The moon stares down at me from an angle that says daylight’s a long way off. I don’t know how far I ran or which way the camp is. Yelling for my friends and Duke is going to bring a lot of questions about why I took off and what happened to his nose, and where had he and Natalie gone off to in the first place, and why.
I don’t feel like answering those questions right now, maybe not ever, so I pull myself the rest of the way up the ridge and take a look at my foot. It’s smashed to shit, my little toe nearly flat and the two next to it scraped wide-open. It’s dark, and I’m too drunk to feel much, but I know I’ll be hurting in the morning. It’s still bleeding freely, so I pull my shirt off and wrap it around my foot, knowing full well it needs cleaning, but I’m in no shape to do it.
The adrenaline that sent me into a mad dash has faded, and the beer in my bloodstream is reasserting itself, fading the edges of my vision and telling me to lie back down, fast. There’s a stick in my back, and the wind blows a leaf right into my cleavage, frayed edges crackling against my skin as I roll onto my side, exhaustion claiming me. I’ll find everyone in the morning, face Duke and their questions and Natalie’s snide smiles. Right now all I’ve got is self-pity and a throbbing pain in my foot, so I let both take me down into unconsciousness.
Because it’s so much better than being aware right now.
Part Two
When I Was Lost
Day One
When I wake up I know two things.
One is that it’s nearly noon and somebody should’ve come looking for me by now. And the other is that I have really fucked up my foot. In the moonlight all I could make out was the damage done to my toes, but once I unwrap my shirt there’s a lot more on display, and none of it should be visible.
The human foot is a complicated thing, and I know a lot about it after putting hundreds of miles of trail underneath mine. When you hike as much as I do you learn that small parts you didn’t know you had can hurt until it seems like it’s the only bit of you to feel anything at all. There are twenty-six bones in my foot, and right now I can see a handful of them, plain as day, as well as a tendon with a tear that is going to send me into a world of pain as soon as I try to stand up.
But I’ve got to, because the sun is high, and my head is pounding, my lips cracked and begging for a drink. Water is my first priority, and I’m lucky enough to remember splashing through a stream last night before keeling over. I pull myself to the edge of the ridge and spot it, although using the word stream would be an exaggeration.
It’s a trickle of water, runoff from places higher than this one, going in search of something lower. Everything it touches as it heads downward is in there; animal shit and rotting plants, all kinds of things that I don’t want in me but don’t have much choice about right now. If I had my pack, I could drop a purification tablet into my canteen, but I don’t even have my canteen. All I’ve got is my mouth and my hands, and I guess it’s enough because a few minutes later I’m not thirsty anymore. I’m worried about my foot and if I just ingested any bacteria, but mostly the basic part of me needed a drink, so I went and got one.
My next challenge is going to be standing up.
I know it’s going to hurt, know that fresh blood is going to gush and agony will rush up my leg and take over my head in a black wave. But knowing doesn’t make it any easier, and a noise comes out of me no sane person can make, as I lean against a tree for support and force myself to breathe in deep breaths until the spots in my vision start to fade.
So I’m up. Now I’ve got to walk.
My immediate thought is Fuck that. But my other option is to yell for help, and to be honest I’d rather pass out four or five times on the way back to the campsite than admit that I need it. It’s deep inside me, a gene come down from my momma that drove her to do everything alone—even that last thing, which was leaving. That little bit of DNA is mixed in with my dad’s inability to say he was wrong about something, an explosive mix that blew their marriage to bits when I was just a kid.
Put those things together inside of one person instead of facing off and what you get is me. I’m a living example of the old saying “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” because I sure as hell am never wrong and other people just get in my way. Even when my foot is flayed open and I’m alone in the woods, I am not calling for help. I’ll drag myself back to camp on my elbows before I admit I can’t do this on my own.
Thing is, I’m not so sure which way camp is. I was hurting in more ways than one when I ran last night. Drunk, hysterical, injured. I don’t know how far I went or what direction I was pointing, which is an issue. It’s like a math equation—there can only be so many unknown variables before it becomes an unsolvable problem. I can find north easy enough, but I don’t know which way the camp is.
I lean forward, grabbing for the next tree that can hold me and taking a hop, bad foot in the air. The pain is enormous, but I grit my teeth and aim for the next tree until I can scan the far ridge closely.
I’ve never been much of a hunter, but Dad taught me to track so that I’d know what was in the woods with me. Looking for the passage of something as big as an insane teenage girl should be easy, I think, as I look for signs I made last night. There’s a decent furrow where it looks like I went down on my shoulder and slid a good ways toward the stream, and a break in the bracken at the top where I busted through.
Good enough. I take a deep breath, bracing myself for the climb—which is nearly impossible when all I can do is hop. I fall twice, misjudging the reach of my arm and ending up with a face full of leaves, and once nearly losing an eye on a downed limb. Even then I won’t yell for my friends; instead I say Goddammit under my breath and get back up. I figure God can hear me, at least, and should know how I feel about the situation.
By the time I reach the top my foot feels like a lead weight at the end of my leg, and my knee hurts from keeping it bent. There’s sweat running down my face and pooling in my bra, but goose bumps popping underneath it when I pass into the shade. It’s not warm and not cold right now. It’s the perfect temperature to make you unhappy both ways.
But it’s the least of my problems once I reach the top.
I bitch all the time about people who don’t know how to walk in the woods, the ones that break branches and kick up noise, turning over rotting wood with one step and crushing new growth with the next. I don’t want to hike with them, for sure, but I wish in this moment that I was one of them.
Apparently even when I’m a drunk crazy woman I don’t leave a trail.
I swear and slide to the ground, leaning back against a tree for support. I stretch out my knee and take a good look at my foot, trying not to get freaked about the fact that my tendon is taking a good look back at me. It’s not bleeding so much anymore, but it’s starting to swell from hanging at the end of my leg like a pendulum. I take my shirt back off and tie it tight around my foot, ignoring the throb of pain from my own pulse as I do.
I blow out everything I’ve got in one breath, thinking hard. I couldn’t have gone far, but time is slippery when you’re drunk. Conversations that you drift in and out of seem to last for hours instead of only minutes. So I guess it’s possible I ran longer than I think, which is not good. A wave of panic crests in my gut, pushing its way up into my throat and threatening to squeeze tears out of my eyes.