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Her eyes light up.
“S’mores it is.” Hoisting my bag on my back, I lead the way to the path.
Without stopping to examine the scenery every two steps, the hike back to the truck takes only a few minutes. Before long, we’re parked at the campsite. As Brendan grabs some firewood, Asra and I search around for sticks to use as kindling.
“How do you know so much about nature?”
I pick up a stick and pause, holding it between my fingers. “Scouts.”
“Wait, you and your brother were in Boy Scouts?”
“My dad had us in it until we made Eagle Scout.”
A laugh escapes her lips. “Brendan is an Eagle Scout?”
I shrug. Brendan definitely doesn’t do his duty to society, nature, or anyone other than himself daily, but we both learned a lot from the experience. Well, I learned a lot while he was off sleeping with the troop leader’s daughter. “It was someplace for us to go after school once a week while our dad was working. Kept us busy and out of trouble.” Mostly out of trouble. Gave us a few tricks to get into more trouble, too.
“What about you? What extracurricular activities did you do growing up?”
This time, it’s her that pauses and twirls a stick for a few moments. “Doctor’s appointments.”
Fuck. I stuck my foot in my mouth, again. It always comes back to that. I pick up a few more sticks and shake them in my grasp. One day, it won’t. One day I will show her that she is more.
After I’ve gathered enough kindling, I head toward the stone fire pit. Laying all the sticks I’ve gathered out, I make quick work of organizing them by size. Smallest to largest, thinnest to thickest. I could go with a classic log cabin setup, or a tepee. Both are effective. Most of my sticks are the same size, though, so I go with the criss-cross technique. As I ball a cluster of dried grass and frayed twigs to create the starter, Asra comes up and dumps her pile near mine.
“You learn that in Scouts?”
I nod, lowering the starter into my little hut. “Wilderness survival skills.”
“Impressive. You learn anything else from those weekly meetings?”
“All types of things.” With a light chuckle, I head to the truck and pull a bag out of the trunk. “Just don’t ask Brendan what all he learned there.”
“What I learned where?”
“Scouts.” Asra smiles up at him while I dig the lighter and some newspaper out of the pack and start our fire.
A wistful smile stretches across Brendan’s face as he dumps the bundle of firewood near the pit and plops down on a log beside Asra. He scratches his chin while his smile grows. “There were some good memories there. If you want,” he nudges her with his shoulder, “I’d be more than willing to show you a thing or two I learned.”
“Yeah, and what is that?”
I pull the skewers out of the bag and extend them to their full size. “Careful what you ask. He spent more of the meetings sneaking around with the troop leader’s daughter than with the actual troop.” Returning to the fire pit, I set to work slowly adding more crumpled newspaper and feeding it more kindling.
“Yeah,” he laughs, “took him about six months to figure out there were two of us.”
“I’ll pass.” Asra shakes her head and stares off at the young flames licking their way up the thin twigs.
Without turning his head, Brendan’s eyes meet mine. His laugh stops hard, disappearing along with his smile. His eyebrows rise. I nod.
Shot down. Another no.
His shoulders sag as he turns toward the fire. While the sky overhead darkens to full nightfall, the flames grow brighter. Pale yellow morphs to orange. Red turns to white as hot, blue flames lick and jump their way over the tight structure. Once the tiny cabin transforms to char, I add a few new logs.
It’s quiet, peaceful despite the seesaw of tension building around us only to ebb like the current. Taking a seat on the long, sideways log keeping Asra sandwiched between us, I watch as the flames grow larger. Biting my bottom lip, I hold in asking the questions that’ve been on my mind all day.
Earlier, before my nap, I read that there are new, experimental drugs, and blood transfusions that can help patients with porphyria. It’s a long shot, and not guaranteed, especially with how different symptoms can be for each person, but it’s a light sticking out of a dark tunnel. A chance, a hope. Yet, I don’t want Asra to think that all I see when I look at her is that flipping disease, that she’s a project I need to fix. I have enough projects on my own. And she’s more than that. She’s a person, whole and beautiful. A light and life so vibrant it’s already caught the attention and desire of both my brother and I.
I take a deep breath and blow it out, the flames flicking with the gentle push of air. They jump and spark into the sky.
