“Reggie’s in Virginia. He’s got his own thing.”
“Someone, then. So it’s not just you out there, alone.”
“You know the agreement I made on this. I have to be alone.”
“You’re taking them into the mountains tomorrow. The first morning, and you’re taking them up?”
“It’s how it will need to go this summer. Not bad, just different. I want my usual patterns disrupted. Just in case.”
“You should have demanded someone else come along.”
“I love you,” Ethan said.
“That’s sweeter than saying end of discussion. Even if it means the same thing.”
“I love you,” he repeated.
She leaned down and kissed him, then rested her forehead against his, and her lips grazed him when she spoke.
“I’ll let it go. I won’t speak of it again. You don’t need it, and Lord knows, I don’t need to beat my head on the chunk of granite that you like to call your opinion.”
“Nasty tone, Miss Montana.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry. I know you were only the runner-up.”
Usually he could get a rise out of her with this, could turn anger to laughter. This afternoon, though, she was silent. He took her in his arms, pulled her on top of him, and still something was wrong. Tensed muscles where loose ones belonged. He put his hands on her sides and pushed her back, and now it was his turn to search for eye contact in the darkness.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to worry about him. Whichever one he is. But it’s more than that. I just…something doesn’t feel right. I’ve been restless. Uneasy. Like something’s on the way.”
He laughed at her then, something that he would recall over and over in the days to come, the serious weight of her warning and how melodramatic it had sounded to him there in the darkened bedroom with her body pressed to his and the cabin full of warmth and wood smoke.
“You’ve been back to the folklore books?” he said. They were a favorite of hers, and she’d spoken countless times of her envy of those with the gift of premonitions, which was always a source of amusement to him, both that she believed in it and that she desired it. “What do you see, baby? Shade of the moon, shadow of a spider, the way the cat holds his tail?”
“No,” she said. Her voice soft. “Nothing like that. But I feel it, all the same.”
“I haven’t gotten killed in these mountains yet,” he said. “And it won’t happen this year.”
She was silent.
“Baby?” he said. “It…won’t…happen.”
“All right,” she said. “All right.” But her tone was still heavy and somber. He touched the side of her face gently and she kissed his palm and said it a third time. “All right, Ethan.”
He meant to ask her more then, because she was so serious. Not that she would have had answers for a feeling that rose from someplace inexplicable or primal or, hell, maybe mystical, for all he knew. She slid her hands down his chest and over his stomach and found him, though, and then any questions that were on his lips faded, first within her cool palm and then within her warmth, and later she was asleep on his chest and he didn’t want to disturb her, but he had to be out at the fire to meet the boys, so he slipped out quietly.
They did not speak of her unease again before he entered the mountains.
6
Jace Wilson was dead.
He’d perished in a quarry, and Connor Reynolds needed to keep that in mind. The hardest part of the new name wasn’t remembering to identify himself by it; it was reacting when other people called him by it.
“Connor? Yo? Connor? You, like, coherent, dude?”
They were on the first trail day when the loud kid, Marco, started talking to him, and Jace was focused on the countryside around them, in awe of the sheer size of it. The distances were staggering. He’d hiked a lot in Indiana and thought he was familiar enough with the idea. There, though, you’d come up over a ridge and look ahead to the next point in the trail and then it would be maybe five, ten minutes until you were there. Up here it would be an hour, an exhausting, sweating-and-gasping hour, and you’d stop for a water break, turn around, and realize you could still see the place you’d started from. It looked like you weren’t gaining any ground at all.
They were walking in a shallow gulch with mountains looming high on each side, and he didn’t mind looking at the peaks from down here. He’d been unnerved at the start, fearing they were going out on some sort of mountain-goat trail where a fall would be your death-even the highway had felt like that; he’d had to pretend he was asleep to keep from watching the switchbacks, with all the other kids awake and talking and laughing about it-but so far the trail hadn’t been bad. Had been, honestly, pretty cool. And he felt safer out here, which was strange. Up in the mountains, he had the sense that nobody was going to sneak up on them. Certainly not on Ethan Serbin, who seemed to notice every out-of-place pine needle. So he was feeling pretty good, pretty secure, and then the loud kid started calling him by his new name, and he didn’t respond.
By the fourth time Marco yelled the name, they were all watching him. Even Ethan seemed interested. Jace felt a panicking sensation that he’d blown it already, they were onto him, and he’d been reminded time and again that this was the only way it could go bad up here in the mountains. If he let anyone know the truth, let anyone know he wasn’t who he was pretending to be, that was when the men from the quarry would arrive. He thought of them now and heard their voices in place of Marco’s and as the panic rose, it brought with it the realization that he had to explain this somehow, come up with a reason he was ignoring this kid. He couldn’t just say he was distracted or hadn’t heard him. It wasn’t enough. He had to play his role.
“If I wanted to talk to you,” Jace said, staring right at Marco, “I would.”
Marco pulled his head back, eyes wide. “The fuck? Hey, man, I-”
“Stop it!” Ethan Serbin thundered. “Both of you, stop talking. Now. And you’re going to owe me for the language, Marco. You’ll enjoy that once we get back to camp. Hope you like gathering firewood. You can call the logs whatever you’d like.”
“Man, this kid-”
Ethan held a hand up, silencing him. Everyone was still staring at Jace, and he felt exposed but tried to keep a tough expression, tried to look like what he was supposed to be: a problem kid with a bad attitude, worse than the rest of them. If he was the worst, they’d leave him alone.
“Connor? What’s your problem today? Is there a reason you feel the need to disrespect your friends?”
Got to stick with it, Jace told himself, even though he hated acting the part in front of Ethan Serbin, who had this powerful way of showing disappointment through silence that reminded Jace of his dad. And Jace had to please his dad, because his father worked long hours and he worked in pain and he took pills to help but they never did. Jace had learned early that the more he did on his own, the more problems he fixed by himself, the better. It wasn’t that his dad was mean, or angry all the time. It was that life hadn’t been kind to him, so Jace tried to be.
So while the Jace half of him said, Please, Ethan, the Connor half of him said, Give him what he thinks you are, and Jace was smart enough to listen to that half.
“He’s not my friend. We’re not up here because we’re friends. Or because we want to be. Everybody knows that.”
It sounded good to him, sounded right. Fit the part, fit the part. That had been his dad’s advice. Of course, a key element of fitting the part was remembering your own name.