Shadow of the Past

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

I sighed as I grabbed my mini-suitcase. It contained three days' worth of clothing and toiletries.  At first I didn't really want to go on the camping trip anymore since I felt exhausted and just wanted to sleep the whole weekend.  Ashlyn, however, had other plans, and managed to guilt me into going again. 

Ashlyn and I walked together to the main parking lot, which is where Natalie and Priscilla had told us to meet them. Soon we saw a beaten up minivan approach us, and we saw Priscilla in the driver's seat.  She waved enthusiastically at us and indicated towards the minivan for us to get in.  

Once inside the minivan, the girls quickly greeted us before resuming chatter amongst themselves.  I closed my eyes in preparation for the one hour drive to the destination they had chosen as our camping site.

I felt a nudge at my side, causing my eyes to fly open.  I glanced around in apprehension, only to see Ashlyn smiling at me.

"Hey, we're here," she told me.  I glanced around to see the car parked in a small clearing, with the edge of a forest surrounding it ubiquitously.  

"Um, is this where we'll be camping?" I ask, not bothering to hide the apprehension in my voice.  When Ashlyn told me about the camping trip, I had been expecting the kind of camping site that families went to, with designated lots.  What I wasn't anticipating was for us to be camping alone in the middle of nowhere.  The dark, foreboding forest just screamed danger, yet none of the other girls seemed to notice.

"Yeah, isn't it nice?" Priscilla answered for Ashlyn. "I camped here twice when I was younger with my family. Don't worry about getting lost.  There's a small dirt path, the one we drove on to get here, that pretty much leads us anywhere we want to go." She pointed to the ground a few meters away from us, and I saw the path she was talking about.  It acted like a bridge, connecting the southern edge of the forest to the northern edge, with this clearing as a sort of body of water.  

"So are we just going to stay here for three days?" I asked.

"No, silly," Priscilla smiled. "I told you, the path leads to a lot of exciting things.  If we go up to the northern side of the forest, there's a small lake that has fish.  I brought fishing rods.  We can also get our water from there."

"Pardon? We're drinking lake water?" I asked incredulously. "Aren't there toxins in there?"

"I've got it covered. I brought iodine to clean it, and we can boil the water," Priscilla smiled again.  

"But why didn't we just bring bottled water?" 

Ashlyn quickly stepped in. "Because we wanted to embrace nature during our trip.  Just enjoy it, Elise.  Don't worry about anything. It'll be a lot of fun!"  

Embrace nature? Yeah right. I almost snorted.  At least I brought two bottles of my trusty Poland Spring.  I would try to make it last for as long as possible. 

The rest of the afternoon passed by rather uneventfully, with us setting up the tents and making a campfire, which I found rather cliche.  What surprised me was that Natalie had brought a guitar, and she played a bit for us in the evening.  On the inside I was wondering why they could bring a guitar but not bottled water. After eating sandwiches (I was glad they didn't expect us to hunt for our own food) and making s'mores, we all crashed into our tents.  I shared one with Ashlyn, and Priscilla shared with Natalie. 

The next morning we went fishing, but we didn't wind up eating any of the fish.  It was fun to catch a fish, but we tossed them back into the lake afterwards.  I managed to catch one, which I was fairly proud of, until I discovered Priscilla had caught four.