I think we were also above the every-living-creature zone. There weren’t any animals. Or even bugs. Unless you counted us cockroaches. And I think the air was getting thinner, because that pack of mine felt heavier with every step.
On our way back down to earth, though, we started seeing a whole bunch of cool animals. There were mountain goats, and marmots, and deer, and rams. Pittman and Fish knew all about them and pointed out some birds too, like the blue grouse, the American dipper, and (okay, this was pretty cool) a real live American bald eagle.
But we still weren’t done with the Marathon, which, it turned out, was two obstacles in one. Next up, Pittman and Fish started handing out blindfolds for something called a trust hike. The idea was to follow someone else along the trail for a mile, even though you couldn’t see.
With Arnie out of the picture, we had to work in groups of two and three. Carmen went right for Burp and Thea. I guess that meant she wasn’t going to be talking to me if I wasn’t going to be doing her work for her. I got paired with Veronica, which seemed like a good thing—at first.
The next morning, we worked like dogs—again—to clear part of the trail and “leave it better than we found it.” (I think that was Captain Crowder’s theme song.)
By the time we finished fixing the trail, hiked back to our campsite, and sat down for “lunch” (peanut butter and crackers, plus whatever peanut butter you could lick off your fingers), everyone was worn OUT. I was ready for a vacation—not that I was about to get one.
Five and a half days down. Nineteen tags earned. Eight obstacles completed.
That meant one more obstacle to go before we hit the home stretch.
And this one wasn’t going to be like any of the others.
Just One More
One more to go, cockroaches. Not too shabby,” Fish said, right before they started handing out the paper and pencils again.
“Another quiz?” Carmen said as the other kids started to groan.
“Nope,” Pittman said. “These materials are all you’ll be taking with you this afternoon on your solos.”
“Our what-o’s?” Burp said.
“Solos,” Pittman said. “As in—on your own. It’s a time for you to sit quietly by yourself and reflect on what you want to take away from this experience.”
When I got my paper, I saw it was just a blank sheet.
“I don’t get it,” D.J. said. “What are these for?”
Fish took that one. “Each of you will use this time to write yourself a letter. In that letter, you will answer one question. And that question is: What do you want your life to look like one year from today? Think hard about it.
“At the end of your solos, when you’ve shown us that you’ve written a real letter, you will seal it in an envelope, address it to yourself, and hand it back to me. Then, one year from today, you can expect some mail.”
“Ooh, super-deep,” Carmen said with a snicker.
“Stow it, Carmen,” Fish said.
“How long do these solo things last?” Burp asked.
“All afternoon,” Fish said.
“And what do you mean, a real letter?” Diego said.
“We mean actual sentences. We mean more than one paragraph,” Pittman told us. “We do not mean writing I am so bored over and over on your page.”
“Anyone who chooses to not write the letter, or spends his or her solo goofing off, can expect to be packing his or her bags this evening,” Fish said. “My suggestion is—take it seriously, cockroaches.”
That’s when I started to figure out why this all felt kind of familiar. Hours of sitting there, alone, with nothing to do but some kind of homework? Yeah, I’d done this before, all right. In school. And more than once.
Maybe they called it a solo, but I knew was it really was.
This was an in-woods suspension.
Solo Artist
Pittman and Fish walked us way up into the woods and dropped us off in different spots where we couldn’t see or hear each other. They said they’d be patrolling the area, so “don’t think about any funny business.” At the end of the time, Pittman was going to blow an air horn, and we were all supposed to make our way back to camp.
Meanwhile, it was just as bad as I thought. It was pretty creepily quiet out there. Just me, the woods, a piece of paper, a pencil, and my own thoughts.
I stared at that empty page. I tried to think about what I wanted to put in that letter to myself. Then I started to write.
That’s as far as I got. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and even worse, I really didn’t feel like figuring it out.
So I stared at the sky and the trees for a while.
I watched an ant take forever to carry a piece of leaf about two feet.
After that, I looked at my letter some more. I put a comma after the “Dear Rafe” part.
Then I took another stare-at-the-sky break.
Somewhere in there, I finally figured something else out. I didn’t need both sides of that page just for a little letter. And there was no sense letting the other side go to waste.
So I flipped it over, put it down on the flattest rock I could find, and started to draw.
Solo, So Low, What’s the Difference?
I still had a million more minutes to go out there. Or two hours. Or thirty seconds. I had no idea. At least with in-school suspension, you know how long you’re going to be there.
Now I didn’t even have a clock tick-tocking me toward the finish line. But the funny thing was, after a while, it started to feel like I did. I could have sworn I heard it, going by in slow motion. Tick… tock… tick…
Dear Cockroach
When I’d stalled as much as I could, I started to panic. The shadows of the trees were getting longer and longer in the afternoon sun.
What was the question again? Oh yeah—what I want my life to look like a year from now.
Hmm, what I really want is to somehow win ten million bucks, live in a huge mansion far, far away from Hills Village, with a whole wing for my mom and Grandma Dotty. Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about Georgia. I’d give her a job at one of my many theme parks, scraping bird poop off the benches.
But I have a feeling that’s not the kind of letter Sergeant Fish wanted.
So I just started writing. And you know what? Future Rafe wasn’t a bad person to write to. I had a feeling he knew exactly what I was trying to say.
A Celebration of Sorts
I guess everyone else wrote actual letters too, because that night, we had a celebration. Of sorts. That’s what Fish said, since we weren’t done yet. But they brought out the graham crackers, marshmallows, and real live actual Hershey bars from wherever they’d been hiding them. Then we had the best s’mores in the history of the universe of s’mores.
We even had this dinky little ceremony around the fire. Fish and Pittman said we’d all earned the right to run the last day of the course, and handed out our twentieth tags.
Right before they made us give all our tags back.
“You don’t need them,” Pittman said. “It’s the memories you’ll keep. Those are more valuable than anything.”
I guess that meant Captain Crowder was too cheap to buy new string, washers, and paint every time.
But who cared? Not me. We were this close to being done. That meant no more tags to earn. No more shelters to build. No more “Move-move-move-move-MOOOOOOVE!” in the morning. I felt like I was home free.
Even if I wasn’t. Not yet.
We kept asking Pittman and Fish what the last day was all about, but they weren’t telling.
“I’ll say this much,” Pittman said. “You all need to be ready for anything.”
“It’s the last day, not a free day,” Fish said. “Just the opposite, cockroaches.” He even smiled when he said it, which sent a chill down my spine.
I don’t know why I thought anything was going to get easier around there. Maybe it was those s’mores, making me sugar crazy or something. But I wa
s dead wrong.
If anything, it was going to get s’more worse before it got s’more better.
Gone!
When I woke up the next morning, camp seemed kind of quiet.
And then I realized why. It was quiet. That’s because Fish wasn’t screaming us awake at the crack of dawn.
In fact, dawn had already cracked.
“What’s going on?” I said when I came outside.
“Fish and Pittman are gone,” Thea said. You could see where their tents had been—but no tents now. Just a couple of Sarge-shaped dents in the ground.
“Hey!” Diego said. “What’s that?”
When I looked where he was pointing, I saw a note stuck into a big pine tree with a Swiss Army knife.
“Fish,” I said. It had to be.
D.J. got to it first and ripped it down. The rest of us all huddled around while he read it out loud.
Everyone stopped at the same time and looked around. Did that mean Pittman and Fish were out there somewhere?
Probably. And by probably, I mean, of course they were.
Thea took the note out of D.J.’s hand and turned it over. That’s where the rest of the instructions were.
“Break down camp per normal,” she said. “Pack gear per normal. Follow the markers to the head of the Highline Trail.”
“What’s ‘pernormal’?” Burp said. “Is that like abnormal?”
“You’re abnormal,” D.J. said.
“Shut up, Burp,” Burp said. “I mean—shut up, D.J.”
“Everyone shut up,” Thea said. “It says here—”
“Since when are you in charge?” Carmen asked her.
“Why? You think you’re in charge?” D.J. asked Carmen.
“Can’t we just focus and try to get out of here?!” Thea broke in. “I don’t know about you guys, but I want to go home.”
There was something about that word—home. It seemed like everyone heard it and figured out that Thea was right. The one thing we all wanted was to get out of there. But first we had to escape. The only way to do that was to start moving.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Burp said.
“We can do this,” Thea said.
“Do we have any choice?” Carmen said.
And that’s when it started to rain.
No I in Team
Watch out!”
“You watch out!”
“I’m trying to let you go first. So GO!”
“Calm down.”
“YOU calm down!”
I guess you could say it wasn’t going so great. The rain kind of stunk, but then again, so did we. At least we got a shower out of it.
When we finally got to the checkpoint, it was just an old campground. There was a fire circle made out of rocks, and in the middle of that, someone had left three cans of baked beans, which I guess were better than the oatmeal, or at least better than nothing.
There was a note with the cans too. It was all wet and runny, but we could still read it.
Over our heads, there was another note, hanging on a string, on a branch, way up high. I guess we had to figure out how to get it down.
“One thing at a time,” Thea said. “First we need a fire for those beans.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen,” D.J. said. “Hello? IT’S RAINING!!”
He turned around in a circle and yelled that last part a couple times. To make sure Fish and Pittman heard him, I guess. It was weird, knowing they were out there somewhere, stalking us. Like wolves. Or zombies. Or wolf-zombies.
“Can we just eat the beans and go?” Burp said.
“Dude, we have to make a fire. It says so right here,” Diego said. “I’m not blowing this now.”
“Me either,” Thea said. Veronica was nodding. None of us wanted to ignore any of Fish’s instructions, just in case.
“There’s got to be some wood we can burn around here,” Diego said. After the first thunderstorm, Pittman and Fish had shown us how to find dry logs under evergreens and pull dead branches off trees with a rope.
“Yeah, but we still need something for tinder,” D.J. said. “Wet birch bark’s not going to cut it. Not out here IN THE RAIN!!!”
“Yeah, yeah, they heard you the first ten times,” Burp said.
“Shut up, Burp.”
“No, YOU shut up.”
“BOTH OF YOU SHUT UP!”
It was Fish’s voice. It came from somewhere behind me, but I swear when we turned to look, there wasn’t anybody there.
Before anyone could say anything else, Carmen spoke up.
“We can use Rafe’s notebook,” she said, pointing at me.
“What notebook?” Thea said, whirling around.
“The one he’s been writing in all this week.”
“Not writing. Drawing,” I said as everyone gathered closer.
“Writing, drawing, it all burns the same,” Carmen said. She was looking right at me now. It was like her eyes had a message for me, and the message was: GOTCHA. She hadn’t forgotten what had gone down, and I guess she’d been waiting to make her move.
“No way,” I said. “It’s my notebook.”
“Just some blank pages,” Diego said. “Not all of it.”
“I don’t have any blank pages,” I said. I was already drawing on the back of everything I had.
But now it wasn’t just Carmen looking at me like a creep. Everyone was. They all wanted that notebook now.
And here’s the thing. Maybe Carmen was evil, and mean, and crazy, and dangerous. But she was also right. We needed that fire, and I couldn’t think of any other way to do it.
I mean, it wasn’t like I’d forget those comics. I could always redraw them. But it was like Carmen getting in the last word. Or the last punch. Whatever you want to call that, it felt a whole lot like losing.
So while everyone looked for dry logs, and started making a little fire shelter, and got out the frying pan and can opener from D.J.’s pack, I started figuring out which Loozer comics had to go.
Once everything was set up, I used the flint and fire starter from D.J.’s pack to get a spark going. It took a while, but then the paper started to burn.
“Yes!” Thea shouted.
Watching that fire was like the definition of mixed feelings for me—like Jeanne Galletta telling me I’m the second-coolest guy in school.
“Thanks, Rafe,” Burp said.
“Yeah, dude. We totally appreciate it,” Diego said as he huddled closer to the flames to warm up. I’d gone from Weak Link to Fire Savior, just like that.
Maybe it didn’t feel the way I thought it would, but it did get us one big step closer to home. And for right then, that was all that counted.
Full Circle
After we cooked and ate those beans, it was time to move on.
“What now?” I said.
“Thea, get on my shoulders,” D.J. said. “And Veronica, get on her shoulders.” Veronica and Thea were just light enough that D.J. could support them.
I didn’t think it was going to work, but it did. Pretty soon, Veronica was pulling down that envelope and we were reading the note inside.
Yes! This was the real home stretch—the one I’ll bet everyone had been thinking about since we got on that bus a week ago.
Was it really just a week? It felt more like I’d been out there for ten years. And each one of those years was three years long.
Still, we were moving now, and we had a plan. That 2.8 miles went by faster than I thought, and all of a sudden, we were coming out of the woods and into a familiar place.
Straight ahead, I could see that climbing tower from the first day. I didn’t even mind the memory of my freak-out, because this time I didn’t have to go near it. All I had to do was smile, wave, and keep on moving.
“Hey, look!” Burp said.
A bunch of kids were getting ready to start climbing. When I looked up at the top, I could see that trunk of food waiting for them too. I wondered what was in there, since we never did get
to find out.
“Ready?” some other sergeant yelled at them. “Three, two, one—GO!” And those kids started climbing like their lives depended on it. Or at least, their dinner.
“Is that… Arnie?” Thea said.
I looked again, and sure enough, it was him. I guess he got a second chance faster than anyone expected, and he was going for it. He was already yelling at everyone else, telling them how to get to the top.
And I thought, Good luck, Arnie. But that was it. None of us stuck around to see how they did. We were on the move too. Running like crazy, straight for base camp and that finish line. We were so close we could smell home.
“Let’s go, cockroaches!” Diego yelled, and we all said the next part together, at the same time.
“Move, move, move, move, MOOOOOOVE!”
Later!
The bus ride from base camp back to civilization was kind of… weird.
I shook hands with Carmen, if you can believe that. I guess I never should have listened to her in the first place. Not that I knew any better. Sure, it seemed like she got in the last word, but at least she hadn’t broken my face yet.
Maybe I was learning. Maybe after this, every other girl was going to seem easy to figure out and talk to. Maybe Carmen was as tricky as it got.
“Later, Rafe,” she said to me.
“Later,” I said back.
“I still think you’re kind of cute,” she said, which was just about the weirdest part.
And I thought, Have a nice life, Carmen. But I didn’t say it out loud. She could still punch me in the throat if she wanted to.
After that, I moved to a different part of the bus.
“What happens to you now?” Burp said. Everyone suddenly wanted to know what everyone else was doing after this.