You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

“Yes.” I take my time searching for a Band-Aid, smoothing it across my broken skin. Through the transparent bandage, the red of my blood spreads. I add another Band-Aid.

“Can you just hand me the deodorant? I swear, I won’t look at . . . whatever it is you’re doing.”

“In a minute.” I pull my pajamas back up and sink to the floor, rereading Arjun’s texts.

“Are you . . . okay in there?” Tovah asks.

I groan. Embarrassing. “God. Yes. I’m fine,” I say, and finally open the door.

Tovah and I pass each other in the hall. I refuse to meet her eyes, as though, even though it is impossible, she knows what I was doing in there.

Twenty-four

Tovah

OVER AND OVER, WE FAIL miserably at starting a campfire.

“This is probably an embarrassing time to mention I was a Boy Scout,” Zack says. “Though I never did earn my fire-safety badge.”

“Not helping,” Troy says as Lindsay holds up her phone so all of us can see the how-to YouTube video. “We should arrange the logs in a triangle shape, like this. . . .”

The four of us spent the day trekking through old-growth forests, and though Zack and I have had plenty of alone time, I haven’t yet figured out how to talk to him about what Adina said after school the other day. On one hike, Zack pulled me against a tree, leaned in, and whispered into my ear: “Sleeping next to you tonight is gonna be amazing.” That helped me feel significantly better about it all.

Eventually, we borrow a lighter from some nearby campers and get a small fire going. The smoky-wood smell fills the air around us. As the sky turns bruised, then black, we cook hot dogs on skewers and drizzle mustard onto them.

“Anyone know any good ghost stories?” Zack asks, licking mustard off his hot dog before it drips onto his hand.

“No ghost stories, please,” Lindsay says. “I’d like to sleep tonight, thank you very much.”

Troy flicks a pebble onto the fire. “I should have brought my guitar.”

“You can’t play guitar.”

“Yes, I can!”

“You know four chords.”

“And that’s all you need to play a punk-rock song.”

I scoot closer to Zack. “I have an idea. My sister and I used to play this game on long car trips when we were bored. Each person says one sentence, and the goal is to make them into a story.”

“Let’s do it,” Zack says, and we try our hardest to turn the story scary, but Lindsay foils our plans every time it gets creepy.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” Troy begins.

“The wind rustled through the trees,” I say.

“It sounded like the screams of children,” Zack adds.

Lindsay glares at us. “Suddenly, the sky opened up and it started raining gumballs!”

We tell stories until the fires in the distance start going out. Around midnight, Troy pours water on our pit, and Lindsay gently tugs my elbow so she can speak into my ear.

“I don’t know about you,” she whispers as the guys watch the flames die, “but we only brought one sleeping bag.”

My stomach plummets to my toes for more than a few reasons, one of them being that Lindsay and I aren’t close enough to joke like that anymore. She and Troy disappear into their tent, leaving me with Zack and two sleeping bags and an entire night alone.

We change into pajamas separately, first me and then him, and when he opens the tent to let me back in, he’s wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved thermal tee. We zip the tent closed and use our phone screens to guide us into our separate sleeping bags. My heart rate must be well over one hundred bpm. Does he think we’re going to have sex? Was “camping” code for “sex,” like Lindsay insinuated?