Free Wildlife by Fiona Wood Page A

seeing as we’re sharing a bathroom? Also, she seems so sensible. Maybe she’s got a friend suffering from an eating disorder. Have the others got this burning pain around the ankles? The hot, fat feeling of blisters establishing themselves? Why didn’t I walk my boots in properly?
    What am I even
doing
here? Me, a city girl. Ninety percent of my life happens on one highly resourced page of the street directory. I should have been maneuvering my way out of this school long ago, seeing this on the horizon. It always seemed to be so far off in the future—until now. Now it’s got me in its zealously healthy stranglehold.
    This will take forever to get used to. By then it will be time to turn around and go back home. So, classic time-waster. My giant boots plonk along like mud-clogged hoofs, every step a challenge to balance already made precarious by the pack and the slidey, muddy trail. My hair is plastered to my forehead with sweat and rain.
    All this time it is as though I’ve been in a tight urban hug without properly realizing it, and now it’s like someone’s let me go. Everything here feels too big, too open. Like a series of safety bonds are breaking—
ping, ping, ping
—releasing me into this quietness. I’m falling. Filling my lungs with the air of another planet. It’s severely unnatural.
    After too long, and nonstop complaints from Holly, we reach the base of Mount Paradiso and decide to keep going, hiking up to the first grassy saddle. We argue about where to put the tent. We’re not supposed to pitch under trees, because they fall over sometimes, especially after wet weather, and we’ve had a record wet winter. But we all feel a little insecure about choosing a spot in the open. So we compromise and put the back of the tents close to a rocky outcrop that gives us at least the illusion of protection.
    I cannot imagine being okay out here by myself. It feels weird enough, and ominously enough like the beginning of a horror movie, with two other humans; it is unthinkable that I could be here alone. I refuse to be here alone. I assert my rights as a pack animal.
    My simple plan to ensure that I don’t have to do the solo hike is as follows: log name in the solo hike schedule for the final week (done), at which time I will pull a sickie. And that will be the end of it. The alternative is possible fear-induced insanity or heart failure. If any of my friends want to torture me, they all know they only have to tell me the plot of any horror movie they choose. I have always refused to actually watch one. My imagination, along with accidentally glimpsed trailers here and there, has given me enough terrifying horror fodder for life.
    *     *     *
    We find a ring of rocks that campers past have used as a fireplace, so that saves a bit of work. Finding dry wood is a challenge, after the rain all day, but we scrabble together enough. We combine our three packs of pasta for dinner—pesto. We tip the dried stuff into a pan, add water, and simmer.
    We try it, looking at one another with disbelief as it hits the taste buds. “It’s pesto, Jim, but not as we know it,” I say.
    “Fascinating,” says Lou, unsmilingly humoring my
Star Trek
reference, while wincing at the foul food. (And what made me say that? Is there such a thing as a dad-joke vacuum that needs to be filled, even in the wild?)
    Lou stares into the fire, eating on autopilot. She has dark hair cut in a bob, with long bangs. She trims it herself. Her glasses frames are heavy and black, hardcore nerd. Her nose has a little dip in the middle, too cute really for her anti-pretty style. She is the sort of girl who would wear heavy boots if she ever put on a pretty frock, just to show she was calling the shots.
    “I’ve never tasted shittier food,” says Holly. “And it’s probably solid carbs.”
    “That’s the idea.” Lou prods and reshapes the fire with the big stick, our poker. It crackles up and throws a comforting heat. “So we