At first I only got “around.” I was trying to keep my eyes simultaneously on her, behind me, and on the Kirschbaums ahead, who might hear footsteps, or the splutter of our stifled laughter. But as Cassie said later, “Couldn’t you tell just by looking that he’d be deaf? And she had that cap over her ears—probably so she wouldn’t have to hear him. Because you could tell just by looking that he’s an a-hole too.”
Which was mean, but I laughed anyway. Laughter was the point of so many things we did together. Cassie made everything funny, like her giant tiptoeing back toward the road, her silly staring face, holding her forearms up like a kangaroo, her dressed hand a bright-white blob in the muted colors of the forest.
“Better be careful,” she hissed when she thought we were far enough back. “For all we know, he might be a hunter. Might think my paw is a deer’s tail, and shoot.”
“Might,” I said, “or your hair, for that matter.” How conspicuous she was; how completely she failed to blend in with our surroundings. “But he won’t. More likely to turn us in to Rudy and let that dog eat us for dinner.”
“A dog already ate me for lunch,” Cassie said. “I don’t want to be dinner too.”
We stood for a moment, able to discern, still, the muted sounds of the Kirschbaums talking—it wasn’t English they spoke to each other, you could tell without hearing the words—as they continued to slip smoothly through the water.
“What now?” I asked. The backpack containing our lunch stuck moistly to my shirt.
“It’s obvious, right? Picnic at the asylum.”
“The asylum?”
“Duh!”
“But I’m so hot.”
“Everything happens for a reason, my mom always says. Asylum first, swim later. They can’t be here all afternoon. Do you think that lady sunbathes?”
“But we don’t know where the asylum is. I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.”
“Crap, Juju. That’s crap. Scaredy-cat. Wriggly Robinson, wriggling out of the fun, afraid of getting in trouble.”
“Am not.”
“Scared of ghosts, are you? Boooo!” She made a taunting face. “Are you up for it, Scaredy, or do you need to run on home?”
“Whatever else,” I said, “I’m not a scaredy-cat. Let’s go.”
There were no signs. At my insistence we followed the trails rather than setting off blind through the trees. The red-dot trail turned out to be a loop, and brought us back to the quarry on the other side of the parking lot twenty minutes after we left. The Kirschbaums’ crimson Prius was still parked between two Norwegian maples. We followed the blue-triangle trail for a while before Cassie protested, “This one’s uphill. Think about it. If we went back out to the main road and followed it to the turn-off that goes down by the asylum, there’s no hill between here and there. This can’t be right.”
I was tired, and getting hungry. The backpack weighed on me. “We don’t know what we’re looking for,” I said. “Maybe we need to ask one of the older kids and come back another day.”
“Who do you know who’s actually been there? Not just bragged about it, but been there?”
I shook my head. It was a bit of a myth, like the drowned boy in the quarry. If you drove past the asylum from the road, you couldn’t see anything but the long stretch of high stone wall, and the padlocked gates with the sign: NO TRESPASSING. What you could see of the drive behind the gates was straggly and overhung with branches, the gravel sprouting waist-high bursts of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you’d done, without actually wishing to do it.
“There’s only the green trail left,” Cassie said. “I vote we go back to the parking lot, take the green trail, and then we’ll see.”
“I vote we eat.”
“It’s not like you’re not going to get your lunch. I’m just suggesting you try harder for it.”
Cassie could be affectionate and scornful at the same time, and I always felt that if I wasn’t careful, the scorn might win out. So we returned to the parking lot and set off down the green-square trail. The Prius was still there.
THE GREEN TRAIL proved messier and more confusing than the other two—fewer unchanging rocks, more diverse foliage, and muckier too. Pretty soon we were picking our way alongside a brook. Not especially large, the brook made a pleasing gurgly sound. A ribbon of clear water in a small gully, passing over piles of debris and winding blithely around others, it looked as though, like Miss Buono, our social studies teacher, it might vary a lot in size depending on the season. I made this point to Cassie, and then said, “Right now, it’s August, and both the stream and Miss B are in bikini season: skimpy.” Which made Cassie laugh—there’s something hilarious about the word “skimpy,” if you repeat it over and over. But she couldn’t resist saying, “No matter what the season, Buono’s butt is big.” And we were snickering about Miss B’s butt when Cassie pointed out a flattened log across the stream, upon which someone had piled three large, flat stones.
“What’s that then?”
“Not the path. The next green square is on that tree up there.”
“It’s not the path, but it’s a path.” If you looked on the other side of the stream you could pick out the traces of a path winding off through the woods. Not marked, but worn, and not worn only by a single set of feet. It looked like nobody’d been down it in a while, but I could tell that excited Cassie all the more.
“I’m sure that’s it,” she said.
The forest lay very still.
“Who put the stones, do you think?”
“Who cares?” Cassie replied. “They’ve been there for ages. Look—moss.” The little pile of stones was dotted with near-luminous lichen, in starburst patterns.
“Okay. Let’s go.” I stepped onto the log, which gave slightly beneath me, soft and rotted by damp. It didn’t break.
“For real?” Cassie’s eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she’d expected me to stop us. She’d goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe.
“For real,” I said.
The path, such as it was, would seem to come and go, and the greenery overhead became more dense, the sun more obscured, as if we were going ever deeper into the woods. I tried to trace a mental map—we turned right at the broad rotted stump, we bore left where the two maple trunks had grown intertwined, we kept the water behind our left ears and its gurgly sound came near, and retreated, and came again. I knew I’d have to reverse these signs on the return (turn left at the rotted stump), and worried that I’d get muddled. I even pulled some pages from the little notebook in my pack and impaled them on branches along the way—like Cassie’s white mitt, they’d stand out, I thought, in the swimmy green.