Where am I? That’s my first thought as I wake up. I take a deep breath of hot, stuffy air and look around. Oh yeah. The little cabin in the abandoned lumber camp. I sniff the air, but the smell of a distant fire hasn’t changed. My second thought is about my mother. I’m worried. Did I mention she’s in rehab?

Maybe you think all drug addicts are losers. Not my mother. A loser would give up when her husband dies in some stupid road accident on the other side of the world. A few days after the funeral, she called me into the kitchen and sat me down. “I’m not sure what’s next for us, Sammy, but it will be something good, that’s a promise. Your dad is gone, and we’ll miss him every day, but that doesn’t mean we give up. No way, not ever. Not as long as we have each other.”

Mom was sad about Dad, desperate sad, but she kept her job as a physical therapist, taking extra shifts to make ends meet. In her free time, which wasn’t much, she made sure I was okay, and worked in her garden, which she always said was better than medicine.

Weeding, planting, helping things bloom, helping people heal. That’s my mother, or it was until she got rear-ended in a parking lot last year and injured her neck real bad, and started taking prescription meds for the pain. After a while she was taking more and more pills, and pretty soon it seemed like she wasn’t really there, like she couldn’t concentrate or pay attention. She started missing shifts and let the garden go to weeds.

Mom kept apologizing, and blamed it on being tired, but it kept getting worse. Until one day I came home from school and found her passed out on the floor, barely breathing. I tried to wake her, and when that didn’t work, I dialed 911 and they took her to the hospital and pumped her stomach and tested her blood for opioids.

Opioids. I hate that word. Sounds like some horrible kind of mind spider that takes over your brain. Anyhow, at the hospital, they assigned me a social worker, Mrs. Labrie, who talked to me about going into foster care while my mother went to rehab. When I freaked out, she came up with a plan for me to go to summer camp instead. Which was the perfect solution, until the fire wrecked everything.

I swing my legs over the steel-frame bunk. Sitting there all sweaty with the stifling heat as I try to clear my head. Think smart, like my dad used to say. Stop worrying about things I can’t change. Nothing I can do about Mom, not today. Today I need to keep clear of the fire and find my way back home. Concentrate on making that happen.

I have no idea what time it is, but it must be early, not long after sunrise. I’m dizzy, or maybe light-headed is more like it. The constant heat is partly to blame, but mostly it’s because my belly is growling, Feed me, feed me. I head for the stack of crates, figuring to fill up on bottled water. But what I find in the second crate is way better than that. The crate is loaded with canned goods. B&M beans, Dinty Moore beef stew, canned franks and beans, canned brown bread, Spam, pears, tuna fish. Tons of stuff, enough to live for weeks or maybe months, and there’s even a can opener and a jackknife!

Cold beef stew for breakfast, right out of the can? If you haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours, it tastes great, let me tell you. And better yet, the food goes right to my brain, and out pops an idea. Okay, maybe it’s not an original idea, but it just might work. Remember that movie where a guy gets stranded on an island and spells out “HELP” in the sand? What if I do the same thing in the clearing, except spell it out with trees? Not big trees, of course, but white birch saplings small enough for me to drag into place?

I mean, they’ll be searching for me, right? Sending out helicopters and planes and search parties, whatever they do when a kid goes missing in the woods. Unless they think I burned up in the fire. Which is discouraging for about ten seconds, and then I decide to make a giant “HELP” and hope for the best. That somebody will see it and rescue me before the fire gets here. Before the old camp explodes in flames, and me with it.

So my plan is to find an ax or a handsaw and get started. Doesn’t take long to search the little cabin and discover there’s nothing bigger than the jackknife I found. I decide to put it in my pocket and hope the owner won’t mind. Then I remember those falling-down sheds. It makes sense there might be old hand tools in a lumber camp, and if there are, they’d likely be stored in a shed.

Feeling like the smartest twelve-year-old in the universe, I stride out of the hot cabin and into the overgrown clearing. I check out the skyline, looking for signs of fire. The horizon is dark with smoke, but it still looks a long way off. Shoving my way through low bushes and ferns, I head for the closest shed. The one where the roof is more or less intact.

The big shed doors are heavy, but swing smoothly on recently oiled hinges. A blast of super-hot air hits me from inside, and a faint odor of something familiar. Gasoline and motor oil. In my mind, that means a chain saw, which would make my job a whole lot easier. If I can figure out how to start a chain saw. Can’t be that hard, right?

As the doors swing all the way open, daylight spreads into the dim interior of the shed. And what I see there just about blows my mind.