Chapter Six
SIX
There’s only one dream you remember from your restless sleep that night.
You and Diana walking by an ocean, arguing over the color of the water.
“Blue-gray,” she says. “Green,” you say.
She shakes her head. “We need a tiebreaker,” she says, and then you both go quiet because even in this dream, you know who the tiebreaker should be. Who it’s always been.
Under your feet, the ground is crunching whenever you take a step.
For a moment, you’re sure you’re walking on bones, and you can feel a sense of horror creeping through your body, but when you look closely, they’re just seashells, all broken and fragmented, like the serrated teeth of some prehistoric creature.
Diana is walking in front of you, but every once in a while, she turns back to see if you’re still there.
The waves crash and foam. You try to catch up.
You finally make it to her, but when you reach out to take her hand, you open your eyes instead.
“Up! Up! Everybody up!” says Silas in a faux-cheerful voice. “Day one starts in fifteen minutes! Gather your gear and roll out!”
You look up through unfocused eyes and see him cupping his hands over his mouth. He starts making trumpet noises.
“Day one of what exactly?” says Fran from somewhere inside the depths of her sleeping bag. “You haven’t told us freaking anything. We could be going on a death march, for all we know!”
Silas ignores this comment. He throws open the doors to the lodge and slips through them without a sound.
He does this before you can make eye contact to see where things stand, so you look around the room instead.
You can’t make out much except the twisted cocoons of sleeping bags until you finally catch some motion to your right where someone’s doing push-ups with the syncopated motion of a piston.
It’s Will, of course. His form is impeccable, and he’s counting them off in what you assume is Korean, his face bright red.
“Hana. Dul. Set. Net.” He just keeps going.
Past ten. Twenty. Thirty. They look like they’re never going to end.
But, finally, he transitions into a handstand, his body perfectly perpendicular to the ground, before launching himself back onto his feet, where he dips down and rolls up his sleeping bag with precision.
Then he turns to face the room, where everyone is now awake and unabashedly staring at him. He brushes a lock of sweaty hair from his forehead.
“What?” he says.
Troy is the first to speak.
“What do you mean what?” he says. “Are you in Cirque du Soleil?”
Will smiles, but it’s dangerously close to being a smirk. He turns his head sideways to crack his neck in a way that sounds painful.
“Stillness is death,” he says.
He waits for this to sink in. It doesn’t seem to.
“For the body,” he says. “You guys might as well be eating a bag of doughnuts and mainlining a milkshake, lying there like that.”
“That would be more fun than listening to you,” says Fran, who emerges, having seemingly slept in her hoodie, though now there are some strands of faded pink hair sticking out. “Also, have you ever had a doughnut? They’re really good.”
Will rolls his eyes. He turns around to go, and that’s when you finally hear Diana’s voice from the back of the lodge.
“Hey,” she says. “What’s a NARP?”
Her voice is softer than you remember, but it still cuts through the room with some of its old power.
“What?” says Will.
“You called Case a NARP. I don’t know what that is. Can you tell me, please?”
His jaw flexes.
“A NARP,” he says, “is a non-athletic regular person.”
Then he smiles again.
“So, you know: basically all of you.”
His sleeping bag is rolled so tight it looks like it might implode from the pressure.
“Says the guy who couldn’t outrun Silas,” says Diana.
If this makes Will angry, it doesn’t register on his face.
“It’s not terrain I’m used to,” he says plainly. “And I didn’t have the right shoes. Otherwise, I would be gone, bro. Believe me.”
“Why did you come here, then?” you ask before you can think better of it.
He’s quiet for a few beats.
“His dad tricked him,” says Fran.
Will shoots her a death glare.
“Sorry, man,” she says. “I saw you in the parking lot. Your dad lied to you. I heard you yelling at him. That’s super messed up.”
“Wait,” says Troy. “Where did you think you were going?”
For a moment, Will seems to consider answering. Then the vulnerability in his face disappears. His brow smooths.
“At least I didn’t choose to be here,” he says. “At least I have an excuse. You guys brought this on yourselves.”
Then he too walks out the door and into the lusterless morning, leaving the rest of you to exit your swaddles.
When you’re done packing up, you wait a second for Diana, hoping she’ll tell you why she stood up for you with Will.
But, as usual, she’s gone. Which is no surprise.
She was always good at disappearing, leaving nothing more than a hint of perfume in the hallway after she spent the night in your brother’s room, a ghost of something girlish in a house of boys.
When you head out, she’s out there too, walking toward the lake like the rest of you.
You’re still half asleep as you follow the herd, but you open your eyes wider when you reach the water.
In all of your brief life, you’ve never seen water like this.
This is not a city lake from back home, clogged with beer cans and a sheen of boat oil.
This surface is so clear it looks like a mirror.
And the old-growth cedars towering above you reflect upside down on the water along with an endless sheet of ice-blue sky.
You can’t look away until you kick a pebble into the water, and the ripples swirl it all into a Monet.
You’ve never been much of an outdoors person—aside from a little stargazing on the garage, you are more likely to be blowing up digitally rendered parts of the natural world in a video game than enjoying it in real life—but even you can admit that this place is different. It’s untouched.
Pristine.
The word seems to echo in your head as you watch the water.
This place is pristine.
“Five days!” says Silas, bringing you back.
His boots plant in the muddy shore in front of you. Behind him is a row of sleek, bright yellow canoes that look like giant bananas made of Kevlar. They’re laid out, half in the lake, half out. There is one, you quickly calculate, for every two of you.
“That’s how long we have to get to the first drop point for supplies. We have exactly enough food and water to get us there, but if we don’t make it on time, we’re gonna be hungry.”
Your gear is piled in front of you, the essentials you were told to bring, and okay, sure … a bit more, but there isn’t much food in there. Now you know why: Apparently you have to earn your food?
“If we don’t find the drop point,” says Silas, “we’re going hungry.”
A nearby canoe lists in a breeze.
“And if animals get to our food before we do…,” he says.
A mosquito’s scream dopplers around your ear. You swat it away.
“Let me guess,” says Fran. “We go hungry?”
Silas points at her and touches his nose.
“What is this, the marines?” asks Troy, pushing up his glasses. “Why didn’t we just bring enough food for the whole trip?”
“Because it would be too heavy to carry,” says Silas. “And because it’s a challenge. But I know you’re capable.”
Troy actually laughs at this. Then he takes his glasses off and defogs them. His eyes look bloodshot, and you’re guessing he didn’t sleep much after his episode last night.
“Capable of what?”
Silas takes a step toward him.
“Capable of anything, brother,” he says. “If you can do this thing we’re about to do, then you can do anything. Period. And if you can believe in yourself here, then you can believe in yourself when you’re suffering. That’s how this works.”
Silas is speaking with an air of finality, but Troy is not having it. He’s sleep-deprived and looks uncomfortable in his hiking clothes. He didn’t use the toilet because of the spiders.
“Sounds like the marines,” he says. “And there’s not a great history of the way they treat Black and brown people in the army, by the way. I’m not going to break myself any more than I’m already broken for your sadistic enjoyment, man. I hope you know that.”
He pauses, looking out over the water. Everyone is quiet, watching him. Including Silas.
“Besides,” Troy adds, asking the question we all want to ask: “How do you know this works?”
Silas sighs. Precious time is being wasted. He collects himself, though, and he looks at all of you, not just Troy.
“I know because I did it myself,” he says.
He nudges a canoe with his boot.
“When I came on this trip twelve years ago, I was having ten panic attacks a day, and there wasn’t much that I could do to stop them.
I couldn’t be around more than four people at a time.
I couldn’t drive a car. There were songs I couldn’t listen to because they made me too anxious.
Let me say that again, my friends: I had to avoid songs.
I would leave the room when they came on.
And movies with anything tense? Forget it.
I was crossing new things off my list every day that I couldn’t do. Sound familiar?”
No one speaks. But no one denies anything.
“And listen: This trip didn’t change everything. But it started the process. It can work. It does work. But you have to be willing to challenge yourself and see what you can do. Any more questions?”
He doesn’t wait for any this time. And he doesn’t do anything to acknowledge your stunned expressions, but you sense a shift among your troops, a slight bend toward Silas.
“Now,” he says, “if we’re ready, can we move on to lesson one?”
He pulls out something you have only previously seen in movies. The object is round and attached to a small rectangle. And if you aren’t mistaken, it looks like a …