He Started It

‘Not while we were eating.’

‘But we ate out of cans. It couldn’t have been –’

‘The cocoa,’ he said. ‘I bet it was in the cocoa.’

Possible. Maybe. ‘Wouldn’t she have been drugged, too?’ I said. She had her own cup. Grandpa had retied her hands in the front so she could hold it by herself.

‘Seems like it.’ Grandpa walked back over to the where the campfire was. We sat on rocks around it the night before, and he knelt down near where Nikki had been sitting. ‘There’s melted marshmallows here,’ he said.

My brain was slow and heavy, so it took me a minute to understand. ‘She poured it out?’

‘Yeah. She did.’

‘It was me.’

The tiny voice came from behind us.

Portia.

She was sitting on her sleeping bag, holding her stomach like it hurt.

‘What was you?’ I said.

‘It was sugar. That’s what Nikki said it was. She had a pouch of it in her bag, she told me to get it out and sprinkle it on the cocoa.’

Now I remembered. Portia had put the marshmallows on top of our cocoa. And the pills. Nikki had them all crushed and ready to go, like she had been waiting for the right moment.

‘She said it was powdered sugar,’ Portia said, her bottom lip trembling. ‘She told me it would make the cocoa even better.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’

She cried anyway.

So Nikki had really done it. She had managed to drug everyone – even me – and just like that, our story became stereotypical. Again.

There’s always one of these nights, sometimes more than one. Happens every time. Someone is drunk or drugged or so sleep deprived they can’t remember what happened. You know how that story goes because it’s become a standard, a law, written in stone. Just like the missing girl.

That’s how it went with us. We were all swept away by a good cup of hot cocoa, and no one could remember a thing. Nikki drugged us and ran.

No. She escaped.

I can say that now. She was a teenager who had been tied up by her grandfather and brother, so of course she escaped. At the time, it felt like she had abandoned me. I couldn’t believe she didn’t wake me up to go with her.

After I stayed by her side, even going along with her lies about Grandpa touching Portia, she left me behind.

Eddie burst through the trees, all out of breath. ‘I ran all the way to the car. Nothing.’ He bent over at the waist and put his hands on his knees. His face was pale. Sickly.

‘She drugged us,’ I said.

He shook his head, looking like he was about to puke. ‘She’s a bitch. She’s always been a bitch.’ Eddie stood up and ran back into the woods.

Portia lay down and closed her eyes. ‘Sick,’ she said.

‘I know,’ Grandpa said. ‘I’ll get you some bread.’

Nikki had done a lot to Portia on the trip. She had used her as a pawn, a weapon, an ally – whatever suited her needs at the time. But Grandpa had tied her up, for Christ’s sake. Nikki had to do what she did.

Grandpa was the asshole. Everything Nikki did was a reaction to that.

I grabbed my bag to see if she had taken her stuff. She had given me some of her makeup because I had helped her put it on while her hands were tied, and it was still in the bag.

I also had the camera – the first one, the one we used to take pictures of ourselves. Eddie still had the second; it never left his pocket.

One thing had been added to my bag: Nikki’s rainbow shirt. The one I always wanted was now mine, yet I wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t want it like that.

Nikki had also taken something. What I didn’t have were my ashtrays, the two I had stolen from the motels, the two I had kept when Grandpa took the others. Both were gone, along with the shirt I had wrapped around them.

The button is gone.

The old one with the tarnished gold color, it’s gone. At first, I think that I’m just missing it, that it must be here, but it isn’t. I realized this as we repacked our bags before heading out into the woods, to the campsite, and now it’s all I can think about. That damn button appeared and then disappeared without any explanation.

Felix doesn’t know anything about it, so if he did go through my bag I doubt he’d take an old button. He’d take the cigarettes instead – or at least wonder why I have them.

It would be easy to blame Portia since we shared a room so many times, but Eddie had access as well. There were plenty of times I left my bag in the car to use the restroom or go into the store. Anyone could have taken it.

I think about this as we walk single file into the woods, even as I continue to argue with Felix. ‘You bought way too much stuff for one night.’

‘You buy too much stuff all the time,’ he says, half turning around to wink at me.

Now that we have our camping equipment, he’s back to the pretend fighting, and he’s really bad at it. I still wink back.

‘Time out,’ Portia yells from behind us. ‘Hold the bickering until we get there.’

I don’t say anything else. All I hear now is the clink of the bottles in Portia’s bag.

The walk isn’t a long one. One minute we’re in the middle of the woods, and the next we’re in a small clearing in front of the water. This isn’t one of the formal campgrounds, so there are no cabins, outhouses, or anything that looks like civilization.

The memories come back. I can see exactly how it looked then: where each of our sleeping bags were located, and off to the right, the woods where I last saw Nikki.

It makes me feel like crying all over again.

‘Well, this is nice,’ Felix says, walking around like he’s checking out another motel room. ‘I don’t see any bear droppings or anything.’

Lovely.

Portia looks at him like he’s crazy.

‘You didn’t look for bear droppings last time?’ Felix says.

‘No,’ Eddie says.

Felix whistles. He’s good at it. ‘You guys are so lucky to be alive.’

‘All right,’ Eddie says, cutting off anyone who thinks about continuing this conversation. ‘Here’s how we’re going to set this up.’

He barks out orders about where everything should go, then Felix contradicts him, and I feel like hitting both of them with my can of bug spray.

Portia motions for me to follow her into the woods. She grabs one of her orange juice bottles and brings it along. We go just far enough that we hear them talk but they can’t hear us whisper.

‘Bears?’ she says, unscrewing the top. She has premixed vodka with the orange juice. The smell hits me from a foot away.

‘He’s just being … Felix. That’s how he is.’

‘Huh.’ She takes a swig of the drink and nods. ‘How long have you been with him?’

‘So many years.’

‘Huh.’

‘You don’t like him?’ I say.

‘Oh, he’s fine, I guess. A little quirky, maybe.’

Quirky. Yes, I would say he’s quirky. And he can be uptight, finicky, and completely overorganized. And when you least expect it, he’ll slam his fist on the dashboard. Maybe into other things, too. Maybe I’ve just never seen it.