The walls of our cabin collapse in on themselves like the sides of a stomped cardboard box. Dark smoke rises as Erik and I watch through the trees. Nobody sprints over to us and I fold her in my arms, then Dennis appears, followed by a wide-eyed Kurt, Troy trailing him and half-carrying Jada, then at last Javier comes running over to me as Erik slips away. I’m starting to wonder if my hearing will ever come back, when it does, all at once: Nobody’s groan next to my neck, the hiss and crackle of the flames, and Kate calling our names in the distance.
“HERE! OVER HERE!” Jada screams, and Kate hurries through the trees, cat’s-eye glasses askew, soot streaks across her face.
“What’s happening?” We mob her.
“Everything’s under control.” Kate clears her throat. “We just had some issues with the facilities—”
“Seriously?!” I snap. “Issues with the facilities?! That was a bomb!”
“It was a boiler malfunction,” Kate says firmly.
“Boiler? To heat up all the water in the showers, right?” Erik is furious.
“It’s Protectionists. We’re being attacked!” Jada wails.
“Quiet! All of you! Please!” Kate grits her teeth and then levels with us: “Listen. Our visitor last night left an incendiary behind, alright?”
I imagine Dog Mask crawling under our cabin to place the bomb, while just overhead we sat obliviously talking about the meaning of life, and feel sick.
“So we need to stay away from all the cabins until they’ve been swept for explosives. Dennis, you and I are going to go through the wreckage with fire extinguishers, find the device, and examine it. Javier and Erik, you are going to stay here until Dave has finished sweeping the main cabin, and help him get supplies together. Everyone else will go up to the obstacle course field and find whatever tents or tarps are in the shed and set up a place where we can camp tonight. Alright? Everyone clear on what they’re doing?”
We all nod. “Then let’s get moving!” she says, and blows her whistle to send us on our way.
The morning is unusually warm, and by the time the four of us have raked and cleared a patch of lawn and staked a few big tarps over it for tonight, we’re unspeakably gross. Kurt’s and Troy’s shirts are both soaked through with sweat, Nobody’s nails are black with dried blood and Jada’s Spongebob Squarepants nightshirt is stiff with it. Itchy mud squelches between my toes inside my canvas sneakers.
Dave appears with Erik and Javier toward midday; they’ve gotten a chance to shower and are hauling up bags of food and sleeping bags. When he sees me, Javier drops the bag and starts walking toward me, but Dave blows his whistle:
“Girls, hit the showers! Kurt and Troy, you’ll go when they come back!”
For once I’m grateful for Dave’s control freak tendencies; I want to shower before getting too close to Javier, and also am sort of unsure how close to get or how to act now we’re a couple. Do we, like, tell everyone? It’s such a petty thing to announce, considering camp is under siege. I fret about it on the walk down to the cabin, while Jada grills Nobody on why she wears a ski mask.
“People can be weird when they think you’re pretty,” Nobody shrugs.
“What, like they’re too nice?” I laugh.
“Yes,” she says, and her tone makes me stop laughing.
Dave and Kate’s shower is just as cold as ours, it turns out. And finding clothes from the lost and found is impossible: everything that fits and isn’t hideous was already scavenged; what’s left either doesn’t fit or is, well, hideous. Jada makes it a game: who can put together the worst outfit?
We’re all laughing uproariously at each other’s clothes as we return to the obstacle course, hair still damp, with me the declared winner: I have too-tight red track pants that say “CHEER” on the butt and a massive navy Big Dogs sweatshirt. (It features a Saint Bernard on a surfboard and the caption “If you can’t surf with the Big Dogs, stay off the Net.”)
When Erik sees me from across the field, he throws his head back and laughs.
“It’s called fashion!” I cry at him.
“Wow.” Javier leaps up from the quilt where he’s helping Dave with dinner and hurries toward me, and everyone is watching. “How do you look gorgeous in everything?” Javier says, and he twirls me around like he actually wants to get a better look, scanning me up and down.
Kurt wolf-whistles and Troy yells “Smooth!” and my face heats. Is this how we’re letting the group know we’re together?
Apparently yes, because then Javier brings me into him and kisses me hard, his stubble scraping my face as wild catcalls echo across the field, until Dave’s whistle cuts through and Javier pulls away. I stagger a few steps when he lets me go, overwhelmed, but not with the giddiness from before. I feel blindsided and a little embarrassed as Jada gives me a playful shove: “You and Javi?! Whaaaat?!?! That’s so cuuute!!!”
Nobody widens her eyes at me before Kate calls her over, and the twins high-five Javier when he returns to Dave. I look across the field to Erik. But he’s deep in conversation with Dennis and doesn’t look back at me.
Dave calls everyone to dinner and we gather on the picnic blanket, and it seems like Nobody is giving me space; she sits at the other end of the quilt instead of next to me. Jada and Troy sit across from me and Javier, talking to us both at the same time, like we’re a unit. I can barely follow the conversation, I’m so conscious of Javier next to me. He keeps his long arm draped loosely behind me, his head occasionally dipping closer to say little sweet things: “You cold? You want my fleece?” And “Did you want me to get you another granola bar, gorgeous?” Or I’ll catch him just looking at me. Like he doesn’t want to take his eyes off me.
Erik sits with Nobody and Dennis, his back to us.
When the sky starts to blush with the sunset, Javier drapes his huge fleece over my shoulders, and I’m surrounded by his warmth. It’s surreal, being treated like someone’s girlfriend. I don’t know why it makes me so uneasy. Maybe I’m just not used to belonging.
After the sun sets, Kate suggests we make up for lost sleep by going to bed early, and Javier takes two sleeping bags over to a corner of the tarp away from everyone else. And this is easier: to be him and me, instead of us and everyone else.
“My tattoo needs a touch-up,” I tell him as the first stars start to tremble overhead. He takes my forearm, his finger tracing inside my wrist. It feels like sparkling wherever his finger touches.
“Or I could do a new one somewhere else?” His eyes glint in the dark.
“I cannot lose that dandelion.”
“You’re missing the lesson of the temporary tattoo,” he says, teasingly, his finger moving from the tattoo to trace from my elbow to my wrist. “The moment you start stressing about how to keep something, you lose it forever. Because you’re not enjoying it. You’re just owning it. Temporary tattoos are about living for the moment.”
“Whoa!” I laugh, tucking my arm back into my sleeping bag with a heady shiver. “I had no idea you were such a philosopher.”
“I’m full of surprises.” He smiles. “You’ll see.”
He falls asleep midsentence not long after, the field growing quiet, everyone’s exhausted. But I can’t sleep, I keep staring at the stars overhead. In Ledmonton, I thought the night sky was flat. But now I see trenches and waves and chasms that must be millions of miles deep.
I realize he’s beside me before he speaks.
“Signal,” Erik whispers. “Come with me.”
I don’t answer, afraid to wake Javier, I just rise and follow him.
I follow him to the last obstacle on the course, the fake apartment building. I follow him all the way up the fire escapes to the small platform of fake roof at the top. The wind is higher and colder three stories up, the treetops billowing below us like an ocean before a storm. I have never felt closer to the stars.
“Erik, if this is about—”
“Dennis told me something interesting,” Erik cuts me off. The moonlight turns him black and white, like a silver screen idol. “Kate is taking down the fence tonight, in case we have to make a run for it. Just until dawn.”
“So what, you’re going to run away?” I don’t know why that comes out. But Erik shakes his head.
“It doesn’t work like that. The way Dennis explained it, if we’re on the wrong side of the fence but still in range when it comes back on, our kill switch still goes off. And the range is over twenty miles.” He bites his thumbnail. “I can’t cover twenty miles before dawn. But I could get there and back.”
And he points to a small grouping of lights past the first ridge of trees, maybe a dozen city blocks away.
He pulls a flashlight out of his hoodie. “What if we could get that screen time after all?”
A night hike with Erik? I should be exhausted, but instead an almost manic energy steals through me.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Erik puts a leg over the edge of the fake apartment building, turns, and drops out of sight. I lean over in time to see him jumping from the top of the doorsill to the ground and roll my eyes. I take the fire stairs, like a normal human being.
When I get to the ground he’s pacing impatiently, staring out at the forest like it’s a pool he wants to dive into.
“Could you have possibly taken longer to get down here, Grandma?” he says as we make our way down through the forgotten playground. Shielded from the field by the trees, he turns on the flashlight. A bleached-out circle floats across the ground ahead of us, the ghost of a sunbeam.
“Now, now,” I say. “Calling me names is not going to make me fall in love with you.”
“What?” Erik sounds genuinely puzzled. “In love with me? What are you talking about?”
Utter. Mortification. “Remember? Before the bomb went off?”
“Oh, right, when I made that joke.” Erik’s face clears. “Sorry if I got your hopes up there, Signal, but I wouldn’t dream of intruding between you and Javier. What you’ve got going is so healthy, so real: he gets to play at being high school sweethearts and you get to pretend you can change a cold-blooded murderer—”
“We’re not pretending anything. We’re both broken people. I know you see me as some sweet little weakling, but I’ve got my share of regrets to carry, believe me.”
“Yeah, I can only imagine how many flavors of lip gloss you used to shoplift,” Erik snaps. “Have you told him you’re innocent yet?”
I take a deep breath. “It hasn’t come up.”
Erik looks smug. “Well, the good news is I don’t actually care. I’m sure it’s all very exciting, but as an onlooker you two bore me to tears. I’d much rather ask more questions about Rose, if I’m allowed.”
“Actually … Would it be alright if we talked about you for a little while?” I say as nicely as I can. “You know things about me I’ve never told anyone else, and I don’t even know your last name.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He mutters in a low voice.
“You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to,” I continue. “But we only ever talk about me. I’d like to know more about you.”
He doesn’t say no.
“Like, who were you in high school? Did you play sports? Were you in all AP classes? Backpack or messenger bag?” I smile in the dark, trying to imagine Erik with either. I truly can’t.
“I never went to high school,” Erik says. “I was pulled out in sixth grade and home schooled.”
“Oh.” That would explain the precocious way he talks. “Was your mom, like, a stay-at-home mom or something?”
“She was a forensic psychologist.”
“… And your dad?”
“A computer programmer.”
“Why did they home school you?”
I can hear Erik smiling his heartthrob smile.
“They didn’t want me to hurt a classmate and end up in prison.”
“Oh.”
“Am I creeping you out again?” he asks, still smiling.
“A little, yeah,” I confess. “That’s quite a statement, Erik. You want to give it some context?”
“Context, context …” I’m sure he’s about to blow me off with some pithy remark. Instead, his words rush out with strange intensity: “When I was thirteen, I attacked an emotionally abusive narcissist who deserved it. He was over twenty at the time, so it’s not like it wasn’t an even match. And face stitches look cool! I still don’t see what the big deal was. But I was informed that I lack in empathy. So my mom pulled me out of school and tried to fix me.”
“Fix you how?”
“Oh, she tried everything. Medications. Music. Aromatherapy. ‘Incentivizing kindness,’ that was a big one.” His disembodied words in the dark feel so intimate, like a voice on the phone late at night. “Lots of reading. I am definitely the type who spent his weekends at the library.”
I really wish I could see his face.
“… Did it work?”
“Well, no, obviously,” Erik laughs, and my blood runs cold. “Or maybe it did sort of, but that’s a story much longer than this walk. Next question, please.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
“Next question.”
“I’m really supposed to let that one go?”
“Another time. Next question.”
“Ooooh-kaaay. What’s your favorite color?”
“Gray.”
“Favorite food?”
“Pop rocks.”
“What do you mean by sort of?”
Erik’s hand grazes mine briefly as he swerves in the dark, so I know to follow him. The sensation reverberates up my arm like a struck bell.
He stops, and gestures to lights up ahead. We circle the small cabin, staying just inside the tree line.
“No signs of a dog. One station wagon. Motion lights by garage.” He frowns and suddenly is halfway up a chain link fence. I follow him, and we land in a small grassy yard. From there it’s strictly hand signals between us as we pause, check for motion lights, then dart up the steps, pressing ourselves to the side of the house, holding our breaths and straining to hear if anyone inside has seen us.
And then a tinny scream pierces the night, and a sting of synth swells.
“Someone’s up, watching TV,” I hiss at Erik as he steps to the nearest window and looks in. “We need to go!!!” But he turns to me with a dismissive half-smile and shakes his head.
“It’s just a little kid watching a scary movie. I’m guessing he snuck out of bed, so probably his parents are asleep. Come on.”
“Probably?!?”
Erik kneels by a tiny basement window, which looks about the size of a shoebox. He slides open the glass and fiddles with the screen so it pops and falls backward into the room below, noiselessly.
“Carpeted. Nice,” Erik exhales.
“Yeah, right, you’ll never fit through that win—”
Erik, who is over six feet tall and has almost disproportionately broad shoulders, is through before I’ve finished the sentence.
Erik smiles up at me from the basement window.
“You want to find Mr. Moody or not?” he says, and disappears from sight.
There’s only one answer. So with the deepest sense of dread I lower myself through the small window and into the unknown.