Lack of sleep scraped at the backs of my eyelids and memories of the night before filled my muscles with cicada buzzing. It had been after three when Brandon and I had sneaked back down from the pumpkin, our eyes bleary from the harsh glow of the laptop screen and lips aching from use. It wasn’t until after lunch, when Bryn Mawr clapped her hands together and told us to line up in the quad, that I remembered that we were heading into a double Cheeseman event today.
I hadn’t even thought to stretch. Whatever was coming our way was going to hurt.
Jams and Hunter exchanged a blushing glance as the counselors marched all of us into the arboretum, taking the right fork out of the tree canopy. The sky over the ash tree was so blue that it hurt to look at it directly. Other than the trampled grass around the trunk, there was no sign that all of the counselors had ransacked the tree house the night before. I couldn’t tell from the path if all of the stolen goods had been cleared out from under the blue tarp roof.
“Why hasn’t anyone mentioned it?” I asked Brandon softly as we passed by. “I expected an announcement at breakfast or lunch, but nothing?”
He smothered a yawn in his elbow. His hair was frizzy and matted over his eyes. “No one wants to hear that everything except the binders was found. Especially not when the first skirmish is the day after tomorrow.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said, squinting into the fierce daylight. “I don’t think I’m ever going to feel truly prepared.”
“No one does,” he said. “That’s why they can’t even hint at getting the binders back. Everyone wants to keep studying, to have some semblance of readiness. Anything else would be spit on.”
“Yeah?” I asked with a smile. “You don’t want your socks back?”
He sighed heavily. “I do miss my socks. I borrowed a pair from Jams today. They aren’t the same.”
“I will bore the pants off of you talking about properly cushioned socks,” I said.
“Really? I’m listening.”
Laughing, I popped a kiss onto his lips. Behind us, I heard the snapping of fingers. We turned to see Meg, tiny and furious, sweeping her hands at us.
“Eyes on the road, please, little rabbits,” she chirped. “I’m not explaining any pregnancies to parents, thank you very much.”
Leigh cackle-snorted.
Brandon’s shoulders rounded up to his ears and his eyes squeezed momentarily shut. “I have three older sisters, and yet no one has ever embarrassed me more than Meg.”
I giggled and poked him in the side. “I think she’d take that as high praise.”
Ahead, the paved path stopped and a dirt trail appeared, cutting a serpentine curve between pine trees so narrow that we had to squeeze two by two to keep from running into the trees. Galen looked elated when Perla fell into step with him ahead of me and Brandon.
“I’m understanding why they’d call this the Mud Trail,” Galen said with a strange forced laugh. “Most of the year, this must be soup.”
“Don’t you want to study archaeology?” Perla asked, more confused than sneering. “You’ll have to be less of a wuss about dirt to go digging for artifacts.”
“Perla,” Kate said with a frown, “you do know that not all archaeologists are Indiana Jones, right?”
“Really, my interest is in cartography,” Galen started.
Perla cut him off, rolling her eyes and pointing as the line veered off the trail. “No time for maps, Doctor Jones!”
Bryn Mawr was shooing everyone into the trees. Our part of the line followed, sidestepping branches and crunching across the cracked, dry ground. The landscape tipped up and then slanted down. The trees thinned out, possibly to a clearing, but ahead there was only the unnatural crawl of dense, blue-tinged white fog.
“I take back every time I made fun of you for thinking the school was haunted,” Leigh said, appearing at my elbow.
The air had an unmistakable, cold cloy. It was a smell that stuck in your nostrils and swelled in your lungs like chewing and swallowing a pair of tights. I knew it from too many of Beth’s plays to count. Hamlet, Macbeth, even Oklahoma! all cranked up the fog machine and let the billowing white stink clouds fill the stage like a crappy TV dream sequence.
“Welcome to a double event,” said Bryn Mawr, standing in front of the wall of fog. “Today’s challenge is to crawl through the swamp on Dagobah.” The word seemed to physically pain her. I didn’t believe for a second that she had any idea what Dagobah was or which Jedi master had lived there. “Once on the other side, you will fight to the ‘death.’” She threw up finger quotes in case anyone was worried. “In a lightsaber duel. A ribbon will be awarded to the person with the fastest time through the swamp and to the person who defeats the most opponents in the duel. But you may not compete in one without the other. It would be an unfair advantage. Those who do not wish to compete will be led to the other side of the swamp by their counselors. If you’d like a chance to win one of these two ribbons, make a single file line in front of me.”
“No way,” Galen said with a shudder. “That fog is going to give me an asthma attack from here. I’m not crawling through it.”
“I’m not crawling for shit,” Perla said.
“Wonder of wonders,” Jams said. “Perla doesn’t want to play.”
“Don’t pick at each other,” Meg chided. “Come on. We’ll go to the other side and watch all the excitement.”
She led Perla and Galen through the trees, following the long line of other campers who were opting out.
“I thought the lightsaber duel would be more of a draw,” Hunter said, as the rest of us trudged to Bryn Mawr’s queue.
“I doubt they’re real lightsabers,” Kate said.
“You’d better hope so,” Leigh said. “Otherwise, we’re gonna have a lot of hasty amputations to explain.”
“The heat of the lightsaber does cauterize the wounds on impact,” Brandon said. “So at least there wouldn’t be any infections or complications.”
Jams laughed. “I’d call decapitations bloody complicated.”
“But the cauterizing would stop the bleeding,” Kate said. Her face fell. “Oh. Sorry. Slang.”
A whistle blew on the other side of the fog and Bryn Mawr tapped the first two people in line—Meuy and another of the girls on our hall—to go into the fog. It was only a few minutes before the whistle blew again and the next person was sent down. It was disconcerting not to be able to see what was going on through the fog. Only the shouts and groans of the crowd reacting came back to us.
I snapped at a tangle in my hair as the line moved forward, only to stall for another stretch. When Brandon kissed me for luck and slunk into the fog, I tried to think of a quote from Earnest to distract myself and came up short, so instead I started mentally reciting the Litany Against Fear from Dune on a loop to steady my heartbeat.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer.
The line moved again.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.