“Why?”
He gazed at the table. “She was hot.”
He seemed on the verge of adding something, but instead leaned forward, ashing the cigarette.
“Who dropped her off?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “Don’t know. Next morning, breakfast, she was just there. Sitting by herself at one of the picnic tables in the corner, eating a piece of cornbread. She was all packed and ready to go, red bandanna in her hair. The rest of us were totally disorganized. Running around like deranged chickens to get ready. Finally we left.”
“And you introduced yourself,” I suggested.
He shook his head, tapping the cigarette on a plate. “Nope. She kept to herself. Obviously, everyone knew who her father was and that she was the little girl from To Breathe with Kings, so people were all over her. But she iced everyone out, said nothing beyond yes, no.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t like she was sulking. She just wasn’t into making friends. Pretty soon there was resentment, especially from the girls, about all the get-outta-jail-free cards she got from the counselors. Every night around the campfire we had to wax poetic about all the shit we’d done to end up there. Burglary. Suicide attempts. Drugs. The rap sheets of some of these kids, longer than War and Peace. Ash never had to say a thing. They’d skip over her, no explanation. The only clue was this ACE bandage on her hand, which she had when she first arrived. Couple of weeks into the hike she took it off and there was a bad burn mark. She never said what it was from.”
I was surprised to hear this. That very burn mark, along with her foot tattoo, were mentioned in the missing-person’s report as her only identifiable markings.
“Two days into the hike we made a bet,” Hopper continued. “First kid to sustain a conversation with Ashley that lasted longer than fifteen minutes would get the two hits of ecstasy one of the kids from L.A., Joshua, had smuggled in taped into the hollow shoelace tip of his hiking boot.” He tilted his head back, quickly exhaling smoke at the ceiling. “I decided to hold back, get my game together, let the others jihad themselves. And they did. Ashley blew them all off. One by one.”
“Until you,” I said.
It was easy to imagine: two gorgeous teenagers finding each other in the wilderness of adolescence, two orchids blooming in a desert.
“Just the opposite, actually,” he said. “She blew me off, too.”
I stared at him. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “About a week after everyone else had crashed and burned, I made my move. Ashley always walked in the back, so I did. I asked where she was from. She said New York. After that it was just one-word replies and a nod. I struck out.”
He stubbed the cigarette out on the coffee table and tossed it on top of the other butts, sitting back against the couch.
“Ashley didn’t say anything to anyone for ten weeks?” I asked.
“Well, she did. But nothing more than the bare bones of conversation. Everyone broke down at some point, had their fifteen-minute Shawshank Redemption where they howled at the sky. The hiking, the counselors, voyeuristic fucks, they made you dredge up all this shit from your past. Everyone broke. Half of it was real and half of it was to get them off your back. Everyone took their Oscar-nominated turn, howling about parents, how all they wanted was to be loved. Except Ashley. She never cried, never complained. Not once.”
“Did she ever mention her family?”
“No.”
“What about her father?”
“Nothing. She was like the Sphinx. That’s what we called her.”
“So that was it?” I asked.
He shook his head, clearing his throat. “Three weeks into the hike, Orlando, the fat Asian kid, was a mess. He was so sunburned he had blisters all over his face, which the counselors dealt with by handing him a bottle of calamine lotion. Crusty pink shit all over his face, crying all the time, he looked like a leper. So one night Joshua slips him one of the pills of X, a gift, you know, to lift his spirits. He must have taken it when we started out the next morning, because at nine A.M. suddenly Orlando was out of his goddamn mind, hugging people, telling them they were beautiful, eyes dilated, shuffling his feet like he was John Travolta in a twist contest. At one point we lost him, had to backtrack, and found him twirling around a field, smiling at the sky. Hawk Feather, the head counselor, went apeshit.”
“Hawk Feather?” I repeated.
He smirked. “The counselors insisted we address each other with Native American tribe names even though most of us were white, fat, and about as of the earth as a Big Mac. Hawk Feather, one a’ these tightly wound Christian assholes, he hauled Orlando away, demanding to know what he was on and where he got the drugs. Orlando was so ripped all he did was laugh and say, ‘It’s just a little Tylenol,’ over and over. ‘It’s just Tylenol.’ ”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Hopper smiled, too, though the amusement quickly left his face.
“That night, everyone was scared shitless,” he went on, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “We didn’t want to know what Hawk Feather was gonna do to Orlando or the rest of us on his mission to find out who’d smuggled in the X. That night, Hawk Feather announces if someone doesn’t come forward to explain who brought the ecstasy he was gonna make our lives hell. Everyone was scared. No one said a word. But I knew it was just a matter of time before someone ratted out Joshua. Suddenly, though, this low voice announces, ‘It was me.’ We all turn around. No one could believe it.”
He fell silent, still amazed, even now.
“It was Ashley,” I said, when he didn’t continue.
He glanced at me, his face solemn. “Yeah. At first, Hawk Feather didn’t believe her. She’d had all this preferential treatment. But then she produces the second pill of X, which somehow she stole from Joshua’s hiking boot. She says she’ll accept whatever punishment he had in mind.” He shook his head. “Hawk Feather went ballistic. He grabbed her, hauled her away from the campsite. He ended up taking her to some far-off site in the middle of nowhere and made her sleep there by herself in just her sleeping bag, totally alone. She wasn’t allowed to come back in the morning till he went and got her.”
“No one challenged this guy?” I asked. “What about the other counselors?”
He shrugged. “They were afraid of him. We were beyond civilization. It was like laws didn’t exist.” He reached forward and snatched the pack of Marlboros off the table, tapping out another cigarette.
“The other part of her punishment was putting up all of our tents and collecting firewood. We weren’t allowed to help. When she was slow, Hawk Feather would scream at her. She’d just stare him down with this look on her face, like she couldn’t care less, like she was so much stronger than him, which only made him more pissed. Finally, he let up. One of the other counselors warned him he was going too far. So, after the seven nights of sleeping on her own, she was allowed to join the rest of us at the campsite.”
He smiled, an unreadable look on his face. He then shook his head and lit the cigarette, exhaling.
“The first night she’s back we all wake up at three in the morning because Hawk Feather is screaming like he’s being stabbed. He runs out of his tent in nothing but his underwear, this fat fuck stammering like a child, crying that there’s a rattlesnake in his sleeping bag. Everyone thought it was a joke, that he’d had a nightmare. But one of the female counselors, Four Crows, she went and got it, unzipped it right in front of us, shaking it out. Sure enough, a rattlesnake, five feet long, fell onto the ground and whipped right across the campsite, disappearing into the dark. Hawk Feather, white as a sheet, about to piss his pants, turned and stared right at Ashley. And she stared back. He didn’t say a fuckin’ word, but I know he believed she put it in there. We all did.”