I exhale, focusing on the cadence of Winona’s voice, trying to remember how she looked inDracula, what it made me feel. Death shouldn’t be comforting, but I’d suddenly give anything to be locked away in some gothic castle up on a hill overlooking an unassuming Eastern European town. There’s nowhere to disappear to in houses. They have delineated outlines, a limited amount of spots to exist.
This forest feels endless.
Beck emerges from the tent, rustling around to zip it up again.
“Whoa.”
I turn around, the sound of a real voice foreign in my ears. “What?”
Beck presses something between her fingertips, rushing over tothe firepit to show me like she thinks it’ll slip out of her hands.
It’s a button. A generic brown plastic button for a shirt.
Still, my stomach bottoms out at the sight.
“Is this yours?” Beck asks.
I look up at her, not even trying to hide the fear in my eyes. In fact, begging Beck to see it without me having to say. “No, it’s not.”
Natalie also doesn’t have buttons like this on her uniform.
Beck drops down into the other camping chair, eyes fixed on the woods. “Did you hear something last night? Like, someone walking? I thought I dreamt it.”
I turn the button over in my fingertips. “It was real. There was someone outside our tent. Someone with long hair.”
Beck’s hands fly to her mouth. “Fuck. Who?”
Something in me says it probably wasn’t—we’re alive, after all—but the answer still doesn’t feel like it’s someone safe. “I don’t know.” I look back in the direction of the visitors’ center. “We can see who else is registered for the next-door campsites and—”
Someone emerges from a break in the trees to the left of our site. Not where we entered.
The girl I saw briefly in the welcome center yesterday.
She now sports a baseball cap with a logo I don’t recognize, tall and slender in a big T-shirt, leggings, and hiking boots. I focus on the leggings, imagining Paisley out here. How she would’ve been dressed in leggings because that’s how she always looked when we did even slightly active activities. Even if it’s too hot out to wear them.
“Do you two have any flints?” she asks.
Beck and I exchange a look. It’s the morning, and she doesn’t seem to have a weapon. Still, my heartbeat picks up. “No,” Beck says.
She doesn’t move back to wherever she came from. “Matches?Extra lighter? I can’t start my fire.”
“The ranger can help you with that,” I say, feeling like an annoying teacher’s pet.
Beck looks to me, dubiousness at this woman so obvious in the turn of her mouth. “I have some matches in my bag. Hold on.”
Beck looks to me again, as if askingare you okay alone?I nod and she skitters over to the tent. As the sound of our tent zipping and rustling fills the forest air, I look everywhere but at this woman as she joins the area around our firepit. But I can’t just be awkward until Beck returns. We need to ask every person we come across for information.
“Are you on vacation or something?” I ask her.
She sniffs. “Sort of. Van life.”
Somehow, that explains the leggings. “Oh. Got it.”
“Name’s Ivy, by the way. You two alone?” she asks, rubbing her hands together against our nonexistent fire.
“Just us.” I pause. “Are you?”
She sucks air in through her teeth. “Yeah, but I’m not camping in a tent right now.”
