Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
CLAY
W e were on our twenty-ninth campfire song and my voice was getting hoarse. Not wanting to overpack, I wasn’t about to lug a full-sized guitar up a mountain, but the tiny ukulele I tied to the outside of my pack proved just enough to give us a melody.
Several of the kids took turns strumming it and proved that it’s a lot harder to play a ukulele than it appears. Eventually it made its way back to me, and now I was picking out the melody for “Dust in the Wind,” which only a few kids knew the words to, judging by the fact that Ally and I were doing most of the singing.
From time to time I’d forget we were sitting amid a circle of students. The wind chime sound of her laugh was nothing compared to her clear, soft singing voice and I kicked myself for not knowing she was a singer. I’d have recruited her long ago to join us for a Friday jam session at the community center.
She seemed to know the words to every song I came up with. Before long, it became a competition between us to see how quickly she could identify the next song I planned to play after hearing only a few notes. The kids got in on it too, cheering her on when she correctly identified the song and started singing. Somehow, they all seemed to be Team Ally, and I didn’t mind one bit.
After we’d sung “Oh! Susanna” for the second time, I noticed the kids were starting to lose steam. They’d proven they knew the words to the song an hour ago, but now less than half of them were singing. It was time to send them to their tents and wish them sweet dreams.
“Okay, guys. You can stay up for a while inside your tents, but if it gets crazy loud, I’ll make you turn off the flashlights.”
A chorus of hiking boots scraping the dirt followed as everyone made their way from the campfire area to the tents. Everyone, that is, except Ally and me.
Normally, after a day of hiking and chaperoning, I’d be so dead tired, I’d be in my tent and half asleep five minutes after dismissing the kids. But tonight, I felt myself lingering by the campfire.
Because sharing a tent with Ally felt so much more intimate than it would with just about any other member of the Green Valley High School faculty. Not just because she was a female. But because she was her.
What had I been thinking, agreeing to her plan to sleep head to feet? Like that would make it any less awkward.
Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize for a moment that Ally hadn’t left the campfire either. When a cascade of sparks rushed into the air, I realized she’d poked the logs with a stick.
“We should make sure this is out—like really out—before we go to sleep,” she said, staring at the flames. “I don’t want to have to evacuate this bunch because we set the forest on fire.”
I got up from the rock where I’d been perched for the past hour and stretched my legs. They felt creaky and hike-weary. Normally, sleeping on the ground after a good hike was my favorite thing in the world. Tonight, I was riddled with anxiety.
I felt my heart hammering in my chest, and I knew it wasn’t in delighted anticipation of inhaling the mountain air as I slept. It was in nervous anticipation of inhaling Ally’s citrus shampoo in close quarters and pretending it didn’t affect me.
Shuffling over to an area where I’d piled up some loose dirt, I scooped a handful and brought it back to the fire. Before I could dump it on the flames, Ally stopped me. “Do you have to put it out? Can I sit a while?”
“Oh. Sure. I figured you were tired.”
She shrugged. “A little tired, but it’s only ten, so I doubt I’ll fall asleep. I’d rather hang out here a bit longer.” In the darkness, I couldn’t see her face well enough to notice a crease in her brow or other signs that would show she felt a similar trepidation about sharing a tent.
She probably didn’t. She was a mature adult who knew that two colleagues could take one for the team and sleep in close quarters without it being a big deal. I needed to get out of my head.
I let the dirt sift through my fingers onto the ground and sat back on my rock across from her. It took every bit of self-control not to edge closer, and I mentally berated myself for not taking better advantage of this same situation a week earlier when we didn’t have twenty teenagers roaming around aware of our every move.
It didn’t take a crack detective to pick up on the gossip that roamed the halls at school. If students so much as saw a pair of teachers showing anything other than purely professional affection, the rumor mill blazed to life.
Last year, Witty had the poor judgement to stand in the lunchroom line behind Rosalie and use a plastic fork to comb her hair. Instead of swatting him away, Rosalie laughed, and by the end of the day, half the student body was convinced they were having a fling. Episodes like that taught me long ago to keep my hands—and my forks—to myself or risk a public outing of feelings I didn’t know I had.
Except now, the feelings were real and I’d spent much of the day avoiding being too close to Ally for fear of exposing myself.
The flames licked at the remains of the logs and lit up her face in pinks and oranges.
“Today was a good day, don’t you think?” She leaned forward to warm her hands, holding them open in front of the flames.
“I’m just happy you’re not miserable. There’s a big difference between camping in my yard and coming up here.”
“Yeah, two dozen teenagers. How do you ever get them to quiet down and go to sleep?”
A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the trees and blew a few strands of Ally’s hair loose. She swatted at them to tame them. I ached to scoot closer to her and tuck the strands behind her ear. But I did nothing except watch her in the dim light, hoping the darkness would hide the evidence of my thoughts.
“They’re more tired than they realize. They’ll have fun making a commotion in the tents for a while, but eventually, they’ll drop. Just wait. Something happens after an hour or two and suddenly it’s dead silent.”
She cupped a hand around her ear and listened. “Yeah, not yet. Not at all.”
“Patience, grasshopper.”
I should have been telling myself the same thing. Tonight would be fine. I needed to relax and stop worrying about the future.
“So tell me more about Jayne,” I said quietly, glancing behind me to make sure we were really alone. “I didn’t get a heads-up from the school counselor about depression. Is it a new issue for her?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s new. She’s been struggling with it for a while, but she manages it with meds.”
She didn’t look pointedly at me when she said it, and I almost wondered if she’d forgotten what I’d told her after she’d crashed on the track. She had hit her head.
“How’s it going for you?” she asked with quiet concern, like a friend. Like it wasn’t a source of constant anguish for me as I resisted my doctor’s advice to up my meds.
“It’s going okay, thanks.”
I’d looked away, so I didn’t notice that she’d moved closer until she bumped my hip with hers. “Hey, no pat answers. I’m asking for real.”
Exhaling a lungful of mountain air, I realized how few people cared enough to ask, and that was my fault for not letting people in. “It’s been up and down since my grandmother died. Lately, I’ve...struggled a bit more.”
“She was your person in this, huh?”
I nodded. “She understood. I guess I haven’t looked to find someone else who does. My fault.”
“I could be that person, you know. I am your friend and I’m here. So just, you know, talk when you want to talk.”
Even if I’d wanted to talk, I couldn’t have, due to the sudden lump in my throat. Barely able to swallow over it, I simply nodded.
And even though she’d offered, I wasn’t willing to tell her everything. I didn’t want her to know the part of me that sometimes struggled with feeling despondent when I was alone at home. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me or judge me for not trying harder to be happy, as though it were a choice. “Do you know much about mental health issues?”
It’s not that I thought she was necessarily holding out on me with her own struggles, but I wanted to know how open-minded she might be about the severity of mine if I told her more.
Even in the dim light, I could see her eyes go wide with surprise. “I mean, I don’t think you can teach students for ten years and not know about mental health issues. Right?”
“True. I guess I meant more specifically.”
“You mean have I worked one-on-one?”
“Yeah.”
She patted her lips with a finger, thinking, and I stared at the plump shape of her mouth, not quite a pout but full, pillowy lips. I was such an asshole. I’d asked her an important question, and now I was sitting here ogling her lips.
“I’ve had a couple of students confide in me. Jayne is one. Last year I had two others. I wanted to make sure I was telling them the right thing and not just spouting moronic philosophy, so I did a lot of research.”
“Does Jayne seem like she’s handling it? Any red flags?”
She shook her head. “No, she’s managing. She knows what she needs to do to keep herself ‘out of the pit,’ as she calls it.”
I knew the pit. I knew that there were days when it didn’t matter how objectively fine life looked. There was no climbing out of the pit and no desire to try.
I could tell Ally how far down I’d sunk. I could let her know me better.
“Okay. Good for me to know, though. I’ll look out for her a little more than usual.”
No, I wouldn’t tell her. Not yet. I wasn’t ready for her to see me differently.
Ally was watching me, and I realized I had my palms against my cheeks, resting my chin in my hands, elbows tucked against my body protectively. I lowered my hands to my lap and stretched my shoulders, but her gaze stayed fixed on me as though she knew something about me despite my effort to hide it.
Then she leaned back and grabbed a small red duffel bag I hadn’t noticed. Her eyebrows bounced as she pulled the string and opened it, producing a package of graham crackers, a chocolate bar, and a half-full bag of marshmallows.
“You didn’t hang that in the tree with the rest of the food?”
“Not yet. I had a feeling I’d want a little extra dessert. Join me?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
I fished around on the ground for some fresh sticks and speared a marshmallow. The longer we sat out here, the less time we’d be alone together in a tiny tent.