Paper Aeroplanes & Other Stories

Lost

"I thought you said that you could read a map?" Molly said snatching the map from Caleb's hands.

"I can," he protested.

Molly threw the map back at him, "so where are we then?" she asked.

"Somewhere between I don't know and lost," Caleb said laughing as if it were some kind of joke.

"What if there are like bears and monsters in the woods?" Molly said.

"What are you, five?" Nikki said, "of course, there are no monsters in the woods."

I couldn't help but roll my eyes, how did I end up with this bunch of idiots? What was it that Seb had said to me that convinced me that camping was a good idea?

"How do you know? There might be," Seb laughed. "This has all the hallmarks of every clichéd horror movie that ever existed. Bunch of high school kids, in the middle of nowhere, lost."

"True," Caleb said.

"Oh God, you're so dumb! There's no monsters or killers hiding in the woods," Nikki said.

I agreed with Nikki, at least there was more than one of us with a bit of sense. Why would a killer be hiding out in the woods that sat on the edge of our tiny village? It wasn't as if anything exciting ever happened here, and everyone knew everyone else — an outsider wouldn't go unnoticed.

"I have to agree," Nathan said. "Usually the only monsters are the ones hiding in your head; the ones you try to keep hidden."

"What are you?" Nikki asked him, "this is real life, not Tumblr."

"And the killer usually turns out to be one of us guys. My money's on Caleb; he's the one who got us lost," Nathan said, completely ignoring what Nikki had just said.

"Which one of us do you think it is?" Seb asked me.

What? How did our road trip turn into this? "For God's sake, we are not lost, and we haven't stumbled onto the set of some horror movie."

But it was true what Nathan had said; the scariest monsters were usually the ones we kept hidden.

And as dusk descended, and they continued to laugh, and joke and argue, I figured that we'd soon discover which one of us couldn't be trusted.

Caleb, the one who got us lost with his shitty map reading skills. Molly and her overactive imagination; Nikki, who didn't believe in any of that crap. Maybe it would be Nathan who was convinced that there was always a deeper meaning behind everything. Or Seb, the dumb ass who thought that camping in the woods was a good idea.

There was always the possibility that it could be me — I mean I'd run cross country for the county for the last four years, and been part of the archery club, my grandfather first took me hunting when I was six. I'd been camping before too; I knew these woods like the back of my hand.

The night wouldn't last forever, but for some of them, morning would never come.