A WEEK PASSES. Dawn spends it mostly with Lucas. She avoids Amber and really avoids Christian. She figures out, mostly, how to set up her tarp. She eats more rice and lentils than she ever thought possible, and still it doesn’t feel like enough.
She goes to bed hungry.
Her pants start to feel noticeably looser.
A week passes.
At the end of the week, the Out of the Wild Bear Pack staggers back into headquarters, and there’s a new recruit waiting for them, spiffed out in bright-yellow “Bear Club” gear. He’s standing outside the headquarters buildings with the guy who brought Dawn from the airport, Steve. He watches the group stagger in from the woods and his eyes just get wider and wider.
“Hey, group,” Steve says when the Pack reaches the buildings. “Meet Alex.”
Alex is from Spokane. He’s tall and looks fit and Dawn thinks he should be okay in the woods. But he’s looking at the Pack like they’re a horde of zombies. Or, like, prisoners in some wartime camp.
Alex doesn’t look scared. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who gets scared.
But the way he’s looking at Dawn and the others, Dawn can tell he’s at least, you know, unnerved.
Alex shares his Origin Story as they stand around outside headquarters.
“I’m from Spokane, like that dude said,” he tells the Pack while they wait for Christian to take their pictures and give them new gear. “Inner city, as much as you could say that there is one there.”
He says it was stealing that got him dragged out here. “Stickup kids,” he says, kind of grinning. “Me and this guy I was kind of sort of seeing. We’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
He shrugs. “Wasn’t anything violent,” he says. “We were just bored. Kind of for the challenge of it, nothing else. Steal a bunch of shit and go somewhere and hook up.”
He meets Dawn’s eyes.
“Anyway, we got caught, and my man blamed me for everything. And then the youth counselor asked me did I like camping.”
Alex says, “I told her I didn’t care for it.”
He smiles again.
“Wrong answer.”
The rest of the Pack kind of laughs with Alex. As far as Origin Stories go, it’s not the worst thing they’ve ever heard.
And Alex doesn’t seem altogether miserable to be out here. And he kind of looks like he knows what he’s doing. He seems to know how to bundle all of his stuff in his tarp, anyway.
Alex seems like a Good Dude.
He’s not bitter, at least.
(Dawn wonders how long that will last.)