What She Found in the Woods

‘What direction do you think we’re going in?’ he asks.

‘Up?’ I say, hazarding a guess. Bo laughs.

‘I meant compass direction, but up is right.’ He looks over at me, and his face turns serious. ‘If you get confused, remember that town is down.’

‘Town is down,’ I repeat.

‘There are rises in between, but in general, if you’re heading down the mountain, you’re headed back home.’

‘Town is down,’ I say again, trying to seal it in my leaky memory. ‘If the zombie apocalypse happens, I’m with you,’ I tell him.

He gives me a strange look. ‘OK,’ he says, even though it’s clear he has no context for my pop-culture reference. He gets quiet and uncomfortable, focusing on the disconnect between us again now that I’ve gone and underlined it in red.

‘That was a dumb joke,’ I say.

He smiles at me to indicate that he’s letting it go, but I can tell it sticks with him.

I look down. ‘It’s a bad habit of mine. When I feel like someone might be better than me, I try to be funny to prove I’m clever.’

‘I’m not better than you,’ he says. ‘And I don’t know if that joke was funny or not, but I think you’re clever.’

‘I used to think so, too.’

My lie worked too well.

I used to think there was no such thing. How can ‘too well’ mean awful instead of great? But it can.

For three months, our Cultural Outreach Club did exactly what we needed it to. We had an iron-clad reason to get out of any meeting or social function that we knew would bore the crap out us. The Five of us did whatever we wanted and we still looked like saints.

If we got ‘caught’ by someone who saw us at one party when we were supposed to be at another, all we said was that the goat-blood ceremony or whatever it was ended early because, duh, they didn’t actually kill a goat any more in modern voodoo.

Or whatever. We could seriously make up the most outlandish circumstance and say, ‘That’s how they do it in the Amazon jungle,’ and nobody would blink an eye. Or we’d say something like, ‘We stayed until they insisted we drink our own pee to prove our purity. I mean, I support anyone’s right to their own culture, but I’m not drinking my own pee.’

And everyone bought it – all of our outlier friends, all of our teachers, our parents, everyone. At the centre of it all was Ali Bhatti, our alibi. She was the invisible sixth member of our group and the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card.

‘Dad, I’m sorry, but it’s Maha Shivaratri. I have to go to Ali’s and stay up all night to celebrate the god Shiva.’

‘Mom, I can’t. They’re trying to marry Ali off to this savage. We’re staying with her all weekend and barricading her in her room so her parents can’t do it.’

We got hounded by other students who followed my Cultural Outreach blog and wanted to join. We got barraged with emails from kids in other schools who wanted to set up satellite clubs. But that’s not when the trouble started. In fact, that’s when the real fun began. We were the most popular girls pretty much ever, and we had more power over the student body than the Dean.

I got creative with the blog. I did research into oppressed cultures and wrote scathing posts about fear and genocide and the importance of celebrating our differences. I ‘learned’ some deep moral truth every week from some fake refugee I had ‘met’. Shit, I used to make Jinka cry with some of the horrific backstories I fabricated. My un-journal was a hit.

All that praise made me bold. I wrote a five-part series following one imaginary immigrant boy from Guatemala up through Mexico and into Texas. Jinka was hooked on that story. She had me print out hard copies of it so she could put her head in my lap as she read. She devoured the heartbreaking finale with the lights low and a bottle of pilfered wine split between us. That night, the line that separates friends from more than friends blurred a little. The next day, it was forgotten. Most girls experiment eventually, we told ourselves, and nothing really happened anyway.

Then our club got nominated for a humanitarian award. An actual adult humanitarian award that some people spend a lifetime trying to win. So we did the only thing we could. We stuck together and went along with it.

This is how I know I’m a sick person: Even though I was exploiting every culture I could read about on Wikipedia and telling lie after lie to glorify myself, from my rich, white, privileged point of view, I was convinced I was doing good because I was ‘raising awareness’.

I actually believed I deserved to win that award.

26 JULY. AFTERNOON

We arrive at Bo’s home after a very long hike almost completely uphill. I’m exhausted. This is, hands down, the most effort I’ve ever put into a guy.

The woods turn into something like a trail, which suddenly crests and opens into a bowl-shaped clearing. I look around the open space. The ground is kept free of brush, and a large fire pit dominates the centre. There are seven canvas teepees set around the fire pit in a circle. Where there is the most light piercing through the canopy above, there is a fifteen-foot-long greenhouse that arches over the ground in a half-cylinder of plastic and metal ribbing.

‘We make our medicines in there,’ Bo says, gesturing to the teepees. ‘But we live up there.’ Bo points up into the trees. I follow his gesture.