On a normal day, after a relaxing morning of TV, I’d go for a bike ride or meet Cinnamon and Dinah at the pool. Something to get me off my butt and out into the world. At some point I’d fit in a lunch of PB&J, Doritos, and a Coke, or occasionally a pizza Hot Pocket from the pool’s snack bar—although they were gross, and every time I ordered one, I swore to myself I’d never order one again. Maybe they’d be decent if they were cooked in a toaster, but the snack bar workers nuked them in the microwave, which made the crust all nasty.
But today was not a normal day. Today Mom dropped me off at Cinnamon’s house with my duffel bag and my Snoopy sleeping bag, which Cinnamon laughed at. She’d also laughed at my sneakers, which apparently marked me as a greenhorn. She also laughed when I brought up Flight 29 Down.
“That’s not real camping,” Cinnamon said, even though she’d never seen the show. She shoved a pair of wool socks into her backpack. “We will not be foraging for food, and we will not be building a shelter out of palm leaves, I promise. Which I highly doubt six kids could do, anyway. And how come only the kids survived the plane crash and no grown-ups?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask the script writers,” I said.
“Exactly. Script writers, because it’s not real.” She yanked shut her backpack’s zipper. “Real camping is campfires and tents and s’mores. Have you ever had a real s’more? A real s’more?”
I thought about Ty and his microwaved marshmallows, spinning round and round until the timer dinged. Unlike Hot Pockets, marshmallows did quite well in the microwave. Smack them between two graham crackers with half of a Hershey bar stuck in between, and wa-la. Instant deliciousness.
“They can’t be that different,” I said.
“You are sadly mistaken,” Cinnamon said. “Just wait and see.”
A car horn beeped.
“That’s her!” Cinnamon cried.
Excitement fluttered in my stomach, and I followed Cinnamon downstairs. This would be my first time to go camping and my first time to meet Cinnamon’s mom. I’d heard a lot about her—she smoked, she made silver jewelry, she used to hate Cinnamon’s stepmom, but had mellowed slightly since getting a boyfriend of her own—but we’d never met face-to-face. Mrs. Meyers lived in North Carolina, which was where we’d be going camping. From Atlanta it would take three hours to get there.
“Hi, Mom!” Cinnamon said as she burst out the back door. Cinnamon tended to talk about her mom dismissively, but she sure seemed happy to see her. “This is Winnie. Winnie, Mom. Mom, Winnie.”
“Hi, Winnie,” Mrs. Meyers said. She’d gotten out of her Subaru and was in the process of opening the trunk. She was way skinnier than Cinnamon, with grayish-blond hair pulled into two pigtails. Her jeans were patched with purple and red squares. She wore chunky silver rings on seven of her ten fingers.
“Hi, Mrs. Meyers,” I said.
“Call me Mary Beth,” she urged.
“Told you,” Cinnamon said.
Cinnamon’s dad came out with my bag, which he loaded into the car along with Cinnamon’s backpack.
“Mary Beth,” he said.
“Warren,” she said.
They were civil to each other, but nothing close to friendly. Mr. Meyers walked over and hugged Cinnamon good-bye. He released her, but kept his hands on her shoulders. “Listen up, you. You better take care of yourself, and you want to know why?”
“Da-a-ad,” she complained.
He refused to be deterred. “Because you’re my one and only brown-haired, green-eyed daughter. I want you back safe and sound.” He turned to me. “That goes for you, too.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
“Even though your eyes are brown.”
“And I’m not your daughter.”
“Right,” he said, grinning.
Cinnamon and I climbed into the car, and we were off.
The first two-thirds of the journey was smooth and easy, but the last hour took us higher into the Blue Ridge Mountains, and while it was gorgeous, it was also extremely curvy. The two-lane road took us through an abandoned work zone called Bad Creek Project, which looked industrial and spooky, then snaked up endless hairpin turns that made me green-in-the-gills carsick. To our right, bare rock stretched toward the sky. To our left, the road dropped off sharply into forest.
“You should come up in the winter,” Cinnamon said from the front seat. She twisted to face me. “Icicles hang from the rocks, like three feet long. Sometimes we stop and break them off.”
“Mother Nature’s popsicles,” Mary Beth said.
“Remember the time Logan stuck one in his diaper?” Cinnamon asked.
Mary Beth chuckled.
I was probably supposed to ask who Logan was, but I wasn’t in a good position to be talking. If I opened my mouth, I was afraid I might throw up.
“Logan’s one of the kids who’s coming camping with us,” Cinnamon supplied. “He’s eight now. His brother, Adam, is our age.”
I gave a tiny nod.
“The Gibsons are very nice,” Mary Beth said. “We’ve been going camping with them since before Cinnamon’s father turned into a jerk.”
“Mom!” Cinnamon said.
“You’re right, you’re right,” she said. “He was a jerk all along. I was just too dumb to realize it.”
“Mom.”
If this was the “slightly mellow” version of post-divorce Mary Beth, then I felt bad for Cinnamon. Except I was too queasy to care.
Cinnamon crossed her eyes at me. Then she frowned. “Winnie? You okay?”
I wasn’t, but I didn’t want her drawing attention to it.
“Mom, Winnie’s carsick,” she announced.
“Oh, poor thing,” Mary Beth said. We took a sharp turn, and I gripped the armrest. “Do you need me to stop?”
“That’s okay,” I managed.
“Good, because we’re almost there,” Cinnamon said. “Aren’t we, Mom? Aren’t we almost to the ‘Are You Lost’ rock? And from there it’s, like, twenty minutes to the campsite.”
“There it is,” Mary Beth said, pointing. I wanted her to put her hand back on the steering wheel, so I obediently lifted my head. A gray rock the size of a grizzly bear protruded from the mountain side, painted with crude white letters which read, R U LOST, OR R U SAVED?
Cinnamon leaned forward to peer out the windshield, then flopped back into her seat. The car bounced.
“I love that rock,” she said. Even through my nausea, I could hear how happy she was. Happy to be with her mom, happy to be going camping, happy to have me along.
She turned to face me yet again, and I didn’t get how she could squirm about so much and not feel sick. Her grin dimmed as she took in my condition. Then it flashed back, both sympathetic and superior.
“City girl,” she said condescendingly.
I couldn’t defend myself. I was too weak to reply.
At the campsite, Mary Beth had us unload the trunk and put the plastic milk jugs in the creek to keep them cold. Cinnamon showed me how to loop a piece of twine through each jug’s handle and leash them to a tree so they couldn’t float away. They looked goofy, like bobbing-milk dogs. I thought it was a cool idea, though—way more funky than a red-and-white insulated cooler.
The Gibsons arrived as we were putting up our tents—one tent for Mary Beth, one tent for me and Cinnamon, both of them army green and un-fancy. Our fellow campers piled out of their Honda Odyssey with lots of noise and laughter, and the first thing Cinnamon said to them was, “Hey, guys! This is my friend, Winnie. She got carsick.”
I blushed. I didn’t like it when Cinnamon said things like that, and she said them fairly often. To Mr. Fackler, when I was late to history: Don’t be mad at her—her spaghetti gave her the runs. To the annoying Louise, after Louise said something rude about a girl who supposedly had bad personal hygiene: You think that’s bad? Sometimes Winnie goes three days without taking a shower! To Lars, taking over my computer when I was IM-ing him: winnie misses u so much! omg! she’s like totall
y whipped!
Sometimes it felt like she was out to get me. Or at least make me feel dumb. But she was also one of my BFFs, and I knew that in my heart. So it was confusing.
Logan, the younger of the two Gibson boys, said, “Gross. Did she barf?” He glanced at me in the way of eight-year-old boys, loud and show-off-y and not the slightest bit sympathetic. Icicle-diaper boy, I thought.
The older boy, Adam, shoved his brother. “Nice way to make a first impression,” he said. To me, he said, “Ignore him. He still watches the Doodlebops.”
“I do not!” Logan yelped.
I smiled. The Doodlebops were an Australian kid-music band with fluorescent hair and overly-animated expressions, and no self-respecting eight-year-old would ever be caught watching them. Even Ty, at six, knew enough to scorn the Doodlebops.
“She didn’t barf, but she came close,” Cinnamon said, wanting to swing the attention back to her.
“Because you made me ride in the back,” I said. “If I’d ridden in the front, I’d have been fine.”
“Yeah, Cinnamon,” Adam said. He had dark brown hair, cut kind of geekily, and brown eyes. “You should have let her have the front.”
Cinnamon considered this. Then she shrugged. “Oops.”
Mrs. Gibson, who had fiery red hair and wore a blue sweat suit, dug around in the back of the Odyssey and emerged with a bottle of wine. “It’s wine o’clock, sweeties!” she caroled. “Mary Beth, please tell me you remembered a corkscrew?”
“Wine?” Cinnamon said. “You’re letting us have wine?”
“Ha ha,” Cinnamon’s mom said. She fished a corkscrew out of her pack and tossed it to Mrs. Gibson. “You kids are on dinner duty. Call us when it’s ready.”
“Ohhh, so that’s how it’s going to be,” Cinnamon said.
The cork popped out with a satisfying thwop. “Yep,” Mary Beth said.
She and Mrs. Gibson laughed, and Mr. Gibson, who looked a bit like an egg, brought over three plastic cups. They dropped down onto a log that had clearly lived by the fire circle for years and years.
“Ahh,” Mr. Gibson said, pouring the wine. “Here’s to good, clean living.” The three of them raised their cups.
Adam turned to Cinnamon and said, “Pizza bagels?”
“Aces,” Cinnamon said. “Me and Winnie’ll start the fire.”
By the time we’d eaten and cleaned up, it was dark. The fire popped and shimmered, and as I stared at the flames, I felt as if I were going into a trance. My muscles were sore and my belly was full, and watching the fire was as good as watching TV. Better, even. Magical.
The only problem was the smoke, which followed me no matter where I went. If I sat by Cinnamon on the log, the smoke found me there. When I scooched two feet to the left, the smoke scooched as well. When I got up and moved to a pig-shaped stump (which Adam informed me was indeed called “the pig”), the smoke faltered for a minute, then murmured, “Oh, there she is,” and curled on over.
“It’s chasing me!” I complained.
“It is not,” Cinnamon said. “You just think it is because it keeps shifting to wherever you’re sitting.”
I gazed at her. “And the difference is…?”
Adam laughed. It was a nice laugh, though like his hair, a bit on the dorky side. I’d learned over the course of the night that he was going into eighth grade, too. He went to a public school in Asheville, and we’d talked a little about the whole public school/private school thing. Like how Westminster’s cafeteria food was actually good, while Adam’s cafeteria still supported the “ketchup is a vegetable” rule. Also how not every single person at Adam’s school cared about grades and status and going to the right college, which sounded refreshingly relaxing. So there were points in both schools’ favor.
I also learned that Adam played the trombone, and that he was a boy scout. That’s where he’d learned to make the pizza bagels, which were yummy.
I couldn’t be certain—after all, I’d known him for less than three hours—but I got the strangest prickly sensation that he…I don’t know. Kind of thought I was cute, maybe. Just from the way he checked my reaction when he said things, and from how he thwacked Logan’s head when Logan laughed at me for jumping at a noise from the woods.
“She thought it was a bear!” Logan crowed.
“No, I didn’t,” I lied.
“Shut up,” Adam told his brother. “She’s never been camping before.”
“Yeah I have,” I said. “I went to spend-the-night camp last summer.”
“Not the same,” Cinnamon said.
“Don’t worry, there are no bears in Pisgah Forest,” Adam told me.
“Only escaped murderers,” Logan said, stretching the word out.
“What?” I said.
Adam thwacked Logan again. “Murderer, singular,” he corrected, meeting my eyes in apology. “Not murderers.”
“What?!” I cried.
“Mom, is there an escaped murderer in the forest?” Cinnamon called to Mary Beth, who was sitting across the fire and chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Gibson.
“No, of course not,” Mary Beth said.
“Actually, yes,” Mrs. Gibson said. “We heard it on the news.”
“Told you!” Logan said.
“But it’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Apparently, a convict from the state prison—”
“A murderer,” Logan interjected.
“—broke free from his work group. The police think he headed up the Blue Ridge Parkway into the forest.”
“Oh my god,” Mary Beth said. “Should we be here? Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s safe,” Mrs. Gibson said. “He’s not out to bother anyone. He just didn’t want to be in jail.”
“Can you blame him?” Mr. Gibson said, letting out a booming laugh. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Killed his wife. Crime of passion.”
“Are you pulling my leg?” Mary Beth said. “I’m serious, Charlie. Tell the truth.”
“No, no, it’s absolutely true,” Mrs. Gibson said. Her wide eyes didn’t seem capable of deceit. She swayed a little, and Mr. Gibson steadied her. “But if he was in this neck of the woods, I’m sure it would be crawling with police.”
“Unless he killed them all,” Logan pointed out.
Adam thwacked him.
“Ow!” Logan said.
Mrs. Gibson patted Mary Beth’s knee, then poured herself another cup of wine. “Now. Who’s ready for s’mores?”
That night, in our tent, I tried not to think about the murderer. I giggled with Cinnamon about what a greedy-guts Logan was (he’d wolfed down four s’mores and five additional marshmallows), and agreed that her patented marshmallow-toasting technique beat the pants off Logan’s scorch-’em-and-scarf-’em method.
“It’s all about the coals,” Cinnamon pontificated. Our hands were under our heads. Our sleeping bags were pulled up to our chins. “Stick your marshmallow directly in the fire, and it’s going to burst into flames. Case closed.”
“I hear ya,” I said. Time after time, Logan had charred his marshmallows to a crisp, and time after time, he’d yelped in dismay and blown at them madly, which only fed the flames. But he’d eaten them anyway, blackened crust and all.
Adam, on the other hand, demonstrated admirable finesse. His marshmallows puffed to perfection and turned an even, golden brown. Had there been a marshmallow-toasting prize, I secretly would have awarded it to him.
Adam was an interesting guy. Although, hmm…was that actually true? He was smart and said funny things and was somehow less stud-muffin-poser-ish than most boys I knew. Maybe it was a public school–versus–private school thing. Maybe private school guys were more polished, and not always in a good way.
But if I were honest with myself, the really interesting thing about Adam was that he liked me. It was both foreign and thrilling to have this boy whom I’d only known for several hours pay so much attention to me.
It wasn’t like Adam was any competition for La
rs. Not hardly. But was I the type of girl who not just one but two boys could like?
Apparently, I was.
Next to me, Cinnamon sighed. We listened to the silence, which wasn’t really silence, since there were things out there, alive and moving on the other side of our flimsy tent. A twig snapped, and I flinched.
“You okay?” Cinnamon said.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Only…”
“Only what?”
“You’re going to kill me.”
“Why?”
She rolled to face me. Her expression was pleading. “I have to pee.”
“What? No!” I said. Everyone else was in their tents, probably asleep. The fire was out, doused by lugged-up jugs of creek water. It was dark and spooky and the murderer I was trying very hard not to think of leered and beckoned in my brain.
Come, little girlies, he whispered. Come to me now.
“Can’t you hold it?” I said.
“I can’t,” Cinnamon said.
“Are you sure?”
“If I wait much longer, I’ll go in the tent. And that would not be pleasant.”
I scowled and pushed myself to my elbows. “Fine,” I groused. “Let’s go.”
“Thank you, Winnie,” she gushed, squirming out of her sleeping bag. “You are the best friend ever. And if you ever have to go, even in the middle of the night, I promise I’ll go with you.”
“You better.”
“I will!”
We held hands as we tiptoed past the fire pit. Our grips tightened as an owl hooted. We fought to hold in our nervous laughter.
“Curse you, oh owl!” Cinnamon whispered.
“Demon of the dark!” I contributed.
“Don’t say that word,” Cinnamon said.
“What, ‘demon’?”
“Yes! Don’t!”
“Demon, demon, demon!” I whispered. It was funny. It was also payback for the “Winnie got carsick” remark.
“I’m serious!” Cinnamon begged.
We stepped behind a tree just a few feet from the campsite, and Cinnamon tugged down her sweatpants. She squatted, and after a few seconds I heard the ssss of pee against ground. If it were daylight, she’d have hiked much farther away to do her business. But in the pit of night? No way.