Four Weeks, Five People

For some reason, tonight makes me think of that night. It’s weird, because they’re totally different—then, I was with my best friends in the world; tonight, I’m with four people I don’t know at all. But when we walk into Stella’s room and find her and Clarisa dressed in jackets and hiking boots and Stella tells us to “go back and put on real clothes—except you, Mason, you can get hypothermia if you want—because we’re going on a hike,” I’m kind of excited. Stella picks the lock keeping the back door shut from the outside with a hairpin, and then we walk outside and the freedom, the air, the forest—it feels familiar. It doesn’t really matter that Mason won’t shut up and it doesn’t really matter that Stella might be the worst person in the world to follow into the woods in the middle of the night and it doesn’t even matter that we might get caught. I mean, they can’t exactly kick all of us out of camp.

We follow Stella away from the cabins, toward the trees. By the time we step into the forest, I can hear Clarisa breathing hard. “You all right?” I say.

“So many trees,” she whispers back, as if there’s someone around to hear us. “I have to count, I can’t count, I have to count, I can’t count, I have to—”

“Count steps,” I say. “If it takes a safe number of steps to get to where we’re going, then it’s safe, right?”

“The trees,” she says again, her eyes squeezed shut. “There are too many. I can’t count them—”

“Look down, Clarisa, look at your feet,” Stella says. “Step forward. Okay, that’s good. That’s one. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. It’s going to be great, I promise.”

Five minutes later, Stella takes an abrupt turn off the path, straight into a cluster of trees. Another seven steps later and the trees disappear. We’re standing in a grassy clearing that drops off steeply about fifty feet in front of us. There are dead trees lying across the ground, barks peeling. Now that we’re not under the canopy anymore, it’s actually incredibly bright under the light of the moon. It kind of reminds me of a stage—the darkness of the forest behind us, the sudden brightness, the ledge in front. The feeling that the silence is just waiting for you to break it. I wish I had my guitar.

“Welcome,” Stella announces, “to The Ridge.” She takes a seat on one of the dead trees on the ground.

“Why are we here?” Mason asks. He walks along the grass suspiciously and looks around.

“Don’t you ever get tired of having all of our conversations and actions and everything else monitored all the time?” Stella says. “It’s just a place where we can hang out without feeling like we’re criminals. Jesus.”

“Wow,” Ben says. He takes a seat on another log on the ground. There’s a third right behind me, and the three form a rough triangle in the middle of the clearing. Between them is a makeshift fire pit with bunches of sticks and branches in it. I wonder how long campers have been doing this, and if they’ve ever gotten caught. God, Sam would get a kick out of this. He used to always try to get us to sneak out in the middle of the night to go downtown and do graffiti with him. “We can’t even design our own album art,” I remember Jake saying to him once. “And you want to deface a building?”

Maybe it’s that it’s the middle of the night, when I’m used to being surrounded by Sam and Jake and Aidan and pages and pages of sheet music and song lyrics, or maybe it’s just that the memory hits me out of nowhere, but all of a sudden I really miss them. My stomach clenches from the sadness, or maybe from hunger. I can never really tell when it’s hunger anymore.

I take a seat on the third log. Clarisa sits down next to Ben, but I don’t think he notices, because he’s staring at Stella. He’s actually gone from looking mildly impressed to looking like a groupie. I feel kind of embarrassed for him, to be honest.

“You okay there, Ben?” Stella asks, and Ben turns really, really red.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “This is just...way cool.”

He turns even redder.

“Everyone just ignore me,” he says.

“You flatter me,” Stella responds.

“You really do,” Mason says. Apparently he has deemed The Ridge safe, because he swings his legs over Stella’s log, sits down, and throws an arm around her shoulders.

“Mason,” Stella says flatly.

“Hmm?”

“I will light your arm on fire, I swear to God.”

“Oh, stop,” he says. He’s grinning now and keeps trying to make eye contact with her. “Isn’t this why you dragged us here in the middle of the night?” Mason continues. “For some good old unsupervised bonding, you kno—Jesus, all right!”

Mason pulls his arm away and almost falls off the log. I don’t blame him, because Stella has actually reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a lighter.

“What’s the matter?” she asks. “What’s some good old unsupervised bonding without a campfire to bond over?”

Stella is the type of girl who would probably do graffiti with Sam.

“Do you think,” Clarisa asks, “that you brought more legal or illegal things to camp?”

Stella walks to the fire pit in the center of the triangle. “Probably illegal,” she says. “But only because I brought almost every contraband item on the list.”

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