Silas
“Is that legal?”Kat is asking. It’s an hour later and we’re all at a table together: Kat next to me, Wyatt on her other side, Levi, Javier, and Gideon across the table from us.
“Of course it’s legal,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t build a whole cabin if it weren’t legal.”
“I feel like you might, actually,” she says, and everyone else at the table exchanges some looks.
“We have a lease,” I say, pretending to be offended. “For ten years, from the Forest Service. It took months of detangling red tape to make it all legal, thanks very much.”
“You know, the rest of us never saw that paperwork,” Wyatt says, leaning around Kat.
“I watched you sign it,” Gideon says.
“You did?”
“Did I sign it?” asks Javier, idly swirling the last of his soda in the bottom of his glass.
“Yes,” says Gideon. “You, me, Wyatt, and Silas all signed leases. And, frankly, we did the Forest Service a favor because we had to dismantle the old cabins that were there before we built ours.”
“And that was legal, too?” Kat asks.
“They weren’t historical or anything,” I say, and can’t help grinning at her.
“That’s not what the lady asked,” says Wyatt.
“They were a hazard,” I say.
“So you tore down cabins and built your own without telling the Forest Service?” Kat asks, still teasing me. “I can’t believe you didn’t get a permit.”
“You can’t?” says Wyatt.
“They’re up to code,” I tell her. “Totally safe, well-maintained. Much better than the crumbling fire traps that used to be there.”
“Technically,” Levi says, and everyone turns to look at him. “Those cabins weren’t there. The paperwork never mentioned them. Maybe it got lost, who knows. The files on Wildwood were a mess.”
It’s true. When I started looking into Camp Wildwood—a small clearing on the side of a mountain in the national forest with a handful of old, rundown cabins—it was almost impossible to find anything about it, almost like it didn’t exist. Levi offered to help, and eventually we wound up in a dusty basement in Roanoke, going through faded carbon copy forms, though they only said that First Baptist of Sprucevale had had a lease on the camp that ended in 1972. It took a while to convince anyone that it was worth the time and effort to write up more lease paperwork, but we did, and now it’s ours. More or less.
“So it’s semi-legal,” Kat says.
“It’s plenty legal,” I say, and take another drink from my beer.
Next to me, Kat laughs, and I can’t help but grin at her.
We talk like that for a while. Kat’s mostly quiet—she’s Kat—but she’s relaxed and happy and even joins in teasing me every so often, which everyone else loves. I get a lot of looks, and I don’t care.
“I like her,” Levi says a while later. We’re still at the table while Kat is playing shuffleboard with the other three, standing next to Wyatt at one end of the long table while Gideon and Javier are on the other side.
“Yeah?”
“No, I said that to get your hopes up,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Fuck off.”
“Yes, I like her,” he says. “She gives you a hard time.”
I start laughing, and that gets a big, honest grin out of Levi, the rarest of all facial expressions.
“That’s your criteria?”