the woods! Laura loves it.”
“It’s hers?”
Alex nodded, wiping sweat off her forehead but leaving behind a line of dirt. “I borrowed it for the cabin. Because, you know, I thought I’d be, like, relaxing by the lake. Good photo op.” She smoothed the fabric on her arm. “It’s Laura’s favorite, but she loaned it to me anyway because she’s that nice—and these are my colors. I’m a summer palette.” Alex pointed to the swirls of peach and turquoise blue. “I promised her I’d take care of it.” There was a waver in her voice, like she knew now that she would most likely be breaking that promise. And I felt a little bad for Alex, because I know how it feels to be scared of making a friend mad at you or of doing something to make her not want to be your friend anymore.
I really know how that feels.
I tugged again. The beading was stuck tight. “I’m going to have to rip it, but I’ll be as gentle as possible.”
Alex let out a deep sigh and braced herself. “Okay.”
I pulled, and she winced as the fabric made a tearing sound. “You’re free now,” I said, examining the part that had been stuck. Beads had fallen off, but the damage was minor—definitely something that could be mended. That made me feel less guilty because part of me had secretly enjoyed shredding Laura’s clothing, even just a tiny bit.
“Ready to keep moving?” I asked.
“Sure.” Alex sighed. “How much farther?”
Like I know. We’d been walking for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes? The only thing that could help us tell the passage of time was the light and the temperature. It couldn’t be that late in the day, because the sun was pretty high in the sky and the forest was still warm-ish. But for daytime in August, it was surprisingly chilly in the woods. The shade and dampness kept things really cool. “Ten minutes, maybe?” I guessed. If we were heading in the right direction, toward the river, we couldn’t be more than ten minutes away.
We kept on walking, only now Alex was protectively clutching the fabric of her cover-up with one hand. Around us, the trees and plants grew tight. Scarily dense, like it might be impossible to escape their maze of branches. I felt a tug on my hair and let out a yelp, throwing my free hand up to feel if something was now on my head. Possibly something from one of the spiderwebs. My fingers landed on the prickly spines of…a burr. I yanked it out of my hair and threw it onto the ground. I ran my hand over my head again, picking off two more.
It was getting harder and harder to walk in my water shoes. The elastic edges dug into my skin, which had been rubbed raw. I wanted so badly to pull the shoes off, even for a few steps. But walking with bare feet would be risking injury, and probably even more painful. I couldn’t believe how much the shoes already hurt. We hadn’t been out of the water for that long.
Like she could hear me thinking, Alex whined, “How much longer?”
My spine prickled with annoyance. You just asked me that. “How should I know?” Was she turning into Nolan? I felt like my mom when we’re in the car and Nolan asks every five minutes, “Are we there yet?” But I stopped to wait for Alex to catch up. My right foot pulsed, and I scrunched up my toes inside the water shoe, giving my sore heel a moment of relief.
I heard the slap-slap of her flip-flops as Alex, huffing, came up next to me. I’d felt so superior earlier, not having worn sandals for the tubing trip. But now I eyed hers with envy. Sure, she had a few scratches, and her feet were completely covered in mud, but Alex didn’t have throbbing blisters on the backs of her heels. Who was the smart one now?
“I need a freaking break,” she said, shading her eyes. “Where is a rock or a log or something we can sit on?”
“Why do you keep asking me where everything is?” I sniped. “It’s not like I’m in charge.”
“Oh, really? It’s because of you that we’re wandering the woods.”
Wait, what? That was 100 percent her fault. Alex had been the one to dive out of the tube to rescue her phone. She’d been the one to insist we head off on an unknown trail instead of staying put in the cove. And she had also been the one to keep plowing forward in the forest when the trail disappeared, without telling me that she no longer knew where she was going but was educated guessing. All I’d done had been giving the tube one tiny, frustrated bounce. And I was pretty sure she wasn’t aware I’d done that.
“Um, this is not my fault. I don’t want to get into blaming or whatever, but you were in the lead, and you didn’t notice when we went off the path.”
“But you’re the nature lover! With your whole talented-and-gifted project on this dumb forest.” When she said “talented-and-gifted project,” she adopted a mocking British accent. “I thought you knew everything about it.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I told her.
“Whatever. You’re the one who wanted to come on this trip.” Then Alex muttered something, and I could only pick out a few words: boring, rather, Madison, Laura, parents, no.
“What did you say?” I asked, uncertain I wanted her to repeat it, because when I strung those overheard words together in my head, the sentences I made up were not things I wanted to hear. Other than “no” and “Laura.”
“Nothing.” Alex brushed a bunch of leaves into a pile on top of some green plants and then plopped down on it. “I’m sitting here and taking a break. By myself. I’ll let you know when I’m done.” She stared at her phone, like if she just gazed at it long enough, and with healing love in her eyes, then it might come back to life.
I blinked a few times, then moved to sit on top of a large, moss-covered log a few feet away. For a moment or two, my anger still ran hot enough that I wondered why I’d ever felt bad in the first place about what had been going on with Alex this summer. The blip. The shift. The…friendship breakup?
Because I’d felt really bad. There’d been an ache in my chest ever since I saw Alex the day she’d come home from camp, waiting in line at Michael’s Frozen Custard with Laura. She’d lied to me when she’d texted that she was too tired for the pool. Even though I’d been counting the days. I’d written her letters. I’d even skipped swimming in solidarity—and two of those days, it had hit ninety degrees! I’d thought the sacrifice was worth it because Alex was my best friend. But am I still hers? That question felt scary enough to swallow me whole.
Maybe because the temperature was dropping in the shady woods, my anger cooled fast. Then I just felt lonely, even more alone than on registration day, when I’d stood in that bright fluorescent hallway all by myself. Lonely, even though my once-if-not-future best friend was barely an eagle’s wingspan away from me.