11 - Going out, coming back

"Care... wake up..."

"I'm awake," she yawns loudly. "Who's ass we kickin'? Aww jeez, it's still dark. Bad luck to get up before the sun's out."

"I was thinking..." I rustle a full backpack and look out the front of the open tent. "Well, we've got a better chance just getting out of here. I've got a bad feeling about this deal, about this whole town. So I'm going."

"...you're going?" Her face darkens, her heart looks ready to spill out.

"We're going. Together. Why stay here one a second longer? Nowhere can be worse than here."

"No shit." She clenches her fists, closes her eyes, breathes deeply. "What's the plan?"

"We pick a direction and walk. It's that simple."

She looks around the tent and scoffs, finds pants and boots. "Where's the booze and food and shit?"

"I've got it here. All the important things." I've got a stuffed olive drab military backpack, old and unwieldy, but the prospect of anywhere but here makes me feel a little lighter.

"Wonderful," she groans, throwing on a hat and coat. "Hey, anything's worth a shot, right?"

I wonder at her as she walks out of the tent, a pint appearing in her hand like a magician's trick. I zip it up behind us and march after her.

"This direction seem good to you?" she asks, suddenly squatting by a tree a few feet away. "Wait, I need to piss."

"I guess. Any direction." I hadn't even thought of which way to start walking.

A waterfall trickles just around her feet. "You have a napkin or something?"

"Uh, maybe," I fumble around my pockets and go to take the bag off my back.

She zips up her pants and slaps the back of my bag. "Don't worry about it."

I stuff a wadded-up napkin back in my pocket. I'd held onto it since we had breakfast at the diner before the party.

"What about the tent?" she looks back mournfully.

"Too heavy. We've got to travel light. We'll find shelter along the way."

She looks at my giant bag and scoffs. An empty pint of vodka appears in her hand and she throws it back, smashing it off a tree, wiping her mouth. "So, up, up and away with our bag of drugs and no money?"

"One foot in front of the other." Seems like something I've heard before. "Eventually we'll be somewhere that isn't here."

"Yeah? What if the world of shit never ends, man?"

"There has to be good somewhere, Care. Stop doubting it just because..."

"Because what?"

"Because it all looks so dismal. Because we don't know anything else. There's oceans in the world, right? You think the oceans are full of psychos that want to kill us?"

"Ever seen an ocean before?" she asks. I can almost imagine one until she interrupts: "Ever heard of sharks... or pirates? They come from the ocean."

"There's always the woods. We've been left alone here...���

"For a few days. That's called dumb luck. There's homeless in the woods all the way into winter. And lions, tigers and bears, oh my!"

I slap my head.

"I'm just saying, there's nothing out there. There's only us. Only this." She kicks up some leaves.

"Fuck that, there's a whole world out there, and one shit town doesn't change that. A million shit towns don't change that. There are good people out there, like us."

"Yeah, like us." Care laughs. "Speaking of, how many good people you remember meeting? Ever?"

My brain hurts. Static.

"That's... that's what I was saying. Good people are out there, somewhere else, not here."

"Yep, Dreamland's just a long, long walk aways," she sighs, kicking up leaves with every step.

"What about that girl from the party?"

"Who? Oh, Jackie?" She twists her lip in that puffed-out way she does when she thinks or wants to pretend she's thinking, pops a cigarette in. "I guess she was okay. But if there's one lesson I've learned, it's never doubt that someone could screw you over."

My eyes look her over in the waking morning light. Her thin legs stomp through the forest with worker's boots, the rest of her wrapped up in a quilted black jacket and a warm cap. She walks like a child, looks too young to smoke, but puffs away, a little cockeyed, with a look in her face like a much older soul, weary and wary of the world she knows. She notices me and blushes.

"Whatcha starin' at?"

A portrait of humanity. "You smoke too many of those," I say.

She gives me the finger with a half-grin, then tosses the smoke at me. "Nice catch. If you want one, just ask for it." She lights another, naturally.

My foot hits something solid, pulls it from beneath the foliage. The smoldering cig falls out of my mouth in surprise and lands on a grotesque, sprawled pile of black feathers and bones.

"A raven?" I wonder aloud.

"Nah, it's just a bird," Care says, tapping it with her boot. "Wasting a cig ain't gonna bring him back. Guess it'd be neat to watch him burn."

"We're not burning it!" We just stand there looking at it for a while. "I wonder how it died."

"Probably same way we're gonna. Eaten by some animal. Ten-foot tall bear probably whacked it out of the air for shits and giggles." She swipes right by my face with the ciggie in her claw. A little ash hits my eye.

"Hey!"

"Waste of a smoke, that's for sure. Even I wouldn't smoke that now. Hell, he looks cute with it. Have another!" She drags hers to the filter and smooshes it into the bird's eye socket.

"Jesus, you're shameless."

"What's he want, a funeral? I'll pour out a little for him too." She unscrews another pint, but I stop her and lead it up to her mouth. She swigs and smiles big. "Take a joke, little fucker isn't getting free booze too. Let's go."

We tread on. I can't help looking back at once.

"You should eat," she says after a few minutes.

"I should-?" I sigh and reach into my pocket, biting down a candy bar unhungrily and tossing the wrapper.

"Littering, goody girl?" she fake-gasps. "I must be rubbing off on you." She tries to hand me the pint. I wave it away.

"Only thing you've impressed on me is a deeper hate for this town."

"Ohh," she appears beside, smelling of smoke and rubbing alcohol, poking my breast. "Is that all I've im-pressed you with deeply?"

My vision flashes black and I smack her hand away. She looks wounded, then scoffs. "Relax," she says. "I'm only playing."

"We can play later when we're out of here."

"Oo-oh, can we? Then let's go!" She bumps shoulders with me and my vision flashes again. The forest is dark and light reversed, white outlines on pure black. The tree branches are full of spindly figures of lines and smoke, hanging like monkeys or crouching like hunters. Behind the trunks they peek and whisper among themselves in tongues like clamoring winds, their great, round, hollow eyes twisting and staring. One smiles. They all smile.

An acrid, hot breath on the back of my neck. I swing about. It's Care, my hand half an inch from chopping her in the jugular. She looks shocked. I grab the cigarette from her mouth.

"Just kidding," I lie.

She chuckles nervously, taking a shot and lighting up another smoke.

"Know which way we're going?" she yawns.

"I... you just, uh, use the sun to know where you're going." I look up and try to orient, but it's all pale soft light peeking through the forest as if from every direction, and only the wind moves in the near-leafless trees. I think and pray it's just us out here now.

"Well, let's hope that sun comes out soon," she says unhopefully.

But it stays hidden behind a dismal sky. The walk is long, cold, and grey.

Care screams and jumps back, hairs standing up on the back of her neck. "The-hell-what-is-that!"

In front of her, that black corpse with the orange cigarette end stuffed in its weathered grey skull, its wings still spread like a warning.

"No fucking way."

"That can't be right. I was taking us in a straight line." Was it the flashes? Did I lose track of time and space too?

"Kade..." She picks up the half-smoked cigarette I'd dropped on the bird and tosses it away. "This thing's still burning."

"What's it been, a half-hour? Forty minutes?"

"Longer than that. You must've taken us in a circle," she shrugs.

"A perfect circle? There's no way."

"I'd hardly call this perfect, hun." A breath of smoke. "Didn't you get a compass from the store?"

I tear the pack off and dig for the compass. She looks on almost disinterestedly.

"Here it is... let's say we go straight west." A clear map appears in my mind, but just as quickly, breaks into shaking puzzle pieces overlapping and crossing each other until it's only chaos.

"Ohio! the land of new beginnings." Her eyes roll.

"You're welcome to turn around, but I'm not going to."

That catches her attention. She moves beside me, watching the forest floor.

"You know, I got away from Matty one time and came out here, walking through the woods. I must've been- I don't know- twelve?"

"Yeah?" I'm curious, but I can't stop watching ahead, trying to keep a straight path, referencing the sun hiding behind thorny branches and the overcast blanket.

"Yeah. I walked and walked forever. It got dark, but it was summer, so it was warm. I kept walking and walking. I lied down and fell asleep on the dirt. I woke up and the sun was shining right over my head, so I got up and kept going."

She looked at me as if for something. "And then?"

"Then I woke up again, and this time I was back at Matty's. He must've kicked me a bunch while I was passed out, but after I woke up... well, he really went off."

"I'm sorry." I swallow. "It won't happen like that again."

"Yeah... not like that, for sure." She chews her lip and scratches the sides of her thumbs till they're raw, then starts playing with a knife. I want to reassure her, but I don't know what else to say. We walk for thirty, forty minutes.

I look up at the bare trees throwing claws into the sky, raking the grey light. It looks like the end of forever. I trip over a root and the compass flies from my hand into the endless bed of dirt-stained leaves. I crawl ahead, grasping for it, until my hand is filled with a bundle of prongs and cold, matted velvet. I hold it before my face, smoke whisping from the cigarette butt twisted into the skeletal bird's eye socket.

Care gasps and falls on her knees beside me.

"It's just like before," she pants. She shakes her head and holds her chest as if in pain. "Walk and walk forever... but there's no way out."

"Care! That's impossible!"

She shuffles ahead and lifts up the bird carcass, hands shaking. "THEN TELL ME WHAT THIS IS! EXPLAIN IT TO ME!"

She rips it in pieces, tosses them at me and runs back, sobbing. The skeletal wings lie crossed in an X, a mark to go no farther.

"Care!" I race after her, hauling the heavy bag, barely keeping on my feet. I follow her elfin form, propelling around brambles and gnarled trunks by her hands, till she disappears, a silhouette sliver dancing like a blade through the sunbeams between the trees.

I follow her trail. Fear strikes me each time it grows lighter, each time she's out of view. Just when I think I'm lost and the glare blinds me, I find a mark of her footsteps again in a scattering of leaves, the hard dirt forest floor peeking out underneath like the bedrock of the whole world.

In a clearing ahead she lies curled up. My heart sinks, thinking her dead. Just as quickly, the sun falls all over and around her in rays, and she looks cozy and warm. She stirs as I kneel down beside her.

"Aauuhhh..." she yawns widely, stretching her fists like puppy paws and blinking sleepy eyes. "I feel like I slept forever."

"You..." I look around. The day is brighter, later. I'm exhausted. I don't know what to say. "Let's go back home."

"Home... sounds nice... What about the deal with those kids? The X."

"What's the point if we can't even walk out of town?..."

She gets up lazily and walks away muttering, "Money fixes everything."

I hope she's right, following slowly behind her toward the skatepark drug deal.

I feel defeated.