“Quit staring at me,” Reyva growled. “I hate failing with an audience.”
“Sorry,” Claire said.
“Go do something useful. Like fetch firewood. This isgoingto work.”
Mumbling another apology, Claire helped Mariana haul more sticks and fallen logs to the shore. Every time she darted in between the trees, she tried to look as deep into the woods as she could. She could see a reasonable distance before the overlapping trunks blocked her view, but that didn’t preclude a lurker behind a tree or a rock. These Maine woods were littered with fallenlogs that had never been cleared and huge boulders left behind by glaciers. Plenty of places to hide.
Stop it, she told herself.
“At home, you can actually see more than a few feet without a tree getting in the way,” Mariana said as she tugged a fallen branch out of a snarl of brambles. “I think all the greenery is making me claustrophobic.”
“Where’s home?” Claire asked, her eyes still on the woods.
She paused, oddly, which made Claire glance over at her. “LA,” Mariana said. “Specifically, Santa Monica, the part where the beach parties start on Wednesday and pretty much don’t stop until Tuesday. I’m not used to the quiet here.”
Claire, on the other hand, wished it weren’t so loud: the wind, the birds, the squirrels. It all made it impossible to tell if they were truly alone. “You like it there?”Hey, look at me having a normal conversation, she thought.
“Sunshine. Earthquakes. Mudslides. Raging wildfires. Excellent burritos. Constant selfies. It has it all. I never want to leave. Plus all our family is there. I’m an only child, but I have a plethora of aunts, uncles, and cousins. We’ve been there for literally generations, and no one’severmoved out of California.”
There was a wistfulness to Mariana’s voice that made Claire wonder if Mariana was worried she’d never see them again. She thought about reassuring her, but wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t sound fake. “You’re close with your family?”
“We’re all close—really close. Everyone’s in everyone else’s business all the time, you know? Which can be great, except when it’s not. When I came out... a lot of my cousins werereally supportive. One aunt was not. She made her opinion known, loudly, as if my very existence was a personal disappointment to her.” Mariana fell silent for a moment, then said brightly, “One out of a gazillion isn’t bad. Could’ve been a lot worse. Having the rest of them around me...” Her voice broke. She swallowed and finished with: “Yeah, I wish they were here. Not my aunt, obviously. Or my parents. But my cousins. Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents. I wish they were all here.”
Claire didn’t have any family besides her parents. But she would have given a lot to have had them here. Or better still, to have never come at all. They’d been so insistent, though—so very certain that this would be a great experience for her and would fix all of her personality flaws, or whatever.
Nope to that, she thought.
She wondered what it would be like to have people around you who supported you, exactly as you were. Did Mariana even know how rare that was?I think she does, Claire thought.Why else would she have sounded so sad? She misses them.
Claire wanted to ask her more: What was it like having a big family, especially one that so obviously loved her as she was, not as she could be? And why did she deliberately exclude her parents when she listed the relatives she missed? But if she asked, then Mariana might expect Claire to open up and talk about herself.... Yeah, she didn’t want to do that.
With one more look at Mariana, Claire returned to Reyva. “Any luck?”
“Does it look like I’ve had any luck?”
Wordlessly, Claire handed her a new rock—a white one.Quartz, she guessed. She wished she’d memorized the relative hardness of rocks. Geology suddenly felt a lot more important than high school science had implied. It had been more focused on volcanos and plate tectonics.
Depositing an armful of sticks next to the boulders, Mariana asked, “Anything?” She was back to sounding cheerful again, no hint of tears in her voice anymore. She was good at hiding herself, Claire thought.
Reyva shot her a glare. “Yeah, I got it blazing, but then decided to stomp it out because it was too hot.”
“Keep trying,” Mariana said encouragingly. “You’re doing great.”
Another glare, but Reyva tried again, even harder. On the third strike, a tiny spark jumped from the quartz and sizzled in the air.
Mariana cheered and—
Crash!
Reyva jumped to her feet. She was yanked down by Mariana. Crouching, Claire felt her heart beating so hard that it almost hurt. It sounded as if something—or someone—had felled a tree. A scream built in her throat but she kept it down. The three of them huddled by the rock, waiting for someone to burst out from the forest.
But no one did.
The trees continued to sway in the wind.
“Broken branch falling?” Reyva offered.
“Squirrel?” Mariana suggested.
