Heather is already dialing her phone. “I need to report this incident immediately—”
Dave calmly takes the phone out of her hand. “No, you don’t.”
“One of these little freaks just tried to kill us! This incident must be investigated and reported in their case files and—”
“They don’t have case files. The moment we crossed the Washington state line these girls ceased to exist,” Dave says. “So if you want to sit through a year’s worth of disciplinary proceedings for impeding a federal officer, keep arguing with me. If you want to help someone, go help the driver.”
Three cars pass as they hold each other’s gaze. Then with a small wobble she backs down, her shoulders bowing. She pulls the first aid kit off the wall, and stumbles down the bus stairs. Dave climbs behind the wheel, pulls the doors closed, and turns in the tall driver’s seat.
“We’ve got about three more hours of driving ahead of us,” he calls to me. “How we doing back there?”
I give him the most sarcastic thumbs-up I can manage.
“Hey, Dave?” I call. “What do you mean we ‘ceased to exist’?”
The only answer I get is the squeal of the brakes releasing as Dave eases back onto the freeway.
* * *
The landscape goes from industrial to rural, and then to something like primordial forest. Dark pines taller than most buildings in my hometown line the roads. There’s no towns or farms or even buildings, until we finally pass the world’s smallest gas station, with a hand-lettered sign out front reading: “LAST GAS 50 MILES.”
For a long time after that, the view remains the same: trunks and branches and forest floor, except for one moment of blue, when we pass a field of lupin reaching up to the sun, and then the trees close in again. But the moment is dazzling.
It takes me back to the field of wildflowers the day Rose’s mom married her stepdad, Tom. After the ceremony, we sat in the shade and watched Rose’s new dad wrap his arms around her mom, Janeane, while the photographer clicked away. The only time Rose smiled that day was when someone with a camera reminded her to.
“They got me a bed,” Rose said, watching them. “It’s a four-poster. It has a canopy and everything. I got to pick it out.”
“That’s so cool.”
“And he’s getting my mom a car, but he said she doesn’t have to work anymore, so it’s mostly just to pick me up from school and for shopping and stuff.”
“It’s like a fairy tale or something.”
“And you’ll be sleeping over like, all the time. Right?” She turned to me then, and I stuck out my pinkie.
“Whenever you want,” I promised, and we linked our fingers together to make it official.
But after she moved across town to the nice neighborhood and joined her stepdad’s church, things changed.
Everyone who went to Rose’s church hung out together, and when they got to high school their youth group became its own little world. They went on group outings instead of dates, they drank root beer instead of Rainier, and they gave each other promise rings junior year. By ninth grade it was very clear there was no place for me in their world of two-story houses, church lock-ins, and wilderness retreats. Rose joined their lunch table while I ate PB&Js in the library and read creepypasta off my phone.
I still followed all Rose’s social media accounts. Her life was like a high school soap opera I couldn’t stop watching. Every moment seemed to take place during golden hour at the center of a circle of beaming friends. That’s what made it so weird when Rose reached out to me again, junior year. When she needed to keep a secret from her “real” friends. When she started seeing a guy whose name she wouldn’t tell me.
She just called him “Mr. Moody.”
* * *
The bus jounces me back to the present as we trade the freeway for a narrow dirt access road that sends vibrations up my cramped legs. The trees close in tight around us. I’d love to pull down my window and breathe the forest air, but my hands are still cuffed.
“We’re getting close!” Dave announces cheerily.
I glance up front and my eyes immediately lock with Nobody’s. She’s sitting straight up in her seat and staring at me through the frayed eyeholes of her mask. How long has she been awake?
How long has she been staring at me?
She rises slowly from her seat, the way a snake rises out of a coil. Squaring her broad shoulders, Nobody lurches down the long narrow aisle toward me. Her orange jumpsuit is dark with rusty arcs of blood. One of her long hands, clenched into a fist, is gloved with arterial spray.
Even if I call out for Dave, he won’t make it to me before she does. I’m cornered and pinned in place. I clench my jaw and desperately hold her stare as she lands beside me, looming over me, her eyes just visible through her mask.
Then her arms shoot out over my head and she unlatches my window. It falls open, cool forest air rolling in with a smell like Christmas trees and sunshine.
“Thanks?” I mutter.
Nobody nods, crosses the aisle and lowers the parallel window, then crosses again to the window in front of me. Soon a cross-breeze is sending my hair flying around my face.
“Almost there!” Dave announces. “Here’s the sign for the entrance to camp!”
I twist in my seat and crane my neck as we pass beneath two tall wood posts bracing a weathered wood sign that reads:
WELCOME TO CAMP NARAMAUKE.
Where’s the chain link? The barbed wire? The prison guards?
The walls, for crying out loud? All I see between the trees are blackberry bushes and butterflies.
I scan for a guardhouse or gun tower as we pass under the gate, but instead, as the trees clear, I’m greeted by the most beautiful field I’ve ever seen, which dissolves into sand ringing a lake of shimmering blue water with a weathered dock.
Through the windows on the other side of the bus I clock a low log cabin with a stone chimney, its front steps almost buried in banks of lavender, its roof thick with velvety moss. Next to the cabin is a covered patio, and beyond that I glimpse what must be a fire pit, ringed by sun-bleached logs.
Straight ahead four little cabins peer through the trees, red with faded white trim, their sides spotted with fallen shingles.
We’re going to live in an abandoned sleep-away camp?
Dave parks, then strolls to my seat and unfastens me from my cuffs completely. Confused, I stand and put my hands up for him to cuff again, but he just goes back down to the driver’s seat and throws open the bus doors.
“Come on, you two, time to meet the others,” Dave says, and jogs down the bus steps.
Nobody and I look at each other in surprise and then, warily, follow him outside. The cool wind rushes to meet us with the smell of pine and lavender, sunlight bathing us from the top of a limitless blue sky. I stagger down the gravel path, lovestruck by the world.
As we pass by the log cabin, a curvy woman pops out of a side door with a giant tray of crayons in her arms. She’s mid-thirties, like Dave.
“The new recruits!” She smiles and two symmetrical dimples appear in her plump cheeks, which bolster a pair of red cat-eye glasses. “I’m Kate, and you must be Signal and—”
“Nobody,” Dave interrupts. “She prefers Nobody.”