As scared as I was to go into the woods, Troyer actually making a sound blurred that fear for a moment.

"Holy s.h.i.t, you can actually talk?" I said, touching Troyer's shoulder.

"We'll deal with that later," Rawe said, pointing to my tent.

"She hasn't said a word in weeks and you want to deal with it later?" I said. It was possible I was stalling. It was possible it wasn't all about Troyer.

"Unless she wants to talk again, and then she can join you," Rawe said.

"You're punishing her for talking when she never talks? That's so backward," I said.

"You want three nights?" Rawe asked, holding up as many fingers.

I looked at Troyer, her hands still on her mouth. She was crying, maybe for me, but probably because she had finally let words escape. She had finally let words escape and it was because of me, who was such a sucky friend I didn't even use her first name.

I looked over at Ben. His face was angry, undoubtedly because I had messed up his girlfriend's perfect face. I was surprised he hadn't run over and hugged her, but maybe he was afraid if he did he would also end up alone for two nights in the woods.

Two nights alone in the woods? That hadn't really sunk in yet.

"Wick, today," Rawe said.

"This is really happening?" I asked. I felt dizzy, like my head wasn't attached to the rest of my body.

"You have no choice," Rawe said.

Well at least for once someone realized that.

5 f.u.c.king Days to Go I am in the middle of nowhere, the sun so far from going down. Luckily I have my trusty a.s.sessment Diary so I can write it's the next day, even though it isn't.

I want it to be the next day so badly. Bad enough to trick my mind into pretending it is by writing it at the top of this page. That date would mean my first night alone in the woods was over. It would mean that I was only one day away from Rawe coming back for me.

Honestly, I don't know how I am going to survive it. I can't even really think about it without feeling like I'm going to puke, scream, and explode all at the same time. Sure, I had wanted to push Nez. I had pushed Nez, but does that mean I deserve this?

Maybe I will die alone in the woods. Sure, eye-for-an-eye seems fitting, but it doesn't mean I'm not scared s.h.i.tless to face it.

After everyone left me here and moved on to the next camp, I put up my tent with shaky hands. There was no way I was letting it get dark without having a place to crawl into and hide.

Rawe had told me being alone out here would help me, change me, allow me to find strength inside. But so far that was a pile of bulls.h.i.t.

I looked up at the tree above me as I put the tarp down. It was ma.s.sive, its trunk as wide as a kiddie pool. If I wanted to get all nature-y, I could have told myself it looked maternal. I could have told myself it was going to watch over me, but I knew I didn't deserve any of that. I deserved for Mother Nature to f.u.c.k me sideways.

I deserved for the tree to be struck by lightning and fall on me. It seemed like one of the least horrible scenarios that could kill me in the night.

Rawe had left me with a knife so I could hunt if I needed to, but there was no way I was killing anything. I had already made a dead thing. I had paid to make a dead thing.

A thing so small, it was amazing how huge it felt.

Once the tent was up, I got inside. No fire for me. No dinner for me. Safely zipped up in my tent was about all I could handle, even though I knew if a bear came along-h.e.l.l, if a racc.o.o.n came along-it could claw my tent into angry red ribbons.

It was hot in there, the sun baking it like it was a Hot Pocket and I was the filling. I took off my uniform and lay on my sleeping bag in my bra and underwear, red, fire-engine red all around. The red tinged my skin so all of it was the color of the poison ivy sores that were starting to heal. All my skin turned to blood.

Red was what I saw when I closed my eyes at the clinic. When I first closed them and the florescent lights. .h.i.t my lids, I saw red-bright, angry. My mind had swirled with drugs, making the murmured voices around me echo, making the cold hands that touched me turn my skin warm and gooey. As they put a breathing mask on me, the antiseptic smell hit my nose and the red I saw went to pinp.r.i.c.ks-the middle of a bull's-eye surrounded by black that drowned it.

It was all here now, again.

So much red. All the blood I shed, all the beats of the heart I prevented.

Over the last few days, my feelings had lodged loose from where I kept them in a little wooden box in my brain. I had pushed the lid down for weeks. Sat on it, punched it closed when it tried to open, but now I guess the memory was going to come out whenever it felt like it-uncontrollable, drowning me, making it hard for me to breathe.

Maybe death by racc.o.o.n mauling was better.

I closed my eyes, trying to make the red go away. That day at the clinic there had been so much red and so much white and so much black, colors that felt more like suffocating blankets, like knives.

The warm sleeping bag on my skin was the only thing that was keeping me in the now. Barely. It was a sick irony that I was stuck in a tent, but it made sense. The day my brother had driven me to the clinic, we'd lied to our parents and said we were going camping. We'd even brought a tent with us, the old stinky tent that sat in our garage unused for years, used only as evidence for a disgusting lie. We put the tent in the trunk of his car, along with a cooler, a flashlight, and our sleeping bags, hoping that would be enough to make them believe.

When we got back to the house the next morning and my brother pulled the tent out of the trunk, it felt so c.r.a.ppy-a sick, sick lie that began and ended with an un-popped tent.

My brother tried so hard to make it true, even took the time to put the tent up in our backyard to air it out like we really had used it. I remember seeing it through the window at dinner that night-tan like skin, empty like I was. Shaking in the wind like it was laughing at me.

My brother kicked me lightly under the table, his way of telling me to stop staring at it, stop thinking the things you're thinking, like he knew.

He always tried to do the best he could for me, was the only one who ever did, and in this terrible moment back in a tent, I realized that he never had anyone like that. I should have been that person for my brother, but I never could be because I was selfish.

In yet another sick irony, I'm not even that person for myself.

The ache in my lower stomach had started when I woke up at the clinic. Once it went away, once my body had healed, I recreated it by punching myself over and over, so I would never forget. That was what I couldn't tell Troyer when she asked. I hit myself because I needed to remember. I deserved to have to remember.

I closed my eyes and punched myself in the stomach, once, twice, harder, harder, knocking the wind out of me, hoping to make myself pa.s.s out from the pain. Again, again, my knuckles getting sore. Again, my body curling in on itself on the floor of the tent like a flower wilting.

Again, letting out a breath as the red all around me went black.

I woke up in the middle of the night to branches cracking outside the tent. Something was coming. It sounded heavy, lumbering, and moved with that kind of force like it knew what it was looking for. I sat up. This was it. I was going to be eaten by a bear.

Not that I was happy about it, but this was supposed to happen. I kept trying to punish myself with punching, with anger, with the bile that I spewed from my mouth. It wasn't enough. Mauling was what I deserved. Mauling and being eaten alive by a big, hairy, rabid bear.

I sat motionless, silent in the tent. Sucked in a breath and held it. It was so dark. I considered clicking on my flashlight to scare the bear away, but I knew it would make the tent look like an enormous cherry lollipop in the night. Exactly the type of thing a hungry bear who was about to eat someone who deserved it would not be able to resist.

I heard the sound coming closer: branch crack, leaf shuffle, branch crack, leaf shuffle, branch crack. A light flashed on the red canvas of my tent.

I exhaled. Not a bear. Rawe? Probably feeling like s.h.i.t for making me stay out here all alone and too guilty to sleep. So guilty, she had to come all the way back here to see if I was okay.

f.u.c.k her, I wasn't okay.

"Rawe, you scared the s.h.i.t out of me," I yelled from inside the tent. "Way to warn me it was you."

"It's not Rawe," a male voice said.

Ben's voice.

Ben?

Ben had come in the middle of the night into the a.s.s-crack of nowhere to see me. He must have been seeking revenge for Nez. Only anger would push someone who had been ignoring you to walk in the dark-wooded night to find you. Only blind, over-the-top anger. I knew that anger.

"Are you going to come out of your tent or what?" he asked, his flashlight still illuminating it from outside.

"Wasn't planning on it," I said. I was crouched in the middle of it, like a pearl in an oyster. If he lunged for the tent, he probably wouldn't be able to reach me.

"Are you going to let me in?" Ben asked, his flashlight running circles on the red canvas like he was trying to see where I was sitting.

"I definitely wasn't planning on that," I said, my lips on my bare knees. I could hear him standing so close and breathing, could see his shadow. "What do you want?" I waited. It was possible he wasn't angry. If I was angry I would have ripped the tent in half trying to get in. I would have blown it down with hot, stinking air like a fairy-tale wolf.

"I wanted to make sure you were okay," he said.

"I'm f.u.c.king great," I said, my defenses going up without me even being able to stop them.

Was stupid Nez right? We always want what we can't have. Now that Ben was back, wanting me, I was pushing him away again.

"Ca.s.sie, do you want to have a cigarette or not?" he asked impatiently.

I did, desperately, and maybe I kind of wanted to see him, too.

"Fine, come in," I said. It was about as much niceness as I could expel.

Ben unzipped the tent, so loud in the woods it was like someone ripping someone else in half. I felt like I'd been ripped in two; half of me was melting from Ben being so close and half of me was freezing from it.

His flashlight entered the tent before he did. It went from my face, which made me squint, to my chest.

"So I guess you were waiting for me." He laughed, ducking his head as he stepped inside.

I looked down. I was still in my bra and underwear. "Oh, f.u.c.k you, Ben," I said, hiding myself under my sleeping bag. "I was hot, okay?"

"You are hot," he said, his eyebrows going up and a smile quivering playfully on his face.

"I thought you weren't talking to me," I said, my cheeks going as red as the tent as I desperately tried to change the subject.

"I was worried about you." He looked at his hands.

"I don't need you to worry about me," I said, even though his words fell on me like raindrops after a blistering hot day, the kind of rain you open your mouth and try to catch.

"You're lying in the middle of the woods half naked. I'd say you do." He held his flashlight at his waist. I saw he had his backpack with him.

"You running away?" I asked. "If so, I'd keep going. This place sucks."

"I figured if I got caught I could say I was gathering wood, since you guys kind of messed that up today."

"Thanks for the reminder," I said.

"I think you're sitting in the reminder." He laughed.

I looked down. Until that moment, I had forgotten that I was still essentially naked aside from my sleeping bag and I hadn't kicked him out of the tent yet.

I guess he realized it, too. "I'll go outside and wait while you get dressed so we can smoke," he mumbled, zipping up the tent behind him.

I pulled my uniform on in the dark. My brother would have come out here in the middle of the night to make sure I was okay.

And Ben had, too.

He sat against the tree next to my tent. His cigarette was already lit. In the night it was orange, glowing like the way the sun looks in outer s.p.a.ce.

I sat down next to him, clicked on my flashlight, and put my bra-strap-crumpled cigarette in my mouth. He pulled out his lighter and lit it. I sucked in smoke. It seemed like it filled every empty part of me, like air inflating a ball. I looked up. The stars were tiny crystals above the trees, so bright it seemed like they were whistling with heat.

"Is Nez okay?" I asked, exhaling heavily, the smoke gray in the flashlight beam. I could have asked him so many things: Why did you come all the way out here? Why did you risk everything to do it? Why do you give a s.h.i.t about me at all? But I knew I couldn't. Sitting next to him felt like all I could handle right then.

"Do you care?" he asked.

"Not really. I mean, I guess a little," I said.

We sat there for a moment in silence, except for the quiet shush of cigarette paper burning as we inhaled.

"You weren't really with Nez, were you?" I asked.

"With her?" he asked, like he really didn't know what I was talking about.

"Don't make me ask again," I said, looking at my cigarette, staring into the cherry of it like it could hypnotize me into saying the hard things I was starting to be able to say, feel the things I was starting to let myself feel.

"No," he said, the pebbles underneath him crunching as he shifted. "Why? Did she tell you I was?"

"Yeah," I said, feeling so stupid that I'd ever believed her.

"Nez is f.u.c.king crazy," he said, shaking his head, smoke dancing around him.

"You think I am too, don't you?" I asked.

"No," he said.

"Then why were you ignoring me? I know it's because of what happened at the infirmary."

"I-" He paused, took a long drag. "I just don't want to let you down again."

"Again?" I asked. "You're, like, further up my a.s.s than Rawe."

He laughed.

"At least you were," I said, unable to look at him when I did.

"I understand it's not about me," Ben said, his face illuminated in the flashlight beam, his eyes big, like they were the brown paint from two watercolor sets, "but I figure it's got to be another guy." He exhaled smoke.

"You finally guessed right," I said, taking a long drag. "I wasn't abducted by aliens."