Four Weeks, Five People. Jennifer Yu

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СКАЧАТЬ practically feel the carbs becoming fat and I’m thinking about all the work I’ve put in to get to where I am now and “better” starts sounding a lot like “disgusting.” It’s hard to want to get better when I’m staring down the calories in my head, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

      I want to go to bed the second Jessie tells us we’re done for the day. If I go to bed, then I can fall asleep, and when I wake up, it’ll be morning. Back to zero. Fresh start, new beginning. But I can’t. I’ve just eaten an entire meal, and if I take off my shirt to go to sleep, I’m going to look down and see my stomach protruding and I just—I can’t. I know what it looks like, and I can’t look at it right now, and I know it’s there, so I can’t not look at it if I do go to bed, so I sit in the lounge and watch Mason and Ben argue over whether or not movies have any value to society. I want to grab my guitar from my room and write music, but everything I write in moments like these is crap because I can’t think straight, and besides, my band fulfilled its quota of sad ballads about hating yourself, like, three EPs ago.

      I know something’s up when Stella joins me on the couch. She’s pretty much refused to talk to anyone the entire day, and I don’t think I look particularly fun while drowning in my own self-hatred.

      “So,” she says. “You’re in a band?”

      “Yeah,” I say.

      “What’s it called?” She doesn’t sound genuine exactly—more like she’s referencing an inside joke between the two of us that I’m too stupid to even know about, or have somehow forgotten. But she also doesn’t sound completely offended at my existence, either. I take this as a good sign.

      “Um, The Eureka Moment,” I respond. “Because, like, we were all sitting around Aidan’s basement, trying to come up with a band name, and no matter how long we brainstormed, we just couldn’t think of the right one. Like, dude, we were throwing around options like Abyss Gazers and Between Bruises—it was bad. I called Aidan’s suggestion some ‘tween pop bullshit,’ which is pretty much the worst thing you could say to a serious musician. Anyway, before Aidan could punch me, Jake was just, like, ‘Guess we’re still waiting on that eureka moment, huh?’ and everyone realized that that was it, that that was—”

      “That’s cute,” she says, cutting me off.

      Anything else, I probably could have taken. She could have called it weird, or stupid, or even asked if we’re a “real band,” like every adult insisted on doing when we first started. She could have laughed out loud, for all I care. But cute is too much.

      “It’s not cute,” I say. “It’s not cute at all—we spent, like, three hours coming up with it and would’ve spent three more hours coming up with something better if it was something cute. Cute doesn’t sell records unless you’re interested in the Disney Channel crowd, which we’re not—”

      Suddenly, Stella grabs my hand. It takes a couple seconds for the realization to make its way to my brain. “We’re not trying to be the next Jonas Broth—Dude, what are you doing?”

      She pulls her hand away as quickly as she’d grabbed mine.

      “Is everything okay over there?” Jessie says.

      Stella rolls her eyes and gets up off the couch. “Better than okay, Jess,” she says. “Andrew was just telling me about his band. They’re superlegit and hard-core and not at all cute.”

      She’s already turned away from me by the time I realize that she’s slipped a piece of paper into my hand.

      Our room, right after the midnight room check, it says.

      Well, I think. At least that’ll be a few more hours to burn calories.

      * * *

      I went on a camping trip with my band last year for Memorial Day. This was before anyone knew who we were, when we were just a few friends bothering the neighbors at weird hours of the night with music no one really understood. I still have no idea how any of us managed to convince our parents to let us go—especially after Jake’s dad found the giant cooler full of forties—but somehow we did, and then there we were, just the four of us in the middle of the woods with nothing to do other than drink and fuck around on guitars and a bass you couldn’t really hear and a drum box.

      I think that weekend was when all of us realized that this was actually something we could picture ourselves doing together for the rest of our lives. I mean, whatever, that’s really corny. But I just always figured it was one of those things that would be set to really dramatic, violin-heavy music in a documentary about our band, you know? This one night, we each had, like, three beers, and then started hiking, and then got so, so lost. It was crazy. We all thought we were going to die. We were passing around a notebook writing down goodbyes when Aidan found the map in his backpack and we realized we had walked in a giant circle and were actually five minutes away from the campsite. I blame the beer.

      For some reason, tonight makes me think of that night. It’s weird, because they’re totally different—then, I was with my best friends in the world; tonight, I’m with four people I don’t know at all. But when we walk into Stella’s room and find her and Clarisa dressed in jackets and hiking boots and Stella tells us to “go back and put on real clothes—except you, Mason, you can get hypothermia if you want—because we’re going on a hike,” I’m kind of excited. Stella picks the lock keeping the back door shut from the outside with a hairpin, and then we walk outside and the freedom, the air, the forest—it feels familiar. It doesn’t really matter that Mason won’t shut up and it doesn’t really matter that Stella might be the worst person in the world to follow into the woods in the middle of the night and it doesn’t even matter that we might get caught. I mean, they can’t exactly kick all of us out of camp.

      We follow Stella away from the cabins, toward the trees. By the time we step into the forest, I can hear Clarisa breathing hard. “You all right?” I say.

      “So many trees,” she whispers back, as if there’s someone around to hear us. “I have to count, I can’t count, I have to count, I can’t count, I have to—”

      “Count steps,” I say. “If it takes a safe number of steps to get to where we’re going, then it’s safe, right?”

      “The trees,” she says again, her eyes squeezed shut. “There are too many. I can’t count them—”

      “Look down, Clarisa, look at your feet,” Stella says. “Step forward. Okay, that’s good. That’s one. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. It’s going to be great, I promise.”

      Five minutes later, Stella takes an abrupt turn off the path, straight into a cluster of trees. Another seven steps later and the trees disappear. We’re standing in a grassy clearing that drops off steeply about fifty feet in front of us. There are dead trees lying across the ground, barks peeling. Now that we’re not under the canopy anymore, it’s actually incredibly bright under the light of the moon. It kind of reminds me of a stage—the darkness of the forest behind us, the sudden brightness, the ledge in front. The feeling that the silence is just waiting for you to break it. I wish I had my guitar.

      “Welcome,” Stella announces, “to The Ridge.” She takes a seat on one of the dead trees on the ground.

      “Why are we here?” Mason asks. He walks along the grass suspiciously and looks around.

      “Don’t you ever get tired of having all of our conversations and actions and everything else monitored all the СКАЧАТЬ