She hit bottom with a bonecrunching thud, and suddenly her sneakers were full of freezing cold water. She pulled them out, turned around, flopped onto her belly, and drank until a spike drove into her forehead the way it sometimes did when she was hot and hungry and gobbled ice cream too fast. Trisha pulled her dripping, mudstreaked face out of the stream's cold boiling course and looked up at the dark-ening sky, gasping and grinning blissfully. Had she ever tasted water this good? No. Had she ever tasted anything this good? Absolutely not. This was in a class by itself. She plunged her face back in and drank again. At last she got up on her knees, uttered a vast watery belch, and then laughed shakily. Her stomach felt swollen, tight as a drum. For the time being, at least, she wasn't even hungry.
The flume was too steep and too slippery to re-climb; she might get halfway or even most of the way up only to slide all the way back to the bottom again. The going looked fairly easy on the other side of the brook, however - steep and tree-covered but not too brushy - and there were plenty of rocks to use as stepping-stones. She could go a lit-tle way before it got too dark to see. Why not? Now that she had filled her belly with water she felt strong again, wonderfully strong. And confident. The bog was behind her and she had found another stream. A good stream.
Yes, but what about the special thing? the cold voice asked.
Trisha was frightened by that voice all over again. The stuff it said was bad; that she should have discovered such a dark girl hiding inside her was even worse. Did you forget about the special thing?
"If there ever was a special thing," Trisha said, "it's gone now. Back with the deer, maybe."
It was true, or seemed to be true. That sensation of being watched, perhaps stalked, was gone. The cold voice knew it and made no reply. Trisha found she could visualize its owner, a tough little sneery-mouthed tootsie who looked only slightly, coincidentally, like Trisha herself (the resem-blance of a second cousin, perhaps). Now she was stalking away with her shoulders held stiffly high and her fists clenched, the very picture of resentment.
"Yeah, go away and stay away," Trisha said. "You don't scare me." And after a pause: "Fuck you!" There it came out of her mouth again, what Pepsi called The Terrible Effword, and Trisha wasn't sorry. She could even imagine saying it to her brother Pete if Pete started up with all his Malden crap again while they were walking home from school. Malden this and Malden that, Dad this and Dad that, and what if she just said Hey Pete, f**k you, deal with it instead of trying to be either all quiet and sympathetic or all bright and cheery and let's-change-the-subject? Just Hey Pete, that's a big f**k you, like that? Trisha saw him in her head - saw him staring at her with his jaw dropped most of the way down to his chin. The image made her giggle.
She got up, approached the water, picked out four stones that would take her across, and dropped them, one at a time, into the streambed. Once on the far side, she began to work her way down the slope.
The hillside steepened steadily and the stream grew ever noisier beside her, rolling and tumbling in its rocky bed.
When Trisha came to a clearing where the ground was rela-tively flat, she decided to stop for the night. The air had grown thick and shadowy; if she tried to go on down the slope, she would be risking a fall. Besides, this wasn't too bad; she could see the sky, at least.
"Bugs are fierce, though," she said, waving at the mos-120 quitoes around her face and slapping a few more off her neck. She went to the stream to get mud, but - ha-ha, joke's on you, girl - there was no mud to get. Plenty of rocks but no mud. Trisha sat back on her heels for a moment while the minges executed complicated flying patterns around her eyes, thought things over, then nodded. She scraped the needles away from a small circle of ground with the sides of her hands, dug a little bowl in the soft earth, then used her water-bottle to fill it up from the stream. She made mud with her fingers, taking a great deal of pleasure in the process (it was Gramma Andersen she thought of, making bread in Gramma Andersen's kitchen on Saturday mornings, stand-ing on a stool to knead the dough because the counter was so high). When she had lots of good goo she smeared it all over her face. By the time she finished this, it was almost dark.
Trisha stood up, still rubbing mud on her arms, and looked around. There was no convenient fallen tree to sleep under tonight, but about twenty yards from this side of the stream she spied a tangle of dead pine-boughs. She took these to one of the tall firs near the stream and leaned them against the trunk like upside-down fans, creating a little space she could crawl into... sort of a half-tent. If no wind came up to knock the branches over, she thought she would be fairly snug.
As she brought the last two over, her stomach cramped and her bowels loosened. Trisha stopped, holding a branch in each hand, waiting to see what would happen next. The cramp let go and the odd weak feeling down low inside of her passed, but she still didn't feel quite right. Fluttery. But-terfluttery was Gramma Andersen's word, only she used it to mean nervous and Trisha didn't feel nervous, exactly. She didn't know how she felt.
Chapter 9
It was the water, the cold voice said. Something in the water.
You're poisoned, sugar. Probably be dead by morning.
"If I am I am," Trisha said, and added the last two branches to her makeshift shelter. "I was so thirsty. I had to drink."