Chapter 46: Jasper

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I wake up in the middle of the night with my hands clenched into fists and sweat pooling across my forehead, vaguely aware of a dream that involved the lake, my prosthetic leg, and the Director screaming at me for something. Maybe for falling into the lake with a metal leg? I remember her shouting the word rust.

So I stare up at the ceiling and wait for my breathing to calm down. It doesn't. Crap. Usually, when this happens to me, I watch M*A*S*H until I'm calm enough to go back to sleep, but there's no television at camp...

Maybe I'll go for a walk. Yeah, a walk would be nice. The fresh Alaskan air always helps clears my head.

It's a chilly night outside and there's a brisk breeze blowing, but I don't mind. It reminds me of home. The wind battles with my hair and whips through my shirt and I trudge over to the bathroom, feeling oddly insubstantial. Time passes strangely, too, as if it's more circular than linear. The fabric of the universe always stretches a little thinner in the shadowy hours between midnight and five.

It takes me a while to realize I'm not on the path anymore. Or, I am on a path, just not the path I'm supposed to be on. After doing a quick three-sixty, I conclude that I'm lost. It's the middle of the night, the only hour of the day when it's dark outside, and I'm lost in the words.

"Well, shit."

The pressure is already starting to build on my chest. I start speed-walking down the path, determined not to think about all the things waiting for me in the darkness— moose, wolves, zombies, zombie-moose... suddenly, my heart starts to jackrabbit, and I break into a run. Shit, shit, shit. How did I get lost? How do I always get lost?

Miraculously, I glimpse light on the trail ahead. I pick up my feet and run, my breath forming pale clouds, until I burst through the tree line and into a small clearing flooded with moonlight.

I screech to a halt. I think I know where I am now— we played Capture the Flag somewhere around here; I can hear the creek gurgling in the distance. Slowly, I pivot around, trying to identify the natural landmarks. The forest looks so alien at night. It feels more like I'm standing on the ocean floor than in the woods of Alaska; like the swaying trees are tendrils of seaweed moving in the current, and the navy-blue sky is the miles of water between me and the surface...

The whole situation is so otherworldly that when I first hear the noise, I'm sure that it was just conjured up by my overly paranoid mind. But then I hear it again. It's a sniffling, sad sort of noise, almost like a muffled sob. It doesn't sound like a noise that a hungry grizzly bear would make (unless the grizzly bear was having, like, a mid-life crisis), which is reassuring, so I stop and listen closer, trying to judge where the sound is coming from. The camper— I'm sure it's a camper now— sounds like they're close by.

I'm already lost, so I throw caution to the wind and get even more lost. Carefully, I step off the trail and pick my way through a copse of whistling pine trees in the direction of the creek. It's a full moon tonight, and the sky is so bright and starry that I don't even have to squint to know that it's Giselle who's crying. She's crouched on the bank of the creek with her bare feet dipped in the water; her pale hair flowing as smoothly over her bare shoulders as the stream rushing over her manicured toes.

It makes little sense for her to be here in the woods; but there she is, defying all the odds in just her pajamas— if sports shorts and a peach-pink tank top count as pajamas. Which reminds me I'm wearing my pajamas, too, if a pair of sweatpants with the slogan "I <3 Canada" printed on the side and a t-shirt with a cartoon T-Rex on it counts as pajamas. And then I step on a twig, and I realize that it doesn't even matter what I'm wearing because Giselle would murder me even if I was wearing a ballroom gown.

Crack! Giselle whirls around at the sound, her expression suddenly vicious. "What the hell are you doing here?" she snarls. Her face softens a bit when she sees that it's me, but her bloodshot eyes which remain narrowed in suspicion. "Oh. It's just you."

Something inside of Giselle deflates, and she slouches downwards, flashing me a glimpse of the glass bottle clutched forcibly in her hands. Her fingers tremble slightly, making the amber liquid inside slosh and shake.

How the hell did she sneak booze into camp? I swear, the longer I know this girl, the more of a mystery she becomes.

"Ha. Jasper Sostenuto," Giselle mutters, saying the last part more like an adjective than a name. "I should've known— you always show up when nobody wants you."

The barb stings, but since she's wasted, I let it slide. "How drunk are you?"

"On a scale of one to ten? I forget the numbers in between." Giselle takes a sip from her drink and then scowls at it. "God, this is shit. Why don't you share it with me? Life sucks and the alcohol is bad, too, but it always tastes better with company."

"Where did you even get that? Did you steal it?"

"A magician never reveals their secrets," Giselle says. Her words slur together, drawing out a slight country twang that I hadn't noticed before. I always forget that Giselle is from the South; I think she tries to hide her accent. I don't know why. It's sort of pretty. "But no. I didn't steal it. I stashed this baby in the woods on the first day of camp. Few days ago, a little bird named Ronan Lockwood told me how to sneak out on a hidden trail, so I hiked out into the wilderness to pursue my new career as a bootlegger." She takes another sip. "So down with prohibition, and all that. Cheers."

Now I just feel sorry for her, and maybe still a little scared that the Director is going to pop out of the bushes and bust us for breaking the rules. "That all sounds really illegal," I say, already feeling myself edge away. I don't want to get caught with Giselle and her contraband booze. All I want to do is pee and then return to my warm, safe bed. "Like, really illegal...."

"Does it? I hadn't noticed. Come, be illegal with me, Sostenuto. It's no fun to break the rules alone."

"I don't want to break the rules at all."

She takes a moment to sing, "Everybody wants to break the rules" to the tune of the Tears for Fears song. Then her tone becomes more serious. "Please? Will you?"

"I don't know. I really can't risk getting another week of kitchen duty...."

Giselle turns her face towards me, and she looks so downtrodden that I forget all about the Director, all about not wanting to break the rules, all about going back to sleep. "Fine," I say reluctantly. "I'll stay, just as long as you try not to get me in trouble."

"Ha. I make no promises."

I take a seat beside Giselle on the bank of the creek, curling my knees up against my chest for warmth. The night air is freezing, but Giselle doesn't seem bothered by it; not even with her feet submerged in the water. I look down. The tips of her toes are turning blue.

"So, what's wrong?" I ask, because people don't cry and drink on riverbanks in the middle of the night when everything is jolly. "You weren't upset this afternoon." Or maybe she was, and I just didn't notice.

"Drink first. Questions later." Giselle hands me the bottle.

She sounds adamant about this, so I take a small sip— and immediately spit it out in the creek. "What the hell? That's the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted."

"Whiskey. I warned you it was shit." Giselle removes the bottle from my hands and closes her eyes and takes a long drink. She doesn't open her eyes after she puts the glass down. "The drunker you are, the better it tastes."

"Why?"

"Probably because everything tastes better when you're shitfaced; I don't know. I'm not a fucking scientist."

"No. I meant, why are you drinking?" Then, I ask again, more insistently this time, "What happened to you?"

Giselle opens her eyes. They're puffy and red and sort of glazed-over, and I wonder if she's even going to remember that we had this conversation in the morning. For her sake, I hope she doesn't.

She bites down on her lower lip like she can't bear to force the words out. "I'm drinking because life sucks, and the world isn't fair."

"You're out here crying because the world isn't fair?" I raise my eyebrows at her. "That's funny. I didn't take you for the existential type."

For a moment, I think about my warm bed back at Skilak Cabin, and how good it would feel to not be exhausted tomorrow. I also think about the counselors who monitor the camp at night and how much trouble I'd get in if they found us sitting out here with a bottle of whiskey.

And then I think about Giselle, and her sad eyes, and all of my other thoughts fade away into the night breeze.

"If I tell you my secret," I say, "will you tell me yours?"

Giselle let out a soft, incredulous laugh. "My secret? Why the hell would you care about my secret?"

"You're my friend, Giselle. Of course I care."

Her sharp, mascara-streaked face turns away from mine, and the breeze catches her hair and lifts it upwards, exposing chestnut brown roots that don't match the blondness of the rest of her hair. I never knew Giselle dyed her hair. It makes me think about all the tiny secrets hidden everywhere, the ones that only reveal themselves to you if you look hard enough.

Still facing away from me, Giselle sticks her arm out to offer me the bottle. "You should drink," she says. "I promised to get you drunk."

I accept the bottle, but I don't drink from it; I just roll it between my hands, feeling the smoothness of the glass and watching the brown liquid slosh at the sides. "I've never been drunk before," I say, a little pointlessly, since Giselle already knows this. "It sort of scares me. But I wouldn't want to make you break a promise."

Giselle turns back around. Her red eyes are drilling into me now, and my head has suddenly become filled with static and white noise instead of common sense and reasonable judgment. "Tell me your secret," she whispers.

And just like that, all of my remaining inhibitions grow wings and fly away.

I tilt my chin back and take a swig from the bottle, and this time, I don't spit it out. I manage to chug a good amount until my stomach churns violently and I have to stop. "This still tastes terrible."

"Then drink more, idiot."

I take another sip. My throat turns warm. I feel oddly afloat; not because of the alcohol (I've barely had any, and I'm not that much of a lightweight), but more like because something inside me has come untethered, uninhibited. I drink some more. Giselle's right, the whiskey tastes less horrible with time.

I hand the bottle back to her, but she doesn't drink from it this time. Instead, she narrows her eyes at me. "So, are you gonna spill your secret, or do we have to play twenty questions?"

And that's when it hits me. That I'm tired of waking up in the middle of the night, my heart beating wildly from a night terror. That I'm tired of having to cram myself behind my bed just to change out of a pair of pants. I'm tired of hiding and lying, of fading into the background and falling into the cracks. Looking at Giselle makes me realize this. She makes me realize I don't want to be tired anymore. That I don't want to keep this secret anymore.

She makes me realize it's time to let go.

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