Back of Beyond

“Sure it is. Just accept yourself and look for the good in others. It’s not complicated.”

“Do you see good in me?” Gracie asked.

He smiled. He even had a nice smile. “Of course. You watch out for your sister and your dad, I think.”

“So who watches out for me?”

“I will, if you want,” he said sincerely.

Gracie shook her head. She’d never met someone so comfortable in their own skin. It weirded her out. There must be more to him, she thought. A dark side. But when she looked into his open face and that impossible smile, she couldn’t see it. No one was that good. Maybe he was a sociopath. And she felt immediately guilty for thinking it.

“See how it works?” he said, as if reading her mind.

Gracie was grateful when Danielle suddenly reappeared and grasped Justin’s face between her hands before sitting back down.

Justin didn’t pull his face away, and smiled at Danielle sloppily. He liked it. Gracie rolled her eyes again and looked back to the fire. “Hey, look,” Justin said to Danielle, “out on the lake. Can you see what’s going on?”

“What?” her sister asked.

“The fish are rising.”

Gracie followed his outstretched arm. The moon lit the still surface of the lake in light blue and sure enough, ringlets were appearing everywhere, as if it were raining upside down.

Justin said, “Want to go down to the shore with me and see if we can catch one?”

Danielle was up like a shot. She stood in front of Gracie and blocked the light and heat, and Gracie felt as if she’d been plunged into cold. She started to stand but Danielle reached back and put a hand on her shoulder, preventing her from rising. Danielle turned and bent over close to her ear, and said, “Not you.”

Justin winked and asked Gracie, “Do you want to come along?”

“No,” Danielle said. “She doesn’t.”

And Gracie thought, She doesn’t deserve him.

After they’d left, Gracie considered asking Dakota to help her find that snake so she could put it into the bottom of her sister’s sleeping bag.

* * *

She hugged herself against the chill, now that her sister had abandoned her. It seemed very late but it wasn’t even ten yet. The sky was a bright smear of stars she’d never known existed before, and the busy sky above and the absolute darkness of everything beyond the fire made her feel smaller than she’d ever felt.

The campfire was the hub that held everyone in place. When it started to die Dakota or Jeb would leave their place behind the cooking station where they were washing dishes and toss another piece of wood on it.

She observed the others without staring at them.

The Glodes kept to themselves. They were the farthest away from Gracie, on the opposite side of the fire. Tristan Glode smoked a big black cigar, and the glow danced in the darkness. Donna stared into the fire as if she were comatose. Gracie thought that although they were by themselves they weren’t really with each other. It was as if there were a wall between them even though they were a couple of feet apart. How sad, she thought.

Two of the three Wall Streeters, Tony D’Amato and Drey Russell, were whittling on sticks and joking about it. Everything, it seemed, was a joke to them. Little light-colored piles of shavings gathered on their boots, and the blades from their pocketknives flashed in the firelight.

“A year ago,” D’Amato said in a singsong, bluesy cadence, “I was looking out over the Sea of Cortez from my air-conditioned bungalow in Baja. Now here I am in the freezing mountains, sittin’ on a log. Whittlin’.”

“You a whittlin’ man,” Russell sang along.

“I’m a whittlin’ man,” D’Amato sang back. “Whittlin’ ’til I ain’t got no stick left.”

“You a whittlin’ man…”

“Think I’ll whittle me a boat and float on out of here back to Baja…”

“He a whittlin’ man who ain’t a-scared of no snakes!” Russell laughed, and the two of them collapsed in on each other. Luckily, they held their knives out to the side.

“You guys are embarrassing me,” James Knox said from the cooking station.

Gracie found herself staring at them with more than a little awe. Knox caught her, smiled, and said, “Do you find us strange?”

Embarrassed, she said, “I’ve never met any New Yorkers before. I’ve heard about you and read about you and you’re on all the television shows, but…”

D’Amato laughed. “But you’ve never met any of us in real life. You make me feel like a zoo animal or something.”

“Sorry,” she said, and looked down. It was just that they were exactly how they were portrayed, and she’d always thought they couldn’t possibly really be like that: fast-talking, ethnic, animated. Like they were playing the roles of New Yorkers according to the script. Just like TV. But she didn’t say it.

* * *

To the right, Gracie’s dad was perched on a large rock next to Rachel Mina, who sat in the grass with her plate in her lap, finishing her dinner. Gracie had noted how Rachel had waited patiently for everyone else to be served steaks before getting her dinner-panfried fish and the last of the beans and corn. She admired the fact that Rachel hadn’t made a fuss but simply waited for her nonmeat meal. Too many of Gracie’s vegetarian friends went on and on about their preferences in the lunchroom, she thought. On and on about what they could eat and what they wouldn’t. They could learn something from Rachel Mina. The clicking of her utensils on the tin plate was rhythmic and delicate and Gracie hoped that someday she could be as graceful and feminine when she ate.

Then, obviously thinking no one was paying attention, her dad reached down and snatched a small piece of fish off Rachel’s plate and popped it in his mouth. She looked back but rather than object, she smiled at him. Her dad raised his eyebrows in an It’s actually good gesture. Rachel turned back around and finished her plate.

It had happened quickly, and without a sound. But Gracie sat transfixed as if a thunderbolt had hit her in the chest.

They knew each other, she thought. The scene had a kind of sweet intimacy about it, like it had happened often before and had become a shared joke.

They knew each other. Really well.

She felt bushwhacked. Her eyes misted and she looked away.

When she opened them she saw Wilson, who’d suddenly appeared from the direction of the tents. Standing there, staring at her, his face lit orange with firelight.

“What do you want?” she asked, too loudly.

The others around the campfire stopped talking or doing what they were doing. Jed and Dakota peered over the top of the cooking station, washcloths poised and still.

“Goodness, little girl,” Wilson said. “What is your problem?” He looked at the others with his palms open and held up. “All I did was walk up here to get warm. I didn’t do anything.”

No one said a word. A beat passed, and she was glad no one could see her face flush red. She wiped angrily at the tears in her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

From the right, her dad said, “Gracie, are you okay?”

She stood up and refused to look at him. “I’m going to bed,” she said, and started for the tents.

She was gone before her eyes could adjust from the fire to the total darkness, and she tripped over a root or rock and she sprawled forward. She landed spread-eagle, grass in her mouth.

Somebody-D’Amato or Russell or Jed-barked a laugh. Someone else said, “Cool it, that’s rude.”

“Sorry.”

She scrambled to her feet spitting grass and dried weed buds and stomped toward the tents. D’Amato called