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9

This Is Not the Hotel

Lore knew how to sleep angry. Some people did not. Cedar certainly didn’t—you had a fight with Cedar, or gods, even a mild disagreement, they could not go to sleep until it was resolved. Lore was no such animal. The world was fucked up, everything was fundamentally broken, and she was upset all of the time . As such, it was easy for her to simply disassociate—she disentangled herself from the world, freeing herself from its foul roots and grasping claws before falling into dreamless sleep like a vampire when the sun rose.

Being creative was the same way for her. She knew way too many artists and writers and game designers who couldn’t do shit if they were feeling anxious, so when the world or simply their small lives got them down, they were stuck in that place. Unable to do shit. Unable to make shit. Not Lore. For her, creativity was a door. She could simply walk right through it, close it behind her, and be in a different room, a room where her only impetus was to make, design, create, iterate, reiterate.

Point was, after her fight with Hamish—which she told herself was not a fight so much as it was just her challenging him, shaking him up, trying to find the Hamish That Once Was—she put on music ( Love’s Secret Domain by Coil) and fell right the fuck to sleep.

She awoke when she felt the car slow. Idly, she reached up, eyes still closed, and turned off her headphones. The music and the hiss of the noise canceling ended, and the sounds of the world rushed back in—

Immediately, she heard a voice. Owen. “What is this? Where are we?”

At that, she drew a deep breath and sat up.

The Escalade had pulled off into a small gravel lot off what looked to be a local two-lane highway. Beyond it, a forest—dark evergreens and the brighter green of spring leaves popping. Not many cars going past.

“This is not the hotel,” she muttered.

“We are here,” was all Roman said, killing the Cadillac’s engine.

“It’s Nick!” Hamish said, happy as a Labrador retriever—and just as eager, since his next move was to pop open the door and bolt out.

Sure enough, out the open door, Lore saw him.

Nick Lobell.

Still rangy and lean, not tall exactly, but long like a fox. Older now, though. As they all were, she supposed. Still the fox, but one that had gone through too many rough fencerows, that had survived too many scrapes but had lost some fur along the way. But he still had that same chaotic spark—as if he was still the same kid who stole his neighbor’s lawn mower and drove it nine miles to the mall, then left it there and took a bus home. Everything for shits and giggles.

Lore shrugged at Owen, who shrugged back.

“I guess we get out?” he said.

“Are we picking him up?” she asked.

But there was no answer forthcoming for either of them. Guess we’re doing this, she thought, not wanting to get out—in part because that meant seeing Nick, and seeing Nick meant acknowledging what was happening to Nick. But the ride was the ride and they were buckled into it.

She got out of the car.

Owen followed.

“The Covenant!” Nick shouted at them from over Hamish’s shoulder, because he was already in a Hamish bear hug, lifted high, his legs dangling, his chin resting on the other man’s chest. He cackled and oof ed as Hamish set him down, then slinked his way over to the other two, smirking.

“Hey, Nick,” Owen said. “It’s good to see you.” They hugged, too. But Nick and Owen, they hadn’t always had the tightest relationship, Lore knew. Every friendship group like theirs had little dyads and triads and shifting alliances—but those two, they had never been close. Nick scared Owen, she’d always thought.

“Nailbiter,” Nick said—his nickname for Owen, given Owen’s predilection for chewing his fingers down to the bloody quick. “I knew I could guilt your ass into coming.”

Then Nick turned his attention to Lore.

“Holy fuck,” he said. “Look at you. I think you’re the coolest person I know, Lauren .” She was about to protest but he cut her off, laughing. “Sorry, sorry. Lore . I was just fucking with you in the email, man, I’ll call you whatever you wanna be called. I’m just glad you could get away from your wildly successful life to come hang out with us plebes and proles.”

Next to her, Owen seemed to…bristle a little. Didn’t he? Did she imagine that? Maybe not bristle. But twitch, at least.

“Hey, you know—the Covenant,” she said, though it felt false on her tongue—not quite a lie, but closer to a sales pitch.

“Of course we’d show up,” Owen said. “We all knew we had to. For you.” At that, it was Lore’s turn to bristle at what felt like competitiveness from Owen. Nick wasn’t talking to you, Zuikas .

She was about to say something—say what, she honestly didn’t even know, something about his cancer, maybe, about how sad she was, about how fucked up it was—when she heard the sounds of bags hitting gravel behind them. Roman was getting out their luggage. Here. In the middle of Assfuck, New Hampshire?

Jesus, were they even in New Hampshire?

“Hey!” she barked to Roman, who did not seem to acknowledge her yelling. She turned back to Nick. “Hey, uhh? What’s the deal here?”

But Nick was Nick. He just grinned like the same guy he always was, the kind of guy who would sneak acid into your iced tea. (Which he had done.) (More than once.) “Jeez, I dunno, Lore,” he said, but it was an act, just him being a cheeky dick.

“The fuck?” she said, then hurried over to Roman as he pulled out the last bag—hers, the backpack. She caught it before it hit the ground and tried to put it back into the SUV, but he was already closing it up. “Fuck, what, no. What. Hey—hey, driver guy, I don’t want to stay here.”

Roman shrugged. “This is destination.”

Then he headed back to the driver’s side.

Lore felt someone next to her. Owen, who seemed to be catching up to the situation and realizing what was up. “Lore, hey—wait. Are those our bags?”

“Uh, yeah, Zuikas. Yeah.”

“Why are they on the ground?”

She mimicked Roman’s Russian accent: “ This is destination .” Then she dropped the backpack on the ground with a thud before fetching her phone out of her pocket. Hamish and Nick were walking up at this point.

Owen asked, “Nick, what is going on? This isn’t a hotel—”

“It’s cool,” Nick said. A very Nick answer. He loved knowing more than everyone. Loved holding all the cards. Lore, meanwhile, was pulling up the Lyft app with her phone. Aaaaaand, no signal. They were in a dead zone. She lifted her phone up in the air and waved it around as if she could somehow access a cloud of 5G just out of reach.

Roman drove off in the Escalade. Gravel kicked up behind his tires, and the SUV hit the highway and then was gone.

Lore watched it go as irritation flooded her veins.

“What the bedazzled fuck, Nick,” she said.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Hamish said. Just cool with it. That, too, was very Hamish—the old Hamish, anyway. Small favor, that.

“This is the woods,” Owen said. Like, duh, but he was right. Ahead of them was just trees. Trees here, trees there, a ribbon of cracked asphalt between them. “Where are we supposed to go?”

“I can’t even get a signal,” Lore complained, holding up her phone as if to demonstrate, Look, no signal, nada, nothing .

Nick just laughed it all off. “Jesus, you people. This isn’t fucking Deliverance . It’s New Hampshire. Okay, fine, New Hampshire gets a little weird out here, but whatever. I’m just saying trust me, okay?”

“Famous last words,” Lore said. “Remember when he said we were going to see Luscious Jackson at the Troc?”

Hamish filled in the rest: “And instead, we helped him buy weed from some freak show in Glenside?”

Nick shrugged. “Whatever. I needed you guys for backup, and it was a dicey situation. It was fun! The weed was good.”

“It was cut with something,” Hamish muttered.

“Like I said, it was good. Anyway, whatever. Relax. We’re going camping, you dicks.”

“The fuck we are,” Lore said.

She expected Owen to jump in and agree. Even in college, he was a sensitive sleeper—needed the room dark, a noise machine, all that crap. But instead he said, “Hey, guys, if Nick said we’re camping…”

Coward, she thought.

“We didn’t sign up for this,” Lore said.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Listen to you. You show up here not ready for an adventure? Come on. We used to camp all the time. It was our thing .”

“Not because we liked camping!” Lore said, protesting. “We camped because we needed a place to go and drink beer, smoke up, and trip balls, and we had no money but we all had camping gear and, and—” And you remember what happened the last time we went camping, she wanted to say, but she undertook the considerable effort necessary to hold her tongue and choke those words back down into her roiling belly. “We’re adults now. We don’t have to camp. Owen. Jesus. Come on. Back me up.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t hate a hotel,” Owen said, shrugging.

Hamish erupted.

“You fucking assholes, Nick has cancer!”

And then, quiet.

No cars on the road, no wind, no birds, nothing but the distant roar of a plane somewhere. The air was still and filled with the tragedy of reality.

“I mean, fuck,” Hamish said, now more quiet. “Nick asked us here, and we’re here. It’s not going to kill us to hang out with him on his terms. Besides, he’s right. We used to camp out all the time. It could be pretty great.”

Now, Nick looked a little reduced . Like something had been taken out of him. Again, the image of the older fox, scratched and scraped and scarred. Humbled by the hardships of simply existing, and surely weighed down by—

Don’t even think about it .

Don’t think about that day.

Don’t put his name in your mind.

(Matty.)

Nick shrugged, said, “Don’t do it for pity.” He smirked. “You can do it for the guilt, though. Listen. I set up a campsite. Nice tents. Little grill. There’s food. It’s not a far walk. Oh, hey, I got beer—good beer, too, not like the piss-in-a-can we used to drink, not Natty Light or, fuck, what else did we used to drink—”

“Coors Light, Keystone, Yuengling if we had money,” Hamish said.

“Worst was Hamm’s,” Owen said. “I hated that stuff. Pbr—”

“Fuck that, I still drink Pbr,” Nick said.

“I don’t know what you all are talking about,” Lore said. “I didn’t drink any of that swill. It was all Boone’s Farm for me. Kiwi Strawberry. Makes for the tastiest hangover chunks to blow the next morning, if I may say.” She did a chef’s kiss gesture.

At that, they laughed, and then laughed even harder when Nick said, “Don’t worry, I remember, and that’s why I fuckin’ bought a bottle for you.”

“You did not!”

“I did. I swear to Christ, they still make that shit.”

And Lore laughed, and they all were suddenly having a good time, but through it came the cutting realization that she would be spending a night in the woods, and the last time that happened, they lost a friend, and she did not want to be reminded of that, not now, certainly not all night long. But she, as noted, was a master of compartmentalization. She would go through that door and slam it shut behind her, letting no ghosts—

(Matty)

—follow her through.

“So we’re all in?” Nick said, finally.

Lore nodded and Hamish whooped a yawp of assent, and Owen smiled but didn’t say anything. They all got their bags as Nick was pointing to a trail that broke off from this little gravel lot, winding its way through the trees. Lore started to go with them but noticed Owen was hanging back, staring out at something. She paused by his side and asked, “What’re you looking at?”

But all she had to do was follow his gaze with her own in order to find the pair of ink-black crows picking bits of mashed squirrel off the road. Red threads like wet yarn plucked by plundering beak. A beat-up minivan blasted past, and the crows took flight into the trees, carping and nagging as they went.

A wind kicked up. Colder than expected. It shook the trees.

“Guess we’re doing this,” Owen said, and sighed. He looked sad. And she understood that. If only he could close it off, the way she did.

Owen turned to follow after the other two, and Lore asked him to wait up.

Into the woods they went.