Chapter 9 Chris #2
“I’m not a fan of Lyme disease,” I said, looking my calves over. “Or the deer these things come on.”
“Yes, let’s not forget those hideous monsters. You still think this would be a good date?” she asked, opening her granola bar and taking a bite. She smiled at me while she chewed.
“Well, there’s something to be said about trauma bonding.”
She cracked up.
She gave me the other half of the granola bar, then took a bite out of the apple and offered it to me. I took it from her and took a bite and handed it back.
She bit off a piece of apple and fed it to Woofarine and I gave him some of the training treats I carried. Larissa dug through her backpack one more time and found a beef stick. She held it up like she’d discovered the holy grail and honestly it felt that way, out here in the middle of nowhere.
“Everything just tastes better when you’re lost in the wilderness,” she said, watching me chew my half of it.
“I don’t even like these and this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“What did you rate the bread?” she asked, nodding at the breadstick wrapper on the tree trunk between us.
“An eleven out of ten.”
“See? Sometimes happiness comes from the most unexpected places.”
“We’ll have to thank Mike,” I mumbled, giving Woofarine the last bite of the jerky.
We reapplied sunblock, cleaned up our mess, took one more painful swallow of our grape blood water, and got back on the trail.
The stop was a good one. I felt better. Ready to take on the next six miles—actually looking forward to the next six miles, I realized.
I didn’t enjoy being plunked in the woods on some epic adventure with no warning, but I did like the company.
It made me think The Amazing Race or Naked and Afraid, where the person you’re partnered with makes all the difference.
“You know what this makes me think of?” she said.
“What?”
“Naked and Afraid.”
I grinned. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Would you ever go on a show like that?” she asked, glancing at me.
“God no. Would you?”
She shrugged. “I think it would be cool. I’d learn so much about myself.”
“You’d learn what malaria feels like,” I said.
“I’d learn to appreciate the comforts I have at home. I’d learn to savor the things I take for granted. I’d finally kick my caffeine habit.”
“You’d learn suffering in a world full of way more suffering than necessary. And you’d have to be naked in front of a stranger,” I said.
“And a camera crew,” she added.
“And then all the people watching at home.”
“Yeah, but they blur the important stuff. Nobody at home would see anything. And the camera guys are used to it.”
“So you’d do it?” I asked.
“I mean, I’d have to learn survival skills. I don’t actually know how to do any of that stuff. But yeah. I would.”
“Like you’d learn stick in the parking lot?” I said, referring to the comment she made that day at the hospital.
“Sometimes necessity forces us to be the most efficient version of ourselves,” she said. “So you wouldn’t do it, then?”
“I think I know too much,” I said. “All the stomach parasites and infectious diseases. I’d just be stressed the whole time. You know, some of that stuff causes lifelong chronic illness. It’s not worth it.”
“Christopher—what’s your last name?”
“Wright,” I said. “Christopher Wright.”
“So tell me, Christopher Wright, is that why you don’t like deer? Lyme disease?”
I smiled at the trail. “No.”
I felt her looking at me. “Oh, this is a thing, isn’t it?”
I glanced at her, but I didn’t answer.
“Did a deer murder your family?” she asked.
“How’d you know?”
“Ha. Tell me. I won’t tease you. Much.”
“How do you know it’s something I get teased for. Did Mike tell you?”
“No! He knows?”
“He’s my best friend,” I said. “I’m surprised he didn’t regale you with the whole thing already. He loves to tell that story.”
“Well now you have to tell me because I’m going to find out anyway.”
I blew a breath through my nose. “I got attacked by a deer.”
She turned to blink at me. “You did? Was it protecting a baby or something?”
“No, it was licking me.”
She burst into laughter.
I gave her a moment to crack up before I continued.
“I was eight,” I said, a smile in my voice.
“We were up at Mike’s cabin for a week, and I was outside playing with Mike and this deer came out of the tree line and started licking the sweat off me.
It was chasing me all over the yard. Mike ran inside crying and told his mom a deer was eating me. ”
Larissa was gasping. I had to pause in my story.
“This is a joke. You’re kidding me,” she said.
“I’m not. When Donna came out, she started laughing so hard she could barely help me.”
“So you have a deer phobia now?”
“Yes, they’re terrifying. I have a recurring nightmare of three deer stacked up on each other’s shoulders under a trench coat in a dark alley.”
She choked.
To be honest, I didn’t love telling this story. The guys used it to tease me all through high school. But I did like making her laugh.
“If we ever encounter a deer, I’ll protect you, okay?” she said, still giggling.
I let a laugh out through my nose. “Oh yeah? How many of those things do you think you could take out in a fight? Real numbers here.”
“How many?”
“Yeah. They travel in herds. Have you ever seen fewer than two deer together?” I said. “Bare minimum, you’re in hand-to-hand combat with at least two. Realistically, you’re looking at five or six. You think you can take out five to six deer?”
“Deer run,” she said, looking amused. “They’re flight animals.”
“Not the ones I’ve met. Not the ones we’re talking about.
If the deer come for us, it’s over, we’re screwed.
They’ve got the numbers, they reproduce faster than we do.
You’ve got a full-grown deer in three years.
They weigh as much as a man, they run thirty miles per hour, they can jump eight feet, see in the dark, they have superior hearing and smell, they’ve got stabby sticks on their head—”
She gasped. “Oh no, not the stabby sticks.” She made a fake scared face.
I had to fight to keep my expression straight. “You’re laughing at me, but I’m being totally serious. We’re lucky they haven’t organized. You think we’d still be at the top of the food chain if deer finally got sick of our shit?”
“They don’t have opposable thumbs, Chris. They don’t speak, they can’t conspire, they have no language.”
“Yet. That we know of. Do you know how many people are killed by deer every year?” I asked. “I mean, sure, most of the deaths are from traffic accidents—or are they accidents?”
She was shaking her head. “You are too much. Deer are not scary. Be scared of something actually scary.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Canada geese? Woofarine?”
I laughed at the Woofarine comment.
“Geese are birds. Nobody’s getting killed by geese,” I said.
“So you think you could take a pissed off Canada goose?” she asked. “They’re cobra chickens.”
“I’m not saying it’d be a good time, but yeah.”
“What if there was a whole flock of them?”
“There’s a better chance at surviving a massive goose attack than an organized deer ambush. Not to mention geese are a seasonal threat and deer are here daily, living amongst us, patrolling our lawns while we’re asleep.”
“Something tells me you’ve never met the business end of a Canada goose. You’re waaaay too cocky.”
I smiled. “I want you to know that I’d put myself between you and a deer, and you and a goose for that matter, because that’s just the kind of guy I am, but know that I’d be terrified.”
“Well, it’s not brave if you’re not scared.” She shook her head, still cracking up.
I smiled, looking at her a moment longer than I should. She had a little dimple. I remembered the first time I noticed it, the night we met. Barefoot, hanging off Lexi’s back. Fun. Easygoing.
Her blond hair had been wavy from the humidity of the crowd. Not frizzy. Like a day spent on the beach. And she’d been so vibrant, that beaming grin she always had, despite all the crappy things I know she deals with—a shitty dad, all that debt, and all the jobs she works to pay it off.
I don’t know that I’d be as good of a person if the world had treated me the way it treated her. Even out here, lost and hot and tired and sunburned, she was positive and making the best of it.
Last week, I’d gone to her place to pick up Woofarine.
Larissa was out babysitting, so Nancy let me in and wrangled me into talking for a few minutes.
I was sitting there drinking an off-brand soda, chatting with her mom, looking around, and I could feel Larissa in every inch of that apartment.
Larissa was like a flower planted in a garbage heap.
She made this run-down place somehow feel bright and homey.
There was a rainbow afghan Nancy said Larissa had made, draped over the couch, vases she thrifted, secondhand furniture she’d upcycled in the living room.
She was so talented—and I don’t think she ever sat still.
I know it probably didn’t feel like it right now, but Larissa was going to succeed, regardless of what life threw at her.
Despite it. I think she would defy what takes most people down in the end because she had the ability to shrug things off and keep going. Keep smiling.
Life buries us. We get heavier and heavier as time goes on and we labor under the layers we’ve collected. Sometimes the layers make us who we are and sometimes they make us someone else entirely.
I wondered if what had happened to Mom started like that. Small and thin and it piled on until she didn’t recognize herself.
And I didn’t even know she was gone until it was too late.
I must have been quiet.
“What’s wrong?” Larissa said from next to me.
I shook my head. “Nothing. I’m just thinking about my mom.”
She waited. I almost didn’t go on, but for some reason here in the middle of nowhere, I felt like I could. Like maybe I could leave it here in the woods and walk out without it.