Every Little Thing in the World (18 page)

I wished I had Silas's ability, to change something so basic and then continue without a backward glance. My body felt worn out from everything it had done that day, not to mention everything that had occupied my mind, and I fought the urge to let my head fall onto his scratchy shoulder. Then, remembering his big hand on top of my head, I thought,
What the hell
. At the moment, in this world, Silas was like the dad. With the intimacy of night and the campfire, snuggling up to Silas seemed a whole lot more natural and easy than snuggling up to my own father. So I did it. I plopped my head right against his upper arm. He didn't acknowledge the gesture in any way, but he didn't rebuff it either. He just kept playing, my head bumping up and down as he moved his fingers along the fret. Jane seemed completely unbothered, working away at the fire.

Before dinner, Natalia, Mick, and I had gathered around Brendan as usual for a spray from his ultra-deet bottle. But now Mick and Natalia huddled up together on the opposite side of the fire, leaving Brendan to Lori and Meredith. Lori sat on one side of him, chatting away about Uta Hagen and
Method acting, while Meredith slumped on the other side, looking embarrassed and apologetic. Brendan nodded politely, and I wished he would try to engage Lori more. Maybe then she would stay.

Not being a schemer, this didn't occur to Brendan. Instead he excused himself to get his guitar and sat down with me and Silas. Silas showed him some new chords, and the two of them played together for a while. We all sat listening, Meredith and Lori up later than usual, Charlie and Sam smoking their deer moss, which had become a major habit. If the sterilization myth proved true, neither of those two would have any hope of ever reproducing. After a while, Mick and Natalia stood up and walked off into the woods hand in hand. I turned toward Brendan, whose eyes were fixed on the pair, sad but maybe also a little relieved.

I had the weirdest, jumpiest feeling in my gut. I wondered if Natalia would have sex with Mick, and if so, would she say that she had done it for me, to keep him quiet. I couldn't bear to think of how responsible this made me, for so many things, not the least of which was this unfaithfulness to Steve. And even though I
did
feel guilty, it also made me kind of furious that I should be put in that position. I hadn't asked Natalia to come on this trip or flirt with Mick. I hadn't asked her to do one damn thing except keep her mouth shut and help me get an abortion—neither of which she'd been willing to do.

An hour or so later, when Natalia and Mick still hadn't returned, Brendan and I walked together to the lake. We
washed our faces in water that felt much warmer than the night around us. After all, the sun had been shining on its still surface all day.

“Let's go swimming,” Brendan said.

I looked back toward the fire, to where my bikini still hung drying on a low branch. When I looked back to Brendan, he had already pulled off his jacket and shirt.
Why not?
I thought, taking some comfort that even in the strong moonlight I could mostly see only the outline of Brendan's body. Still, I waited until his back was to me—the white glare of his naked butt heading into the water—before I disrobed. Wading into the lake, I placed my hand on my stomach, which still felt flat. I wondered if the pregnancy tests had been wrong. The label claimed the test was 99 percent accurate, but it also said to see a doctor for a blood test. Why would that be necessary if the result was a sure thing? I'd never taken a pregnancy test before. What if I had some weird condition that made my hormones register as pregnant? Or maybe I was just part of that 1 percent, an inaccurate result, a false positive. Never mind what Mick and Natalia might be discussing in the woods, or that if they weren't talking, whatever they did would come back to haunt me. On a night like this, with the stars and moon above me, the peaceful wilderness around me, I felt so young, so untouched and unchanged. How could I feel that way if it weren't just a little bit true?

All I wanted was to float, stare at the sky, doing nothing. Doing nothing, I thought, should only result in nothing. It
shouldn't result in a pregnancy, or a baby nine months down the road. It shouldn't result in anything.

The water became deep quickly, my feet floating above the sandy, pebbled bottom. I couldn't believe that another being swam inside me, the way I now swam in this cool, calm lake. I splashed over to Brendan, who treaded water, his head dry. “Are you okay?” I asked him. I hoped my voice didn't travel over the water, back to the campsite. Brendan, either unaware of the acoustics of water or not caring, replied in a normal voice.

“I'm fine,” he said. “The truth is that thing last night changed my feelings.”

I swam closer. Underwater, our legs moved in and out of each other's. “It was creepy, right?” I said. “Do you think anybody else knows? About the guy he killed?”

“I don't know,” said Brendan. “For all we know, he got in trouble for it. Maybe that's why he's here.”

I pondered this. It seemed unlikely that Mick could be convicted of manslaughter one summer and go camping with normal kids the next.

“I doubt the kids Mr. Campbell brings on this trip are murderers,” I said. “More like drug users and runaways. Don't you think? I mean, he has insurance premiums to pay.”

Brendan nodded. He reached out and placed his hands on my waist, then pulled me closer. My chin brushed against his shoulder. The air on our faces felt cold, but his skin under the warmish water felt smooth and good. I wrapped my arms
around his neck and snuggled into him, tactfully avoiding his penis, which bobbed limp and harmless in the water.

“Anyway,” Brendan said hopefully, “maybe it's not true. It just weirded me out, the
N
word and everything. And how I couldn't be sure it
wasn't
true. It scared me.”

“We could pretend to be a couple,” I said, tasting the drops of lake water on Brendan's ear. “You and me. That way Mick would never guess about you.”

Brendan laughed, as if he wasn't worried enough about Mick to bother with plotting.

“I'm cold,” he said, not agreeing to but not rejecting my plan. “Let's go back in.”

We toweled off onshore. When we returned to the campfire, bundled up but with dripping hair, Mick and Natalia sat on a log, sharing water from her Nalgene bottle.

“Anyone else awake?” I said.

“No,” Mick said. “Just us. Wanna play Truth or Dare?” His voice was a dare itself, full of jeering and menace. I stared at him for a long minute, now accustomed to that spark in his eye—a rabid dog waiting to be baited.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think I had enough of that last night.”

I turned, heading toward the girls' tent. Behind me I could feel Brendan's discomfort, not knowing whether he was welcome to stay with Natalia and Mick.

“Hey,” I said to Brendan, loud enough for the other two to hear. “Want to come in our tent? It looks like Natalia's spending the night with Mick.” I waited for Natalia to protest, but she
didn't say anything. That wide expanse of butterflies opened again in my gut. I couldn't quite decide whether they represented fear for Natalia or a weird kind of jealousy, or simple sadness—that the closer Natalia got to Mick, the further she would get from me.

“Sure,” Brendan said.

I crawled into the tent and over Meredith and Lori, who already snored away. A few minutes later Brendan came in, dragging Mick's crappy sleeping bag. Unfamiliar with our system, he let in a cloud of mosquitoes.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You let the bugs in. Don't you guys have a system in your tent?”

“Yeah,” he whispered back, settling between me and the far wall. “Give me your flashlight.”

He turned it on and shone the light at the wall. As mosquitoes gathered in the beam, we smashed them one by one. As we missed, he moved the beam from side to side. We smashed and missed, smashed and hit, cracking up between every blow.

“Come on, girls,” Lori moaned. “I need to sleep.”

We laughed again, then turned off the light. I moved my sleeping bag closer to Brendan and threw my arm over him—hoping the closeness of my body might make up for his flimsy sleeping bag. Within a few minutes, the zipper to the tent opened, and Natalia crept over Lori (more moaning protests) and Meredith. “Move over,” Natalia whispered, yanking her tangled sleeping bag out from under me.

“What happened?” I whispered, and Natalia whispered back, fierce and offended:

“Nothing. Of course, nothing.”

I listened to the sound of her breathing, almost expecting a sob, or a whimper—some indication of a torn and restless heart. But all I heard was silence, barely even a breath, until she announced, “I love Steve.”

This must have sounded as incriminating to her as it did to me, because after a minute she added, in a more honest voice, “It's weird. He can be so sweet.” Two faces floated in my memory, the two boys. And though one seemed to me distinctly sweet and the other distinctly not, I didn't have to ask Natalia which one she meant.

The next morning, after Brendan left the tent, Natalia stuck her head out and called to Meredith, who sat by the water having her usual dawn communion with the loons. It may have been the first time Natalia had spoken to her directly, and Meredith responded with immediate obedience, trotting back to the tent at the fiercest clip I'd seen from her.

“Listen,” Natalia said, in a low and definite voice. Sleep crusted her lashes, and her face looked puffy and creased, but she couldn't have commanded more authority if she'd been standing at a podium. “I've decided definitely. I'm going home, and so is Sydney.”

“What?” Sunlight cast moving pixels into the tent, blurring everyone's face. I sat up, adrenaline pumping. “I never said that,” I said. “I am not leaving.”

I could feel Natalia go pale, even if I couldn't quite see her.
On the other side of the tent, Meredith gained courage from my defiance. “I'm not leaving either,” she said.

Lori burst into tears. Natalia sighed, exasperated, but her voice was also laced with tears as she issued the request that was clearly a command: “Could you two please leave us alone for a minute?”

Meredith and Lori scuffled out of the tent with no hesitation. I sat up, still zipped into my sleeping bag below the waist.

“I am not asking you,” Natalia said, her voice shaking with the unshed tears. “I am begging you. I need to go home. I need to see Steve. I need to get out of here. My parents won't let me come home if you don't also. They'll think I just want to see Steve.”

“I can't,” I said, surprised at the coldness in my voice. “I can't leave.”

“You won't leave,” Natalia said, “because you're in denial.”

“This isn't about me,” I said. “This is about you wanting to cheat on Steve.” A cloud passed overhead, graying the light around us. Natalia's face looked less wounded than concentrated. I could see the panicked strategizing.

“I had this thought,” she said, “that if you had the baby, I could take it.”

I couldn't help it. I burst out laughing. “You?” I said. “How can you take it any more than I can?”

“I have more money,” she said. And although her statement was obvious, I felt somehow that I'd been punched in the gut. Natalia had everything.
Everything
. She had every guy on the
face of the planet panting after her. She had Steve, and now she had Mick. She had two smiling, glamorous parents who doted on and adored her, and she had a sister who adored her just as much. So what if the family configuration had turned out to be a giant lie? At least the truth of the matter remained: a giant, daily lovefest. While I was threatened with a crappy public school, she would be outfitted in a fur-lined parka and sent off to the slopes in Switzerland.

Natalia had come to the lake on the basis of a simple request, and in the space of three days had been outfitted with the most expensive equipment possible. I had borrowed equipment from the Stone Age and would spend August working on a farm to pay for July. Natalia had everything, and now she wanted my baby, too.

“You don't have any money,” I hissed. “Your parents have the money.” I found myself returning to the name by which I'd always known them—by which I still thought of them. “Your parents aren't going to support you and my baby. How would you live?”

“Oh, so you're worried about its well-being but you don't mind killing it.”

I paused, shaken and confused. Not so much about what Natalia had said but about why it would bother me so much to hand something over that I didn't even want.

“My baby,” Natalia persisted. “You just said those words, my baby.”

“That's because you said it,” I whispered. And then, because
I couldn't think of anything else to say, and I didn't want to continue like this, I said, “I'm not leaving.”

Natalia's tears stood up and made themselves known, pooling in her eyes but not quite falling. “Everything that happens next is your fault,” she said. “It's your fault for not using a condom. It's your fault for getting sent on this stupid trip and not deciding what you're going to do. It's your fault for wanting to kill your own damn baby.”

Her voice had risen to a high, clear crescendo. She escaped the tent noisily, leaving the zipper wide open and flapping. I crawled out behind her tentatively. The cloud still hung over camp, so gray that I could barely make out the smoke wafting from the fire. But I could make out the faces of everyone who sat around waiting for breakfast: Charlie and Sam, playing Spit with a soggy deck of cards; Jane and Lori, locked in their own fierce conversation while Silas and Brendan strummed their guitars, the music loud enough to drown out the words—if not the tone—of our battle; Meredith, miserably chewing on an ancient piece of beef jerky. Only one set of eyes looked at me knowingly, and because they were strangely full of understanding and forgiveness, I walked toward them.