“There it is! Turn here, you’re going to miss it!” The car turned at a long sign built into the rocks which read Tate’s Hell State Forest. “They’re at marker 45, by the gazebo.” They drove the winding road in silence. Emma stared all around her. There was nothing so dense and green in Arizona, and even her short time in Florida had not prepared her for this. The trees gave way to huge expanses of lake before swallowing up the scenery completely with moss, trees and high grass. A sign they passed read that there were Florida Black Bears in the woods, and that it was a crime to mess with them. Emma glanced uneasily at her father, hoping he had not noticed the sign.
The road finally found a flat, grassy clearing next to a swamp. “There! Stop, they’re right there!” Emma bounced with anticipation as her father pulled into a parking spot near a huge wooden structure that held two tables. Two backpacks sat at one of the tables.
“Where are their parent’s?” Her dad asked. Without really registering his question she shot out of the car before it had rolled to a complete stop. “Hey!” He shouted after her.
Kayla was sitting on the dock rubbing bug spray into her olive arms. Above her Caroline turned, smiling as Emma ran up, her footsteps echoing loudly on the sun bleached boards.
“There she is,” Caroline said. She stepped forward and hugged a surprised Emma. The two had spent the last five weeks in English and Algebra 2 together, but they had never been close enough to hug. “We’ve been waiting for you.” She looked over Emma’s shoulder. “Oh, you brought your dad.”
“Yeah, he drove me here.”
From behind her Emma heard her dad approach on the walkway. “Ladies,” he said. The three girls smiled up at him.
“Hello Mr. Charles, it’s good to see you again,” Caroline said.
“Hello Caroline. Where are your parents?”
“They dropped us off, like an hour ago. They’re coming back around seven when the park closes, then Kayla is staying the night with me. Is it okay if Emma stays the night, too?”
Emma’s dad looked around him at the small grass clearing with its gazebo, at the swampy terrain, at the three small girls standing on the boardwalk. “They just left you here? Without anyone to watch you?”
“Duh, they drop us here all the time,” Caroline told him. “The rangers come by like every thirty minutes so there’s always someone watching. Besides, they don’t want to spend all day hiking with us. Mama says if she wanted to go marching through the swamp and fighting off mosquitoes she would move down to the Everglades and sell her car. So can she?”
“Can she what?”
Caroline rolled her eyes again. “Can Emma stay the night at my place? We’re going to watch that old James Cauldron movie, the one about the serial killer stalker guy.”
“I guess,” he answered, “but she doesn’t have any overnight clothes with her.”
“That’s okay, we’ll take care of her.”
“So, your parents just leave you girls out here?” He asked. He scratched the back of his neck, a mannerism Emma knew meant he was stalling a decision he didn’t want to make. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that.”
“It’s fine. Like I said, the rangers come by. Besides, we have phones. If anything bad happened it’s not like we would be lost on the path or anything.” Emma’s dad watched Caroline for what seemed like minutes, and if she was uncomfortable by his scrutiny she didn’t show it. In her short time at Pinebridge Prep she had seen this display many times with their shared teachers. Caroline didn’t let the advantage of adulthood dissuade her holier-than-thou attitude.
It was one of the traits Emma liked most about her.
“Okay, I guess. If you girls are sure you’ll be okay out here?” It came out as a question. Caroline nodded her head.
“We’re going to be great. My folks will be back at seven, and then it’s sleepover time!” She grabbed Emma by the shoulders and shook her playfully.
Emma, unaware she was going to be jostled, shrieked first in surprise, then in joy at the playfulness.
“Okay, okay.” He looked into his daughter’s smiling eyes. “If you need me, you call me. You understand?” Seeing his sincerity, the smile dropped from Emma’s face. She nodded, somber.
“We’re going to be fine. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we want to make it to the lakeside to go swimming before there’s too many tourists.” Caroline pronounced the last word with the disgust most children reserved for the darker sufferings in life.
Emma’s dad nodded, winking at his daughter. “Have fun!”
“I will,” she said.
Then Emma was alone with Caroline and Kayla.
“So, what do you want to do first?” Emma asked. The other two girls exchanged a smile.
“We’ve got to get our bags, then we’re going somewhere cool,” Caroline told her.
“Where?”
“The dwarf palms!” Kayla barked. Caroline shot her a dark look.
“Dwarf palms? What are those? I thought we were going swimming,” Emma asked.
“We can go swimming in the lake, if you like getting eaten by alligators,” Kayla said as they pushed past her.
“There aren’t alligators in the lake,” Emma said, trying to sound more confident than she felt.
“This is Florida, there are alligators everywhere,” Caroline corrected. “Basically if there’s water there are snakes and alligators in it. Why do you think they built all these wood walkways over the wetlands?”
Emma’s eyes scanned the high-grassed, swampy terrain.
“Well, let’s get hiking,” Caroline said, her backpack securely on her back. “We’ve got to get to the clearing before it gets too dark.”
Without answering Emma followed the two girls onto the boardwalk, their footsteps sounding like drumbeats in the hot afternoon air. They passed two pairs of hikers before they came to the next grassy clearing in the wetlands, where two tables of young children were performing tests on water samples they had taken from the preserve. A dozen pairs of eyes watched them as they walked from one boardwalk to another.
“Can we
