Ethan leads me in front of him by the waist. I feel the heat of his proximity all the way up my back like steam on the surface of a hot spring. “There’s no impending ‘dark side’ here, I promise. Just breathe, Beek.” Then, with a sweet brush of his lips on my shoulder, he shoves me straight into the clearing.
—
Their setup is sparse: a few camp chairs, a couple tiny pop-up tents, and oneNaked and Afraid–style leafy lean-to. There’s a gray latrine, with which I’m avoiding eye contact, and a pile of logs set up around a small smoldering fire pit. It’s not at all the spot I’d imagined for Laurel’s spontaneous nuptials, and Imomentarily wonder whether the purple-haired woman posted up in a collapsible camping chair is even her.
But then Laurel turns toward the source of snapping twigs and chattering voices, and there’s absolutely no doubt that my sister’s at this campsite.
“Thank god!” She stands and throws her canteen to the ground for dramatic effect. “I was starting to think you’d gotten eaten by a bear.”
“There are bears?” I ask.
Petey’s already charging at us. “Char-Char Binks!” He picks me up like I’m nothing and heaves me over the back of his shoulder. “Hey! Hi. You made it! You’re soaking wet.”
“We did. And I am,” I tell his retired-hockey-player butt.
“E, can you believe we’re doing this?” Petey asks Ethan. I’m still in the air, by the way, but no one seems bothered by that detail.
Ethan smiles, clearly over the moon to be in shoulder-socking distance with his best dude-bro. “Took you two long enough.”
“Hey now. Every wrong turn is part of our story,” Petey tells him.
“Put her down, babe. Her face is getting red.” Laurel swats at Petey’s arm and a bit of my thigh. “We need a group picture.”
“Sure thing, babe.” He finally plops me down on the ground and drapes his heavy arm around my neck like a shoulder yoke. “Harlow? Can you…?” He gestures to a young woman with light brown skin who’s reading a worn paperback on a blanket. She pops up, smiling brightly, and jogs over with a DSLR, her long dark braids swaying behind her.
“Say ‘bumblebee,’ ” she instructs, holding up her camera.The four of us repeat it back as the shutter clicks over and over, holding each other so close we can smell each other’s sweat and feel each other’s heartbeats.
The relief of being close like this, the four of us together again, flutters in my belly. Still, something twinges in my chest the way it does whenever we relive the past. Like we’re touching the glass wall between experiencing ourselves as we are and remembering how we were.
“I like that better than ‘cheese’ for relaxing your facial muscles. And you can’t look unhappy while thinking about a bumblebee. It’s scientifically impossible.” The woman lowers the camera and presses her hand to her collarbone with an elegance I find instantly intimidating. I have the posture of someone whose entire life is held together by nail glue and a bullet journal. I may notactuallybullet journal, but I’m self-aware enough to admit that, energetically, I’m someone who’d buy a dot Moleskine in a moment of psychic despair and am thus programmed to find the woman in front of me equal parts terrifying and intoxicating.
“I met Lo and Pete yesterday, and I’m already in love with them. Harlow,” she says, introducing herself. She seems like a Harlow, or at least someone with the beauty to carry off a name that should be reserved for nepo babies and skin-care influencers. “You must be the friends we’re waiting on? Ethan and Charley?”
“Nah,” Petey answers, squeezing us both tighter. “E’s like a brother to me and Charley’s about to be my sister. But the gang’s all here now. So should we do this thing?”
My vision blurs at the phrase “about to be my sister.” My eyes dart around at the group of strangers in search of myactualsister but everything’s happening too fast. “Laurel, canwe have a sec?” I ask her, but she doesn’t answer. She’s too focused on adjusting her braid in the reflection of Petey’s aviators. My insides shake with twenty-four hours of pent-up agita.
“Jesus, Charley. Your teeth are chattering.” Ethan’s hands rub my shoulders.
I add his gesture to the “maybe this won’t be weird” column but then notice something curious.
“Did you just call me ‘Charley’?” I ask through my whole-body shiver.
“It’s your name,” he says dismissively. “Can we get a fire going first? We were in the water, and I think she needs to warm up.”
I want to argue but it wouldn’t do much good since I’m physically shaking. My body needs the entire world to take a breath while I catch up. Then I need a moment alone with Laurel.
The group of strangers works on warming me as one would a hypothermic Victorian child. I repeatedly try to break off from the group with my sister but am thwarted and shuffled back to the fire by the ragtag crew Laurel and Petey have amassed.
There’s Harlow, the adventure photographer who every so often shoots our campsite for her YouTube channel, but also wraps me in the most luxuriously cozy blanket that’s ever brushed against human skin.
There’s Walter, a hedge fund manager from New York who’s sporting a painful-looking sunburn after abruptly quitting his job six days prior to this trip. While meticulously applying a thick layer of topical ointment to his tender skin, he assures us no fewer than twelve times that he’snotin thethroes of a midlife crisis, but it’s a bit “the man doth protest too much” after the third denial. By the sixth, it gets awkward, but somewhere around the ninth time, it becomes the most hilarious inside joke and will make zero sense to Stacy when I repeat it to her back at the office.
Finally, there’s Jonah, the bucket-hatted near–sex interrupter who owns an artisanal pickling company and happens to be ordained.
After an hour, something funny happens. The strangers are no longer strangers but vacation friends—the kind you optimistically add on Instagram only to mute days later when you learn their feed consists of lengthy microwave pizza reviews.
Petey drags Ethan all over the campsite to show off his new camping gear to the tune of “Dude, dude, bro, no, seriously…” and “You have no idea how sick this thing is…” Ethan looks just as enamored of the new toys as Petey does. That wild, pitched-up laugh that only Petey and his particular brand of absurd humor can elicit bounces off the trees.
