Into the Woods

8 Forest Fruit Roll-Ups

8

FOREST FRUIT ROLL-UPS

Gretchen

“This is all your fault.”

I didn’t know exactly how, but the fact that we were lost in the freaking North Woods was Teddy’s fault. It had something to do with whatever had come over him this past week. His personality transplant. He was so easy to talk to now. He was so distracting .

“My fault!” he protested. “You’re the one with the compass.”

“Yes!” I doubled down. “Your fault!”

After surprising me by showing up at the bus that morning, Teddy had continued delivering shocks: Posing for pictures by the waterfall when asked. Swimming with good cheer—even going so far as to join some kids in a competition to see who could make the biggest splash cannonballing into the swimming hole.

And the last one, which I’d felt as a literal shock, a visceral, galvanizing bee sting: falling into step with me on the return trip and asking, earnestly and with seemingly genuine interest, about the conversation he’d walked in on last night—about my burgeoning choreographic ambitions. Which, in the light of day, with Teddy freaking Knight and his split personality, I was more than a little sheepish about.

“You’re the one who kept asking questions!” I added. “You’re the reason we fell behind!” I shook my useless compass at the sky. Sure, I had a compass, but since I didn’t know which way was “out,” it wasn’t any use. “Definitely your fault!”

“That… might be true.”

See? Case in point about how weird he was being. All agreeable and interested in other people and just generally… decent. It was disarming. I didn’t know what to do with this new Teddy. At the best of times, but this was not the best of times. This was lost in the God damn woods times.

We’d tried shouting. We’d tried retracing our steps to see if we’d missed an obvious turnoff.

“Oh wait!” Teddy said. “Duh! We can call someone. I don’t have my phone—get out yours.”

“I don’t have my phone, either!”

“Why not?”

“Because I gave it up, remember? You’re the one who was all holier-than-thou about it! You’re the one who said phones mess with your brain!”

“Since when do you listen to me?”

A terrifying thought dawned, and I answered his question with one of my own. “Are there bears in these woods?” I could hear the panic in my voice, but I couldn’t control it.

“How should I know? You’re the Minnesotan.”

“Oh my God!”

“We’re going to be OK. Come. Sit. Take a breath.”

That… was probably a good idea. We were both sweating from running around trying to get unlost, and my breath was coming in shallow huffs, like it had the other day when I’d spent an hour working on hook jumps with the girls. Then the breathlessness had been in service of something: after we were done, the girls could do hook jumps. Kind of. Most of them. Here I was just panicking, and I had enough sense left to know that panicking wouldn’t help.

Teddy settled himself on a flat rock and patted the space next to him. I sucked in a slow, shaky breath and sat.

He shrugged off the pack he was carrying. “You’ve got water, right?”

“Yes!” I was disproportionately pleased with this morsel of good news. I extracted my water bottle. “This is still about half-full.”

He nodded at my day pack. “Anything else in there?”

I upended the bag. “Wet swimsuit, sunscreen, and—oh! Granola bars. So we won’t starve.”

“And hey, if it comes to it, we both know how to starve, right?” He bumped his shoulder against mine, and I experienced another wave of that odd solidarity, though come to think of it, it was starting to feel less odd.

More importantly, the solidarity was subsuming the panic. I took another deep breath; this one sounded smoother.

“All I have is water,” he said, “but Marion gave me one of the first aid kits to carry.” He broke the seal on the bag and started pulling out items. “Bandages, gauze, tape, scissors.”

“So we can wrap presents,” I said, trying to keep my fear at bay with a joke, and I was pleased when he smiled.

“We have one of those tinfoil survival blankets.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

He made a hum of agreement. “What’s this?” He held up a multicolored cylinder, tilting it so he could read the side. “EpiPen.” He did the same with a bunch of other items. “Painkillers, antihistamines, antibiotic cream.” He kept rummaging. “Damn. I was hoping for flares or something.”

My semisoothed state didn’t last. “It’s a first aid kit, not a survival kit! What good is first aid if we’re not going to survive?” My voice was going shrill, like Minnie Mouse had taken control of it.

“Gretchen, Gretchen. It’s going to be OK.” He held my hand. Like, actually picked up one of my hands and held it in one of his. The resultant shock tipped me out of my panic. “They’re going to notice we’re missing, they’re going to find us, and this is going to make a great story someday. Probably not even that far off. Monday’s sunrise circle.”

“Are you going to come to Monday’s sunrise circle and tell it?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

“You’ve missed all of them so far.”

“I was waiting until I had a really good story to tell.”

I looked down at our joined hands. He wore a bunch of silver rock star rings, and there were the calluses that I’d been finding so… interesting. I kind of felt like rubbing my thumb against one of them would be soothing in the way textures sometime are. It would be hella weird, though.

Well, fuck it. We were lost in the woods, and I was trying to keep my terror at bay. So yeah, like a complete freak, I stroked one of Teddy Knight’s calluses.

There was a thin line of black around the edges of two of his fingernails. “Is that the remnants of nail polish?”

He joined me in looking down at his hand. “Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“Are you going to say something about how nail polish is for girls?”

He sounded like he’d heard that a lot. “Oh my God, no. I would never do that. It’s…” Uncannily attractive. “I’m just surprised.” It occurred to me that I was using the words surprised and shocked a lot today as they related to Teddy Knight. He was being so nice . I didn’t know if I could trust it.

“My sister used to paint my nails sometimes when we were kids,” he said. “She went through this nail art phase, and I’d let her practice on me.” He shrugged. “When you play guitar, you look at your hands a lot.” He pulled his hand out of mine, which, I’m not going to lie, was disappointing, and held it up to examine his nails. “I liked seeing an interesting color rather than my own boring nails. And honestly—this is going to sound gross; I’ve never said this out loud, and if you tell anyone I will have to murder you.” I got a little thrill at the idea of being about to hear something that Teddy Knight had never told anyone else. “The water at our building was often shut off. So we were… well, we were dirty sometimes. I’d have this dirt under my nails that was, like, a permanent feature. The polish covered it. I preferred being the weird arty kid people slung homophobic insults at to being the dirty kid.”

I didn’t say anything. Being cool over this revelation seemed like the right move, so I didn’t react with outrage or concern or anything, though I felt all that stuff swirling around inside me.

“But I did actually like it aesthetically,” he went on. “So I kept it up. Not all the time but occasionally when we had a day off on this last tour, I’d go get my nails done.”

“In a salon?”

“Not salons. No-frills nail bars where you don’t need an appointment—you know, like in a strip mall? I’d just look up the closest one to wherever we were.”

“I’m trying to imagine a nail tech in, like, Cincinnati, looking up at her next client and it’s Teddy Knight from Concrete Temple.”

“Oh, no, they usually had no idea who I was. Scott was the face of the band. And anyway, nail techs in Cincinnati weren’t generally our demographic—nothing against nail techs in Cincinnati.”

“Who do you think was your demographic?”

“Good question. One thing I noticed is that our fans grew with us. Aged with us. You didn’t really see teenagers or people in their early twenties at shows.”

“So Concrete Temple wasn’t a growth proposition?”

He barked a laugh. “I guess not. I would have said I didn’t care. If you’re lucky enough to have an audience, who cares if they’re the same age as you? In our case dudes—and I feel like they were mostly dudes—in their thirties and forties. Maybe some a bit older.”

“You would have said that, but you don’t anymore?”

“Well, at the risk of ruining my image as a curmudgeon, this week has been eye-opening. I have this one kid. She’s… well, she’s fantastic. She’s basically a songwriting prodigy, and I’m not throwing that word around lightly. I’m learning so much from her.”

This must be the girl I’d heard him singing with. “Nice.”

“It’s like this for you all the time at your studio, isn’t it?”

“No. Definitely no. But I know that energizing feeling that you sometimes get when you’re teaching.”

“But no dance prodigies at your studio?”

“It’s not really that kind of place. A lot of my kids, and I say this with love, are not natural dancers. Which is fine. More than fine—it’s kind of the point. I pride myself on running an inclusive studio that doesn’t deal in a lot of the garbage that many dance studios do. I have this sign that displays my—you’re going to think this is dorky—philosophy of dance. It’s distilled into three rules I call Miss Miller’s Morals.”

“That doesn’t sound dorky. What are they?”

Well, look at me: lost in the woods, telling Teddy Knight about Miss Miller’s Morals. I started ticking them off on my fingers. “Number one: ‘Everybody is welcome at Miss Miller’s.’ Two: ‘Everybody can dance.’ Three: ‘Dancing is supposed to be fun.’ Then there’s a joking number four that just reads, ‘The end.’”

“That’s great.”

“It is great. You probably don’t know much about how dance culture messes with kids’—girls’ mostly—mental well-being. And physical.”

“I can imagine. Am I sensing a ‘but,’ though? You have this great, inclusive, evolved studio, but…?”

I sighed. I hadn’t even articulated this to myself, so I didn’t know how to explain it to him. But we potentially had hours of time to fill before our rescue, and Teddy had proven himself a not-bad listener on several occasions now. “I think I have to start from the beginning for this to make sense.”

“I’m afraid we might have a lot of time to fill,” he said, echoing my thoughts. But the prospect wasn’t so scary anymore.

“OK, so, I’ve already told you about my shitty childhood.” He nodded. “When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be my own boss. I looked at my parents, and I thought about what they did. My mom waited tables for forty years. Forty years! Not that there’s not honor in that job, but you know. She took a lot of shit, worked long shifts, often at night, and income was up and down because it depended on tips. And I told you about my dad.” I sighed. “Sometimes I think I’m too hard on him. I can see some of myself in him. He was really creative.”

“Was?”

“He died a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. We weren’t close as adults. I mean, I loved him. He loved me. I was sad when he died. But—and I’m aware this sounds bad—in some ways, his death was a relief, because then I only had to worry about my mom. Between my sister and me, we were able to get her into a little condo.” I paused. “Is your mom alive?” He had talked about her, but only in the past tense.

“As far as I know.”

I waited for more, but he didn’t say anything. So we weren’t going there. Fair enough. “I could see my dad bristling against ‘the Man.’ Like, he didn’t want to have to wake up early to be at work by a specific time. He didn’t want to work to enrich others—some of his jobs were really physical, hard on his body. I get it. I think I even got it at the time, at least to some degree, but I didn’t have a lot of patience for it. This is the way of the world, I used to think. If you wanted to opt out of capitalism, you shouldn’t have had kids who needed things like food and clothes, or hell, maybe even a musical instrument or the occasional vacation, you know?”

He snorted. “Oh, I know. Believe me, I know.”

More solidarity with Teddy Knight. Which was still weird, but maybe a little less so. “But I think in some elemental way, my dad and I were alike. He was creative. He just never had the opportunity to nurture it. He hadn’t grown up with money, or access to higher education, so he never had a shot at a white-collar job, which, while it might have been soul destroying, would at least have been more lucrative.”

“So you took your dad—your parents—as a cautionary tale.”

“Exactly. I got to the end of high school, and I thought, ‘I want to do something where I’m my own boss.’”

“That was some serious foresight.”

“And/or naivete.” Maybe it had been both. I did look back on my teenage self with empathy, and with gratitude. In some ways, it was for her that I was embarking on my man cleanse. My become-a-crone quest was the completion of a project she’d started so many years ago. She had always looked to the future with clear eyes and a sense of what was important to her, and I owed it to her to keep doing that.

I returned to my story. “I did a two-year community college degree and learned basic accounting and marketing. I started thinking about what I wanted to do specifically. I narrowed it down to the two things I loved the most: dance and cats.”

He barked a laugh. “Cats!”

“Yeah, I’m a cat lady.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“I just realized that I know you, but I don’t really know you. Camp feels like a pause in the normal space-time continuum.”

“I know what you mean. It’s that camp friends thing Marion was talking about. Like, in the normal world I would never be lost in the woods with Teddy Knight. I’d be lost in the woods with a nonfamous person.”

“Ha. No. It’s more that people have contexts, you know? Or at least some people do.”

“You don’t have a context?”

“Well, I did.”

I didn’t know if he was talking about the band or the ex. Probably both.

“Anyway,” he said, “go on. Cats versus dance?”

“Yeah, I narrowed it down to opening a dance studio or a pet grooming place. But I’m not really a dog person, so I went with dance.” I paused. “It sounds so cold and calculating when I say it like that. I love dance. I love it inherently, but I also love it because it has allowed me the life I have. I work hard, but I’m the boss.”

“Sounds ideal.”

“I guess.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ again.”

“I myself managed to avoid most of the toxic dance culture garbage, probably because as a kid I only had lessons on and off, as we had money or didn’t. So it wasn’t until high school, when I was on the dance team, that I had any consistent instruction. I saw a lot of girls on my team damage themselves with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, all that junk.”

“Can I just say again that you seem to have been remarkably self-aware from a young age?”

“I’m not sure if it’s that. It’s hard to develop an eating disorder when you don’t consistently have enough to eat to begin with. Or if I was unusually self-aware, maybe it’s only because I was forced to be by circumstances.”

“Yeah.”

“You, too?”

“No. Well, maybe, but I was thinking of my sister. You remind me of her in a way.”

“What way?”

“We’ll do me later.”

We’ll do me later. I got a thrill at that notion. “Well, that’s pretty much it for me. I decided to open a dance studio, but I was determined that it be inclusive, that it not perpetuate all the harm that can be endemic to dance. Hence Miss Miller’s Morals. I have a one-strike-you’re-out policy on body-shaming, bullying, all that. I run a tight ship.”

“But? We keep almost getting to the ‘but.’”

I sighed. “I think it’s what you said about camp being a pause in the normal state of things. At the studio, I choreograph all the recitals—we have two a year. I’m known for my choreography, in fact. This is part of the Miss Miller’s Morals thing. I’m not into little girls shaking their asses in skimpy costumes. So oftentimes I theme recitals based around older music. Or they’re funny on purpose—once I did an entire ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic recital. But—and here’s the ‘but’ finally—being at Wild Arts has made me see how what I’m doing isn’t really choreography. It’s choreography lite. Or maybe that’s not fair. But the girls here, and the dance counselors, are really into dance. They’re talented technically, but they’re also creative about how they think about dance and what it can do. It’s exhilarating to work with people like that. To think about not only setting steps to music, but about telling a story, or communicating a message. It’s like solving a puzzle. It’s, well… it’s awesome.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I feel bad even thinking all that stuff I said, because it feels like it goes against Miss Miller’s Morals, like it goes against my whole life’s purpose. On the one hand, I’m saying everyone can dance, it doesn’t matter how good you are, dancing is about fun. I’ve built my whole professional life, and my livelihood, around that idea. But on the other hand, here I am with these elite, talented dancers, and it feels like… I don’t know, like it’s waking up this dormant impulse inside me.”

“Does it have to be one or the other, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your studio sounds pretty great. Can it be great, but also not be enough for you at this stage of your life, creatively? It’s doing an important service, it sounds like, meeting a community need. And it’s paying your bills. But…” He trailed off and scrunched up his forehead. “It’s OK to want to do something different, or more.”

“Why do you have that funny look on your face?”

“We’ll do me later.”

That was the second time he’d said that. I hoped we didn’t get rescued too soon to “do him.” Look at me—suddenly not wanting to be rescued.

“Anyway,” I said, “it’s a moot point. I literally just bought a new building.”

“Yeah? This is what you meant when you said you were expanding your business?”

“Yep. I’ve been renting in a strip mall all these years, but I’ve bought my own building, and I’m going to double the studio space and start offering yoga and Pilates. I’m about to be up to my eyeballs in renos and bills. So I can’t suddenly decide to ‘become a choreographer.’” I made air quotes with my fingers.

“What about Caleb’s offer to do something with him? You could do that on the side, even if you’re busy.”

“I don’t know how to write.”

“Yeah, but you know how to dance. Isn’t the point of what he’s suggesting that the story is told, at least partially, through dance?”

“Yeah. It’s just…”

“Terrifying,” he said with quiet surety.

Yet again, I was startled. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Is it time to do you now?”

We didn’t “do” Teddy for a while. He deflected, suggesting we try yelling for help again. “Maybe it took them a while to realize we were missing,” he said. “Maybe they’ve doubled back for us.” After a round of shouting proved unfruitful, we used the scissors in the first aid kit to hack off sections of gauze, and Teddy began an exercise wherein he would walk away from our spot in a straight line and tie strips of gauze to trees to make a trail leading to us. We would call back and forth to each other as he walked, and he’d only go as far as he felt he could without losing touch with me. I imagined the finished product from above as a sort of mummy-sunshine hybrid, gauzy “sunbeams” radiating out from where we were at the center. It probably was going to make no difference unless they sent helicopters. And if they had to send helicopters, we were more screwed than I had imagined, even in my moments of panic. I told myself that Teddy was right: they would come back and find us. We couldn’t be that far off the path we’d walked as a group. Still, our little art installation gave us a purpose, and having a purpose was calming.

Eventually, though, dusk was upon us. The temperature began dropping, and I could feel the fingers of panic starting to slide up my spine.

No. I wasn’t going there again. “I think we should prepare for the possibility that we might have to spend the night here,” I said when Teddy came back from his latest tree-decorating excursion. “And I don’t think you should go off on your own anymore.”

He blew out a resigned breath. “Agreed.”

“When it gets dark, it’s going to get dark .”

“The question is, How cold is it going to get?” he asked.

“Not cold enough to harm us, I don’t think. But probably cold enough to be unpleasant.”

“It’s been so hot at camp so far. There were nights I would have killed to be ‘too cold.’”

“Should we try to make a fire?” I asked.

“With what?”

“I don’t know. Rubbing sticks together? Does that only work on TV?”

“I have no idea,” he said, “but I guess it’s something to do.”

As the ambient light around us dimmed, we went around and collected leaves and twigs and made what looked like a decent approximation of a firebed—neither of us had experience with outdoorsy pursuits.

“I have concluded this does only work on TV,” I said after a good ten minutes of rubbing two sticks together.

He stopped, too, and shook out his hand. “I think maybe you need a flint for this to work?” He paused. “Is that a real thing? I don’t even know what a flint actually is.”

“Remind me never to go on Survivor with you.”

“Oh yeah, we’d be dead immediately.”

We laughed and gave up. He came to sit next to me where I was leaning against a tree. We sat in what I would have called companionable silence, except it was more like companionable anxiety.

“Let’s eat the granola bars before it gets fully dark,” I finally said. We’d been holding off, but I didn’t want to die because a bear had sniffed out my Kashi. Teddy tried to make me eat both of them, but I forced one on him. We tapped them together as if we were cheers-ing, and after we ate, we returned to our companionable anxiety.

Eventually, and out of the blue, he said, “That thing you said about contexts. I think I’m freaking out right now because I don’t have a context. Well, not right now –right now. Right now –right now, I’m freaking out because I’m lost in the woods.”

“Maybe you’re lost in the metaphorical woods.” I paused. “In addition to the literal woods.”

He blew out a breath that made his lips vibrate, which I was starting to recognize as something he did when confronted with a perhaps-uncomfortable truth. “Basically. The band that’s been my life for the last seventeen years is dead.”

“And you got dumped.”

“Yeah, but I’m over that.” He waved a hand dismissively. “That’s just a logistical problem at this point, not an emotional one. I need her out of my apartment, but she’s already out of my heart.”

I thought about the lyrics to that “Lemon Tree” song. I thought about how happy he and Karlie looked when he’d appeared on her Instagram. “Are you sure?”

He shot me a quizzical look. Fair. When a person repeatedly questioned if another person was over an ex, it was generally because Person A was getting jealous and territorial.

And jealous and territorial were states of being associated with dating. Which I did not do anymore.

“Pretty sure,” he said mildly.

I needed to stop poking at the girlfriend thing. “It’s like you got divorced.”

“What? No. I mean, yes, we were together for a few years, but it’s not like that at all.” Cue another quizzical look. A more serious one: he was staring at me like he was trying to see my thoughts.

“No, sorry, I meant the band. I meant Scott Collier.”

He looked away. “Right.”

Things had become awkward. He drew a breath like he was going to start talking, but he didn’t. The easy fellowship of before, when we’d been talking about me, felt miles away. I wondered if I should tell him about my disastrous date with Scott. On the one hand, it wasn’t any of his business. And did Scott even deserve the airtime? What was he but another example of a bad date with a mediocre man—the kind of date that was firmly in my past?

On the other hand, it was starting to feel weird that Teddy was grappling with stuff to do with Scott while I was keeping quiet about my own recent encounter with him.

There was also the issue of Scott’s wife, Cinda Lewis. I’d crept her Instagram, too, but there wasn’t much to see. All her posts were professional—fashion shows and the like.

Anyway, now was not the time for any of it. It could wait until we were unlost. “So I remind you of your sister, huh?” I asked, sending myself back to the part of our previous conversation where Teddy had first deflected attention from himself. Talking about his sister was probably less fraught than talking about himself.

“Yeah. She’s that same mix of creative and practical.” I could hear the affection in his voice.

“Is she a musician, too? You said you grew up singing together?”

“She sings and plays piano and paints and does photography. And she’s always picking up these oddball arts and crafts, like one minute she’ll be doing origami and the next she’s learning traditional rug hooking.”

“Wow.”

“But it’s all in the hobby realm. By day she’s an actuary.”

“Wow again.”

“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, she likes her job. She was always really good at math. But I think she probably made a conscious choice to follow a career path that would bring money and stability to her life.”

“I get that.”

“I thought you would.”

“But is she undergoing a dark night of the soul that’s making her question her life’s path?”

He chuckled. “No, that’s you.” He paused. “And me.”

“Do go on.” We had circled back to the topic, but this time the awkwardness was gone.

“It’s not some big thing. Just that I’m supposed to be writing songs for a new album, and I’m… not.”

“What do you mean ‘supposed to be’?”

“That was my whole goal for my time here. The point in coming. I was going to write songs for a solo album.”

“You’re allowed to change your goals. Marion didn’t take notes on anything anyone said. You didn’t sign your name in blood. You’re allowed to change your mind— you just told me that.”

There was a pause before he asked, “Did you change your mind about your goals for your time here?”

“I’m befuddled on that topic. As you know—we just talked about that.”

“That’s not what you said your goal for your time here was.”

Oh. “You mean my man cleanse. My become-a-crone project.”

“Your what project?”

I ignored his question. I didn’t want to get into it. “No, I’m not changing my mind about that goal. My man cleanse is… still underway.” Say it like you mean it, lady. Jeez. I cleared my throat and said, with false cheer, “We’re supposed to be doing you. So you’re not writing the songs you thought you would, or should?”

He sighed but did not speak. I’d made things too heavy with my questioning. I had a sudden inspiration for how to lighten the mood and reached into my pocket, where I had some cash. “Ten dollars for your thoughts.”

He cracked up as I handed him a wrinkled bill. “Is that the same ten dollars?”

“Yep. We were supposedly stopping for fast food on the way home.” I moaned. “What would you give for a Big Mac right now?”

He took the money with a wry smile. The awkwardness had dissipated, and he looked right at me and said, “I think I’m not writing because I don’t want to write the same kind of stuff anymore.”

“So don’t write the same kind of stuff.”

“But that’s what I know how to write, and…”

“And what?” I asked gently, feeling as if we were on the precipice of something.

“I don’t know if I can write without Scott.”

“Ah. I don’t have a pat comeback for that.”

“Yeah, I’ve never done it.”

I had a feeling he did know how to write without Scott, or at least that he could discover a way to, and I hated the idea of that jerk making Teddy feel less than, but what did I know about any of it? “Literally never?”

“Well, usually one or the other of us would start a song, but we’d always finish it together.”

Well, maybe I did have a pat comeback. “You know what? You don’t need that asshole.”

“Whoa!” he said—but laughingly.

“I said what I said.” Of course, he didn’t know why I’d said it—which probably explained the bewildered look I somehow knew he was giving me. It was now officially too dark to see, but I’d gotten to the point where I could sense his bewilderment. Maybe because I was so often the cause of it.

“I guess not only do you not call the tabloids, you don’t read them,” he said. “I’m the one who threw a fit when he tried to dump me. So, logically, I think I do need him.”

“Screw logic. This is sounding more and more like a divorce, and you know how it works: when your friend gets divorced, you’re automatically on their side. So it’s Team Teddy here.”

“It is, huh?” He was trying to be wry, but he sounded chuffed. “You know what? I think ‘screw logic’ is the right approach in general. For writing songs, I mean. I think I’m way too up in my own head. I need to, like… rely on muscle memory or something. I know how to write songs—you were right about that. It’s just…”

“It’s terrifying, right? Like you said. I guess we both need to figure out whether being terrified is sufficient reason not to do something.”

“Yeah, I guess we do.”

I woke up with a start sometime later with my head on Teddy’s shoulder and his arm around me. I’d fallen asleep. “Oh, shit,” I mumbled. “Sorry.”

“No problem.”

I made an involuntary squeak of dismay when I pulled away. It was cold and he was… cozy.

“Yeah,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts—read my squeak. “How is it so fucking freezing here? It’s not this cold in our cabins at night.”

“I don’t know, maybe something sciencey to do with the trees? Or just the simple fact of shelter. Anyway, it’s probably not as cold as we think it is. We’re not going to die of exposure.” I paused. “I’m saying that to myself as much as to you.”

“I didn’t want to wake you, but now that you’re up, I think we should get out that blanket.”

“Yes.” I completed the unwelcome task of disentangling myself from him and hopped around to try to get my blood flowing while he dug in the first aid kit.

“OK, come back,” he said.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark. He was settling himself back against the tree trunk with the blanket wrapped around his back and shoulders like a cape. He was holding up one side of it, making a space for me next to him. I went willingly but winced audibly as I tried to arrange myself into anything remotely resembling a comfortable position.

“Sorry, I have a crick in my hip. It’s an old injury that acts up when I’m cold. And when I sit too long.” The solution was to extend my leg, so I did that as well as I could while keeping my upper body cozied up to the heat sources that were the blanket and Teddy.

“Maybe we should put it over us actually like a blanket,” he suggested.

“Let’s try.”

Several minutes of awkward logistical wrangling followed. We’d get one end of the blanket tucked under one of us, but then the other end wouldn’t quite reach over and around the other person, and it would end up flapping in the breeze.

“Argh!” I said.

“All right. Pause.” He held up both hands like I was robbing him. “Pause.” He got up and pulled me to my feet. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Step one: we’re going to kind of… hug.” He moved toward me and put his arms out as if to embrace me but stopped short of actually doing it. “Except horizontally, on the ground, OK?”

“Horizontal hugging. Is that what they call it these days? Sheesh, no wonder I quit dating.”

“Shut up.”

“You say that to all the girls, don’t you?” I lowered my voice in a parody of masculinity. “Come on, baby, let’s hug horizontally.”

He ignored me, pulling me against his chest with one hand and using the other to measure the amount of space we took up relative to the blanket. “This is going to work. And we should try to sleep, right? It will be easier if we’re lying down.”

“Yeah, OK,” I said, and he lay on the ground and pulled me down with him.

“Do we actually have to hug, though?” I asked. “Can’t we lie side by side?” Because not only was I not going to sleep if we were hugging, I was not going to relax even one iota. “I feel like we take up less room this way than we did sitting.”

“Let’s try.” He tucked one edge of the blanket under himself and handed me the other. I tried to do the same, but I had to tug it into place.

“No, no, it’s coming out on my end,” he said.

“It’s not wide enough,” I said. “It’s not going to work.”

“It’s going to work, but I’m sorry to say, we have to resort to hugging. Here, come here.”

Somehow, I wasn’t even really sure how it happened, we ended up lying face-to-face, or face-to-neck—my face to his neck—near the edge of the blanket. There wasn’t time for it to be awkward, though, because he shouted, “OK, roll!”

“What do you mean, roll?”

“Roll!” He hoisted me onto his body. Before I could adjust to the fact that I was literally lying on top of Teddy Knight, he’d rolled me down the other side. “Oh, I see what you’re going for—like a burrito.” I tried to bring the bottom of the blanket up with my feet.

“No!” he said. “We’re going for flauta, not burrito.”

“What’s the difference?”

“We’re just rolling, we’re not fussed about filling coming out of the bottom, so there’s no tuck-in.”

“Well, I for one am fussed about stuff coming in the bottom, so maybe there should be a tuck-in!”

“What’s going to come in the bottom?”

“Bugs! I don’t know… wolves? Frigid air?” My face was jammed into his neck—which smelled weirdly good—so I couldn’t see his face, but I suspected he was rolling his eyes. “You know what I mean!”

“Yes, but the blanket isn’t long enough. We can either have our feet in it or our shoulders covered. We have shoes on, so we should prioritize the shoulders. Yours are bare.”

They were. He was wearing a T-shirt, but I was wearing a tank top. “OK, OK. I surrender. Flautas. Or maybe a Fruit Roll-Up is a better analogy.”

“Let’s start again.” He pulled away from me and futzed with our setup. “OK, roll!”

I rolled.

But I also started laughing.

“Be serious!” he admonished, but there was amusement in his tone, too. “We can get this. Try again.”

By the time he was yelling, “Fruit Roll-Up, take three!” I was snorting with laughter, though I tried my best to roll at the same time.

He was laughing, too, and he had a great laugh: low and rumbly and, I don’t know… hard-won sounding. It called to mind a rusty engine taking a minute to start but then roaring to life. My face was once again nestled into the crook of his neck, so I could feel his laughter. It was like the purring of my cats—but more. Bigger. Like the purring of a lion, maybe: cozy but dangerous.

Soon enough I had to abandon my high-minded similes because we were in hysterics. We weren’t even trying to tuck ourselves in anymore, we were just lying there smooshed up against each other, convulsing with laughter.

“Oh my God, my stomach!” I gasped. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. When was the last time that had happened?

It took a while for it to wear off. We’d stop, but then one of us would start again, and off we’d go. Eventually, though, we wound down, and I was left with my nose in his neck. “Sorry I got your neck wet. I was laughing so hard I cried.”

“’S’okay,” he rasped. After a pause, he said, “Are you smelling me?”

“I…” Had been. It was impossible not to notice, jammed in there like I was, his aftershave or whatever it was. It was medicinal, like eucalyptus maybe, or rosemary, but with an overlay of something citrusy. “Sorry,” I finally said. “You smell good.” I could feel my face flush. At least that was one perk of being lost in the woods at night—no one could see you blush.

“Uh, thanks?”

I tried to adopt a businesslike tone as I said, “I think this is going to work better if we spoon.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“Do you want to spend the whole night with me lying here smelling your neck?”

“All right, all right.”

I wrangled myself over and settled back against him. He half sat up and tugged the edge of the blanket over me. “Lift your knee,” he prompted, tucking me in. When he settled back, we did some scooching and adjusting and, finally, we were settled.

“I guess I shouldn’t have assumed I’d get to be the little spoon,” I said into the darkness.

He shushed me and threw an arm over me. It was… nice.

“We’re stuck here now,” I said.

“Yes. You can’t move. This was too hard-won.”

“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“You should have thought of that before.”

I made a little noise of dismay, and he said, quickly, “Of course if you have to go to the bathroom, you have to go to the bathroom.”

“I don’t. That was just a generic expression of unease.”

“Are you thinking about bears again?”

“ Now I am.”

“Sorry. Can you try to sleep?”

“Maybe.” Surprisingly, I thought I could. I felt like I was having an adrenaline crash. “Don’t leave me, though.” For some reason, I needed to not be alone for my hypothetical bear mauling. Everyone dies alone, they say, but not me. I was going to die with a rock star named after a poet.

“Never,” he said gruffly, his tone more in keeping with a solemn vow than comforting my scaredy-cat self.

“I just mean if you have to pee or something. Can you wake me up if I’m asleep and you need to get up?”

“Yes.” His top arm tightened around me, and it was… still nice. It was really nice. I wouldn’t say I was warm, but I was no longer freezing. I felt… not safe exactly, but… sorted.

I yawned.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up, unsure how long I’d been asleep. I was cold and uncomfortable—so much for sorted and not cold.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“How long was I out?” I whispered back.

“I don’t know, maybe an hour?”

“Did you sleep?”

“Nah.”

“How come?” I answered my own question with a self-deprecating snort. “I guess because not everyone can lose consciousness on the ground in the middle of a probably-teeming-with-bears forest they’re lost in.”

“It’s more that I thought I should, I don’t know, keep watch? Is that dumb?”

It was actually sweet. Chivalrous. If you went for that kind of thing, which I no longer did. I’d developed an immunity.

“Also, there was a mosquito feeding frenzy on the back of my neck as it got dark, and now I’m lying here tormented by the itching.”

I chuckled sympathetically but switched to wincing when pain shot through my hip. “I gotta turn over, I’m sorry. I know we worked hard for the reverse–Fruit Roll-Up arrangement here, but my hip is killing me.”

“No worries.” He rattled the edge of the crinkly blanket. “I’m not sure how much this thing is doing anyway. It’s fucking freezing out here.”

I shivered as I rotated. And then again when I was situated. He returned to hugging me. It was starting to feel normal. “I’m not sure this is doing anything, either,” he said, giving me a little squeeze to indicate that “this” referred to the horizontal hug.

“Eh, it’s doing something in the keep-Gretchen-from-freaking-out-about-bears department.”

He tightened his hold on me. “OK, good.”

I wasn’t lined up with his neck this time. We were face-to-face, and I could feel his breath on my skin when he spoke. “Why are we whispering?” I asked, trying to resist the absurd but intense compulsion to reach out and touch him. Like, I wanted to run my hands all over his face as if I were a blind person? Huh?

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Can bears hear?”

His breath hit my ear in such a way that it tickled. I snaked an arm up to scratch. And then… I don’t know… His face was so close. I still wanted to touch it. And my hand was right there .

He didn’t react as my hand settled on his cheek. He had a serious five-o’clock shadow going. I could hear the raspy sound my fingers made as they slid over his whiskers.

I only had to move a couple inches to touch my mouth to his. His lips were as soft as his face was sharp. It was a chaste kiss, on the surface of things. Brief, gentle, no tongue. But my insides roared to life. I was suddenly remembering my ill-fated date with Scott. Not the date itself, but the idea behind it: one last hurrah. I never got that.

“What was that?” he asked after I pulled away—or as away as I could get, which was only a few inches. He spoke gently—he didn’t seem upset. He had kissed me back, after all.

“I believe that was a kiss,” I said.

“But you’re retired from dating.”

True. But also: “Is this a date?” I asked in such a way that there could only be one answer.

Which he gave me: “No. God, no. This is a brush with death that we will tell as an amazing story on Monday at sunrise circle.”

“But we’ll leave out the kissing part, right?”

“We’ll leave out the kissing part,” he agreed.

“Does that mean we’re going to do it again?”

I still had my hand on his face, so I could feel him smile.

He got right to the point, opening his mouth on a groan and letting his tongue slide into mine. It wasn’t subtle this time. It was hot . So hot I wondered how I had ever been cold. It had been so long since I’d been so well kissed. I felt like someone had come up to me and hit me with a baseball bat. In a good way.

I would have said I saw lights. That fireworks went off.

Except I did see lights. Flashlights hitting the trees. And I was pretty sure the fireworks were actually flares.

I heard it then. “Teddy! Gretchen!”

And I heard him . He probably thought I hadn’t, because he mumbled it under his breath, but I heard him clear as anything, whispering, “ God damn it. ”