Chapter 7
7
My ass was soaked. My pants were shredded. My ankle was twisted. And I was stuck.
It didn’t matter how hard I tugged, I couldn’t get my uninjured foot out of the hole. It was wedged, and without the leverage of a good foot on solid ground, I was not going anywhere.
Of course, I left my phone in my car. So I wouldn’t drop it anywhere. And of course, no one was going to just drive by. Which meant I either had to figure out how to get myself out of the mess I was in or hope Daisy came looking for me when I didn’t come home.
In six hours or so.
“Argh!” I shouted at the sky.
My normal anxiety was a pain in the ass when I was around adults, especially strangers. It left me tripping over my words and fumbling with what I wanted to say and how I wanted to act, or just shutting down completely. What I was feeling, trapped in the hole I dug, literally, was an entirely different kind of anxiety.
This was a new fear. A true fear for my life. Was I going to survive? I was already shivering since I discarded my jacket, again in my damn car. What the hell was I thinking?
I closed my eyes and drew a breath, remembering the years and years and years of therapy that helped me to function. First, box breathing to bring my racing heart down to a level where I could think.
Second, evaluate the situation.
“Really bad,” I told myself. “But I can do this.”
Hearing my own voice was better than feeling so alone.
“The mud is wet and cold. My ankle hurts a lot. I have one foot high and the other low. If I push my hands down to push myself up, it doesn’t work. I have two choices, tuck and roll or risk getting more stuck by putting my injured foot in the same hole.”
My pulse raced with the options, knowing neither was great. But I couldn’t think of an option that didn’t require me getting even dirtier than I was.
“I can do this. I will reward myself with a bubble bath and scrub every inch of my skin. Twice. No more mud baths ever in my life. Why would I want a repeat of this?”
Another deep breath.
“Okay, we’re going to roll.”
I stretched out in the mud, my too thin shirt instantly saturated by the squishy mud. It made the world’s most disgusting sucking, wet, sloppy noise ever and soaked through my shirt and filled my bra.
“So gross,” I groaned.
I’d cleaned up vomit and wiped noses. I’d dealt with spilled food and even the occasional bathroom accident. But none of that was on me.
“Roll, roll, roll,” I whispered to myself as I tried to get myself out of the hole.
With zero success.
“Dammit!” I shouted, again to absolutely no one.
Panic was setting in, and exhaustion and fear were right there cheering the panic on. If I didn’t get the hell out of there soon, I was going to go headfirst into a panic attack.
I had no choice. Rolling out of the hole wasn’t an option with my foot wedged in. The mud at the bottom sucked my boot deeper with every move I made to pull it out.
Putting another boot down there wasn’t appealing. But neither was staying there all afternoon and freezing to death.
I pushed myself upright again, trying to work my foot free. It moved a little, but not enough to get it out of the hole. The squishy sound told me I had to overpower the soft mud that I was so thankful for when I started digging because it was better than frozen ground.
“Fuck you, mud,” I muttered.
Another deep breath. Ignore the tangy scent of dirt and the feel of mud caked onto every inch of my body. Ignore the panic clawing at my throat and desperate to come out. I was going to do this.
I pushed my free foot down into the hole, wedging it on the side instead of letting it go all the way to the bottom.
“Gah!” I shouted, the pain so much worse than I expected it to be.
“I got this. I have to. Okay. One. Two. Three!”
I pushed with my bad foot, using my arms and leg to pry my good foot out of the damn hole.
I rolled to the ground, laughing and relieved and covered in mud, but free from the ground.
There had to be some slap in the face lesson about falling into a hole of my own creation, but all I cared about at that moment was getting up and getting less frozen.
I moved to stand and collapsed to the ground again.
“Ow!” My ankle was not okay. I couldn’t stand up. Which meant I could either crawl to my car or try to use the shovel as a crutch.
“This will be interesting.” I used the shovel to help me stand, keeping my foot off the ground as much as possible. It hurt to even graze the ground, but I had to get out of there. I had to get back to my car.
Each step was slow. I stabbed the shovel in the ground, then hopped on my good foot, the one that was soaked all the way through and squished between my toes. One step. Then another. And another.
I finally made it to my car and realized I had a whole new problem. I was covered. Head to toe. There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t have mud on it. And I had nothing to protect my car from myself.
Daisy and my mom and everyone I knew in the area said always keep a blanket in your car. Create an emergency kit. Be prepared.
I didn’t go anywhere. Work and home. My parents’ house sometimes. The grocery store and bookstore and out to eat. All local places. Nowhere I needed an emergency kit to get to.
I should have listened to them. And now my seats were going to be ruined because I hadn’t.
I opened the door and debated. I shook my head and laid my coat over the seat, hating that I was going to destroy it but knowing it could be washed. Probably. Hopefully.
The drive home was not fun, but I made it. I parked in the driveway and was extremely grateful Daisy wasn’t home to watch my hobble-stomp-grunt walk to the front door. I let myself in and pried my muddy boots off, wincing when I had to get it off my injured left foot. My socks were almost as muddy as my boots, and my clothes were no better.
“Daisy?” I called out, hoping my suspicions were correct and her car not in the driveway meant she was not home. “Are you here?”
Silence met my questions, and I chewed my lip for a minute. I checked outside again and decided it was for the best to strip to my underwear right there at the door and carry my clothes to the laundry room instead of risking getting the entire house muddy.
I scooped up all my clothes and cringed at the feel of the muddy fabric against my skin, but it was better. I hurried, as fast as my ankle would allow, to the laundry room next to the kitchen and stopped.
“Now what?” I asked no one.
Tossing the muddy clothes into the washing machine didn’t seem like a great idea, but we didn’t have a utility sink and I didn’t have a better idea. I could wash them more than once if I needed to.
“Ugh.”
My underwear needed to go into the laundry, too. I debated for a few seconds, then stripped my bra and panties off. Right there in the middle of the house I shared with my best friend.
“Please don’t come home,” I sang to myself, praying I wasn’t about to bear it all to my bestie.
I dumped the detergent into the dispenser and started the machine. I covered myself with my muddy arms and hobbled to my room, closing the door with no incident.
At least something was going my way.
I turned on my shower and let the water warm up before I climbed in, wincing and cringing with every step on my left foot. The boot and the cold had kept the swelling down, but I knew it was going to blow up as soon as I was warm. Especially if I didn’t get off my foot.
I washed my hair and body thoroughly, twice, then plugged the drain and added bubble bath to the tub as it filled. I sank into the warm water and sighed.
So much better.
I stayed in the bath until the water cooled and my ankle throbbed. I pulled the plug and pushed myself out of the tub, as awkward as a baby deer. I sat on the edge to dry myself off and watch my ankle swell.
Dammit.
I made my way back to my room and found my most comfortable clothes and got dressed. My bathroom was as stocked as a pharmacy for bandages, so I grabbed an elastic bandage that would stick to itself and hobbled to the kitchen.
Ice for my ankle, a sandwich for my belly, and water for my headache. Then I was on the couch with the remote and wrapping the ice around my ankle before the swelling got too bad.
That was how Daisy found me an hour later when she made it home, looking like her day was no better than mine.
“I’m so tired,” she breathed, hanging her coat in the front closet. “How was your— What the hell happened to you?” She rushed to me, sitting next to me. Her eyes widened at the wrap around my ankle.
“I was trying to dig out the old connections for the campsites and fell.”
“Are you okay? Do you need to go to the doctor? Why didn’t you call me?”
I shrugged. She was my best friend in the world. The only person who wasn’t family that I felt like I could be my whole and true self around. She didn’t judge me or criticize me. I loved her like the sister I never had, and I knew the feeling was mutual.
Which was why tears welled up when I heard the concern in her voice. I would have been equally upset if she was hurt.
“You’re not okay,” she said. “What do you need?”
I laid my head on her shoulder before she could get up. “I’ll be okay. I probably need to burn my coat, and my clothes might have ruined the washing machine, but I’ll survive.”
“Okay, go back to the beginning and tell me what happened.”
I took a breath and told Daisy about digging up the campground and how easy it started, then leaving my phone in the car and throwing my coat in there with it, and finally slipping on the mud and getting stuck in the hole.
“Do you think it’s broken?”
I shook my head. “Sprained probably. I could have torn something, but I don’t think it’s that bad. I need to replace the ice and put my laundry in the dryer. If it’s clean.”
“Sit down,” she said as I tried to get up. “I will take care of all of that. Did you eat?”
“I wasn’t sitting here waiting for you to come home and take care of me.”
She glared at me. “What would you say to me if I were the one with the ankle injury?”
“The same,” I admitted.
She grinned. “Exactly. New ice? Do you want me to unwrap it, or are you going to?”
“I will. I need to take this ice off it and give it a little while. It’s been on there almost an hour.”
“Okay, so you unwrap while I put your clothes in the dryer. Food?”
“I had a sandwich.”
“Meds?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t take anything.”
“Do you want something?”
“Not right now. I might before I go to bed.”
“Okay.”
Daisy left to take care of my laundry, then stayed in the kitchen while I unwrapped my ankle. It hurt, but the swelling was better and I could move it slowly.
It wasn’t broken, but it was going to hurt for a week or two.
Daisy came back to the couch and sat next to me with a sandwich of her own and a container of ice cream with two spoons.
I smiled at her and took the offering. Whenever one of us was sick or hurt, we always got ice cream and shared it. Heartbroken? Ice cream. Walked into a pole? Ice cream. Cold or flu? Ice cream.
Daisy ate her sandwich and watched the end of the movie I had on. When it was over, she took the ice cream and her plate back to the kitchen, then brought back a new ice pack.
“I told you being out there alone wasn’t a good idea,” Daisy said.
“It’s my responsibility. I’m the one who’s going to run the camp.”
“Amelia is your boss, though. Shouldn’t she be involved?”
“She has enough to do with the community center. And she wants the campground to be more than just a summer camp. She has ideas about building a four-season building so we can have kids there for winter break and spring break and year-round.”
“That’s what sent you out there today.”
I shook my head. “I was already planning to see what I could do, but I went earlier than I planned and got more done. I wanted to get it all done.”
“To save money? I thought you had a budget.”
“We do, but it’s not enough for this building Amelia is talking about.”
“So, she doesn’t want to help, but she wants to expand your project and make it more complicated for you? I know you were talking about a structure, but I thought you wanted open-air.”
I nodded. “That was the plan, but she’s not wrong. There are a lot of kids who need a place to go during the year. We just finished up the holiday break and there were kids who didn’t have a spot because there’s only so many we can take.”
“That’s a lot more money than you were planning to spend. Is that why you were trying to get this done alone?”
I nodded. “I have to. The budget the mayor gave us is not enough to do the things that need to be done for us to open, let alone even more.”
“But if Amelia wants to add on to your plan, shouldn’t she be asking for more money?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. The mayor made it pretty clear that there was no more money and that he’s not going to change his mind.”
“There are always funds that they can use for things like this. There’s a town need. Did you ask him?”
I pursed my lips and gave my best friend a look that clearly said she forgot who she was talking to.
Her laughter said she got it. “Okay, fine. You’re not going to talk to him. But Amelia should.”
“She might, but even if she does, we’re still not going to have enough. The entire budget we have right now wouldn’t cover the cost of a building. Or the other work. I know I can’t make up for all of it, but anything I can do myself helps the budget.”
“Unless you get yourself killed,” Daisy said softly.
“I survived,” I said, knowing that was a real possibility if I hadn’t gotten out of that hole. I didn’t text Daisy when I went out there because I was so flustered about the new building idea. If I hadn’t gotten out of there, she would have been the only one who suspected where I was or knew I was missing. It could have been bad.
“I think you need to plan a fundraiser. Sooner rather than later.”
“You know I’m no good at things like that.”
“You’re also no good at digging up the ground and not falling into the hole you made.”
I scowled at her.
“You know I’m right. And you know everyone will help.”
“And you know I suck at talking to people.”
“You tell yourself that, but when you talk about these kids and this camp, it’s different. People will see that. And you won’t have to do it alone. I’ll help, and Amelia will hopefully help. And this is important. It’s not like you’re trying to get people to give you money for the hell of it. You have a purpose, and you have a clear mission. We need to make this happen.”
“I don’t know, Daisy. I just?—”
“Something small. We can ask Hudson if we can use his bar, and talk to Chelsea and Haley and all the women at book club. I’m sure there will be people willing to help.”
“We should talk to Goldie. She’s good at these things.”
“Ooh, good idea. Yes. All right, we’re going to book club on Sunday so we can get things moving on this.”
I grumbled but knew she was right. I needed money to make the summer camp amazing. I couldn’t do it all without some help.
Guess that resolution was going to happen after all.