Not Taken

  

I heard the other girls outside. Their voices were muffled by the damp wood of the cabin. I had been sitting cross-legged on the plain blue mattress that had been assigned to me on a bottom bunk. Its frame probably once shone with fresh varnish, but the oils of many tiny fingers throughout the years had worn it down and matted it. Etched in the wood were various forms of graffiti. Mostly names, many of them couples that were only together now in those carved proclamations. Some of them were terrifying things to scare us. Better watch out. Don’t close your eyes. We all thought ourselves far too brave to let that get to us, as we would stay up past bedtime, coming up with narratives in hushed tones for these long-forgotten names and their cryptic messages.   

I felt very powerful in the darkness, where you could almost feel how late it was in the air. I was away from my home for a few days, and there was no such thing as cell phones back then. No parents to scold me for being awake... though the troop leaders could. That didn’t overly matter to me. There was something about being enveloped by the skeletal fingers of trees and the smell of decaying leaves that immediately brought out the savage in me. Couple that with the sounds of nature, where sometimes you could hear everything, every rustle, every snap, every crunch, and then sometimes you were left with just the sound of blood rushing through your body or the rumbling of your stomach.   

The previous night, the other girls had teased me into waking up one of our troop leaders because we were hungry.   

There’s that strangeness that builds up in your gut before you break the rules, a strangeness that doesn’t really have a name, but it burns in your throat and sinks in your stomach. I remember the slow shuffle I made towards the sleeping adult, my socks muffling my movements a bit and getting caught in the splinters of the floor, as the other girls watched from their beds, their eyes glowing like searchlights behind me. Gingerly, I poked her nose and she sprang up so quickly that I nearly yelped. Of course, the request for food at this time of night was ridiculous. In the morning, I barely ate my French toast sticks. They sat defeated in a pool of syrup. She made a comment about how I wasn’t so hungry now.  

The others had all laced up their sneakers and wandered outside. There was only a sprinkling of us left in the cabin. Our troop leaders were working on something in another part of the cabin. To occupy my thoughts, I decided to sit at the long table in the middle of the floor and draw. That was my major hobby. I would draw out storylines like a director would make a storyboard. Then, I’d staple all the pages together, but three or four wouldn’t do, oh no, because I needed a spine, like a real book. These childhood fantasies were rumpled and smeared from ungraceful erasing and oversaturated colors filled the crude shapes recognizable as people, all bound together on one side with a mess of metal. They were beautiful to me.   

My drawing session didn’t last long, as the unpolished surface of the table made all my lines ragged. I hung my head over the paper and made a curtain of my hair. My hair was so straight; it always got tangled. So many crooked lines in my life. And then I heard the girls outside again, and my head sprang up, the curtain opening with a single swoosh.   

I couldn’t tell what they were saying. Just muffled echoes of identifiably human sounds. I listened closer while looking around to see if anyone else left in the cabin cared to notice, but they were all preoccupied with board games and books. Faint 8-bit sounds came from a girl huddled in the corner under a blanket. She must have had a Game Boy. Jealous. I tried to drown out the sounds of clinking plastic game pieces and flipping pages and Mario to see if I could hear what they were saying outside. The voices were actually getting softer and softer.   

Don’t wander off. Don’t wander off. DON’T WANDER OFF. It had been repeated several times with varying degrees of intensity before we even got off the borrowed, bouncy van to this campsite. My parents repeated it. My friends’ parents repeated it. The leaders repeated it every time they could. No way. I already had one stint at going against the rules and ended up with a sinking feeling and drowning French toast sticks.   

“Amdhamdmd mdmdhaocm” came one distant voice (I was relatively certain it was Rachel). “Gibidph a schphryndmph” came another (Jessica? Lisa?). “Mmm-hrrrmmpff!” No, that one was definitely Catherine. She was 15 years old, so she was basically an adult. She was old enough to where my parents said that I should trust her if there were no adults around. That was some serious responsibility.   

Her voice acted like an invisible thread attached to that statement from my parents, and I was pulled outside. I couldn’t even remember stepping into my shoes that were already tied, or the hushed swish of my maroon sweatpants below a matching sweatshirt. That’s how conservative parents dressed their kids in the 90s, I guess. It was as if I automatically brought myself out onto the porch of the cabin.   

The fall air smacked me right in the face. You shouldn’t be doing this, kid. Listen to me, a personification of wind and consciousness. We had reached the muted part of autumn after all the brilliant colors had already fallen and drained. You could step on the leaves when they first fell and hear all the great crunches like yelps of joy. Now they’d gone all soft and damp, only giving off whimpers and whispers of days past of being in big piles and memories of photosynthesis. The tree branches above were splintered against a gray sky, leaving the woods in an eerie non-light.   

To my right, I distinctly heard the voices again, clear and crisp this time. I padded across the porch and right off of it to see them meandering off to the left. They weren’t too far off, only a few yards. I saw Catherine at the head of the group. Her strawberry blonde hair was tied in a ponytail and pulled through the back of a red baseball cap, and I could see it bounce back and forth rhythmically in tune with her steps. She never managed to have tangles in her hair. It was easy to spot her against the somber colors of our surroundings, in her pink top and bright blue jeans. I don’t even think I owned a pair of jeans at the time. She brandished a branch that had fallen and used it like a walking stick, giving a very official, ranger-like aura.   

I felt that unnamed strangeness build up inside me again, and I started following them without a word. But it was Catherine, so it was okay, right? I was supposed to be able to trust her.   

I was still far behind them and didn’t try to catch up. “Can’t… stop… force… too… strong,” I said in my mind like a superhero would say when he’s being pulled in by an evil alien’s tracker beam. I even started to act as though I was struggling against it, making my leg movements erratic and strained. I tried to imagine how it felt to walk through tall water to get that right effect. I did tend to be an overly dramatic child because life was much more interesting in my head than anywhere else. The earliest memory I even have is of my mom telling me we were going to move in with her husband. I must have been 3 or 4 at the time, but I remember stumbling towards our front door, grasping at the frame while I pretended to sob “No, I don’t want to leave! I don’t want to move!” and after a dramatic pause “…Or would I?” and with that line, I turned to my right as if I were breaking the fourth wall and looking into the camera. I treated my life like a movie.   

It wasn’t long before I heard the harsh voices of our troop leaders screaming at us to get back. We hadn’t even gone that far; we could still see the cabin perfectly. If they hadn’t been so loud, I bet we wouldn’t have gotten caught. I ran back quickly as if I hadn’t done anything wrong because I wasn’t really with them. I was behind them, but I just had to follow for some reason.   

All of us younger kids tried to blame Catherine since she was supposed to be the responsible one. Being old doesn’t make you responsible though, and we were all scolded for a while. I felt bad for the rest of the day, which was my default emotion after being yelled at regardless of who did the yelling. For me, being in trouble was like being swallowed up by a storm cloud. It held me in close and obscured my view of the rest of the world. No one else seemed bothered. They all went about their lives again, chatting away about relevant topics like if ‘Nsync or the Backstreet Boys were better or who the heck stole my purple scrunchie. We all crowded at the dining table eating chicken nuggets and tater tots just as we did the night before. But this wasn’t the night before, and I kept wondering why they didn’t care. I actually started to hate them a little.   

Later, the darkness crept in once again. I could feel it seeping in through the cracks in the walls and from underneath the blinds on the windows. It felt colder than before, biting at my starry printed pajamas. My blanket was a lousy shield, and I had no sword. For my friends, it was the same routine, with the whispered ghost stories and the giggles and the annoyed shushes from the adults. I had laid facing the wall. In the darkness, their voices were detached from their bodies. They could be beads rolling across a floor. They could be sand rubbing between my hands. They could be anything but those stupid girls. I nearly gave those voices all the joyous anonymity I could until two distinct syllables of my name came up. They were suggesting if they should get me to go wake up the leader to ask for food again.   

I didn’t move. I pretended to be asleep.