The Truth About Fragile Things Read online

  He paused to meet my eyes. “I just had to see if you were joking,” he said. Then he stepped out and slammed his door.

  I scrambled after him. “I’m not joking. They’ll have bathrooms like this, right?” The wooden building with its signs depicting local wildlife and the wide, smooth sidewalks gave me hope.

  He opened the trunk and started rummaging through our things. “Megan, let’s get all this stuff organized. We can leave most of it until tonight. Today we’re just doing the three mile loop up to the falls. We don’t need to carry it until we go to the campsite.” Just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer me at all, he picked up a roll of toilet paper. “Here’s your bathroom. Be thankful I brought that.”

  “Can’t I just use this bathroom?” I asked in desperation.

  “Sure. Be my guest. And when you have to go in the middle of the night, camp is a half mile that way. But there’s a path and you can use my flashlight.”

  My stomach did a graceful dive, twisting and falling all at once. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Go brush your hair and take a whiz or whatever you need to do and then we’re leaving. If Charlotte got up on stage and Bryon saved your life, you can water a bush.” He turned back to the supplies, his face hard with concentration.

  I used the restroom and met them outside, hoping my tennis shoes from freshman gym were up for the task. Phillip handed me my backpack. “I took out all the clothes and things for bedtime. All we need now is food and water. I have first aid.”

  Just when I was feeling extremely brave a young couple with two toddlers passed us. The little girl danced in circles in a sequined tutu. Phillip raised his eyebrows as they disappeared down the trail. “Looks like a brutal hike, doesn’t it?”

  “Shut up. And you,” I pointed to Charlotte. “Text your mother and tell her we made it.”

  While she pulled out her phone Phillip consulted the map. I took a few steps in the same direction as the young family, but Phillip grabbed me from behind and jerked me to a stop. “We’re doing the full loop,” he said like that meant something and veered right.

  “You mean the hard way.”

  “I mean the right way.” He gave me a pat that was half friendly, half mocking and led the way onto the packed earth trail. He stopped me a few times to point out edible plants and the best bark to burn but everything looked the same to me. Charlotte, however, was right at home. She kept running her fingers along the tree trunks in what looked like a greeting. Her small nose wrinkled in the wind and only after watching her sniff the air did I realize how dry and clean it smelled. The path climbed upward. The summit of the first hill emptied us into a clearing of low, flat boulders, half submerged in the grass like natural benches. We could look over the entire valley of trees, scattered with the first yellows and reds of fall.

  Charlotte sat down on a large stone and Phillip joined her, edging in close until their shoulders met. “Do you think he would have liked this?” he asked.

  “I wish I knew.” Charlotte scanned the landscape, the strange, rocky hilltop. “I can’t imagine who wouldn’t.”

  Phillip gave us a few minutes to sit and drink water before he helped her to her feet. “Well you ain’t seen nothing yet. This is just the appetizer.”

  The trail thinned to a dirt path, outlined by thick underbrush and shaded by the high, bending trees, before it disappeared entirely and only red markers led the way. The world turned green and orange as the canopy of leaves blocked out the blue October sky. Every few steps a small bird would flutter from its perch and let out a sharp song. It was difficult to spot them because their flying bodies blended into the falling leaves that tumbled through the branches every time the sky breathed. “Bird berries,” Phillip told me, pointing out the tiny red berries that dotted the forest floor.

  “Are they safe?” I asked.

  “Are you a bird?” Charlotte teased.

  One hiker in full gear passed us going the opposite direction. He watched us with calculating eyes and I suddenly imagined a newspaper article with the headline “Three Teenagers Murdered on Mountain.” But he looked too professionally dressed to be a homicidal recluse. He stopped and turned around, looking at our feet. “Be careful on the rocks ahead. They’re pretty loose right now.” He addressed Phillip, the only one of us who looked like he knew what he was doing. “The falls look good today, but there’s no one around, so be careful.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Phillip said, with a friendly, one fingered salute.

  That was the last person we saw on the trail. I was about to ask Phillip what rocks the man was talking about but at the top of the hill the vegetation stopped and I saw them.

  “We lost the trail,” Charlotte said, frozen. She searched the ground, but the entire hillside was broken stone. “There’s no marker.”

  “This is the trail,” Phillip reassured us. “We go straight up and over. The path picks up at the top.” He took Charlotte’s hand and braced his feet, letting her lean on him as she scrambled up the shallow slope. After she got to sturdier ground, he released her and did the same for me.

  “Use your hands,” Phillip ordered me when I got too far for his grip. “Just bend over and pull with your hands.”

  It never felt dangerous, just slow. I had to pick spots for my feet, calculating the best path. At the top I sat down and waited for Phillip, admiring the look of concentration in his eyes beneath his tangled hair. I almost told him he looked handsome, the same way I would blurt it out at school, but whenever I actually mean it I lose the ability to say it. He smiled when he reached us, his chest filling with air and puffing it out again. “You like it, don’t you?”

  “I like it.” I tightened my shoelace so I had an excuse to hide my face. “How far until the waterfall?”

  “You tell me.” Phillip wiped his upper lip with his sleeve and stood up, his ears tilted toward the sky. “What do you hear?”

  Without the trees at the top of the rocky hill the wind whistled past the boulders, slipping between them with weak, high-pitched wails. The tall grass that grew stubbornly between the rocks bent with the gusts.

  “Is that the water?” Charlotte asked, wonder dawning on her face.

  “Can you hear it?” Phillip stepped over to her, bent his head in the same direction she did.

  “You hear water?” I asked. I closed my eyes, then tightened them, willed my ears to pick up on something other than the wind.

  “Sounds like…can’t you hear that, Megan?” Charlotte’s voice wandered to me in the darkness of my shut eyes.

  I opened them, defeated. “I don’t hear it. Are we close?”

  “We’re close,” Phillip promised and checked his watch. “It’s almost three o’clock. We can stay until four and then we need to get back and pick a campsite. Maybe get some sleep before the meteor shower starts.”

  He led us to where the thin, almost invisible, path reappeared in the shrubs and we climbed, sometimes down, sometimes up. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the way the trail cut through the woods. After a few minutes I heard the low hiss of water. Charlotte was the first one to catch a glimpse through the branches. Phillip broke from the trampled path, led us down a steep hillside coated in slick, fallen leaves. We all had wide mud stains streaking up our shoes and across our shins and thighs before we stood beside dark grey boulders halfway up the falls. The water swept from the top, spilled into a deep pool, and then cascaded to the river below.

  Charlotte shot out in front of us, scrambled to the top of one of the boulders and disappeared down the other side.

  “Charlotte!” I scolded when I lost sight of her.

  Phillip stopped me with his hand on my wrist. “She’s playing. Doesn’t this,” he looked over the secluded spot, the diving water, the trembling trees, “make you want to play?”

  His voice jumped with excitement and he slid down the wet embankment with a loud whoop to meet Charlotte at the bottom.

  “Don’t go in,” I called to b
oth of them. Their voices, fast and bright, clashed with the quiet air. I hugged my arms around my chest, squeezed the part of me that was starting to ache. When I watched the water spill over the top I focused on a single piece of it, followed it down until it crashed into the white foam below. The unexpected sadness pushed me back a step and I sat down on the warm ground. Charlotte and Phillip were too happy and separate to realize I wasn’t with them. I looked up to the ceiling of twisting leaves.

  “Why did you give up all this for me?” I asked Bryon in a voice quieter than a whisper. Then I lay back and closed my eyes, not willing to hear his answer.

  “Megan,” Phillip yelled over the sound of rolling water. I looked up and found him balanced on a boulder in the middle of the river. “Come on.” He waved me over, refused to give me room to worry or sulk.

  “It’s cold. It’s so, so cold,” Charlotte yelped and I scurried down the bank to meet her at the water’s edge. Her hiking boots were unlaced and abandoned in the mud. Her bare feet and ankles shone like white fish under the surface. “Get in,” she urged me.

  I’m glad she asked. I’m not sure I would have ventured in on my own, but an invitation was almost as good as a script. I could see the stage directions: Megan takes off her shoes and splashes into the river. Megan has fun.

  I set my shoes next to hers, ignored Phillip who flipped his wet hand toward us, sending cold droplets across my neck, and stepped in. The cold burned and crawled up my ankles, ate in past the first layers of skin, until it stabbed my muscles and bones. I hopped from foot to foot, pulling them from the icy water in turn. Phillip laughed. Charlotte skipped to the middle of the river, pulled up her jeans and let the water wash over her calves. She slipped on the slimy bottom and caught herself with her hands, burying her arms in the water past her elbows. “You get used to it,” she lied.

  “If you fall in we have a three-mile hike back to the car and dry clothes.” I shivered and watched Phil meet her, steady her, tuck her little arm around his as he helped her across the river. On the opposite side they grabbed onto a tree and pulled themselves up a steep embankment, hanging from the branches over the pebbled sand of the bank. They didn’t see me. Phillip pretended to push Charlotte from the branch and then caught her, pulled her into the safety of his grip, left his muscular arm braced around her back. And she forgot to glare. Forgot her sarcasm and her snark. Forgot me.

  I felt cold in a new way. The lonely wind blew through my ribs, arctic and relentless. I touched the water with my finger, slipped to the protection of a misshapen boulder and crawled into its lap, leaned my head against its stony chest, curled my legs against myself, and let the rocks hide me while Phil and Charlotte played. I saw the script in my mind, but I refused to perform because it said: Megan is confused. Megan cries.

  CHAPTER 19

  Phillip warned us we would run out of time and made us leave the falls, forging our way through the thorn bushes back to the wider path. With the sound of water still rumbling at the bottom of our ears we came to a massive rock that apparently decided a million years ago to split in two pieces. Our trail ran straight through the narrow gap, each towering piece of rock looking like it needed only the smallest excuse to crash to the ground.

  “Devil’s Toll Booth,” Phillip announced. “Take my picture.”

  He stood in the middle, his arms extended toward each side of the cliff, his face twisted in pretended exertion as if he were holding them up. “Charlotte,” he grunted. “Help me hold it.” She took her cue and posed beside him, her hair spilled over his chest as she leaned her head back and grimaced. I snapped the picture, my fingers still cold from the icy water. At least that’s what I told myself.

  When the looping trail emptied us back into the parking lot with cars and occasional people I felt a jolt of surprise, embarrassment. As if I’d been playing the part of the hiker and now we had ducked backstage, three teenage kids imagining that they are camping. That it mattered.

  I stopped in the restroom, ignored the grimy mirror, refused my reflection. When I composed myself enough to join them again I found Phillip and Charlotte loaded with gear. Phillip had a huge backpack with a metal frame that held all of our mutual supplies: a pot, lantern, tarps, and the hammocks. Charlotte and I each grabbed our backpacks and sleeping bags and one side of the small cooler. The melting ice sloshed as we made our way to the campsite. Phillip nodded and said hello to fellow campers already milling around their tents and led us to a solitary corner hidden in a thicket of trees.

  “How will we see the sky?” I asked, my eyes scanning the dense branches, looking for spaces of blue.

  “We will set up everything here like a base camp. We’ll take our sleeping bags up to the summit and watch there. Start gathering branches on the ground,” he instructed us. Charlotte and I dropped our things and followed orders while Phillip paced our campsite, studying I don’t know what before he smoothed out a tarp and laid out supplies.

  It took him only a few minutes to start a fire in an ashy circle of stones. He snapped his fingers at us, pointing to a spot of the forest covered in sticks. “Get those. Get all of those.” When the pile of wood looked unnecessarily big, he sent us back. “More. Twice as much.” I came back with bundles; he came back with mountains of dead branches. He balanced them around the flames like a teepee, feeding the hungry fire. The gray smoke rose toward the sky where the sun was sinking and growing orange.

  Phillip handed out sandwiches, and paced between the trees, gauging distances with squinted eyes. He tied one end of a hammock to a tree before attaching the other side to another thick trunk, working on a knot that made him grunt and his arms strain. He tested it gingerly before stretching out, wiggling inside the netted ropes. “Charlotte, try this one,” he told her. She pushed him out of the way and let the hammock cradle her as she leaned into it. It swung beneath her weight and she laughed in the gathering dusk.

  I took a bite of my sandwich, watching as Phillip started putting up the second hammock. I moaned after I swallowed and called out to Phil. “This is really good,” I said, tearing off another bite.

  He chuckled. “Trail tongue.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “You have trail tongue. Nothing will ever taste as good to you as camp food. Just a fact.”

  “Why?” I asked in wonder, peeking into the bread for secret ingredients. I only found turkey and a slice of white cheese.

  “Because you’re hungry.” Phillip smiled and his eyes lingered on my face in a way that reminded me of how he looked at me at school. The way that made the world feel right.

  “Well it’s really good,” I repeated. I looked at the second hammock and for the first time wondered which he would sleep in. My stomach twisted with hunger as I finished my sandwich. He threw me a second one before I could ask. For the third hammock he paced dramatically across the campsite to the far corner, half hidden by trees. “Is this okay for the boy’s bedroom, Megan? Is it far enough from the girls for your virtue?”

  I just glared while Charlotte laughed. “Keep walking. I’ll tell you when it’s far enough,” I shot back.

  Instead he tied it while he hummed to himself. When all three hammocks were slung in place he opened a can of baked beans and poured the cold lump into the pot. He nestled it down into the fire and stirred it with a wooden spoon.

  “For one of my badges I did an overnight with nothing except a sleeping bag and a knife.” His voice was low over the pop of the burning wood. Charlotte joined us, held her hands over the flames. She had pulled her hair into a messy bun on the back of her head and tied a bandanna to keep her long bangs out of her face. She still had on her muddy clothes and smelled like creek water but when she turned away from the fire to avoid the blowing smoke the light coated her soft cheek, ran along her ear, dripped down her glowing neck. Phillip stopped talking and stared. I couldn’t blame him. I did the same thing. In the raw, in the wild, she was strange and beautiful. I tried to turn my eyes backward, see what I looked like
by the campfire, but I could only imagine myself tall, dark, shadowed, dirty, lost. Most of all, lost.

  Phillip stirred the beans absently, and despite my best efforts to think it was disgusting to eat beans from a can that were flavored with the ashes that settled in the pot, they smelled amazing. While they warmed I called my parents. I imagined our living room, the tweed sofa where they thought I was sitting, and told my parents that rehearsal had gone well and I was watching a movie and going to bed early. How strange to hear their voices blended with the trill of hidden insects all around us. The lie crawled down my back, like an itch I couldn’t reach and I was grateful to hang up.

  “Nice and hot,” Phil announced and handed us each a spoon and metal bowl filled with beans.

  “Five star,” Charlotte teased.

  We huddled around the fire, and my hunger surprised me. After two sandwiches I thought I was full, but the hot food found parts of my stomach I didn’t know I had and filled the hollows. I ate three beans at a time, crushing them on the roof of my mouth, swallowing slowly. When I looked up I realized Charlotte was staring at me, the same way I’d stared at her in the firelight.

  “What?” I asked, half worried a bug was crawling up me.

  She shook her head, the movement swinging one half of her face into the shadows and then the other.

  “Do you want to try to sleep before the meteor shower starts?” Phillip asked, eying the hammocks.

  “I can’t sleep this early,” I told him. But as soon as we finished our food and rinsed out our bowls at the spigot down the path I remembered my muscles. They didn’t hurt as much as they yawned. They let out a little whine of protest and then refused to move. I pulled out my sleeping bag and burrowed into my hammock, hearing the ropes creak against the dry tree. The only thing I missed was a pillow. The sleeping bag had a little padding at the head, but it wasn’t the same as my down pillow, fluffy and dense and familiar.