I should’ve known all hope was lost when Alex refused to eat a doughnut.
There were certain vacation moments that we looked forward to all year. The first being when the huge, slightly creepy, grinning lumberjack came into view at the end of the drive. Clutching an ax so big it shaded the cars in the parking lot, the lumberjack—Paul Bunyan—was there to welcome you to his Cook Shanty restaurant and, unofficially, the Wisconsin Northwoods.
It wasn’t a real lumberjack, of course. Just a huge wooden cutout next to the yellow sign touting the restaurant’s dinner special (usually walleye, which our parents love, but if you ask me just sounds too gross to eat) and, of course, the “logging camp breakfast” served from 7:00 a.m. till noon.
That breakfast was why we always left Madison so early—because the drive to Minocqua usually took between three and four hours, depending on how many times our little brothers had to pee and which parents were driving. The flapjacks, camp potatoes, and warm buttermilk doughnuts would disappear from the red-and-white-checked tables at twelve on the dot. One year, we got a late start because Nolan couldn’t find his glasses, and then vacationer traffic was slow along Highway 51, and we didn’t pull into the lot until 12:11 p.m. It was too late; they’d already moved on to lunch—and were out of doughnuts. Alex almost cried. We had to settle for doughnut holes from the Kwik Trip gas station, and that was not the proper way to start our week at the cabin.
Our families took this vacation together at the end of every summer. It was tradition. “Allard’s Roost,” our cabin on the edge of Buttercup Lake, used to belong to my grandparents. We’ve spent a week there every summer of my life, and after Alex and I became best friends in kindergarten, the Benavides family—Nick, Carmen, Lucy, Alex, and Mateo—started coming along. The A-frame cabin is pretty roomy, with lots of places to sleep, so all nine of us were a tight but manageable squeeze. It helped that Nolan, my little brother, and Mateo actually liked to crash on the musty pullout couch in the den.
My favorite thing about our week “Up North” was…everything. I loved jumping off the sizzling-hot pier into the ice-cold lake for a swim, stargazing from the Adirondack chairs at night, listening to the loons hoot, and hiking around the woods to collect leaves and pine cones. I even loved the notoriously big mosquitoes because their presence meant being surrounded by the glow of citronella candles every night while we gathered on the patio to grill our supper. Stopping at Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty for doughnuts was just the first favorite thing in a week brimming with them.
This year, though, everything about the trip was slightly wrong. Like we’d begun singing half a note off-key, and as the song went on, it only got worse and our voices more out of tune.
Starting with the car arrangements. It took two jam-packed cars to get all of us (and all our stuff) up there, but we didn’t always drive as separate families. Usually, Alex and I begged to be in the same car, so we could play the license-plate game and share chalky-but-sweet Necco wafers—a car-ride candy tradition dating back to when my dad was our age.
Except this year, Alex slid into the back seat of the Benavideses’ brand-new car, buckled her belt, and announced, “I’m beyond tired so I’m just gonna sleep the whole way up.” Then she put on her headphones and pulled her hoodie down so it almost covered her eyes. It felt weird to climb over Lucy to claim the middle seat, so I rode with my parents and the boys, sitting by myself in the wayback of our messy old SUV. Nolan and Mateo played games the whole ride, and the car was loud, and after a while kind of smelly, and I felt vaguely carsick. Possibly because I was trying to read in the back seat. Possibly because of what it meant that a big bag of groceries—and not Alex—was sitting next to me.
It’s going to be okay when we get there, I told myself. It’ll be like hitting a reset button. We’ll finally talk about what happened. Then everything will go back to normal. I tried not to think of how far from normal we’d already veered.
I finally spotted Paul Bunyan (and his famously blue ox, Babe) at eleven thirty, which meant we had plenty of time. The boys cheered as we pulled into the parking lot. Even though my legs were stiff from the drive and I was still queasy, I bounded out of the car.
“Doughnuts! Doughnuts doughnuts doughnuts!” our brothers chanted as they raced inside.
“Coffee,” Lucy said with a dramatic sigh as she chased after them.
Alex lingered in her seat, her fingers flying over the keypad on her phone. So much for sleeping the whole way. I lingered next to the open door, tracing shapes on the sticky-hot blacktop with my sneaker toe.
“Are you coming?” I finally asked. “They’re going to stop serving breakfast soon.” Everyone else had gone inside but us. My stomach growled.
“Sure, just a sec,” Alex mumbled, still typing. Then she clicked her phone’s screen off. Before she’d even shut the car door, it buzzed and lit up again with a rapid-fire stream of texts. “Ugh, I haven’t had decent cell service for the last hour. I’m dying.”
“I’m dying to eat something,” I muttered, moving slowly enough to keep pace with her as she walked-while-texting into the restaurant.
The lightning-quick servers had already brought platters of family-style food to our long picnic table, and everybody was loading up their plates. My dad stared at his biscuits and gravy with the same loving expression he has in the framed wedding photo of him and my mom on our mantel at home. “I’m in heaven,” he said with a happy sigh.
The two empty seats at the table for Alex and me were next to each other, like always. I plopped down and grabbed a plate, still warm from the dishwasher. “Pass the doughnuts, please!” I made grabby hands in anticipation.
When Nolan handed them off to me, I dropped two onto my plate. The first one you gobble up because you’re starving after that long drive. The second is to savor the flavor, because it’ll be a year before you come back. Before the servers clear the platters, you snag a third doughnut and wrap it in a napkin for later, a midnight snack.
I plopped the first of her two doughnuts onto Alex’s plate.
“No, thanks.”
I had just grabbed her second when she said it again, a little louder and sounding slightly annoyed. “I said, no.”
My hand hovered over her plate, waiting to drop the doughnut like a bomb. “You’re kidding, right—”
“I don’t want a doughnut, Jocelyn!”
Everyone at the table quieted, except for Nolan, who is an extremely loud chewer. Lucy frowned. I could tell my mom was sneaking a glance at us.
“But we have them every year,” I said in a very quiet voice. My face flushed, and I moved my hand—and the doughnut—away from Alex.
“Well, things change.” Alex grabbed her fork and scratched at her almost-empty plate.
I didn’t understand why she seemed so angry. I’m the one who deserves to be mad.
Her mom cleared her throat. “Alex, honey, are you feeling okay? Aren’t you going to eat something?”
“This food is kind of gross,” Alex grumbled, but she scooped up a bit of the scrambled eggs. “It’s unhealthy.”
I stared down at my plate, with its two greasy doughnuts staring back at me like wide-open eyes. Suddenly, I didn’t want to eat them, either.
“I’ll tell you what’s gross: this coffee,” Lucy said, wrinkling her nose. “It needs all the sugar.” Her voice was a touch too loud and upbeat. But it worked—everybody else went back to talking and eating. Except Alex. She pushed her eggs around her plate for a while, eating maybe half of what was there.
While the rest of us went back for seconds, she mumbled something about looking for a signal and wandered off in the direction of the gift shop.
“Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the car, huh?” her dad said, shaking his head.
Nobody was looking at me, which made me think they were all embarrassed on my behalf.
I ate only one of the doughnuts, and I picked at the rest of my food. It didn’t taste right. When it was time to leave, though, I wrapped up two doughnuts in a big paper napkin. Maybe we’d eat them later, sitting cross-legged on the pier underneath the stars, which twinkled so brightly in the Northwoods night sky. After the cabin worked its magic and turned my best friend back into herself.
I felt stranded in the wilderness, without her.