Feral Youth
Shaun David Hutchinson & Suzanne Young & Marieke Nijkamp & Robin Talley & Stephanie Kuehn & E. C. Myers
I’M NOT A LIAR. You’re a liar. I’m just telling stories; that’s all. And sometimes when you’re telling a story, you can’t let stupid shit like the truth get in the way.
Besides, what good is the truth for anyway? Folks get put in prison for shit they didn’t do every single day, and telling the truth doesn’t help them one bit. Ask any woman who’s ever reported a sexual assault, and she’ll tell you how much the truth is worth. Nothing. The truth isn’t worth a damned thing. Only what people believe. And the funny thing is that most of the time, the story being told and how the person’s telling it isn’t as important as who’s doing the telling. Ask any black person who’s ever gone up against the police, and they’ll tell you.
Nah. There’s no such thing as an objective truth anymore. It’s all about what you believe. Believe something hard enough and—to you at least—that’s the truth forever and ever, and fuck anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
Take these stories. I don’t know if they’re true or not, but I bet the ones doing the telling believe them. And that’s kind of all that matters. Whether a story is true isn’t important if you’re hurting all the same because of it.
Regardless, I’m going to tell you the truth. Not my truth, not their truths. The truth. The truth about the three days we spent alone in the woods, trying to hike back to Zeppelin Bend. How one broke their leg, how others fought, how we all nearly died, and how we managed to get our shit together and make it back alive.
Believe it or don’t. Makes no difference to me.
DAY 1
RECIPE FOR A CLUSTERFUCK: take ten teenagers the world believes are human garbage, toss in some hippy work-together-to-make-the-world-better bullshit, add a dash of insecurity and a dollop of fear, and then send the kids into the woods for three days and expect them not to kill and eat each other. Voilà! One glorious clusterfuck.
Zeppelin Bend isn’t one of those summer camps where campers spend their time finger painting and canoeing and singing songs. It’s the kind of place they send kids no one else wants and tell us it’s our last chance to make a U-turn before we wind up in juvie until we’re eighteen. Before Doug (which is the kind of name a parent gives their kid when they expect he’s going to turn out to be a massive asshole) drove us into the woods blindfolded, kicked us out of the van, and told us we had three days to hike back to Zeppelin Bend on our own, we spent three weeks learning how to use a compass, find food that wouldn’t kill us, start a fire without a lighter, and run from bears—since that’s really all you can do if a bear comes your way. In short, we supposedly learned all the skills necessary for a bunch of delinquents like us to survive. Doug even told us we’d get a surprise if we made it back to the Bend by the end of the third day. I figured it was probably an ice cream party or some other stupid bullshit, but even that sounded good after weeks of plain oatmeal and whatever chunky meat was in the stews they served for dinner.
It was just after sunrise when Doug marooned us in the woods, and we spent the first hour arguing over who was going to be in charge. Every group needs a leader, and everyone thinks it should be them. Everyone but me, anyway. I hung in the background, waiting to see who was going to come out on top. No use picking sides if you’re just going to pick the losing one. But eventually, we were going to have to choose someone, and I didn’t think it mattered who because, like I said, we were a recipe for a clusterfuck, and even the best chefs break a few eggs.
*
I guess I should tell you what I know about the others. Most of it’s shit I picked up around the Bend, so I can’t vouch for the truth of it. That’s why I like stories. They usually wind up revealing more about a person than what they’d tell you about themselves. It’s not that they lie intentionally, but when people describe themselves they’re really describing what they see in a mirror, and most mirrors are too distorted to show us the truth. If you listen hard enough, there’s more truth in fiction than in all the other shit combined.
Jackie Armstrong was the first person I met after my uncle dropped me off at the Bend. She’s kind of invisible in the way girls like her often are, and she was wearing a T-shirt with a logo from that werewolves in space TV show Space Howl. That was before we all got told we had to wear these shitty brown uniforms. It’s easy to dismiss a girl like Jackie, but you’re an idiot if you do.
Then there’s Tino Estevez. We got a lot in common, mostly being we’re both Mexican. Well, I’m mixed and he’s not, but it’s something. The kid’s kind of quiet, but if you watch him real hard, you can see some anger bubbling there under the surface. Before we’d even been dumped in the woods, my money was on him clocking someone before we were done. He kind of thought he should be the leader, but he wasn’t ready to fight for it hard enough.
Now, Jaila Davis is one badass motherfucker. She’s like a foot shorter than anyone else, but she acts like she’s a foot taller. I thought she was stuck-up when I first met her, but she’s probably better equipped to spend three days in the woods than anyone else in our dysfunctional group. And I don’t know how many languages she speaks, but she cusses in at least three.
David Kim Park was another one who thought he should be the leader, which was hilarious. The kid couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper bag, and he’s obsessed with sex. No lie. Anytime someone was like “Where’s David?” chances are he was hiding somewhere beating off. It was so bad, Doug had to pull him aside and talk to him about it twice. Plus, David was convinced there was a Bigfoot or aliens or something in the woods.
The third of the J girls was Jenna Cantor. I basically pegged her as a rich white girl from day one, and she didn’t do much to prove me wrong while we were at the Bend. She was kind of weird, too. Aside from being able to do calculations in her head I couldn’t figure with a calculator, she was real quiet. But not like snobby quiet. More like she was living in a world the rest of us couldn’t see.
Lucinda Banks wore her anger on her uniform. I tried to figure out why she’d been sent to the Bend, but she hardly ever talked except to complain about the shitty jumpsuits they made us wear. They weren’t the worst things I’d ever owned, but Lucinda seemed to take having to wear one personally in a way I found particularly interesting.