Knox
I’m staring at the fire when I hear Sylvie’s van door open and Winslow bounds out to me. He’s wagging his tail so vigorously it makes his whole body undulate.
I scratch his muzzle. “Mornin’, good boy.” He sniffs loudly at my cast. “Oh, I see we’re admiring our handiwork. Although I guess technically it was a rock that did this, not you.”
Sylvie approaches from behind, her footsteps crackling in the fragrant pine needles that carpet the ground.
“You’re gonna have to trust me, but I started this fire really quickly,” I say.
She sits beside me, hugging her knees to her chest against the morning chill. “I have no reason whatsoever to doubt you.”
“I had an Avatar dream last night.” I lift my chin to prevent Winslow licking my lips.
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“I’ll have you know my dream was very innocent. I was riding a dragon-bird thingy.”
“Not touching that. How’s your arm?”
“It hurts. I’m already excited for this cast to be off.”
“You don’t think you’re going to get into recreational casting?”
“You know there’s someone who’s into that though.”
“I’ve never had a broken bone. Just a broken heart.”
I squint as smoke lashes my eyes. “Me neither until now. I cannot recommend it as an experience.”
“Bones or hearts?”
“Bones.” And hearts.
We’re quiet for a while. I keep trying to think of things to say but I’m suddenly too sad. I want to tell her that even with the broken arm, this has been one of the best twenty-four-hour periods of my life. Instead I say, “I had a lot of fun yesterday.”
“So passing the day with me is fun relative to breaking your arm?”
I smile and shake my head. I’m going to miss her. I know I don’t even know yet how much. More than I miss my mom right now. “If I say yes, will it give you a big head?”
Sylvie smiles and gazes into the fire. “Nah,” she says quietly.
What feels like a long time passes and neither of us say anything.
“You hungry?” Sylvie asks.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to mooch all your food. Can I contribute? I have . . . a couple cans of beef stew.”
Sylvie giggles. “Ohhhh, tantalizing offer to get my morning stew on. I’ll drink it out of my ‘Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Beef Stew’ mug.”
“You telling me you don’t want to get all stewed up at eight a.m.? Is it eight?”
“It’s close. How about we enjoy some of my homemade granola with coconut and cacao and almond milk and you flatter me on my granolacraft?”
“Twist my arm. Literally my one good arm left available for twisting.”
We go back to Sylvie’s van and pour bowls of granola. We return to the fire and sit and eat. I rave about her granolacraft.
“For all my questions, I still haven’t asked you how you ended up out here,” Sylvie says.
Panicking, I chuckle and hang my head and stare at the ground, stalling. Think fast. “You’ll think it’s dumb.” Because whatever I conjure in this moment will sound dumb.
“I’m not in the judging business.”
“We’ll see. You ever read that book Into the Wild?”
“About the guy who wants to escape from society and ends up dying in a school bus in Alaska?”
“Yep.”
“Would it shock you to learn that there’s a movie of it, which I’ve seen?”
“So,” I say, “I read that in high school and I decided when I graduated I wanted to take a solo road trip across the country to Alaska.”
“Not really the message of that story—that you should do that.”
“Yeah, well, I bought my uncle’s 1991 Chevy S-10 for five hundred bucks and started driving, and I made it here before it threw a rod through the engine block and went to the scrapyard. I took it as a sign.” It kills me how easily and skillfully I lie. What a terrible talent.
“So here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“That’s not that dumb a story. I’m actually really glad you didn’t make it to Alaska to, like, die in a school bus. Or worse—survive in a school bus and come back and be extremely annoying about it.”
“Living in a school bus is very overrated, I’m sure.
” My heart aches. I need to just pull out the thorn and go.
I have a long, trying, lonely road ahead of me to North Carolina and my mamaw’s house and little idea of how I’m going to get there.
It would be challenging even if I had two good arms. Even if I weren’t missing a girl I’ve known for a day.
There’s no sense dragging it out. So I stand.
“I better let you get to packing up. I have an email address. I don’t check it a whole lot, but—” I pull a notebook from my backpack and write it down, then I tear off another piece of paper.
“I don’t have a phone right at the moment but maybe you could give me your number for in the future. ”