Tent City (19 page)

“It’s not so much that I have a problem with the name you call me, it’s how many times you use it. You say it right before you say anything to me, as if like, for emphasis, but you don’t have to, I’m listening.” At this, he smiles.

“So apparently, it works.” He laughs. “Come on now, time’s a wasting!”

He races up to the very top and without any warning, he’s pitched himself in without any checking of the water and I do the same.

After we have exhausted ourselves swimming in what feels like liquid heaven in this heat, we take a break to set up our picnic.

He’s the one shivering now since he hasn’t brought his normal gear and has gone swimming as I do, with clothes on.

“Here,” I say, as I throw him an extra t-shirt I packed for this very reason. I take out the other one and slip it over my head. I chuckle a little when I see that my t-shirt looks ridiculous on him. It’s a gray Pantera t-shirt that has been worn soft and shrunken by years of use; a favorite hand-me-down from my dad.

He shrugs and takes it off, so now he’s left with no shirt, and I’m left slightly uncomfortable. I don’t know why. It’s hot now and most of the guys don’t wear their shirts around camp. I think it’s because of our proximity and no chaperones for miles. Chaperones, as if we had them in the first place.

As annoyed as Callie might have been at our little outing, she has packed us a nice lunch. I pass him the Wasabi nuts and decline his offer to share. Something about the nuts feels too private.

She has also packed peanut butter and blackberry jam sandwiches and pretzels. I didn’t realize how hungry I was and everything is delicious.

“Want to go back in?” he asks, and I realize we’ve been sitting in silence for quite a long time.

“No, not right now.”

“It’s nice.”

“What’s nice?” I ask, while I try to comb the knots out of my hair and I stare absently at the water crashing down.

“This. I don’t feel like we need to talk, and I feel like if we do, that’s okay too. There are so many things on my plate back at camp. This really is the only place to kind of let that go for a while.”

I have that feeling come up in me again where I want to say some smart remark just to get us back to the way we were a couple of days ago. I like it more when there’s a wall between us. It feels…safer.

I don’t say anything for a long time and then he perches himself up on one elbow and looks at me until I look over to meet his gaze.

“Look, I know I messed up with Brody and I would do anything to do it over. But even then, I don’t know what I could have done differently. That’s Jack’s thing, not mine. I have no idea what to do with sick kids. And even if we had brought him to the hospital, they might not have saved him. They might have just shipped him off…And then with you missing, I wasn’t even sure if that was what you wanted me to do with him. I just didn’t know,” he says, almost pleading.

I can see the hurt in his eyes and some part of me just wants to tell him not to worry about it and let’s just move on sort of thing, but that’s not what I do.

“How do you know Jack?” He seems startled at this, but quickly gains his composure and now he’s sitting up all the way.

“It’s a long story, Dani, and one I’d rather not get into right now. Why does it always have to be like this with you? Why are there always so many questions? I wish we could just have what we had even 10 minutes ago.”

“Oh, you mean, you want to be with someone who doesn’t talk? I’m sure there are a lot of girls around camp willing to make that accommodation.” By now, I’m standing and clearly on the defensive.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, still sitting. Apparently, he doesn’t feel as threatened as I do.

“It means, what do you want with me anyway? There are plenty of girls drooling over you and every time we get together, we fight. Why don’t we just agree not to be friends?”

He grunts a little and appears to be getting ready to leave, when he turns to me.

“Don’t you know anything? I don’t want to be around those other girls. Callie is okay, but she’s just a friend. And maybe we’re just friends too, but you’re so much more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met. And so….fearless. God, that’s maddening.”

“Fearless?” Clearly, he’s not remembering when I ran away like a coward the day I got attacked. Feeling ashamed, I look at the ground.

“Yes, fearless,” he says, as he lifts my chin up so I can look him in the eyes.

“I’m really sorry about running away that day of the raid.”

I’m still trying to avoid the eye contact. I wish this had never come up. I had just gotten around to having normal dreams again.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and I look up. “What choice did you have?”

“Oh, I don’t know…stay and fight?”

“You mean, stay and get killed? We barely got out of there the way it was. It was a dumb move on my part. You weren’t ready then. I don’t know what I was thinking. I should be the one apologizing to you.
”

He stays quiet for awhile, contemplating what he wants to say next. “We never did talk about that night. I feel like such an idiot for putting you in that position.”

He clears his throat before he begins again. “And instead of hating me forever, like you should have, look what you did with yourself. You’re practically a warrior now,” he says, with just a touch of a smirk.

“Truce?” I ask, hoping to move past this as quickly as possible.

There were a few days where I was sort of afraid of Bentley, after what I had seen him do. But then I realized I was probably just naïve about what goes on out here. I’m still a little unsettled about it, but it’s better than how I felt before, when I thought he was a heartless murderer.

“Truce,” he says with a smile, and he sticks his hand out to shake for good measure.

But instead of letting me go, he draws me in close to him. Before I have time to decide if that’s even what I want, he has planted one on me.

As he kisses me, a strange feeling is happening inside the pit of my stomach, not unlike what happens when you ride an elevator. He has his hand now on the back of my head, with his thumb lingering on my cheekbone. I take in his smell, which is clean and citrusy. His mouth is soft, yet hungry. I’m picturing his eyes, warm and green.

Every sensation seems to be heightened, and that frightens me. I can hear the birds in the trees beside us, and the water crashing, now sounds deafening. Every inch of my skin is tingling, almost as if burning and all I want to do is run. So that’s what I do.

I run full blast for a mile until I’ve completely exhausted myself. I stay to the path though, so when Bentley comes up behind me, I’m not hard to find.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asks, his breathing heavy and labored. “Can you just wait up a bit? Can we talk?”

“What’s there to talk about? You don’t ever want to talk about anything!” The tears are starting to form and I blink a few times, warning them to stay back. I have stopped, but I am not yet looking at him.

“I see. I understand now.” He is quiet for a bit and then he asks, “What do you want to know?”

The first question that pops into my head is about Jack, but it seems wrong to ask now. Even thinking about Jack after what just happened makes me itch with guilt. My mind is all over the place.

The kiss was undeniably good, but why do I feel bad about Jack? Why do I feel like it should have been him kissing me? Was it because I met him first, or do I have feelings for Jack too? Is it possible to be into two people at the same time? The thought sickens me.

So I start with something simple.

“Where are you from?”

“That’s all? Well, that’s an easy one. I’m from D.C.”

“The capital? Or at least what was the capital? What on earth are you doing here?”

“Well, my mom’s got family around here, or at least she did. I came to find them after all those bad things happened, but I guess I never made it. She’s actually from Williston, North Dakota. After we started building Tent City, I just never really left to go find the rest of our family. I will though, when we’re more stabilized.”

I feel too shy to ask about his mom.

“You call it Tent City too?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“How did it all start, Tent City?” We are walking now and as we move I find it easier to ask questions and he seems to find it easier to answer. He has picked up a stick and is swatting at the leaves as we go by.

“Originally, we only had about a dozen or so of us. It was only guys back then. We even had a stupid rule. No girls, only slow us down. Wes and Grant are part of the original group. We kept climbing up higher into the Black Hills, seeking cover.”

He finds a larger stick and tosses the small one to the side, using the new one as some type of cane, slowing his pace.

“We even had a great idea that we were going to hide out by Mount Rushmore. How crazy is that? Can you imagine a more ridiculous place to try and hide?” He’s actually laughing now. I’m taking in this new side to Bentley.

“Just imagine, ‘move behind Lincoln, it’s got the most shade’.” He says as he stops laughing and then says “Ha, what a joke…But we did find these cabins, that are your family’s I guess, and it has been the safest spot we’ve come across. So we just sort of settled, much like our ancestors once did. At least Callie’s ancestors anyway. Did you know she’s Native American?”

“I knew she was something… She’s beautiful,” I answer back.

He grunts uncomfortably and then shifts the subject slightly.

“She says her people were building a monument called Crazy Horse, even bigger than Mount Rushmore, almost had it finished when the locusts came. Then all work stopped. More important things to do I guess.”

 
“And your family?” I’m feeling a little braver now. The walking is making it so. I don’t have to make eye contact or shift in my seat. I can just keep moving and I suppose he can pretend he didn’t hear me, which is exactly what I think he’s done.

“We’ll get to that, eventually. I don’t really have it in me now. I will tell you this, and then I would like to move on. My mom was an angel and my dad was the devil.”

We spend the rest of the walk home talking about lighter stuff. I even share with him a little about my family and why we’re here. I can’t get out of my head what he said about his parents. I wonder if maybe his dad had beaten his mom or something. It’s strange how I always think these afternoon runs with Bentley are going to solve some mysteries for me, but all they seem to do is create more. 

As soon as we enter camp, the first person I see is Jack. He doesn’t fail to notice Bentley and I are together. He just keeps on going to wherever he was going and acts like he never even saw us. I’m not terribly offended, as I tell myself it is Bentley he has contempt for, not me.

It takes me a while to find Kit and when I do, she and Brody are tending to a girl who is sick. I go in to get Brody and decide to wait for her on the porch of the medical cabin.

“How long has she been in there?” I ask Brody, who looks so much older than even just a few months ago. Instead of buzzing around with a plane or a train, he’s looking wistfully out into the woods.

“Oh, I don’t know, awhile.”

“Who’s she with?”

“Her name is Beth.”

“Is that the girl who was bitten by the raccoon?”

“Yeah,” he says, staring into the woods. He is trying to concentrate harder now, and I look to see what’s got his attention.