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A Walk in the Woods, Part One

It was a climb to Highchair Rocks. Not literally a climb—the journey was not vertical and required no rappelling. But the trail, starting at the west gate of Remington Dover State Park just north of Harrow, gradually grew steeper and steeper until the incline made your legs burn and your Achilles tendons feel like guitar strings about to snap. Most hikers had to reach out along the path to grab at trees and rocks along the way to help haul themselves forward. (Just don’t grab for the thick fuzzy ropes of vine hanging down—those who made that mistake walked away with a nightmare case of poison ivy, the kind that got between your fingers and blistered on your palms, rendering your grip both useless and itchy. So itchy, in fact, you’d probably rip the meat of your hands open just to satisfy the constant needling urge to scratch .)

Those who braved the trail—and who could manage such an unpleasant ascent—were rewarded with a rocky pocket of forest rimmed at the south edge by a handful of glorious vistas. One could look out and see the tops of an old pine and spruce forest running the length of Black Creek, or in the other direction, you might see the old mill and the raw red planks of the covered bridge beyond. On a clear day, you might even see all the way to Haydock Mountain (not a mountain, really, just a very impressive hill ), and even spy the cobbling of the boulder field of Ramble Rocks Quarry near it. Extra bonus: A person could see one helluva sunset and sunrise here, given the way this southern edge jutted out, offering access to both the east and the west. Sun went up, sun went down, and Highchair Rocks was gilded by the growing light of day’s advent, and the fading glow of day’s demise.

Which meant it was a pretty excellent place to get high.

Or drunk. You know, whatever.

So that is why five teenagers—each sixteen or seventeen years old, all of them soon to be seniors at Central Bucks North High School—headed into the woods that Friday. They wanted to be high up. They wanted to get high, high up. They wanted to laugh and feel shit and tell scary stories and bust one another’s balls. Really, they wanted to be with one another in a world that did not seem to care very much about them. School was out. Fuck yeah.

They did not know what they would find up there.

Or what they would lose when they found it.

—

Here, then, was how a crew, this crew, came together.

It was survival, at first. A way to survive at school, yes, but also a way to not be at home .

Lore was always alone at her house, a latchkey kid for years now. Owen knew the people at his house didn’t want him there, not really—his father hated him, his mother kept quiet. Hamish’s parents fought like you wouldn’t believe, always yelling and throwing things. His father was fire, his mother was gasoline, and Hamish just wanted to be away from it. Nick loved his father, they all assumed, but his mother had left long ago, and Nick needed people other than his dad to hang out with, even though everyone loved his dad. Matty was the only one who didn’t really hate home, or so he said. His parents loved him, but everyone knew that their love for him was conditional. They pushed him—too hard, sometimes. Get good grades. Join this club. That team. Try out for the play. Matty couldn’t slip, or they’d freeze him out. He never said as much. But everyone saw it. No way not to see the pressure they put on him, the cracks it formed.

They found one another through the years, not all at once. Lore and Owen in elementary school. Then Hamish. Nick and Matty in junior high. They were each the other’s respite. A safe space, a found family, a real home, existing wherever they each were at any time—they could always shelter in place with one another.

They were more than just a clique, more than just fellow wanderers. They were the crew, bound by their Covenant.

—

Owen in 1998: just a slip of a kid, really, nearly insubstantial, like he was painted upon the world, a streak of dark ink, human eye shadow. Wore jeans, never wore shorts, and everyone was glad for that, too, because Nick always said, “Your legs are so pale, Zuikas, looking at you is like looking at a solar eclipse, all dark but somehow still bright enough to burn the eyes out of your head.” Shirt was a Black Flag tee, which was maybe weird because Owen didn’t really listen to Black Flag. They were too, what, aggressive for him, maybe? NIN was aggro, too, but in a softer, more vulnerable way. Less pure rage and more…spasms of animosity and injury. Didn’t matter, really—Owen’s NIN shirt was in the wash. The clothes hid scars others couldn’t see. The pockets hid the chewed pens and pencils. Even if they didn’t hide the hangnails or chapped and bitten lips.

He wasn’t exactly an outdoors kind of guy—he would’ve much rather been inside, designing Angelfire websites for the burgeoning internet, or listening to music so loud that his ears felt like they were going to squirt blood, or writing stuff in his journal that was weird, sad, funny, or just sorta fucked up. But this was where his friends were. (Where Lauren was.) And he wanted to be with them.

Of course, the one person he didn’t want to be with was himself.

Owen’s greatest fear was the dark, because in the dark, he was alone with that person, always. And though the darkness was mighty, the darkness of his own thoughts was all the blacker, and (felt) all the truer.

Which was why he liked having friends.

Having friends meant not being alone with himself.

Because Owen was certainly not his own friend.

But they were his friends. They had his back, even when he didn’t have his own.

—

Lauren, who would not become Lore until she and Owen went to Sarah Lawrence, dropped back to the end of the line, where Owen walked. She moved to just behind him as he hauled himself up over a crooked, knobby root.

“ Move your ass, Zuikas, ” she said in a faux gruff tone. Like she was their gym teacher, Coach Hutchings.

“Fuck off,” he said, but it was a playful fuck off, not a fuck off fuck off.

“You’re moving like treacle.”

He grunted. His legs felt like hot rags spun up and wrung out. His knees felt like hard rocks wrapped up in those rags, too. “I’m just trying not to break a leg. Or my head. Or touch poison ivy.” Still, he gave himself a little push, though. “And I don’t know what ‘treacle’ is, Laur.” (Laur, just the short form of her name. For now, at least.)

“It’s—I think pudding? It’s a Britishism. I read it in a Pratchett book. It’s like, molassesy, but I think you mine it out of the ground? I don’t fucking know. It just means you’re slow.”

“I know I’m slow.”

“Do you need your inhaler?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. He had asthma, but a particular kind— exercise-induced asthma, they said. He found out he had it when he nearly collapsed, wheezing, during gym class last year when they had to run a mile. He also found out that he had some kind of knobby knees situation—“growing pains,” they said, but then they also said it was called Osgood-Schlatter disease? This kind of exercise—hiking up a steep, steep trail—was fine for his asthma, but shitty on his knees. They throbbed with their own horrible heartbeats.

“Just making sure, dude. Don’t want you dying out here, because I need my writing partner. I can’t do it alone.”

“Thanks, Laur.”

“Oh, hey, dude. Dude . Listen. I thought of a new game idea.”

Owen stuck out his lower lip and used it to blow the beads of sweat gathering on his upper lip. “Oh yeah?”

“So, like, get this—it’s Pokémon, but instead of catching cute little Japanese critters, you’re out there trying to catch Lovecraftian nightmares and pit them against one another—”

Owen laughed. “Right, so you throw your ball—”

“Or your obsidian prism trap or your void sphere or whatever—”

“And you catch a frolicking Nyarlathotep—”

“ Nyarlathotep, I choose you! ” she chirped.

More laughter. “Oh my god, totally . And it doesn’t just have to be Lovecraftian stuff. Imagine it with cryptids. Skunk ape, Mothman, a wild chupacabra goat-sucker appears, and then you could—”

Ahead and above them, Matty Shiffman called.

“Laur! Hey! Laur! C’mere! You wanna see this!”

“Shit,” she said to Owen. “Hold that thought.”

Then Lauren pushed past him, hurrying back up the hill to meet Matty up there. Leaving him all by himself. Again, he thought, somewhat bitterly.

—

Owen kept going. Slowly, now. Not in a hurry because—

Well. Just not in a hurry.

But only ten feet ahead, he found Hamish there, bracing himself against a paper birch, sweat dripping from the long oily coils of his hair.

“Fuck, man,” Hamish said, breathing heavily. “This fucking sucks.”

“No kidding.”

Owen reached behind his own backpack and pulled a glass bottle out of one of the side pockets. It was a mango Snapple. Half drunk, but not yet piss warm. With a bit of a flourish, he handed it to Hamish.

“I present to you— nectar of the gods, ” Owen said.

“Fucking fuck, thank you.” Hamish uncapped it and took a huge swig. “Wahhh,” he said, a guttural gasp of refreshed satisfaction after having gulped more than half the bottle. “So, you bummed?”

“Bummed? About what?”

“Laur being at Matty’s beck and call.”

Owen stumbled over his denial as it tumbled out of him. “What? Wha? That’s—that’s not a thing, man. She’s not—it’s not like that. The fuck, Ham.”

Hamish shrugged, handed back the Snapple. “We all know you have a thing for her.”

“I do not have a ‘thing’ for her. We’re friends.”

“Friends.”

“Just friends.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. That’s why you two were making out last Christmas—”

“Drinks. There were drinks. We were drunk. People do stupid shit when they’re drunk.” Owen frowned over the Snapple bottle as he finished it off. It was true. They had gotten drunk at Nick’s house and wandered out past their shitty aboveground pool and into the maze of overgrown roses Nick’s mom had once preened over year after year before she ran out on the family. That’s when Laur smashed her mouth against Owen’s and pushed her tongue in his mouth, and it was both his first kiss and the best moment in his life, so far. And yet, he also told himself, it was a fluke. Just a weird stupid moment in time.

A weird stupid amazing moment in time.

“People do the stupid shit they have always wanted to do when they’re drunk, man, c’mon.”

“You headbutted a tree last time you were drunk.”

Ham laughed. “Oh, haha, yeah, I did. Hey! That tree had it coming. Trees have had it too good for too long, man.”

That got a laugh out of Owen, too. Hamish really had headbutted a tree. One night he’d gotten hammered on some unholy combination of Goldschl?ger and J?ger. Usually Hamish was nothing but love and laughs when he was lit, but that night he got surly—less the usual Phish vibe and suddenly, inexplicably, more Rage Against the Machine. Hamish took out his rage not on a machine but on an old oak tree in Nick’s backyard. Needless to say, the oak was untroubled by Ham’s head, but the tree gave Ham’s head a pretty good dent. His face ended up a streaky mask of blood. Later, Hamish blew it off, made it seem like he was trying to be funny, but Lauren said it meant Hamish had “a core of anger somewhere deep down.”

The ghost of that injury could still be seen on Hamish’s forehead—faint but yellow, like an old piss stain on pants.

“We’re just friends,” Owen said again, when they were done cackling.

“Just friends,” Hamish reiterated, as if to add, Yeah, sure .

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“So you don’t care if she fucks Matty.”

“She’s not going—I mean, she’s free to if she wants. Matty’s my friend, she’s my friend, I don’t really see them having a real relationship, and it’s not like they’re compatible in any real way, but okay, sure, whatever.”

Hamish shook his head, scratching at the patchy scrub of muttonchops that had inspired Nick to call him Hobo Wolverine. “Okay, if you say so, I’m not gonna harsh your b—”

Up above, a voice rang out. Lauren’s voice. To Owen’s ear, it contained both wonder and alarm.

“Guys!” she yelled down from the top of the trail. “You need to come and see what we found up here!”