The Girls of No Return (36 page)

“Girls, that is enough,” said Amanda sternly. “I don't know what you're playing at here, or what difficulties you're having in your friendship, but Circle Share isn't the place to publicize them. At least, not this way.”

“Friendship?” Boone laughed. “Believe me, Amanda, if we were friends, I would have told her long ago what a colossal bitch she is.”

Amanda opened her mouth, but Boone kept going. “See, Gia, Des Moines sounds about right for you. It sounds like the only honest thing you've said since coming here. Everything else has been as real as Styrofoam. Do you want to tell everyone about your latest lie — aside from the one you just told us, that is — or should I?”

Gia still looked composed, but when she spoke, her voice sounded strangled. “Don't you dare.”

Don't
, I thought.
Please don't start this.

“You'll be interested in this one,” Boone said, addressing Amanda. “Turns out Gia is not just a student; she's a teacher too. At least, that's what she's been telling the ranger who lives up at the Buckhorn fire lookout. The one who thinks she's twenty-three.”

This time, it wasn't a murmur; the sound that cascaded around me was more like a collective yelp. All of the tabloid magazines that the girls had been smuggling into school couldn't compare with the drama they were watching.

Boone continued. Her voice was casual now. She could have been giving directions to a misplaced tourist. “I wonder, Amanda, if this isn't a bit of a liability for Alice Marshall. Troubled girls coming up here, causing more problems than they would down in the real world. Sets a bad precedent, doesn't it?” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Well. Bev'll have some thoughts, I'm sure.”

Amanda said nothing. She looked down at her hands, as though they might tell her something new, give her an idea of what to do with the situation.

Gia just looked at Boone. I don't think she ever believed that Boone would actually tell on her. I hadn't believed she'd do it either.

Boone wasn't finished. “You just don't know how to play well with others, do you, Gia?” She smiled horribly.

Gia stood up slowly. She smoothed the front of her jeans, and pulled her gloves out of her back pocket. She held them loosely in one hand, dangling between finger and thumb.

“Gia, we are going to need to discuss this.” Amanda's face was flushed, and she raised herself halfway out of her seat before giving up and sitting back down again. “Stay,” she added, with no conviction.

Gia hardly glanced in Amanda's direction as she crossed the circle toward the door. Just as she was about to leave the circle, she spun on one heel. She was in front of Boone in less than a second. Maybe it was because I'd imagined something like this so many times that I substituted the scene in my head for the one in front of me, but I heard the slap before I saw it: the hand pulling back, the expert swing. The sound echoed off the Rec Lodge walls like the knocking of joists at a construction site.

 

 

Sometimes I'm afraid that life is just a series of Things, that we keep fucking up and making up and learning nothing and doing it all again and again and again. Those are my darker moments, when I see her face before me and remember how it looked the last time I saw her. No — how she looked at me. Those are the times when I want to slide back into the gray cave of not-thinking, not-hoping, not-caring, not-being. It would be so easy, even now.

I love how people say, “If there's one thing I learned . . . ,” like they're able to sift through the complexities of a conversation or situation and choose what they want to take away from it. What lesson they want to say they learned. Please. Maybe in retrospect it seems clearer. But what about all the things they didn't even know they were absorbing?

Still. If there's one thing I learned, it's that you will always have to deal with yourself, whether you like what you're doing or not. And if you do screw up again and again, you will have to deal with it again and again. And if that sounds exhausting, that's because it is.

You get it now, right? This is my Thing. Every single page.

 

 

AFTER THE SCENE AT CIRCLE SHARE, AFTER GIA HAD WALKED
languidly out of the Rec Lodge, after Amanda had calmly told us all to take a breather and come back new again and she kept Boone behind for twenty minutes, they almost canceled the overnight hike. I guess it was because a younger girl heard Gia whisper something to one of her cabinmates before breakfast the next day, and though she didn't catch it all she thought she heard the word
blood
or maybe it was just
bitch
, and she couldn't be sure who Gia was talking about. But they looked through all of our bags, and even took Gia aside for a more thorough search of her clothing, and all they found was a blue pen that didn't even have its metal clip in some other Sixteen's daypack, so they let us all go because, they said, this was the world we created and didn't we have to learn to live in it?

What was surprising, of course, was that they still let Gia go at all. She must have given Amanda an elaborately convincing explanation when they spoke alone in the Rec Lodge. That, or there hadn't been time for Margaret to climb up to the lookout to find out from Ben if the story was true. Or maybe they just simply didn't believe Boone. But the fact remained that, when it came time to load up the van with our packs and boots and water bottles, squeezing ourselves in between the gear where we could, Boone was nowhere to be found, and Gia got in. She sat up front, of course. Didn't so much as glance at me.

Margaret drove out of the parking lot and headed down toward Hindman. We'd only been in the van about ten minutes before she turned onto an old fire road that was edged with the brittle skeletons of whortleberry bushes, tangled and brown in the October light. From there, we continued to drop down a few hundred feet. Margaret stopped the van at the trailhead long before I was ready to get out.

To say that I didn't want to be there would be a serious understatement. It had been just over twenty-four hours since Gia had slapped Boone in Circle Share. I hadn't talked to either of them since then. Boone had been in the cabin the night before, of course, but she'd been uncharacteristically quiet and — perhaps in deference to her — the other girls didn't ask too many questions about what had happened. I caught Jules looking at me strangely a few times, but I'd gotten into my sleeping bag early, turning toward the wall and pretending to sleep. Boone hadn't hung around in the morning to watch Jules and I stuff our backpacks with the requisite crap. In fact, I hadn't seen her at all since right after breakfast, when she left the Mess Hall, a pack of cigarettes clearly visible in the back pocket of her jeans. It was obvious that, since she had nothing left to lose, she was going to leave nothing left undone. Smoking in plain daylight was just an afterthought.

“Here we are,” Margaret said to a silent audience. No one moved. She swiveled in her seat so that she could see most of the van's occupants. “Ahem. Ladies. I said, here we are.”

The look she gave us was persuasive. People started moving, though slowly. Boots were laced, shirt layers added. One by one, we piled out of the van and huddled next to it in the cold, looking around at the austere scenery. This was not one of those pristine mountain days that photographers seem to capture so well for outdoor magazines. The muddy abundance from earlier in the summer had given way to desiccation in some places, rot in others. The smell that rose from the ground was heavy with decomposition: leaves, soggy pinecones, limp and wilted flower stems. The air was dry, though, so cold it burned the backs of our throats as we stood there breathing nervously and taking it all in. Margaret had stopped at a trailhead that wound away from the old fire road and disappeared into the trees.

“You'll want to hold on to these,” she was saying as she handed out photocopies of a crudely drawn map. “Each of your camping spots is marked here with an X. If you run into trouble during the night, find your closest neighbor. You won't be so far apart that this would be difficult.” She paused, glancing around the group mildly. “And you'll also want these.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a tangle of red whistles. Gwen and Karen hadn't mentioned the whistles, and I wondered if they were a new addition to the overnight. “I've given a walkie-talkie to three of you.” Margaret pointed to a Seventeen and two Fifteens who shuffled their feet importantly. “If Betsy, Katia, or Jennifer hears you whistle, they will contact me immediately. Okay? It's not like you're totally alone out there.” She smiled.

I didn't feel especially comforted by the bright red whistle in my hand. Even so, I slung its thin rope over my head so that it lay across my chest. I felt like a lifeguard. Jules caught my eye and pointed her finger at me.

“Hey, you! Out of the water!” She laughed.

We began putting on our backpacks, testing their weight, adjusting the shoulder straps. Margaret had handed out Ziploc bags before we left the school that were filled with two nights' worth of pasta and dehydrated sauce, instant oatmeal, and energy bars for our lunch, and we each had a small cooking pot and a miniature camping stove. Somehow, these items made our packs feel twice as heavy. There was, I'll admit, quite a bit of groaning.

“Buck up,” said Margaret as she helped a petite Fourteen into her pack. “This is nothing compared to what some folks bring for weeklong trips. Be thankful it's just two nights.”

I was.

“All set?” She looked around the group, taking in the spectacle. Margaret put her hands on her hips. “Enjoy yourselves out there. Take some time to reflect on your journey so far. Ask yourself the hard questions.” She looked at Gia. “Make sure you're the person you hope to be in this life.” Then she paused, and I could tell that we were going to get another one of Margaret's Life Lessons. “The wilderness doesn't judge, ladies. When you're out there alone, you have the unique opportunity to think about who you are and what you want — from yourself and others. Try not to just go through the motions.
Use
this time.
Own
it.” Margaret was quiet for a moment, then she put her hands on one girl's — Betsy's — shoulders and gave her a slight push in the direction of the trailhead. “Now go.”

We started shuffling toward the trail in a single-file line. I was near the back, and right as I picked up one foot to start moving, I felt Margaret's hand on the strap of my backpack.

“Don't be afraid to explore the shadows,” she said quietly to my back. “You might find some hope within the hurt.”

I nodded and, without looking at her, moved forward. The last thing I heard before we rounded a corner and fell into silence was Margaret's voice, shouting one last direction to all of us.

“And be safe!”

It was hard to tell just by looking at our maps how far we were going to hike. Clearly, Margaret hadn't been attempting any feats of topography as she was drawing. There was a very clear squiggle that was meant to be the trail, I guess, and little, lighter squiggles that shot off it in intervals and ended at Xs with our different names attached. My name was next to the very last squiggle. Gia's was closer to the middle. There was also another long line that wove around all of the other lines, crossing the trail a few times. This line had pointy caps scattered across it like party hats. I guessed they were supposed to be waves, and I assumed that the line was a river.

Some of the girls chatted while we hiked, comparing the locations of their campsites, exchanging fears about snakes and bears. Gia was somewhere near the front of the procession, and I was happy to stay at the end, as far away from her as possible. Part of me wanted to grab that long mane of hair and pull until she explained how she could hurt me so badly. Part of me wanted to explain myself, to tell her that I hadn't been the one to tell Boone about Ben, that her secret had been safe all along. But that part of me had seen the casual way in which she slapped Boone the day before — like she was chiding a disobedient puppy — and I didn't want to tempt fate. It just felt too irreparable.