AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Before
AFTER GRIFF LEFT, the days went by slowly. Dad took care of things by himself. I holed up in the cabin and read the thriller from the airport (again), and then the only three books Dad owned. Wildlife guides: one for birds; one for plants; and one for snakes, bugs, and anything that wants to bite you, basically.
I wish I had those books now. They had illustrations and photos and careful descriptions so you knew what would kill you and what would make you sick and what would feed you. At least I learned a little. Like about creeping snowberries—and wintergreen and cattails and wild cucumber and several different kinds of berries, some of which would kill you.
There are a lot of plants here I don’t know if I can eat. There’s one that looks like a blueberry, but it doesn’t grow on a bush like I think that blueberries do. I don’t know if I could eat it. Maybe someday I’ll be hungry enough to try. But the berries are gone already. So on the plus side I won’t be tempted to try eating something stupid. On the downside... Well. You know the downside.
On the fourth day in the cabin with Dad, I heard the sound of a plane, and I ran outside, forgetting for a moment how much it hurt to run. I was limping by the time I hit the pebbled path, but it was worth it for the moment I saw that dot of yellow coming close and knew it was Griff. I waved frantically long before he could probably see me, and kept on waving until the plane came down, chasing a ripple across the surface of the water and then making its own.
Griff yelled and waved when he hopped out of the cockpit. He brought the plane up close to shore and loaded up his dinghy with sacks before coming in.
“How you been, Jess?” he asked when he was on dry land.
I didn’t know quite how to answer that. “I’m glad to see you,” I said. “Griff, I need you to take me home.” I said it like it was a done deal.
He looked puzzled and scratched his scalp. “Seems to me you are home, Miss Jess,” he said.
“I mean back to Alaska,” I said. “Or just as far as a bus that’ll take me to Seattle. I can’t stay here, Griff.”
“Well,” he said. He stopped and gave a kind of convulsive nod. “Well, I’ll have to talk to your dad about that, won’t I? But in the meantime, why don’t you take a look at what I brought for you.”
He reached back and picked out a sack that was tied off with a ragged red ribbon. He held the sack out to me with a sheepish smile.
It took some doing to get my fingers between the ribbon and the sack and work it up over the neck of the bag, since the knots had pulled themselves tight. I peered into the sack. Inside was a blue-and-pink backpack with a big cartoon kitten on it.
I looked up at Griff. He was ear-to-ear with one of those big grins, and he waved both his hands at the sack excitedly.
“Go on,” he said. “Open it up. There’s more.”
I pulled the backpack free of the bag. It was a cheap kids’ backpack, the kind that feels light and thin and has a kind of shiny vinyl on the front. Inside was a notebook.
This notebook, in case you couldn’t guess.
It is the most out-of-place thing for miles. I mean, other than me. It’s pink, the same pink as the ribbon on the backpack cat’s head. It’s spiral bound with eighty wide-ruled pages (I write two lines for every rule, to save space, and in the margins, too), and on every left-hand page there’s a watercolor of a dancing pony smiling under the lines, and on the right-hand page there’s a watercolor of the words YOU’RE AWESOME!
The cover has three dancing ponies, so you know it means business.
Also in the bag was a pack of gel pens in rainbow colors. So far I’ve bled the Brr Berry Blue one dry and I’m working on the Vivacious Violet. I figure that’ll last another few pages, and then you get to experience the Princess Pink one. I’ll probably never get to the Oh Wow! Orange. What the hell does Oh Wow! Orange mean? I have no idea.
The fox that haunts my campsite stole the Mmm Mint Green pen a while back, but I found it all chewed up. If I take it apart, I can put the little ink tube in one of the used-up ones, maybe. But like I said, I probably won’t last that long.
I managed a “Thaaanks, Griff,” and didn’t even put a question mark at the end.
“I thought you’d like that better than the old duffel to keep things in,” Griff said.
“That was really thoughtful, Griff,” I said. He looked pleased.
Dad and Bo came out of the woods then, Dad with his rifle in hand. The rifles looked so much alike I couldn’t tell one from the other, but I knew one was for hunting deer and one was for smaller animals, like birds and rabbits. He had a rabbit over his shoulder now, gripping it by its back paws. Its muzzle was rimmed with blood, its eyes wide and empty. I looked away.
We helped Griff haul the gear to the cabin, where it got stuffed in until there was hardly room to walk. The more winter wore on, the more space we’d have because we’d eat it up bit by bit. Bo was especially excited about a bag of doggy jerky treats, even though Dad grumbled about wasting jerky on a dog. I made Bo do tricks. Sit and stay, and shake. He didn’t know shake before, but he caught on quick and soon he was following me around limping with one foot up in the hopes that I’d call him a good boy and give him another piece of jerky. I kept the treats in my pocket and tried not to smirk when my dad glared at Bo for being a suck-up.
“You should put your things in the bag,” Griff said, and I smiled at him blandly. To make him happy, I shifted over a few things. My socks and my underwear and the thriller. The thriller’s about a guy whose wife gets killed and so he goes around shooting people and staring in the mirror thinking about how hard his life is. Then he shoots all the people he wanted to shoot and the book ends.
Not as helpful as knowing what’s edible and what’s poisonous, but to be fair, it has been pretty useful. I’ve been using it as tinder when I don’t have time to go by the birch trees and the grass is wet. I have gotten all the way up to the part where the man—his name is Jack, because all action heroes have names that start with J—finds out that the gangsters he’s been shooting up to that point aren’t actually the men who killed his wife. Then he gets to start shooting polished guys in suits instead. It is a terrible book and I have read it four times now. It’s shorter every time, because I keep burning parts of it, but not any better.
Once I had the kitty bag packed I put it on the bed where Griff could see it through the doorway, propped up. If I wanted him to take me home, I had to make sure he was happy, but I also just liked making him smile.
“You staying long?” I asked Griff.
