The Girls of No Return (19 page)

Needless to say, it was my first time camping.

It had stopped raining the night before, and the sun was shining with a vengeance, but the ground was still muddy and slick, especially in the places where our path was covered in shadow. Margaret had given each of us a map of the four-mile hike, and I stopped from time to time to mark our progress. I was surprised by how easily I could identify creeks and streams as we crossed them, how quickly the map had become familiar. The trail followed switchbacks up through a dense forest of lodgepole pines and subalpine fir, the occasional blue wink of lupine visible in the underbrush. Once we reached the peak and started to descend toward a cluster of tiny lakes, my knees wobbled and I struggled to keep from pitching forward and knocking over the girl in front of me. I was exhausted at first by the constant zigzagging; my pack settled more heavily on my shoulders with every turn. Eventually, though, I found myself hiking in a steady rhythm of breath and footfall. Time passed easily, and I was able to enjoy counting the blue gilia flowers that crowded the edge of the trail.

I had to hand it to Boone, though: From the very beginning of the hike, she walked with a step so light that she surprised a family of mule deer around one bend. We hiked for four hours, and she never once stopped to use the bathroom. And it was no different once we got to the campsite. Margaret had paired us with one another before we hit the trail. Boone and I would be sharing a two-person tent. That alone made me nervous enough; it didn't help that the tent — in its bag at least — looked big enough to house only a small rodent. I turned around for a minute to pull the tent out of its sack, and when I looked up, Boone was gone. Two minutes later, she was back with an armload of dry wood.

“Where did you find that?” I asked. As far as I could tell, every stick in the forest was soggy and wet.

She didn't answer me. “You ever built a campfire?” she asked instead.

I looked at her. The answer was obvious.

“Useless,” she said to herself. Then: “Come over here.”

I got up slowly from where I'd been kneeling, reading the tent instructions, and walked to the middle of the large campsite, where the fire ring sat empty.

“Kindling first,” said Boone. “Small stuff: pinecones, dried moss, little sticks.”

That was easy enough. The place was littered with that sort of thing.

“Now,” she continued, “build a pyramid of medium and large pieces of wood over the pile of kindling.” She paused as I wrangled the wood into place. “Good. There you are. You might not have died on the Oregon Trail.”

“Thanks,” I said, brushing off my hands on the sides of my pants. The truth was, I'd enjoyed making the fire. I liked the feel of the wood in my hands, the sense that I was doing something useful — no, more than useful: necessary.

“All we have to do later is light it,” Boone said.

“I'll leave the fire starting to you,” I said, and swallowed heavily. I hadn't meant it to come out that way.

“I wouldn't, if I were you.” She stared at me.

The I-bankers were setting up their tents around us. Since our year was so large, we had split into two groups for the overnight. The other group, with the rest of our cabinmates, had set down their packs a mile back at Infantry Lake. Margaret, Boone, and I, along with a pod of six grumbling I-bankers, were making camp along the banks of the creatively named Soldier Lake, a body of water about the size of a suburban backyard. From the top of the peak, before our descent, it had looked like it was swaddled in yellow lint. From up close, the algae didn't seem so concentrated. It was almost pretty, with the gabled cliffs rising behind it and clusters of water lilies breaking the surface.

“I wonder how Miss Flynn's getting along,” I said. Margaret had cajoled the math teacher into chaperoning the other group of girls.

“She's going to make them sit around the campfire tonight singing songs about their common denominator.” Boone smirked.

We heard a high-pitched, silly laugh from nearby. Two of the most outlandish I-bankers, Chandler and Macy, were setting up their tent on a patch of cleared ground near ours. Chandler was from New York, and carried a Louis Vuitton purse around the school like she was planning to pop over to Bloomingdale's right after her canoe lesson. Macy, the one who had laughed, was smaller and not as pretty as auburn-haired Chandler, but she wore full makeup every day, and I must say, it helped. It also appeared as though she had brought her artillery with her; I spied an open Chanel toiletry bag next to the packs.

“Sorry,” she squeaked. “I couldn't help but overhear.”

Boone continued as though she hadn't heard her, and I saw Macy blush crimson and glance nervously at Chandler. “In any case,” Boone said, “we got the long end of this stick. At least Margaret knows what she's doing up here.” She paused. “Even if we
are
accompanied by stupidity squared.”

I didn't even look to see how the two I-bankers responded to that.

It surprised me how much energy it took to set up camp. First, there were the tents to set up and secure to the ground with sharp, tapered stakes. Then we had to gather even more wood for the fire, and pump lake water through our filters into the collapsible buckets that we packed in, and designate a bathroom area far enough away from the lake that we wouldn't contaminate our drinking water. Only then was it time to light the fire and prepare supper. By that time the sun was casting its last feeble rays over the lake.

The nine of us sat on large rocks or pieces of broken wood that we'd pulled around the campfire. We ate mac and cheese out of the pot, passing it to one another and scooping up the noodles with pieces of flaky pita bread. Macy warmed water over the fire, and we drank hot Tang and felt it fizz on our tongues. It was the best meal I'd ever tasted, and I surprised myself by saying so.

Chandler swallowed a large bite. Some cheese oozed out of the corner of her mouth, and she casually wiped it away with the back of her hand. “Better than anything I've eaten at Adriano's,” she said. “The New York culinary scene could take some tips from you, Margaret.”

“I've found that the best meals are the ones I've worked for,” Margaret said. “Plus, I think altitude makes a great seasoning.” She placed her tin cup on the dirt by her feet. “You can make this dinner when you return to New York, Chandler. It may not have the same dried pine needle garnish, but I bet your family would like it.”

“Not a chance.” Chandler flicked her hair over her shoulder. “Unless I spiked it with Xanax, I don't think Mumsy would approve. Plus,” she added with a laugh, “old dog, old tricks. It's back to the high life for me.” While the I-bankers could probably pass as dutiful daughters at their parents' hoity-toity church meetings and cocktail parties, we all knew what lurked under the cleanly pressed façade.

Margaret let her arm sweep out toward the lake, which was black and still in the moonlight. “The ancient Idaho batholith,” she said. “All of this used to be glaciers one hundred million years ago.” She paused for a moment, looking out at the dark water. “What have we learned here, if not the possibility of re-creation?”

“Rocks don't have juvie records.” Boone was sitting off to the side of the fire, away from the heat.

“You own it, and then you leave it behind,” Margaret said.

“Easy for you to say.” Boone stood up. She walked over to our tent and stuck her torso in, emerging with her hand clasped around something. “Glory time,” she said, and sauntered off into the woods. She didn't even take a flashlight.

“She's like an Eagle Scout or something,” Macy whispered to Chandler. She sounded a little breathless. “Don't you think?”

“Yeah.” Chandler looked admiringly at the dark curtain of woods that Boone had disappeared into. “She's fierce.”

She's fierce
. The phrase kept running through my head as I helped the other girls clean up, washing the pots and cups with boiled water, storing everything neatly in our packs, hanging the food sack over the high branch of a tree.
She's fierce
. Of course I had noticed the grudging respect with which even the I-bankers treated Boone, but I thought it was a respect born out of fear — not approbation, and certainly not envy. Now I saw that I was wrong. These girls came from money, or at least the appearance of it. The Chandlers and Macys of the world would mess up, get sent to someplace like Alice Marshall or even nicer, release some demons in Circle Share, make some art projects to show their parents, go home, and do it all over again. And they would keep doing it all over again until they graduated from high school and got accepted at an equally swanky, artsy college that didn't believe in grades and thought that their high school escapades were evidence of some latent genius.

I had always figured that the wealthiest girls had the least to lose. What I didn't understand until then was that they knew it too, and were ashamed. It didn't matter to them that Boone probably didn't walk out into the woods to squat near a bear and dig her hole in the pitch-black night — that she probably sat comfortably with her back to a fallen log and smoked the cigarette that I thought I'd seen tucked behind her ear as she went. They knew as well as I that Boone could leave Alice Marshall and return home to a locked door. For that reason alone, she was a warrior. What had Gia said once?
Your wounds make you fierce.
If that was true, then Boone must have been born wounded.

 

Nights were always cold at Alice Marshall, but we weren't prepared for the chill that descended like an ice storm around our campground as soon as the fire got low. It went straight through to the back of your skull, this cold, until you couldn't think about anything other than getting in your tent and pulling the warm bonnet of your sleeping bag over your head.

“Morning comes early here, girls,” Margaret called from inside her bivy sack — really just a sleeping bag that zipped entirely shut like a cocoon, with a mesh screen over her face for her to breathe through. She didn't use a tent. (It looked like my idea of hell, but Margaret swore that there was no better way to commune with nature than by placing as few obstacles as possible between yourself and the ground. She said that she was so comfortable in her bivy sack that she could sleep through an earthquake.) “The sun is our natural alarm clock.”

“Great,” I mumbled. Boone and I were already in our sleeping bags, knocking hips, shoulders as we shifted around, trying to get comfortable. “As if we're even going to fall asleep.” The tent, which had seemed small during the day, had apparently shrunk even further when the sun went down.

“Speak for yourself,” Boone muttered. “I'm already asleep.” She flung herself over onto her stomach and tightened the drawstring around the opening of her bag.

I attempted to find some way to position myself so that I wasn't lying directly on top of the sharp rocks that we apparently hadn't seen when we set up the tent. I knew my hips and legs would be spotted with inky bruises by morning. Finally, I gave up trying, and lay quietly in the dark. I was about to start counting sheep or mosquitoes when Boone unzipped part of her sleeping bag and flung it off.

“This is impossible,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“We're never going to sleep,” she said. “We might as well have brought some knitting to keep us busy. Make a blanket for show-and-tell.”

I laughed at the image of Boone clumsily trying to create anything, much less a blanket, out of a large skein of yarn. Then it was quiet again for a few minutes. I listened to her breathe, and compared the tenor of our breaths.

Boone suddenly propped herself up on one elbow so that she was turned toward me. “So, Gia, huh.” Her voice was flat. It was too dark to see her face, but I could feel her watching me intently.

“Gia?” I said, trying to sound like I hadn't been thinking of her all day. It was only too easy to picture her hanging out in a cabin with the other Seventeens, laughing with Jennie and Meredith, realizing that they were so much more her kind of girls than I was.

“You've been following her around like an embarrassed cat.” A fact, not an accusation.

“Bullshit,” I said, but I wondered how she knew. Had Boone seen what no one else had seen? The way I hid my face behind my coffee mug in the Mess Hall during breakfast, believing that Gia wouldn't notice me staring, wouldn't notice that my coffee had long grown cold? I watched her even when I didn't think I was; I would come out of what felt like a trance, only to realize that I'd been following her every move. If I hadn't been able to notice this, how had Boone? And what else had she seen?

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever. It's your life. Waste your time on that bitch if you want to.” She didn't sound as angry as I'd imagined she'd be, and her calmness scared me.

We lay in silence for a while. I crossed my arms and stuck my hands in my armpits, warming them. A couple of the other girls giggled from within their tents. The night gradually fell still.

“Only,” said Boone suddenly, “it's just that you're too smart for this.” She spoke in careful, even tones, and I could feel without looking that she was leaning forward, as though she was delivering a secret message or code. “You're too smart to get wrapped up in someone else's blankets.”

“What blankets?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Blankets, covers, stories, lies. They're all the same thing.”

“You've read her wrong,” I said. I was thinking about the way Gia had looked at me when I told her that I was leaving for the backpacking trip. I'd hurt her, I realized suddenly. She hadn't known I was going away for the night, and her feelings had been hurt. I was filled with the sweetest sort of shame. She
wanted
to be around me, perhaps even as much as I wanted to be around her.