“I don’t have my phone, either!”
“Why not?”
“Because I gave it up, remember? You’re the one who was all holier-than-thou about it! You’re the one who said phones mess with your brain!”
“Since when do you listen to me?”
A terrifying thought dawned, and I answered his question with one of my own. “Are there bears in these woods?” I could hear the panic in my voice, but I couldn’t control it.
“How should I know? You’re the Minnesotan.”
“Oh my God!”
“We’re going to be OK. Come. Sit. Take a breath.”
That… was probably a good idea. We were both sweating from running around trying to get unlost, and my breath was coming in shallow huffs, like it had the other day when I’dspent an hour working on hook jumps with the girls. Then the breathlessness had been in service of something: after we were done, the girls could do hook jumps. Kind of. Most of them. Here I was just panicking, and I had enough sense left to know that panicking wouldn’t help.
Teddy settled himself on a flat rock and patted the space next to him. I sucked in a slow, shaky breath and sat.
He shrugged off the pack he was carrying. “You’ve got water, right?”
“Yes!” I was disproportionately pleased with this morsel of good news. I extracted my water bottle. “This is still about half-full.”
He nodded at my day pack. “Anything else in there?”
I upended the bag. “Wet swimsuit, sunscreen, and—oh! Granola bars. So we won’t starve.”
“And hey, if it comes to it, we both know how to starve, right?” He bumped his shoulder against mine, and I experienced another wave of that odd solidarity, though come to think of it, it was starting to feel less odd.
More importantly, the solidarity was subsuming the panic. I took another deep breath; this one sounded smoother.
“All I have is water,” he said, “but Marion gave me one of the first aid kits to carry.” He broke the seal on the bag and started pulling out items. “Bandages, gauze, tape, scissors.”
“So we can wrap presents,” I said, trying to keep my fear at bay with a joke, and I was pleased when he smiled.
“We have one of those tinfoil survival blankets.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
He made a hum of agreement. “What’s this?” He held up a multicolored cylinder, tilting it so he could read the side. “EpiPen.” He did the same with a bunch of other items.“Painkillers, antihistamines, antibiotic cream.” He kept rummaging. “Damn. I was hoping for flares or something.”
My semisoothed state didn’t last. “It’s a first aid kit, not a survival kit! What good is first aid if we’re not going to survive?” My voice was going shrill, like Minnie Mouse had taken control of it.
“Gretchen, Gretchen. It’s going to be OK.” He held my hand. Like, actually picked up one of my hands and held it in one of his. The resultant shock tipped me out of my panic. “They’re going to notice we’re missing, they’re going to find us, and this is going to make a great story someday. Probably not even that far off. Monday’s sunrise circle.”
“Are you going to come to Monday’s sunrise circle and tell it?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
“You’ve missed all of them so far.”
“I was waiting until I had a really good story to tell.”
I looked down at our joined hands. He wore a bunch of silver rock star rings, and there were the calluses that I’d been finding so… interesting. I kind of felt like rubbing my thumb against one of them would be soothing in the way textures sometime are. It would be hella weird, though.
Well, fuck it. We were lost in the woods, and I was trying to keep my terror at bay. So yeah, like a complete freak, I stroked one of Teddy Knight’s calluses.
There was a thin line of black around the edges of two of his fingernails. “Is that the remnants of nail polish?”
