After, we lay back in the needles and stared up at the heavens. Drowsy and drained, I longed to sleep-drift in the autumn air, right there, with my clothes half off and her head on my chest and my hand on her stomach. I felt closer to her than I had in a long time because sex did that. It made me feel like she loved me and I loved her back. But right then an airplane flew overhead, a slow flicker of lights pulsing across the stark night sky, and Rose turned and asked me what the saddest thing I’d ever read was.
I hesitated. She knew how I was with decisions, how I hated being wrong so much I rarely let myself be right. But after some thought, answers began spilling out of me, lots of them, one after the other, since I didn’t like to choose. First I mentioned Never Let Me Go, then The Book Thief and Watership Down, all of which broke my heart in different ways. Then I started in about Native Son and The Sandcastle Girls and The Bridge to Terabithia and that story about the girl in Japan with leukemia who makes all those paper cranes and then dies.
“Oh,” I said, “and Old Yeller. I bawled like crazy when I read that one in fourth grade. It made everyone in our class cry.”
“But you don’t cry,” Rose said.
“I can’t cry. That’s different. But I read Old Yeller before I got hurt.”
“Well, that book’s not sad anyway.”
“It’s about a boy who has to shoot his dog.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“That’s what makes it so sad!”
Rose shrugged. A careless shiver of shadow and moonlit bone that made me ache. I could taste her on my lips yet felt like I barely knew her.
“Well, what do you think’s sad?” I asked.
“Being alive.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What do you want me to say? Death and loss aren’t sad. They’re all life is. But most people can’t deal with that, so they convince themselves of lies. Like the idea that faith can bring salvation. Or that war can deliver freedom. But those aren’t truths. They’re just fancy ways of dressing up death.”
“Freedom’s definitely not a lie,” I countered.
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean it looks like what we’ve been told it does. Freedom can take different forms for different people.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Rose reached to touch my chest, fingers tapping against breastbone. “That’s because you’re sentimental. You believe everything means just what it’s supposed to.”
“I’m not sentimental,” I said, and this was a truth I was sure of. From an early age, my existence had been forged by loss and suffering, some of which was circumstance and most of which was my own damn fault. Trust me, there was nothing, not one thing, in my life to be sentimental about.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But I think you want to be.”
“Okay.”
“Being stuck is sad, too, though. Maybe that’s the saddest thing of all.”
“Stuck how?”
She frowned. “I don’t know how to explain it. Just . . . stuck. Trapped in a place of your own making and not knowing how to change.”
Pulling her close, I longed to share Rose’s point of view, to see things exactly the way that she saw them. But her words confused me. I knew what it was like to be trapped and how helpless a thing that could be—how it made trying to do anything feel pointless, until inertia was indistinguishable from active revolt. But in my mind, there was no comparison—death and loss were infinitely more frightening than being stuck somewhere I couldn’t get myself out of.
I tried explaining this to her, my rambling thoughts, but Rose rolled away from me, right as I was talking, as if she weren’t one bit interested in my thoughts on death or stuckness or sadness or anything. But she was listening. I know she was. She listened to every word I said that night, and in hindsight, it’s clear that this was the beginning of the end. In hindsight, it’s clear I should’ve known that fate, wild and inescapable, was readying itself to gallop out of the gates after us both.
But back then, on that warm October night, as I lay with my Rose after screwing her for what would be the very last time, beneath the fluttering trees and the glowing swell of the stars above, I swear to God, I had no idea.
DAY TWO
12.
LATER, MUCH LATER, after we’d drifted and dreamed in separate worlds, Rose and I found our way back to the campsite. Stumbling around with a flashlight, I took a quick head count, relieved to see that everyone else had returned safe, if not sober: Tomás, Shelby, and Clay were all in separate tents, while the rest lay sprawled in sleeping bags around the darkened fire ring. The wind blew, and pieces of ash fell softly on their hair like snow. We slid into our own tent. Our own sleeping bags. I held Rose in my arms.
We drifted again.
Then dawn came. Too soon. And it seemed Rose’s intuition about Mr. Howe’s awareness of what us teenagers could get up to without him was right. That went a long way in explaining why he got Archie and Dunc up at the crack of daybreak—well before anyone else—to start the fire and get breakfast going.
“Rise and shine, motherfuckers!” Archie crowed, banging a set of pots together as he marched past our tent. The noise made me jump and swear, and Rose mumbled something about stringing him up by his dick, which I was a hundred percent on board with. Cruelty begets cruelty, I guess, and all that.
I stuck my head out of the tent. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You hungover, too?” He grinned.
“I have ears. And Jesus, put a shirt on, already. You look like a fucking monster.”
He banged the pots again, right in my face, laughing when I winced. “Move your ass, Gibby. Howe says we’re leaving in an hour.”
Ducking back into the tent, hackles raised, I began to reevaluate my assessment of Archie. I’d always written him off as harmless, the class clown, but more and more, it appeared he might be a total asshole. Rose, who was brilliantly naked beneath her sleeping bag, rolled over and went back to sleep. I kissed her cheek, then stroked her breast, my fingers brushing along the dark edges of her nipple. I allowed myself to savor a few beats of lust before scrambling to find clothes. I needed to get out of the tent and take charge. Maintain whatever authority I had left from the night before.
By the time I got my shirt, shorts, and shoes on and stepped outside, dawn had come and gone. The sun, still creeping over the bony ridge to our east, was now high enough to bounce off the moving river and strike my eyes like sharp lasers of white-gold light.
I winced again but didn’t look away.
It really was time to rise and shine, motherfuckers.
—
Morning did its thing. Mr. Howe drove out to the ranger’s office to get an overnight backpacking permit and inform them of our route, while the rest of us toiled bleary-eyed at breaking down tents and packing our bags and rolling our bedrolls as tight as we could before loading up the cars again.