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We stopped to let Gabriel paint the marker.
“They gravel their hiking trails?” April asked, holding the map and a pen. “That’s kind of distracting on a hike.”
“It might just be the start of the trial,” Taylor said. She blew a breath out and shifted some of her long brown hair away from her sharp-featured face. “This might be a two-day job. We’re not covering nearly enough ground, and it’ll get dark soon.”
“We could split up,” April said. “Cover more ground and get more done.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Gabriel said, painting white letters on the wood post. “We’ve only got the one radio.”
“Those with the radio should be the ones going out in the gravel sections,” Taylor said.
“I don’t like the idea of splitting up, though,” Gabriel said. He looked up toward the cloud-covered sky, through the tops of trees. “You could end up on the other side of the camp in the dark.”
“Girls aren’t afraid of the dark,” Taylor said. She looked at me and winked. “Are we?”
I shrugged in reply. I really didn’t want to be far away from our camp in the dark, especially when the temperature was starting to drop. My tongue hadn’t moved the entire time we were out. I wasn’t needed as a directional navigator since we were following the roads.
Taylor lifted a brown eyebrow. “Do you talk at all? I don’t think I’ve heard your voice yet.”
I smothered a frown. I didn’t like getting pressured into talking. I didn’t really have anything to say.
“She talks when she wants to,” Silas said, his voice spooking even me. The others jumped slightly, except for Gabriel, who remained focused on the sign.
“She’s fine,” Gabriel said. “All I’m saying is that it’s getting late. It’s going to get really fucking cold soon. This isn’t an emergency map-making project. We should focus on the paved roads as much as we can and then head back. We can get up early in the morning, and finish out the paved road maps before the others get here.”
“We should have taken a car,” April said. “It would have been faster getting from place to place.”
“Someone can do that tomorrow,” Gabriel said. He stopped his painting, stood up straight, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Take the gravel roads and see how far they stretch out. If we took a car on these main roads, we would have been getting in and out to see what was where.”
April continued walking up the paved road. Taylor hadn’t stopped looking at me since Gabriel had changed the subject.
I looked down at the road and started following April, walking next to Silas.
Taylor lingered back behind us and then came next to me, making me drift even closer to Silas.
When we got to the next sign, April worked with Gabriel to interpret what the sign was trying to say. Then Gabriel painted while April marked the spot on her map.
“So you guys go to high school?” Taylor asked Silas and I as we waited, but she was mostly looking at me.
I turned to Silas. I knew she was just trying to get me to talk, and I didn’t like it if she at all understood I didn’t want to. It felt like almost a challenge.
“Yeah,” he said, and that was all.
Taylor’s eyes shifted slowly from me to Silas and then back to me again. “You, too?”
“Yeah, she does,” Silas said before I even opened my mouth.
I pressed my lips together after that, willing to let Silas answer for me and let him be my voice right now. It wasn’t to be mean or rude, but Taylor made it awkward with her obvious desire to hear from me.
Taylor lifted a brown eyebrow and it disappeared behind her bangs. “What’s it like?”
Had she not gone to high school? Then again, I remembered the boys didn’t go to a normal high school before, either. They’d gone to a regular elementary school, but I didn’t think they’d returned to a normal school until this year. Were all Academy students taken out of public schools?
“It’s shit,” Gabriel said. “We’re in a fucking dump of a school so we can—.”
April smirked and rapped him on the head with the map. “Your momma let you curse like that?”
Gabriel covered his head with an arm, ducking away. “God. So-o-orry. Let me shut my mouth.”
“There’s homework,” Silas said. “You study enough to get the answers right and then forget it again to study another test. Really hard to learn anything when it’s short term memorization.”
April’s smile dissolved. “You really don’t learn anything?”
Gabriel straightened after finishing painting on the post and put the cap on the paint. “It’s stupid. The teachers don’t really care if you learn anything, just as long as you fill in bubbles on tests. If you get something wrong, they don’t go over it and help you. There might be a lecture, but half of the time we’re reading out of those boring textbooks in class. Half of the stuff doesn’t even matter. Will I ever be held at gunpoint and asked the specific date Eisenhower came into office? Probably not. Better they teach me how to look it up on Google.”
“You don’t use a computer?” April asked.
“Fu-nope,” Gabriel said, catching his curse after getting an evil eye from April. “We just read textbooks. But then you’ve got these tests where you have to come up with all the dates and stupid details. Can’t even use your phone; you have to memorize lots of useless material. I’m not saying it isn’t interesting stuff, or it couldn’t be if presented in a good way, but there’s so much important stuff they don’t even bother with. Practical things like how to manage money, do taxes.”
“Balance a checkbook,” Silas said.
“How to change a tire,” Gabriel said. “None of those kids know how. They don’t even train them to how to look it up, or even who you call.”
Taylor slowly shook her head, her eyes wide. “That’s crazy. That’s like basic entry-level Academy stuff.”
I was trying to appear casual, but my heart was beating a mile a minute. I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook. I didn’t know the details of how to change a tire, although I thought I could figure it out...but was I really sure? I rubbed my nose with my gloved hand, as if warming the chill on my skin, but more to hide the blush.
I had a thousand questions—ones I didn’t dare ask—mostly about what Academy classes were like. I wanted to ask Silas or the others after we got away from the girls.
But would we get away from the girls later? Or the other guys, for that matter? Taylor made me nervous. I didn’t get a sense that she was a bad person, but she was overly curious about me, and it made me uncomfortable to have her staring and asking questions.
It suddenly got a lot darker.
Gabriel lifted his head, concentrating on the clouds. “Sun’s down over the trees. We should head back.”
Taylor groaned. “You know what the worst feeling is? A job half done.”
“We’ll do more in the morning,” Gabriel said. “We got a late start today. When’s the initial group meet up?”
“Nine, maybe,” Taylor said. “Maybe earlier.”
“Then we’ll have a few hours if we’re up at dawn,” he said.
Taylor made a pouty face but then reached for the map April held. “If we head this way...” She looked up, glancing up the road we were on, then swiveled her head. “Hang on, I got turned around. Which way is the beach?”
April reached to pull out her phone, as did Silas, but then I pointed east, toward the beach beyond the trees.
Taylor focused on me, her eyebrows raised. “That’s the beach?”
I nodded. I would have said yes, but my tongue felt stuck after not talking for so long. I didn’t mind talking as long as it didn’t feel like a silly challenge.
“Okay,” she said. “I trust you.” She looked at the map again and then pointed to a side road winding eastward. “If we follow that, there’s one more turn and then we should be back at that spot on the beach. And it’s a road we haven’t been d
own yet, so we should be able to map it on the way.”
“Good job, Trouble,” Gabriel said. He came over and wrapped an arm around my shoulders as we walked on. “All this painting and walking makes me want another hot dog. Even cold ones. Something about camping makes me hungry.”
I said nothing but smiled over at Gabriel. As I did, I caught Taylor leaning toward April, talking quietly to her. April’s eyes drifted to me.
I was sure they had as many questions about me as I had about the Academy. This was just one team, too. Soon—tomorrow—I’d face who knew how many more, and many of them would have questions. My spine prickled with the thought of so many questions to answer, the whispers, the eyes on me.
I was an oddball. They’d said it wasn’t normal for a girl to be on a guy team.
If I joined with the guys, I might never escape the whispers and questions for as long as I stayed within the Academy.
I’d once longed to be normal, but now maybe I wouldn’t ever be.
