Four Weeks Five People Page 6

  “We should get one of those four-seasons painting collections,” Ben suggests. “That’s literary and calming.” “No,” I say immediately. It is the second time I’ve spoken in here. Everyone turns around to look at me and I feel myself flush. “It’s just—There would be four,” I say. //

  “No kidding,” Stella says. “A four-seasons painting collection would have four paintings?” She’s sprawled out on the floor of the cabin, doodling on a sheet of paper. Her nonchalance is suddenly infuriating. “Shut up, Stella,” I say. The panic is rising up in my chest and I can feel my breath slipping away even as I say the words and I squeeze my eyes shut to try to get it to stop, but I can’t; it won’t—that’s never worked before and it doesn’t work now. The images come on too fast, too vivid—four paintings in a row, incomplete, not enough, not okay, not good, not safe, dangerous; four, and I can feel my brain short-circuiting; four, and I am watching the cabin get destroyed in front of my eyes; four, and disaster after disaster plays out in my mind, an uninterrupted sequence of catastrophes, each more real than the last. //

  The roof, caving in after a snowstorm. The walls, blown over by torrential wind. The entire cabin, burning down after a candle falls or some idiot tries to smoke a cigarette indoors. Someone trapped inside, someone crushed by logs, someone burning alive, someone—“Clarisa!” Stella shouts. I open my eyes and realize that I’m shaking. 1, I think automatically, counting breaths, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. //

  “Are you okay?” Ben asks. He moves over next to me and tries to put his arm around me, but I shake him off. I can’t take the contact right now, and I don’t deserve the comfort, anyway. “If we’re going to have paintings, there have to be seven. It’s the only way the cabin can be safe,” I say, avoiding eye contact with everyone. There’s no response. It’s the only thing that’s been suggested that no one argues against. //

  ANDREW

  DINNER IS WHEN everything gets fucked up.

  Breakfast is okay. A bagel is 450 calories—around there, anyway—and I know I need to eat around there on most days, just to stay alive. Eating less than that is how The Incident ended up happening, and—well, I’d obviously like to avoid a repeat of that in the near future.

  Lunch I just throw out, because there are so many people milling around the picnic area that it’s easy to slip to the trash cans unnoticed, and because I’ve already gotten my 450 calories for the day, so what’s the point? Stella gives me a sort of suspicious look as I sit back at the table, plate totally cleared, but what is she going to say? “Go get your lunch out of the trash and eat it”?

  Then dinner comes around, and I discover quickly that I am totally, totally screwed. Jessie spends the entire meal sitting at our table, talking to us about how our day has gone and whether or not we’re enjoying our time at camp so far. I’m so agitated that I barely have the mental focus to listen while she and Stella get into their seventh fight of the day after Stella sarcastically describes Project Safe Space as “fucking delightful, thanks for asking, Jessie.” Will Jessie care if I leave dinner without eating anything? Will Jessie notice if I leave dinner without eating anything? The look she gives me when I try to edge off the table midway through her argument with Stella says pretty convincingly that yes, she would care, and yes, she would notice. So—and what choice do I really have here?—I force myself to eat.

  It’s kind of sad how quickly I stop wanting to get better. At 500 calories, “better” seems like a pretty okay thing to be. But then I get halfway through my spaghetti—+100, +200, +300, +400—and I can practically feel the carbs becoming fat and I’m thinking about all the work I’ve put in to get to where I am now and “better” starts sounding a lot like “disgusting.” It’s hard to want to get better when I’m staring down the calories in my head, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

  I want to go to bed the second Jessie tells us we’re done for the day. If I go to bed, then I can fall asleep, and when I wake up, it’ll be morning. Back to zero. Fresh start, new beginning. But I can’t. I’ve just eaten an entire meal, and if I take off my shirt to go to sleep, I’m going to look down and see my stomach protruding and I just—I can’t. I know what it looks like, and I can’t look at it right now, and I know it’s there, so I can’t not look at it if I do go to bed, so I sit in the lounge and watch Mason and Ben argue over whether or not movies have any value to society. I want to grab my guitar from my room and write music, but everything I write in moments like these is crap because I can’t think straight, and besides, my band fulfilled its quota of sad ballads about hating yourself, like, three EPs ago.

  I know something’s up when Stella joins me on the couch. She’s pretty much refused to talk to anyone the entire day, and I don’t think I look particularly fun while drowning in my own self-hatred.

  “So,” she says. “You’re in a band?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “What’s it called?” She doesn’t sound genuine exactly—more like she’s referencing an inside joke between the two of us that I’m too stupid to even know about, or have somehow forgotten. But she also doesn’t sound completely offended at my existence, either. I take this as a good sign.

  “Um, The Eureka Moment,” I respond. “Because, like, we were all sitting around Aidan’s basement, trying to come up with a band name, and no matter how long we brainstormed, we just couldn’t think of the right one. Like, dude, we were throwing around options like Abyss Gazers and Between Bruises—it was bad. I called Aidan’s suggestion some ‘tween pop bullshit,’ which is pretty much the worst thing you could say to a serious musician. Anyway, before Aidan could punch me, Jake was just, like, ‘Guess we’re still waiting on that eureka moment, huh?’ and everyone realized that that was it, that that was—”

  “That’s cute,” she says, cutting me off.

  Anything else, I probably could have taken. She could have called it weird, or stupid, or even asked if we’re a “real band,” like every adult insisted on doing when we first started. She could have laughed out loud, for all I care. But cute is too much.

  “It’s not cute,” I say. “It’s not cute at all—we spent, like, three hours coming up with it and would’ve spent three more hours coming up with something better if it was something cute. Cute doesn’t sell records unless you’re interested in the Disney Channel crowd, which we’re not—”

  Suddenly, Stella grabs my hand. It takes a couple seconds for the realization to make its way to my brain. “We’re not trying to be the next Jonas Broth—Dude, what are you doing?”

  She pulls her hand away as quickly as she’d grabbed mine.

  “Is everything okay over there?” Jessie says.

  Stella rolls her eyes and gets up off the couch. “Better than okay, Jess,” she says. “Andrew was just telling me about his band. They’re superlegit and hard-core and not at all cute.”

  She’s already turned away from me by the time I realize that she’s slipped a piece of paper into my hand.

  Our room, right after the midnight room check, it says.

  Well, I think. At least that’ll be a few more hours to burn calories.

  * * *

  I went on a camping trip with my band last year for Memorial Day. This was before anyone knew who we were, when we were just a few friends bothering the neighbors at weird hours of the night with music no one really understood. I still have no idea how any of us managed to convince our parents to let us go—especially after Jake’s dad found the giant cooler full of forties—but somehow we did, and then there we were, just the four of us in the middle of the woods with nothing to do other than drink and fuck around on guitars and a bass you couldn’t really hear and a drum box.

  I think that weekend was when all of us realized that this was actually something we could picture ourselves doing together for the rest of our lives. I mean, whatever, that’s really corny. But I just always figured it was one
of those things that would be set to really dramatic, violin-heavy music in a documentary about our band, you know? This one night, we each had, like, three beers, and then started hiking, and then got so, so lost. It was crazy. We all thought we were going to die. We were passing around a notebook writing down goodbyes when Aidan found the map in his backpack and we realized we had walked in a giant circle and were actually five minutes away from the campsite. I blame the beer.

  For some reason, tonight makes me think of that night. It’s weird, because they’re totally different—then, I was with my best friends in the world; tonight, I’m with four people I don’t know at all. But when we walk into Stella’s room and find her and Clarisa dressed in jackets and hiking boots and Stella tells us to “go back and put on real clothes—except you, Mason, you can get hypothermia if you want—because we’re going on a hike,” I’m kind of excited. Stella picks the lock keeping the back door shut from the outside with a hairpin, and then we walk outside and the freedom, the air, the forest—it feels familiar. It doesn’t really matter that Mason won’t shut up and it doesn’t really matter that Stella might be the worst person in the world to follow into the woods in the middle of the night and it doesn’t even matter that we might get caught. I mean, they can’t exactly kick all of us out of camp.

  We follow Stella away from the cabins, toward the trees. By the time we step into the forest, I can hear Clarisa breathing hard. “You all right?” I say.

  “So many trees,” she whispers back, as if there’s someone around to hear us. “I have to count, I can’t count, I have to count, I can’t count, I have to—”

  “Count steps,” I say. “If it takes a safe number of steps to get to where we’re going, then it’s safe, right?”

  “The trees,” she says again, her eyes squeezed shut. “There are too many. I can’t count them—”

  “Look down, Clarisa, look at your feet,” Stella says. “Step forward. Okay, that’s good. That’s one. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. It’s going to be great, I promise.”

  Five minutes later, Stella takes an abrupt turn off the path, straight into a cluster of trees. Another seven steps later and the trees disappear. We’re standing in a grassy clearing that drops off steeply about fifty feet in front of us. There are dead trees lying across the ground, barks peeling. Now that we’re not under the canopy anymore, it’s actually incredibly bright under the light of the moon. It kind of reminds me of a stage—the darkness of the forest behind us, the sudden brightness, the ledge in front. The feeling that the silence is just waiting for you to break it. I wish I had my guitar.

  “Welcome,” Stella announces, “to The Ridge.” She takes a seat on one of the dead trees on the ground.

  “Why are we here?” Mason asks. He walks along the grass suspiciously and looks around.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of having all of our conversations and actions and everything else monitored all the time?” Stella says. “It’s just a place where we can hang out without feeling like we’re criminals. Jesus.”

  “Wow,” Ben says. He takes a seat on another log on the ground. There’s a third right behind me, and the three form a rough triangle in the middle of the clearing. Between them is a makeshift fire pit with bunches of sticks and branches in it. I wonder how long campers have been doing this, and if they’ve ever gotten caught. God, Sam would get a kick out of this. He used to always try to get us to sneak out in the middle of the night to go downtown and do graffiti with him. “We can’t even design our own album art,” I remember Jake saying to him once. “And you want to deface a building?”

  Maybe it’s that it’s the middle of the night, when I’m used to being surrounded by Sam and Jake and Aidan and pages and pages of sheet music and song lyrics, or maybe it’s just that the memory hits me out of nowhere, but all of a sudden I really miss them. My stomach clenches from the sadness, or maybe from hunger. I can never really tell when it’s hunger anymore.

  I take a seat on the third log. Clarisa sits down next to Ben, but I don’t think he notices, because he’s staring at Stella. He’s actually gone from looking mildly impressed to looking like a groupie. I feel kind of embarrassed for him, to be honest.

  “You okay there, Ben?” Stella asks, and Ben turns really, really red.

  “Yeah,” he mutters. “This is just...way cool.”

  He turns even redder.

  “Everyone just ignore me,” he says.

  “You flatter me,” Stella responds.

  “You really do,” Mason says. Apparently he has deemed The Ridge safe, because he swings his legs over Stella’s log, sits down, and throws an arm around her shoulders.

  “Mason,” Stella says flatly.

  “Hmm?”

  “I will light your arm on fire, I swear to God.”

  “Oh, stop,” he says. He’s grinning now and keeps trying to make eye contact with her. “Isn’t this why you dragged us here in the middle of the night?” Mason continues. “For some good old unsupervised bonding, you kno—Jesus, all right!”

  Mason pulls his arm away and almost falls off the log. I don’t blame him, because Stella has actually reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a lighter.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks. “What’s some good old unsupervised bonding without a campfire to bond over?”

  Stella is the type of girl who would probably do graffiti with Sam.

  “Do you think,” Clarisa asks, “that you brought more legal or illegal things to camp?”

  Stella walks to the fire pit in the center of the triangle. “Probably illegal,” she says. “But only because I brought almost every contraband item on the list.”

  “What?” Clarisa says. “But—why would you even need, like, keys? Or mechanical pencils? Did you bring a cell phone? We don’t even get service here—what’s the point?”

  “It’s not about using them,” Stella says. She crouches down to inspect the sticks and branches in the fire pit. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “The principle of what thing?” Clarisa says.

  “Oh, you know. Demanding our rightful liberty from dumb rules. Protesting authority. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  Yep. Would definitely do graffiti with Sam.

  “Anyway,” Stella says. She looks up at us solemnly, flicking the lighter on and off with her thumb. “It’s time to get serious.”

  “But we were having so much fun,” Mason says under his breath. It’s so quiet that everyone can hear, but Stella just keeps talking. I’m starting to get the idea that Stella is only here to do the things that she wants to do at camp, and we’re all just trying not to get yelled at. Or alcohol poisoned. Or set on fire.

  “So, I think most traditions are stupid. And a part of me has always thought that the whole sit around a campfire together camp tradition is particularly stupid. But you know what? I actually had some good times around the campfire at The Ridge last year.”

  “You had a good time doing something?” Mason says. “I find that difficult to picture.”

  “And they even got the firewood together for you guys for the first fire,” Stella continues. “So why the fuck not?”

  “‘Why the eff not,’” Clarisa repeats. “I forgot that was a reason to do things like sneak out in the middle of the night and possibly burn a forest down.”

  “Well, here goes,” Stella says, smirking. She moves the flame to the edge of the firewood and the first branch catches. She lights a couple of other ones around the pit and then retreats back to her log, looking satisfied.

  “I really like fire,” Ben murmurs.

  “Look at that,” Stella says. “An emotionally troubled teenage boy who loses himself in movies and likes fire. You are really outdoing yourself with the originality here, Ben.”

  “I get him,” I say. “It’s—I mean, don’t you think i
t’s...beautiful? In, like, a haunting sort of way?”

  “Look at that,” Stella says again. “An emotionally troubled teenage boy who loses himself in music and really likes fire. Mason? You want in on this?”

  “I’m not emotionally troub—” he starts, but Stella cuts him off.

  “An emotionally troubled teenage boy who loses himself in denial,” she says, “and really likes—”

  “Dude,” I interrupt. I’m a little concerned that one of them is going to push the other one into the fire or throw a flaming stick or something, and then we will all probably not like fire as much, ever again. I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Does anyone else know about this place?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stella says. “Me and a couple group mates from last year found it after sneaking out one night, and we never ran into anyone else. And none of them are back this year, so... I’m Queen of The Ridge.” She waves her hands around her head in a mock celebratory gesture. “Hooray.”

  “This is the most cinematic thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Ben says. “This is it. I’ve peaked.”

  “That’s quite the life you’ve lived, then,” Mason says, and again Ben turns ridiculously red.

  “I never said I thought my life was exciting,” Ben mutters. “I know it’s—”

  “Ben?” Clarisa says, interrupting him midsentence. “Can you stop doing that thing where you write yourself off with every other sentence you say? It’s kind of my thing, and you’re making me uncomfortably aware of how ridiculous it sounds.”

  “Thanks for taking us out here, Stella,” I say before Ben’s face can erupt into flames. “This is amazing. Camp is actually kind of nice.”

  “No, it really isn’t,” Stella says.

  “Yes, it kind of is!” I say. “I mean, the weather’s good, and everyone seems pretty cool, and clearly the rules aren’t that strict, and... I mean, it’s a good story at least.” Maybe not on the same level as doing midnight graffiti with Sam would’ve been, I think to myself, but not everything can be midnight graffiti.