Free The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans

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    They’d lived in a disused barracks just outside Helena and although it was a pain being the only girl in the group and you had to get up at the crack of dawn and do all kinds of dumb things like jogging twice a day and doing P.T. and hoisting the flag every morning, the rest of the time all you had to do was sit around and be ‘evaluated,’ which meant answering the same boring questions she had been asked a million times before by probation officers and case managers and social workers and so many different kinds of shrink she’d lost count. Sometimes she just made things up to confuse them or to fool them into thinking they were onto something, but mostly she just trotted out the same old answers. About her home, her childhood, her parents and, of course, her feelings.
    They always wanted to know how you felt about everyone and everything and they asked you so goddamn often it made you want to scream. It was like it was the only thing they’d ever been taught at shrink school or wherever it was they sent these jerks. ‘And how did that make you feel , Skye?’ Like, when you’d just told them how you had to listen every night while your stepfather came home drunk and beat and raped your mom and then came looking for you. ‘And how did that make you FEEL ?’ ‘Oh, terrific, I just loved it, you know?’ And they always asked it with that same look of care and concern, like they really, really understood how it must have been, like they shared the pain, like it had happened to them too, which was of course total bullshit because they were all a bunch of spoon-fed do-gooders and not one of them had lived in the real world or had the faintest fucking clue what it was like.
    After a month at the barracks, suddenly, one night last week, they were given this big spaghetti meal, handed a sleeping bag and a few other things, bundled onto a bus and, four hours later, dumped in the middle of nowhere. On the journey Skye had tried to work out where they were heading but it was too dark. For two days, with barely a bite to eat, they had hiked thirty miles through the mountains which Skye figured was supposed to shock them or break them or something and because of that she just kept her head down and did it. Sometimes her lungs felt like they were going to explode and her feet got all bruised and blistered and hurt like hell but she was damned if she was going to show it.
    On the third night they arrived at a clearing and there was Glen, the program director, to meet them and some other staff, all smiling and joking and slapping everyone on the back and saying how well they’d all done. The staff had buried some cans of peaches in a circle and the whole group had to find them, like it was a game you’d really want to play when you’d been busting your ass hiking for forty-eight hours. The peaches sure tasted good though.
    Ever since, the food had been boring as hell, granola and nuts and raisins and oatmeal and rice, that kind of healthy shit. On that first evening, as they sat around the campfire, Glen told them that they were going to have to learn how to make fires with a bow drill, like Indians did (only he said Native Americans like people did nowadays so as not to cause offense or to try and make you feel proud or something). Glen looked like some old hippie. He had long blond hair tied back in a ponytail and this wispy beard that he kept stroking and a gentle voice that went up at the end of each sentence as if everything he said was a question. When he mentioned this bow-drill thing, he looked at Skye as if, being half Indian, she might already know how to light fires this way. Yeah, right. As if.
    All of the group, he went on, would have to master the bow-drill technique. Each night it would be somebody’s turn to make the fire and if he or she couldn’t do it, then that night no one would get hot food. Which was fine for him because the next morning he got in his truck and went home, leaving Julia in