Lost at Running Brook Trail (9 page)

A little more than half the entrance was blocked.

“What about the top part?” Susan asked.

“We can’t do anything about that and we can’t get back out, and even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to put another stone up there.” Elaine spun the wheel on the lighter and the water-formed stalagmites, barely visible drawings and their makeshift bed came into clearer view. The bed pulled them in, since there was nowhere else to go. And there they sat, trying to find comfort among branches with only their bags and themselves.

“What now?” Susan asked.

“I suggest we sit or lie in the position we’ll be sleeping in, so that if someone falls asleep, we’re all where we’re supposed to be. I’m already at my end.”

They shuffled around in position, Susan now at her end and Miriam and Kimberly in the middle. Although the temperature had fallen outside, it wasn’t as cold inside as they had expected.

“Now what?” Susan asked again. She was hungry. She’d run out of chocolate, and now there was a gnawing in the bottom of her belly that would only go away with food. She had not felt this gnawing in a long time because she didn’t allow herself to get hungry. She didn’t know how she would last until morning. And just where would they get food when day came? The lighter was off and their eyes had adjusted.

“Sleep, dream, think, talk,” Elaine said to them.

“What would we talk about?” Kimberly asked.

“How about your cruelty to others?” Miriam retorted.

“How about minding your own business?” Kimberly snapped.

“Hey, guys.” Elaine interrupted the usual scuffle between the two. “Since you so badly want to find out more about each other, let’s play truth or dare. The dare part of the game may be limited, but we can find out some truths about each other.”

“I’ll go first,” Miriam said.

“No,” Elaine said, “I know who you want to ask a question. Let’s do this with cool heads to pass time. We go in order of where we lie on the bed. You’ll get your turn. I’ll go first by taking a question.”

“Truth or dare,” Susan said.

“Truth.”

“When you got that letter about coming here, did you open it before your parents did?”

“Of course. Wasn’t that what all of us did? Do you think I’m some kind of saint? I wanted to know what it said, especially since I rarely get letters to take home. How would I know how to defend myself? Frankly, I’m sure my mother knew I opened that letter. So much for switching envelopes.”

“How do you know that your mother knew? Did she tell you?” Susan asked.

“They know these things somehow. She often reminds me that she was my age once.”

“Okay, my turn to truth or dare Kimberly!” Miriam said.

“So much for established rules,” Elaine said. “I believe it’s my turn to ask.”

“Sorry, Elaine, but I have a burning question. Truth or dare, Kimberly?”

“I would say dare, but I’m afraid of what you’d ask me to do. So truth.”

“Why are you so cruel and self-centred?”

“That’s the most fascinating question you have? I simply tell the truth the way I see it, and if you were as good looking as I am, you would love me too.”

“I think it’s because nobody else loves you. You’re making up for all the people in the world who should.”

“You shut your mouth! What do you know? My mother loves me!”

Miriam and Kimberly were lying beside each other but seemed as far apart as east from west.

“Ha! Of course our mothers love us. They don’t have much choice. And your father, is he as in love with you as you are with yourself?”

There was silence, and the sound of water dripping could be heard in the distance behind them. It sounded like the third string of a guitar.

“What about my father? What does he have to do with this?”

“Does he love you? That’s the question.” Miriam turned her head to look at Kimberly in the darkness, as if she could gauge her answer by looking at her, even though she couldn’t clearly see her face.

“I have no father!”

Kimberly’s vehement cry took Miriam a little off-guard. It wasn’t the answer she had expected.

“We all have fathers or else we wouldn’t be here. So where is yours, and again, does he love you?”

“I don’t know where my father is. Oh, I heard he’s in England where he is from originally. We all used to live together—me, my mother and him. On my twelfth birthday, I woke up and he was gone. He just packed up and left without a word, and he chose the day I was born to do it. So the answer to your question is that I have no father, and really, from all I just told you, I think you can tell if he loves me. I thought this game only allowed you to ask one question at a time. Are there follow-up questions in truth or dare?”

In the semi-darkness, lying on their backs, using their backpacks as pillows, they could see the rock formations jutting toward them. In their overactive imaginations and the dark cave, they pictured the worse kinds of things, such as the stalactites falling and piercing them.

“We’re in a cave blocked in by stones like caged animals, lying on a bed made from leaves and branches. At this point I’d say normal rules don’t apply to anything.” Miriam remembered that she had once started taken a fencing class but then stopped taking the class. She didn’t have the aptitude or skills for fencing. The stalactites reminded her of swords.

“Well, it’s my turn,” Kimberly said. “So, Miriam, truth or dare?”

“Truth,” Miriam whispered seductively in Kimberly’s ear.

“You’re constantly picking on me. It’s like you have a chip on your shoulder or something. What’s your problem?”

“Where to start.” Miriam drummed her fingers on her bag. “You’re full of your stupid self, you’re cruel and you act like you’re better than the rest of us. Remember that day in the hall at school when you and the rest of your pinhead friends said I should go home to the Philippines?”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You were there in the mob laughing, pointing and mocking.”

“So what’s wrong with the Philippines? You’re from there, aren’t you? And if some girls want to make fun of you, what do you think I can do about it? Do I look like some defender of people who are laughed at?”

“I was born right here in Canada. My parents are from the Philippines. You’re an ignorant person, a clueless North American who, along with your other clueless friends try to embarrass others but only embarrass yourselves with your blatant lack of knowledge about anything important. As for being my defender, I’m not looking for one, but you can choose the people you hang out with. You can choose not to make fun of other people.”

Night had fallen. They could tell from the space at the top of the blockade. The orange sky had slipped away, and all that remained was a silky inkiness.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Yes it is,” Elaine interjected. “My mother would always say you can step back or you can step forward.”

“So I should do one or the other?” Kimberly asked.

“Or both,” Elaine continued. “You can step back from your group—meaning you can separate yourself from them—and you can step forward and say it’s not okay to harass your schoolmates. Maybe they would follow your lead.”

“I never said anything bad about Miriam.”

“That’s going to be your defence?” Miriam said. “You didn’t actually say the words, so that puts you in the clear. If somebody gives a speech and you applaud, what does that say? You didn’t tell your friends not to speak. You’re not some innocent bystander. You’re a participant; that’s what’s so funny to me. So that’s the chip on my shoulder.”

From time to time they heard strange sounds outside and the wind whistling through the cracks of the stacked stones. Unconsciously they moved closer to each other.

“Maybe I can get a question in now,” Elaine said. “My question is for Susan. Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” Susan said.

“Why can’t you commit to anything? You don’t want to take action on anything. It’s like you expect everything to just fall into place without doing anything. You want water, but you won’t go down to the stream to get it. What’s that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You have to know something. This is truth or dare, you have to give a truthful answer.”

Susan prayed for sleep. She was hungry and tired, and now Elaine was asking her hard questions. She should have chosen dare. What could they have dared her to do? Go look at crazy drawings on the wall or try to touch one of those things that were raining down from the ceiling? She didn’t want to think about any of it. But now she had to.

“Decisions are made for me, so I don’t have to think of anything.”

“Really, decisions like what?”

“Like, I get to own and operate my parents’ restaurant, even though I don’t want to. But I’m an only child, so there’s no one else to pass it on to. I got stuck with a burden I don’t want.”

“And you never told your parents you aren’t interested?”

“No, I don’t want to disappoint them. I just accept it. They want to keep it in the family. I don’t even know why I go to school. My future is already sitting at College and Grace.”

“Well,” Elaine said, “since you’ve already made your mind up about taking it, it’s not a gift or a family heirloom. It’s a business, so if you’re going to run a restaurant, you need to understand budgets, costing, customer service and all that stuff. But I don’t see why you can’t tell your parents that you might want to do something else with your life. What do you want to do if you had a choice? Which you do have, by the way.”

“I don’t know.”

They tossed and turned, trying to find comfort on their leafy bed. Knots from branches became thorns in their sides.

“Truth or dare, Miriam,” Kimberly said.

“It’s not your turn.”

“Suddenly you want to play by the rules? Truth or dare?”

Miriam sighed. “Truth.”

“You grilled me about my father. What about yours? Does he love you?”

“He did.”

“Did? Is he dead?”

“As a matter of fact, he is. He died suddenly last year from cancer. I didn’t get to say goodbye. One day he was here, the next day he was gone.”

“So you have something in common,” Elaine said.

“What?”

“You both lost your father.”

“Her father isn’t dead,” Miriam said.

“But he’s not here,” Kimberly said, “so he is quite dead. What kind of cancer did he die from?”

“Does it really matter? It’s all the same. It gnaws away at someone you love and takes him away. But it was in his stomach.”

They lay quiet for a while listening to the dripping of the water. Was there a well back there, formed from the constant dripping? Was it a stream and did it lead anywhere?

“Truth or dare, Elaine?” Susan said after a while.

“Truth.”

“Do you think you should be out here for storing books?”

“Should any of us be out here for the stuff we did? By themselves probably not, but if done repeatedly, I guess they have the right to send us here. Schools are dictatorial by nature. They do what they want with us. I don’t think I should be here. Why should I be punished because I want to learn and get my work done?”

“When I go to the restaurant with my parents, they tell me that storing food for too long can lead to spoilage and waste. First in, first out, they say, so probably the same thing applies to borrowed books.”

“Food and books are not the same thing.”

“No, but hoarding both means somebody might go without.”

They heard the sounds of what sounded like scratching at the rocks at the mouth of the cave. They listened intently, their hearts racing with each scrape. Eventually the sound died away. They were left a little relieved but still edgy and waiting.

“At school we learn the golden rules.” Susan started the poem by the unknown author again. She chanted it in the darkness like a prayer to some unknown god.

“But we never follow them, maybe we’re fools.

In misdeed we constantly play;

Maybe the water will wash it all away.”

“Depressing,” Miriam said. “I never really got what that poem was about. Wasn’t it something to do with doing the wrong thing?”

“It’s about the stupid things we do,” Susan responded.

“Yeah,” Miriam said, “we really need a poem about all that right now. Why do you keep repeating the verses?”

“I can’t get them out of my head. When Ms. Carter sent me to see the principal, she said she was tired of my laziness and my mission to be mediocre. It was funny that she thought I had any mission at all. She obviously thinks more about my ambition than I do. And then she topped it off by saying,
‘
See if you can catch your offense, the density is hard to conceive.’ It’s not a straight quotation—she dropped a couple words I think for emphasis—but it was enough for it to stick. She did drill us with that poem.”

“She did,” Miriam said, “but I can’t recite it like you can, so she might be wrong about your mediocrity.”

“Ms. Carter is warped like that,” Kimberly noted. “She throws lines from novels and poems at us all the time. It’s like she wants to scare sense into us with literature. Like that’s ever going to work. She quoted from that poem to me too, and she did drop some of the words because she wanted to embarrass me. I was late for her class. I had something to do in the bathroom. She said, ‘You never follow the golden rules; you’re a fool.’ She’s just warped.

“Or maybe you really are a fool.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Maybe we’re all foolish,” Elaine said. “How else would you explain all four of us being out here instead of being in a nice warm bed?”

Nobody could answer that question adequately, so they lay quietly, each to her own thoughts.

Susan felt her body sinking into that pleasant place where sleep lived. As she drifted into its arms, she thought about the cave falling in on them. Buried under the rubble, nobody would be able to find them.