Connect the Stars (12 page)

And if that had been all, it would have been so much more than enough, but then, afterward, as we kept walking, it was like my eyes had changed, like the madrones had woken them really and truly up. I noticed everything, every sharp edge, every curve, how all the trees and rocks broke the sky into shapes, every variation in color or texture. The colors were so vivid they seemed to shout, and as I looked around at the world, I wondered if this was how Louis saw all the time. When we got to a cliff face, I noticed that the rock wasn't plain red or plain anything but seamed with a thousand shades of color—honey, rust, coffee brown,
cat's-eye gold—some seams as thin as pencil lines, some hundreds of feet wide. And I felt this huge presence that I understood was
time
, because those ribbons of rock weren't just sandstone and shale but years. Centuries. Millennia.

“If the four and a half billion years the Earth has existed were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour day,” said Aaron, very, very quietly, “humans would have appeared one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight.”

All that time, without us.

A shiver went from my heels to the top of my head.

Who cares if people lie?
I thought.
This—right here—is why the word “awesome” was made.

Day Seven

Hell

Randolph put a millipede down Louis's shirt. I saw it happen, but I was too far away to stop it. We had just gotten to the campsite, and we were all setting up our tents, all of us except Randolph, who was putting a millipede down the back of Louis's shirt. And it wasn't one of those threadlike ones you find under rocks in the woods, either. It was fat and orange and at least six inches long, way more animal than bug (and, yes, I knew that millipedes weren't really bugs, but arthropods in the class Diplopoda,
a word that means “two feet” because they have two pairs of legs for each body segment; or, at least, I knew after Aaron told me).

The screams. The shrieks. The rolling around on the ground. The slapping of his back with his own hands. The spasms of trembling that came and went for hours afterward. Sheer terror. Poor, poor, poor, poor Louis.

Heaven

As Randolph stood red-faced and bent over with laughter, Kate dropped the pieces of her tent, screeched “You!” and came charging at him like a wild animal. Kate can't weigh more than seventy pounds, but it turns out that seventy pounds of pure fury packs quite a punch. Randolph hit the ground like a sack of flour, and Kate sat on his back whacking away at his shoulders, the back of his head, occasionally his round cheek, with her tiny, almost golf-ball-sized fists, shouting, “You think you're funny? Do you? Do you?”

No one jumped in for what felt like a long time. We were all too shocked. Well, almost all of us. Daphne stood a few feet away, one hand on her hip, amusement all over her face, watching. Jare was where he usually was when there was trouble between the campers—nowhere to be found. He'd told us on one of the first days that this was the
wilderness, where survival of the fittest wasn't a theory but part of the daily routine—and it was his job to let it “play out” even among us humans. As soon as I could unfreeze myself, I started to run over, but my shoelace caught on a prickly pear and I almost fell. By the time I'd untangled it, Aaron was there, behind Kate, catching hold of her flying arms and saying, “It's okay, Kate! It's okay!”

And, sure, I know it's not nice to celebrate physical violence, but after Aaron gently tugged Kate off Randolph, and Randolph had gotten to his feet and was rubbing the back of his head, before he could get himself together enough to act tough, the look he gave Kate—this amazing combination of scared and stunned and even sort of awestruck—made me want to hoist that girl onto my shoulders and carry her through an imaginary town square. I didn't, for obvious reasons, but if I had, I guarantee that everyone, all the people lining the streets and hanging out of their car windows and sitting on their porches, would have cheered themselves hoarse.

Day Eight

Hell

It started out as an ordinary meal. Jare got the ingredients for dinner out of the metal, bear-proof storage box where he'd stowed them sometime before our camp started. Cans
of beans, chili spices, Worcestershire sauce, wheat tortillas, dehydrated tomatoes and broccoli, all the makings of a bland-if-filling-and-fairly-nutritious dinner for sixteen. Aaron and Louis helped cook, because it was their turn. Kate and I served, because it was our turn. Jare went off to eat by himself, the way he sometimes did (Louis suspected that he had better food stashed someplace else just for him). And we all started eating.

Then Edie, the other girl in Daphne's group, started to cough. Actually, a number of us were coughing, because the chili spices were pretty hot. But then Edie started to cough
differently
, and soon after that, she started to scratch her head and her arms.

“What's wrong?” I asked her.

She put her hand to her throat and croaked, “I'm having an allergic reaction. I need my shot.”

My heart started beating fast at this. When I was in first grade, a kid at my school named Rocco had gotten stung by a bee on a field trip to a petting zoo. Since no one had known that he had the allergy until then, no one had medicine ready for him, and his symptoms came on fast. I can still see him lying on the grass in the goat pen, his eyes rolling into the back of his head. The teacher had to scoop him up and carry him, running at full tilt, toward the petting zoo office, where, luckily, they had some
epinephrine, and, luckily, it worked. I can remember reaching for Janie's hand, and how we all stood in the pen, looking at each other, while the forgotten goats butted against us, asking for the food that we were still holding in our hands. A few kids started to cry, and nobody made a single joke, because even though we were really little and had seen almost nothing in our lives, we all knew we'd just seen someone almost die.

Randolph, who happened to be sitting next to Edie, jumped up so fast he spilled his chili. Once he was up, he slowly backed away.

“Allergies aren't contagious, Randolph,” said Kate in her flat voice.

“Like you know,” retorted Randolph.

“Where is your shot?” I asked Edie.

“Jare has it!” Her eyes filled with tears, and she made some fluttery motions in front of her mouth that I hoped weren't sign language for “I am going into anaphylactic shock.”

“I'll go!” said Aaron, jumping up and running toward Jare's tent, which we couldn't even see from where we were. Jare always set up his tent at the very edge of the camp, as far away from the rest of us as possible.

“What are you allergic to, anyway?” asked Daphne, turning to Edie with a sneer. She had this amazing talent
for making everything she said sound like an insult.

“Fish,” said Edie in a harsh whisper.

“Fish?” Daphne raised an eyebrow. “Uh, last time I checked, three-bean chili didn't have any fish in it, E-death.”

E-death was Daphne's nickname for Edie, whose real name was Edith. I thought that calling her that at this particular moment, while her throat was closing up, was crossing the line, even for Daphne.

“Well, obviously this chili does,” I snapped.

Daphne turned to Randolph. “E-death's probably faking. Just trying to get attention.”

“Definitely!” said Randolph.

Edie was lying on the ground now. Her eyes and lips were swelling up, and her breathing made a high-pitched whistling noise. Only a lunatic could think she was faking.

“Don't worry,” I told her. “Everything will be okay.”

Aaron came running up, looking worried.

“Where's Jare?” I asked.

“He's coming. I think.”

“You
think
?” I stood up. “Did you tell him we have an emergency here?”

Aaron nodded, fast. “I did! But he, uh, didn't believe me at first.”

“He thought you were lying?”

“I don't know. More like he thought Edie was? Or something?”

I grabbed Aaron's sleeve. “Aaron! What did he say?”

“He said that he knew all about Edie's allergy. He said he'd put together the menu for the entire camp, personally, with Edie's allergy in mind. So she couldn't be having a reaction.”

“Told you!” said Daphne.

I tugged Aaron's sleeve so hard he almost lost his balance. I knew he was doing his best, but frankly I was getting frantic.
“But she is having one!”
I shouted.

“I know! That's what I told him. So he said he'd come.”

We all looked in the direction of Jare's tent, and sure enough, there he was, coming. But he wasn't exactly in a rush. He wasn't even walking his usual fast-Sasquatch walk. He was
strolling
, one hand in his pocket, like he'd just decided to take a nice turn around the campsite on this lovely evening. If he'd broken into casual whistling, it would not have surprised me.

“Hurry!” I yelled. “She needs her shot!”

Jare shook his head and waved his hand dismissively. “She's fine.” But I could tell he was faking his nonchalance
now, maybe because he'd heard the fear in my voice. He picked up the pace, but only slightly, a shift from strolling to sauntering.

My face got hot. My hands balled into fists.

“Now!” I yelled. “She needs it
right now
!
Run!
”

And, amazingly, he ran.

After it was all over and Edie was asleep in her tent, breathing normally, Aaron asked, “Hey, does anyone know what she's allergic to?”

“Fish,” said Kate.

A light dawned on Aaron's face. “Worcestershire sauce is made with anchovies.”

“You should tell that to Jare,” said Louis.

Aaron glanced nervously at the path to Jare's tent. After Jare had given Edie her shot, with one sudden jab that made all of us flinch except for Edie, he'd been in a black mood, yelling at us and barking out commands before he'd stomped away, seething.

“Uh, I will,” said Aaron with a sheepish grin. “But maybe I'll wait until tomorrow.”

“Told you he was a psycho,” I said.

“According to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
commonly known as the DSM, an individual with narcissistic personality disorder—”

“Aaron! Edie could have died. What kind of person is
so full of himself that he'd risk someone's life because he didn't want to admit that he'd made a mistake?”

“Well, according to the—”

I narrowed my eyes at him menacingly. “What kind of person, Aaron?”

Aaron's eyes met mine, and his face broke into a smile. He shrugged. “A psycho. What else?”

Heaven

That night, after we were all in our tents, I heard Kate crying again, the same doleful, lost, continuous, undramatic crying as before, as if sorrow didn't take hold of her as much as it simply leaked out of her. It wasn't the middle of the night this time, though, so none of us was asleep yet. I wanted to go to her, try to comfort her, but I knew that this was exactly the kind of act that binds people together, turns them into friends, so I stopped myself. But finally I couldn't stand it anymore. She was just so sad.

As quietly as I could, I unzipped my tent and got out, and as I did, I saw two other people emerge from the darkness, their faces pale ovals in the moonlight. Aaron and Louis. We all walked to the door of Kate's tent and just stood there, looking helplessly at each other, unsure of what to do, and listening to the awful sound of Kate's crying. After a while, it started to slow down and get hiccupy,
and then it stopped abruptly, and there was Kate's familiar, dry little voice, saying, “Well, are you going to stand out there all night or come in?” Which made us all smile with relief.

“In?” said Louis doubtfully, eyeing Kate's one-person tent.

“Right,” said Kate. “Go sit in Louis's tent. I'll be there in a second.”

We obeyed. Louis's tent wasn't so big, really, not for people who were used to rooms. But for us, sitting there, it felt as spacious and high ceilinged as a cathedral.

“Wow,” said Aaron, looking around. “This is great.”

“I have this thing about walls closing in on me,” said Louis, shuddering, and I flashed back to his hiking through the narrow gully in the rock, singing “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” as if his life depended on it, which maybe it had, or almost. He smiled a lopsided smile. “I guess I have a lot of ‘things.'”

The tent flap opened, and Kate came inside. In the light of the flashlight we'd set on the ground between us, she looked tired and puffy eyed, but not the least bit embarrassed, which I admired. Whenever I cried in public, I wanted the ground to swallow me.

“I wanted to explain,” she said, “because—” She
paused, thinking, her beautiful hands lying perfectly still on her crossed knees. “Well, I don't really know why.”

We sat in silence, being patient. With the four of us sitting there, so close together, time somehow didn't matter; if we had to wait all night, we would. Even Aaron seemed okay with the quiet. Then Kate looked up at us. I could see her black eyes shining in the dark.

“I guess I don't want you guys to think I'm this depressed person.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say “You aren't?” when Louis said it for me.

“You aren't? I mean, you seem happy sometimes, and you're, like, really nice and all, but I thought maybe you were . . . depressed.”

Kate sighed. “That's what my parents think too. Well, what they say is that I'm ‘in a funk' or ‘in the doldrums' or ‘moping' or ‘brooding.'”

“Oh, I wouldn't say any of those things,” said Louis quickly. “I don't even know what some of them mean.”

I watched Aaron open his mouth, no doubt to fill us in on the dictionary definitions of all those words, with maybe some history about how they came to be (I myself recognized the Doldrums from
The Phantom Tollbooth
, which I spent fifth grade being obsessed with), but then he
closed it again. He caught my eyes and smiled. It occurred to me that he was getting better at knowing when to keep his total recall to himself. It also occurred to me that he had a nice smile.