The Kids Aren't Alright

Chapter 46: Jasper

I wake up in the middle of the night with my hands clenched into fists and sweat pooling across my forehead, vaguely aware of a dream that involved the lake, my prosthetic leg, and the Director screaming at me for something. Maybe for falling into the lake with a metal leg? I remember her shouting the word rust.

So I stare up at the ceiling and wait for my breathing to calm down. It doesn't. Crap. Usually, when this happens to me, I watch M*A*S*H until I'm calm enough to go back to sleep, but there's no television at camp...

Maybe I'll go for a walk. Yeah, a walk would be nice. The fresh Alaskan air always helps clears my head.

It's a chilly night outside and there's a brisk breeze blowing, but I don't mind. It reminds me of home. The wind battles with my hair and whips through my shirt and I trudge over to the bathroom, feeling oddly insubstantial. Time passes strangely, too, as if it's more circular than linear. The fabric of the universe always stretches a little thinner in the shadowy hours between midnight and five.

It takes me a while to realize I'm not on the path anymore. Or, I am on a path, just not the path I'm supposed to be on. After doing a quick three-sixty, I conclude that I'm lost. It's the middle of the night, the only hour of the day when it's dark outside, and I'm lost in the words.

"Well, shit."

The pressure is already starting to build on my chest. I start speed-walking down the path, determined not to think about all the things waiting for me in the darkness— moose, wolves, zombies, zombie-moose... suddenly, my heart starts to jackrabbit, and I break into a run. Shit, shit, shit. How did I get lost? How do I always get lost?

Miraculously, I glimpse light on the trail ahead. I pick up my feet and run, my breath forming pale clouds, until I burst through the tree line and into a small clearing flooded with moonlight.

I screech to a halt. I think I know where I am now— we played Capture the Flag somewhere around here; I can hear the creek gurgling in the distance. Slowly, I pivot around, trying to identify the natural landmarks. The forest looks so alien at night. It feels more like I'm standing on the ocean floor than in the woods of Alaska; like the swaying trees are tendrils of seaweed moving in the current, and the navy-blue sky is the miles of water between me and the surface...

The whole situation is so otherworldly that when I first hear the noise, I'm sure that it was just conjured up by my overly paranoid mind. But then I hear it again. It's a sniffling, sad sort of noise, almost like a muffled sob. It doesn't sound like a noise that a hungry grizzly bear would make (unless the grizzly bear was having, like, a mid-life crisis), which is reassuring, so I stop and listen closer, trying to judge where the sound is coming from. The camper— I'm sure it's a camper now— sounds like they're close by.

I'm already lost, so I throw caution to the wind and get even more lost. Carefully, I step off the trail and pick my way through a copse of whistling pine trees in the direction of the creek. It's a full moon tonight, and the sky is so bright and starry that I don't even have to squint to know that it's Giselle who's crying. She's crouched on the bank of the creek with her bare feet dipped in the water; her pale hair flowing as smoothly over her bare shoulders as the stream rushing over her manicured toes.

It makes little sense for her to be here in the woods; but there she is, defying all the odds in just her pajamas— if sports shorts and a peach-pink tank top count as pajamas. Which reminds me I'm wearing my pajamas, too, if a pair of sweatpants with the slogan "I <3 Canada" printed on the side and a t-shirt with a cartoon T-Rex on it counts as pajamas. And then I step on a twig, and I realize that it doesn't even matter what I'm wearing because Giselle would murder me even if I was wearing a ballroom gown.