“FUUUCCCKKK.” She was curled up on a bed of broken glass, the door handle digging into her hip, her head pushed forward by the bent-up roof. The car made no sense—windows where seats should be, the dashboard sideways, the steering wheel pressing into her thigh. Ivy turned her head slowly, experimentally, and saw red leaves and scraps of white sky through the passenger window. “Fuck,” she whimpered, hiccupping with a sort of gasp-sob combination. She pulled her arm out of the glass crumbs and grabbed the steering wheel, hoisting herself into a crouch. The motor was still running, so she found the keys and switched it off. She reached up to the passenger door and pulled on the handle, but she was too far away to push the door up. Lowering one of the armrests in the middle of the seat and bracing her knee against it, she pushed herself upward against the door, which was as heavy as a drunk. She lowered her head and pushed with her upper back, unfolding her body as the door heaved upward into the sky.
Ivy swayed there like a jack-in-the-box for a moment, trying to sort up from down. The car was mashed against a large tree. She couldn’t see the road at the top of the brambly slope. The only sound was the rushing water about ten yards below her. No sirens, no shouts, no dogs. Ivy crouched on the remains of the driver’s side window and picked some cookies out of the mess, shoving them into her hoodie pocket under her jacket. She found her wallet between the driver’s seat and the window. The soda bottle was behind the driver’s seat, but she couldn’t get her arm past the crumpled roof and couldn’t move the seat because the lever was crushed against the door. She tried the passenger seat and managed to get it pushed forward enough to allow her to squeeze her arm into the back of the car and snag the bottle with her fingertips.
Pulling herself out of the car, she dropped to the ground beside its weirdly upturned belly. She sidestepped down the slope to the creek, which was busying itself among some boulders, oblivious to Ivy’s noisy arrival. The water was clear and fast moving; she wondered if it was okay to drink it. She cupped her hands and slurped a little. It didn’t taste like mud, so she drank some more. The taste was sharp, metallic. It scraped the sugar from her mouth and chilled her insides. Ivy lifted handful after handful to her mouth until her stomach felt like a balloon. Then she emptied the orange soda bottle, rinsed it, and filled it with more water.
She looked up toward the dirt road, craning her neck to see some sort of break in the slope. It was so steep even the trees couldn’t hang on; they were lying all over the place in various states of rot. In some spots, the ground wasn’t even the ground. It was more of a wall, stripped free of ferns and leaves, like a freshly scraped knee, roots snaking out of the raw-looking dirt.
She couldn’t see the road, but she knew it was up there somewhere, and that it was her only hope of finding her way out of these woods. She wasn’t sure what she’d do once she got there, though. Hitchhike to a bus station? Steal another car? The gaping uncertainty—combined with the thought of climbing the steep, muddy slope—wore her out. She decided to walk along the creek until the way up became more obvious.
It wasn’t easy; the creek kept eating away at the bank, forcing Ivy up the slope, her thin Converse useless against the sliding leaves and moss, the bottle of water throwing her off-balance. She considered ditching it, but she’d seen plenty of I Survived episodes about people lost in the wilderness after their car broke down or they took a wrong turn hiking. They always wished they had a bottle of water.
Climbing farther up and across the slope, she found a shallow stream sliding thinly, sluggishly toward the creek. She turned to follow the trickle upward, digging her feet into the softened banks. After she climbed for a while, her gaze caught on something silvery: the foil of a cigarette package half-buried in leaves. A little farther on, she found a matted shoelace, then a plastic grocery bag. Ivy stopped walking and looked up the slope. A colorful smear of beer bottles, soup cans, broken toys, batteries, and tampon boxes stretched up the mountainside to the edge of the dirt road. Here and there, trash bags slumped against tree trunks. A few yards from where she stood, facedown in the trickling stream, lay a bloated diaper scrawled with pastel-colored teddy bears, its edges tinged greenish-brown.
“Christ.” Ivy gave her water bottle a disgusted look, then dropped it among the trash—happy to be relieved of its weight but not its comfort—and picked her way upstream. A raindrop struck her cheek and slid down, cooler and brighter than a tear; then, a few more tapped lightly on her hoodie. The forest began to tick like a clock, leaves nodding and trembling as water drops struck and rolled their way down.
Where the rise met the road, Ivy had to seek out thick-stemmed ferns and saplings to hoist herself onto the
