Happiness for Beginners (25 page)

I worked out a strategy. I would focus on the food first, and savor the hell out of each bite. I'd sit next to Beckett, who I was actually growing fond of. I would participate wholeheartedly in whatever goofy rituals he wanted us to do. I would immerse myself in the moment, fully, without holding anything back. If we sang, I'd sing. If we danced, I'd dance. I'd saturate my brain with such an overabundance of gratitude for every little joy around me that I wouldn't have any room for envy, or loneliness, or sorrow. And if J-Dog did, after all, propose marriage to Heartbreaker two weeks after meeting her—and two weeks and one day after messing around with me—I'd be too insulated by happiness to even care.

*   *   *

The fish smelled mouthwatering as it cooked, and it tasted even better. I let my tongue caress every mouthful, savoring the smoky juice. When Jake came over with his dinner and sat next to me, I popped up and moved over next to Beckett. Jake frowned a little as if to say,
That was weird,
but then Windy came to take my place, and all was forgotten. As we ate, we toasted the fishermen in the group and gave thanks for the fish. I also gave silent thanks for the existence of butter in the world, and the fact that it was so well suited to long camping trips.

We all ate together in a big circle around the burners, which served as a campfire. We sang bawdy songs. Vegas turned out to be a drummer in a college band back in Memphis, and he got all the minions playing Run-DMC rhythms with rocks and sticks. Once that was going, the kids started to dance. They were drunk on plain Kool-Aid somehow, or maybe drunk on exhaustion, or drunk on the good life. I steered my eyes away from the sight of Jake and Windy sitting two by two. Caboose turned out to be quite a singer, and she busted out with a song called the “Cupid Shuffle,” which every single person there could sing along to. (And which I had never even heard before.) Apparently, it had its own line dance, and the kids all popped up to do it.

That's when Beckett pulled me up to join, and when I protested that I didn't know the dance, Beckett said, “Shut the hell up, Holdup. It's easy.”

He wasn't wrong, it turned out. That dance was so easy that a group of goofballs could do it with no music, twenty miles from civilization, under the stars—me, Uno, Dosie, Cookie, and Beckett, dancing in the grass like we'd been friends forever. The fact that I was participating at all was surprising, but it was even more surprising that my plan worked. I had so much fun I forgot to be unhappy. I even forgot to be careful not to look over at Jake and Windy.

That's when I accidentally did. Just as Caboose and the drummers took a break and the dancing broke apart, before I'd found a new distraction, I forgot to resist the gravitational force of glancing at the two of them—and I discovered quite by accident that they were gone.

I looked around. They weren't dancing. They weren't warming up by the cookstoves. They weren't anywhere that I could see. It gave me a jolt of anxiety because there really wasn't anywhere else to go. They couldn't exactly wander to a bar down the street. There was nothing else to do but stay here—except, possibly, the one thing people sneak off in the woods for.

I told myself not to stand there like an idiot looking around for them, but I did it anyway. That's when I saw something else—something even more interesting than the absence of Jake and Windy.

Snowflakes.

 

Chapter 13

“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Snow!”

Everybody stopped to stare at me.

I shook my head and pointed at the air. “Snow!” I said again. That's when they saw it.

Sure enough. Snow. Plump, ethereal snowflakes, smack-dab on the summer solstice. Fluttering down, backlit by the campstoves' flames.

“Um,” Mason said. “Isn't it summer?”

“I
thought
it felt really cold tonight!” Cookie said, delighted to be right.

We all turned to Beckett, but he was just as amazed as the rest of us.

“What do we do, Boss?” Caveman asked.

Beckett turned to us with an
I don't know
expression on his face, but then, taking in the sight of the ten people who needed him to have a plan, I watched him turn his brain to the task of making something up.

“Okay, people,” he said, getting into character. “There's no doubt we've got a snow situation.” With that, he started barking orders to everybody. We were to clean up the party site, but keep the stoves burning and boil water for hot cocoa—but he wanted us to melt a spoonful of butter into each cup we drank. “I don't care if it's gross,” he said. “You'll need the calories to keep yourselves warm through the night.” We pulled out the cheese and cut off hunks to eat. We retied the tarps to make one large cover so we could consolidate warmth by bunking together. We put on our pj's, but then Beckett had us layer our outerwear on top of it—wind jackets included. Anything that wasn't wet, we put on—from mittens and extra socks to the little fleece head-and-neck coverings they called balaclavas. Then we all piled into our sleeping bags like a middle school slumber party.

I was hell-bent on finding a place to sleep as far from Jake and Windy as possible, but there was a lot of jockeying for position. In the end, I wound up sandwiched between Vegas and Caveman, the two loudest snorers in the group, and as awful as that was, I thought, at least it was better than my worst-case scenario. That's when I felt knuckles rapping on my scalp like it was a door, and when I arched back to look, Jake's face was six inches away. His sleeping bag was head-to-head with mine.

He waved. “Sweet dreams.”

Windy was right next to him. She waved too.

“Don't be jealous,” I said, gesturing to the big guys on either side of me. “And no trading.”

“That's right, Holdup,” Vegas said, with a note of affection in his voice. “Just think of us as your personal hot water bottles.”

*   *   *

The next morning, when I opened my eyes, the blue vinyl of the tarp was about an inch from my nose. We had tied it low, but not
that
low. It had sunk at least three feet during the night under the weight of the snowfall. I lifted my hand to touch it, and it was heavy and dense, like a water balloon. I gave it a push and, over by the edge of the tarp, some snow slid off the side. I was the first person awake. I lifted my feet, still in the bag, and gave the tarp a kick, which caused another avalanche off the same spot. Each time I knocked some snow off, the tarp got lighter and rose a little farther from my face.

I kicked until it was high enough for me to sit up and look around, waking everybody around me in the process. I saw a tapestry of sleeping bags, and, beyond it, a forest as white as Narnia. We were in the exact same spot we'd been in before, but the grassy meadow and the wildflowers and the warm rocks where we'd sunned ourselves the day before were all gone. Every single thing that had not been sheltered by the tarp that night was solid, pure white. It was a summer winter wonderland.

The morning was surreal. We cooked breakfast without any sense of how the day would play out. Maybe it goes without saying, but there was no weather forecast; there was no way to know what to expect. We just had to watch the sky to make our best guess. Beckett wanted to stay put if it was going to keep snowing. If it warmed up, he thought we should move to a lower elevation. We lingered around camp, in a state of limbo, waiting to figure it out.

By noon, the sky was clear, and it was warmer. Beckett announced we'd do a short three-mile hike to a place called Elk Ridge, which had a better wind block in case the temperatures plunged again.

We hiked all afternoon. It was slow going—not because the snow was that deep or physically hard to manage, but because we literally didn't know where the trail was. Beckett stopped us every ten minutes to double-check positions and landmarks. Before we left, he'd gone over the route on the map with me and had me double-checking our position as we hiked. We hadn't been moving long before I realized it was actually warming up. The snow seemed to notice it too, because the ground was turning to slush under our feet.

It took the rest of the day to cover those three miles to Elk Ridge, and by the time we arrived it was already dark and most of the beautiful snow was gone.

The next morning, after breakfast, Beckett pointed out to us that we were starting our third and final week of the trip. “This is it, folks,” he said. “Next stop: grand finale.” By “grand finale,” he meant the Solos. Before the week was out, he would send us in three separate groups out on our own to survive for twenty-four hours. He had us make a list of the four people we'd most like to have with us in our groups.

“Take this seriously, people,” he cautioned, raising half an eyebrow. “And be careful who you wish for.”

I took it seriously. I would have loved to hike with Windy, but I felt sure that she'd put Jake on her list—and that Jake, in turn, would put her on his—and I did not want to spend my final days in the Absarokas engaged in
will-they-won't-they
theorizing like a teenage girl. One basic fact was clear: I needed to get the hell away from both of them.

Other than that, I didn't care who I Soloed with. Truly.

In the end, I wrote down,
Anybody but Jake,
circled it twice, folded up my slip of paper, and turned it in.

When Beckett had collected them all, he stuffed them into the pocket of his daypack and said he'd take a couple of days to review our requests and assemble the groups.

In the meantime, we'd work our way to a section of the range where the trail split into three roughly equivalent paths—each path for a different Solo group. When we got there, after reviewing our maps and strategies, he'd turn us loose for twenty-four hours and cross his fingers. During that time, we'd have to find our way, find water, pitch and strike our camps, and make good decisions over and over again. “This is what you're here for, people. This is what you've been working toward. The Solos. Sink or swim. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.”

Then he grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “But not quite yet. Not today. Today, we're just hiking a totally brutal pass called Devil's Crotch.”

*   *   *

Three days later, after supper, Beckett gathered us all to announce the groups for the Solos.

“Remember when I asked you to tell me who you wanted in your group?” he asked.

We nodded.

“Well, I forgot to mention one thing. I don't care.” He lifted his hands, in a what-were-you-thinking shrug. “I don't care who you like or who you don't like—who you have a crush on—who you dream about in your sleeping bag. Doesn't matter. This is not about having fun. It's certainly one of the few things in life that's not about sex. This is survival, folks. I've matched you up not with
who you want
—but with
who you need
. To survive. Skills. Remember those? You came here to learn wilderness skills? Some of you have paid close attention, even taken notes”—here, he paused to point a finger gun right at me—“others of you have wasted your time—and mine. But this is the moment that's either going to make you or break you.”

He reached into his daypack and pulled out his list. “These are the groups. They are nonnegotiable. Do not come to me and tell me you don't like Vegas or that Flash farts in his sleep. I don't care! Maybe Dosie makes fun of you behind your back, or maybe Heartbreaker won't give you the time of day. Too bad! These lists are for your safety and survival. You will make the most of them, and you will be grateful for the opportunity.”

I crossed my fingers.
Not Jake,
I chanted in my head.
Not Jake, not Jake, not Jake.

“Jake!” Beckett called out then. “You will Solo with…” He checked his list again. “Flash, Dosie, and Calamity Jane.”

I looked around. Calamity Jane? Who was that? Then I realized Beckett was pointing at me with another finger pistol. “That's you, Holdup,” he said. “New nickname. Get used to it.
Pew
.”

Windy turned out to be with Caveman, Hound Dog, and Caboose.

She was at my side before Beckett had even finished reading off the rest of the names. “You're with Jake?” she asked. “You got Jake?”

“I didn't
ask
for him,” I said.

“Trade ya?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

Windy grabbed my hand and pulled me over to Beckett.

“Can we trade places?” she asked. “In the Solo groups?”

Beckett tilted his head, like,
Seriously?
“No.”

“But I thought you didn't care,” Windy said.

“I don't care who
you
want in your group. I do care who
I
want in your group.”

Windy crossed her arms in front of her and tried to stare Beckett down. Then, at last, when it didn't work, she flipped that long sheet of yellow hair, and marched away. It was the most juvenile gesture I'd ever seen from her.

Now it was my turn to stare Beckett down. I crossed my own arms. “I put ‘anyone but Jake' on my list.”

“I know,” Beckett said. “And then you got Jake.”

“It's not funny.”

“It's a little funny.”

“You gave me Jake because I asked not to have him?”

He tilted his head. “Not exactly.”

I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Hey. Unlike you, I do not come to the wilderness every summer. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me. I have never been here before, and I will never be here again—or anywhere even similar—and even though I am totally and completely out of my element, I am trying like crazy to make it count.”

“I know,” Beckett said, nodding. “I can tell.”

“I've done everything you ask. I've obeyed every rule. If you said, ‘Go get water,' I got water. If you said, ‘Carry the litter,' I carried the litter. I never said no. I never held back. I've given this trip every single thing I had.”