The Wild Read online

  She gets in the van with Steve.

  It’s a mistake.

  STEVE PLAYS THE RADIO while he’s driving. Something old and annoying. He drives for a long time, out of the city and into dark countryside. The road winds and climbs into foothills and mountains. Steve doesn’t stop at any stop signs for Dawn to jump out. He doesn’t pull over for gas or so she can pee.

  “Where are you taking me?” Dawn asks him.

  Steve glances across at her. He’s whistling along with the music, and it’s annoying as fuck. “You’ll see when we get there,” he tells her. He doesn’t elaborate.

  They drive for a long time. Eventually, they stop.

  There turns out to be a couple of ugly little buildings at the end of a long gravel road. There’s a bright-yellow light on a pole between them, a dimmer light on in a window. A sign by the window reads PARENTS THIS WAY.

  Steve parks the van. Turns it off. Climbs out and walks around to Dawn’s door and waits as she climbs out and looks around. “Come on,” he tells her, starting toward the building with the light on in the window.

  Dawn doesn’t follow. She’s still looking around. Peering into the darkness at the edge of the light, wondering what would happen if she ran, like, now.

  Steve reads her mind. “We’d get you back,” he tells her. “Or we wouldn’t. And believe me, you’d wish we did.”

  He gestures to the building again. “Come on.”

  Dawn follows him.

  “GOT A NEW BEAR CUB for you, Tanya.”

  There’s a woman in the building, sitting at a desk behind an old computer monitor. She’s younger than Steve. Her hair’s pulled up underneath a baseball cap. The cap says OUT OF THE WILD, too. Just like Steve’s jacket.

  Just like the van.

  Tanya stands as Dawn enters the room. She gives Dawn a look, head to toe. “Okay,” she says, apparently satisfied. “Come with me.”

  Dawn glances back at Steve, but he’s over at the desk pretending to ignore her. So Dawn follows Tanya deeper into the building. Into an empty room, a bright-white light, no windows. A table and two chairs. A pile of junk in one corner, straps and rope and what looks like a tarp. Dawn stares at the pile of junk. When she looks back, Tanya’s snapping on rubber gloves.

  (What the fuck?)

  “Welcome to Out of the Wild,” Tanya says. “We’re America’s number one wilderness therapy program for troubled youth. Your parents signed you up because they think we can help you.”

  (What the fuck?)

  “From this moment on, you’re one of our Bear Cubs,” Tanya continues. “You’ll remain in the program until you reach Grizzly status. You’ll work hard for that status. You’ll learn responsibility and respect. You’ll learn how to survive in the wild.”

  “Okay,” Dawn says. “What in the actual fuck.”

  Tanya ditches the spiel. Looks Dawn in the eye. “You’re here because people care about you, Dawn, and because our program works. By the time you walk out of here, you’ll be a whole different person.”

  Dawn wants to slap her. This feels like a dream. “You’re completely nuts,” she tells Tanya, “if you think I’m doing any of this. Those people who supposedly care about me? They’re the reason I’m so fucked up in the first place.

  “I want to go home,” she says.

  But Tanya is unfazed. “You’ll go home when you graduate,” she tells Dawn. “Not a minute before. Believe me, it’s easier if you just accept it.”

  She checks her rubber gloves.

  “Nothing from the outside world is allowed past this point,” she says. “Strip.”

  What happens next is too demeaning to talk about. Suffice it to say, Dawn walks out of that shitty little room without the clothes she walked in with, without her phone, and with Tanya satisfied she’s not holding any of Julian’s stash.

  “Bear Cubs wear yellow,” Tanya tells Dawn, handing her a pair of cargo pants and a yellow T-shirt. “So we can find you better if you lose the rest of the Pack.”

  “What the hell is the Pack?” Dawn asks. “Where are you taking me?”

  “You’ll figure it all out soon enough,” Tanya replies. Then she gestures to the pile of junk in the corner. “That’s the rest of your supplies. We leave it to you to figure out how to transport it.”

  Dawn stares at the pile of junk. Can’t really make sense of it.

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes to take you to camp,” Tanya tells her. “Good luck.”

  THE CONTENTS OF DAWN’S PILE OF JUNK:

  Tarp

  Wool blanket (scratchy)

  Parachute cord (20 feet)

  Assorted straps

  Sleeping bag

  Sleeping pad

  Underwear, two pairs (ugly)

  Socks, two pairs

  Yellow T-shirt

  Yellow fleece

  Rain shell

  Waterproof pants

  Matches

  Cup

  Bowl

  Spork

  Rice (1 bag)

  Lentils (1 bag)

  Raisins (1 bag)

  Oats (1 bag)

  Toothbrush

  Toilet paper (1 roll)

  Book: Wilderness Survival

  Book: Don’t Get Eaten

  Book: Out of the Wild Rules and Regulations

  “You have to earn your camping backpack,” Tanya says, as Dawn staggers out of the building under the weight of her allotment of junk.

  (She’s tied it all together with the parachute cord and the straps, but things keep falling out every couple of steps. Tanya doesn’t offer to help.)

  “Easiest way to earn stuff?” Tanya continues, leading Dawn back toward the white van. “Study the rule book. Memorize it. And don’t be a shit.”

  “AND THAT IS HOW I WOUND UP in this hellhole.”

  Four days after the kidnapping and Dawn is still in that banana-yellow Bear Cub bullshit T-shirt, still dropping things from her tarp literally every time she moves. She’s still kind of half wondering if this whole fiasco isn’t just a bad dream or a bad trip and she’s about to wake up in a pool of her own drool on Julian’s couch again.

  Right now, Dawn is sitting balanced on a lumpy-ass log beside an anemic little campfire, slowly starving to death with the rest of the, quote, unquote, Bear Pack while they wait for the counselors to finish checking the tents before lights-out.

  Dawn still doesn’t have a tent. She hasn’t earned one yet, so she has to rig her tarp into a little lean-to and spread her sleeping bag out underneath it. But she’s really not good at the whole “rigging shit up” thing, so half the time she wakes up in the morning with a face full of dirty tarp, and the other half she wakes up freezing cold and damp to find her tarp’s blown off into the bushes somewhere. It’s September and Washington State in the mountains is a lot colder than Sacramento and when Dawn’s not starving she’s pretty well freezing to death.

  * * *

  There are six other kids in the group. Four guys and two girls. They span a range of ages and demographics, but mostly they all just look miserable.

  Sullen.

  Angry.

  Tired.

  Nobody talks very much in the group because there isn’t much time and nobody has any energy. They’ve been hiking since Dawn got here and maybe since forever, through a never-ending rain forest and over literal mountains. It’s too cold most of the time and too hot the rest, and there are weird bugs and spiders and probably cougars and bears, and Dawn’s back hurts from the way the rope around her tarp digs into her back when she’s trying to carry all of her shit, and she’s hungry because all she’s eaten is rice and raisins and lentils—
r />   (some of the other kids have, like, energy bars and dehydrated meals and even chocolate, but Dawn has surmised you have to earn that stuff, too)

  —and her leg muscles are screaming from having to hike so much, and she twisted her ankle on a tree root somewhere, and she’s dirty and smelly and sick of peeing in the woods and having to wear the same underwear every day, but according to one of the guys in the group, Lucas, this is about as good as Out of the Wild gets.

  “It’s wilderness therapy,” Lucas tells her. “Like, you’ve heard of boot camp and stuff, right? Send all the bad kids to army school and get some drill sergeant to scare the bad right out of them? This is the same shit, but we’re mobile.” He gestures in the vague direction of the counselors. “And those two dumbasses would make terrible drill sergeants.”

  The scheme, Lucas explains, is you hike around in the woods more or less nonstop, graduating through the ranks from Bear Cub all the way up to Grizzly, at which point they let you go home.

  “It usually takes two or three months, sometimes longer,” he says. “I never heard of anyone getting out quicker.”

  Lucas is wearing a red shirt. That apparently makes him a Black Bear, though why the Black Bears wear red is beyond Dawn’s comprehension, until she looks around and notices how every kid in the Pack wears a bright color, no matter what level they are. The Brown Bears wear orange.

  “It’s because of the forest,” Lucas says. “Bright colors make it easier to find you if you escape.”

  “Or find your body if you die,” a girl named Kyla says, rolling her eyes.

  Kyla’s a Polar Bear. Polar Bears wear blue.

  Black Bears are apparently two levels up from Bear Cubs. Brown Bears are between Bear Cubs and Black Bears, and Polar Bears are one level higher than Black Bears. Then it’s Grizzly Bears, who wear whatever they want, because that’s when you graduate. Lucas has been here for almost a month, so he’s doing okay.

  Kyla has been here for three months. She’s not doing as great.

  “They can bust you back down, too,” she tells Dawn. “Like, I lost a bag of rice a while back and we had to cut the hike short, so they demoted me to Black Bear again, not like I gave a shit. What I got waiting for me back home? A little walk in the woods is easy.”

  Kyla’s here because she stabbed her mom’s boyfriend in the neck with a pen when he tried to put his hands on her, and the judge gave her a choice, jail or this.

  “White people are so fucked up,” she says. “Like, this is your idea of punishment, you know? Walking. In nature. Rocks and trees and shit. Shit, I should get y’all’s parents to pay me to take you through my city, try to survive a week where I’m from. You can even wear your pretty yellow shirt.”

  Regardless, Kyla has a tent and nice new hiking backpack. She has better hiking boots than Dawn does, and a thicker rain jacket, too.

  Polar Bears earn.

  So far it hasn’t rained, but it’s Washington State in September. From what Dawn’s heard people saying, it’ll start to rain soon, and it won’t stop until May. Awesome.

  * * *

  There’s one other Polar Bear in the Pack, a tall, brooding guy named Warden. There are two Brown Bears and one other Black Bear.

  The other Black Bear’s name is Brielle, and she doesn’t talk much or make eye contact with anyone, but she’s a good hiker. She’s always up near the front of the Pack.

  Dawn’s always near the back, always out of breath, always sweating through her yellow shirt and praying for another water break.

  * * *

  The Brown Bears are two guys named Evan and Brandon. They hike together and set their tents up beside each other, and whenever the counselors aren’t paying attention, they crack jokes and play fight and generally cause mayhem. They’re both medium tall and kind of plain-featured and entirely unremarkable, and Dawn has already confused their names at least once a day since she arrived. They don’t say much to her, but sometimes she’ll go for water or to find firewood or something and look back and catch their eyes and know they’re talking about her and it’s kind of creepy. She sets her tarp up far away and generally tries to avoid them.

  * * *

  Lucas, Kyla, Brielle. Warden, Evan, Brandon. Those are the kids in Dawn’s, quote, unquote, Pack, and that’s about as much as she knows about each of them, at this point in time. They’re all messed up, clearly, or they wouldn’t be here. They all did something bad enough to get them exiled to this patch of lonely rain forest, anyway. But just who they are and what exactly they’re capable of, Dawn’s going to have to wait and find out.

  And she will.

  THERE ARE TWO COUNSELORS shepherding the Bear Pack through the wilderness. The guy counselor is named Christian and he’s tall as God and twice as skinny. He’s probably around thirty and he looks like a Halloween prop and sounds pretty scary, too, with his deep-ass voice. I know you’re not supposed to judge people on their looks, but Christian is ugly, and even more so because he’s mean.

  According to Kyla, Christian is the one who busted her back down to Black Bear over the rice incident. And also according to Kyla, it wasn’t just the rice that got her demoted but also how Christian wants to keep her in the Pack as long as he can because he has a creepy thing for her, and Dawn isn’t sure if this is true or not, but Christian does spend a lot of time looking at Kyla and making weird comments that are probably inappropriate about how she looks and what she’s wearing and other stuff of that nature.

  It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Christian’s a weirdo, is what I’m saying.

  * * *

  The other counselor is a woman named Amber—because they’re always named Amber—and she’s younger than Christian, and shorter and nicer to look at. She’s not as mean, either. Lucas says she has a degree in young adult development or something, which is better than Christian, who probably did his doctorate in How to Be an Asshole.

  Amber isn’t mean, but she’s pretty stern. She doesn’t take any shit, like when Dawn’s dragging ass at the back of the Pack near the end of the day, Amber will come back there and not necessarily yell but certainly convey with words and tone the urgency of Dawn not, you know, sucking so much. Amber’s the one who makes sure everyone gets their chores done in the morning and is packed up and ready to move out while Christian sometimes sleeps in and sometimes just sits around the fire drinking his coffee and “supervising.”

  Evan and Brandon sometimes talk back to Amber, and Warden and Kyla mostly ignore her, but Dawn does what she says, and so do Lucas and Brielle, though Dawn isn’t sure if this is because she/they actually respect Amber or just because they don’t want to get Christian involved.

  Anyway, those are the counselors. Christian is a dick, and Amber’s good at her job. And at least one of them is going to die.

  BEFORE THE DYING AND STUFF HAPPENS, though, I’d better tell you a little more about what life is like for the Bear Pack, day to day, so you can bond with these characters and make attachments and know who you’re supposed to root for when it all goes to shit.

  Like right now, for instance, our motley collection of bad apples is arranged around their sickly campfire, dreaming about Burger King Whoppers and burritos and extralarge double-cheese pizzas as darkness falls and Amber and Christian check on the tents before lights-out.

  Dawn is retelling her Origin Story: how her mom and her stepdad jacked her out of Julian’s house and kidnapped her and brought her up here, and Lucas and Kyla are listening and nodding, and even Brielle looks like she wants to contribute to the discussion, but she can’t, because just as she opens her mouth, Christian shows up out of the gloom across the fire and fixes his creepy eyes on Dawn.

  “Bear Cub,” he says. “Your shelter sucks. Fix it.”

  And everyone looks at Dawn, and Dawn inwardly groans and after a second she stands and circles the fire and follows Christian into the darknes
s, trying not to think about the way he looks at Kyla and hoping he won’t start looking at her the same way.

  He doesn’t do anything weird, though, just leads Dawn through the bushes to Amber, who’s standing where Dawn strung up her bright-orange parachute cord between two saplings and draped her tarp over the top of it. It’s kind of windy tonight, and Dawn put rocks on each corner of the tarp to hold it steady, but the rocks didn’t work and now the tarp’s half blown away, and Amber’s standing there shining her flashlight on Dawn’s sleeping bag and the rest of her collection of stuff.

  “Not good enough, Dawn,” Amber says, and in the dim light Dawn can see that Amber’s shaking her head, her mouth set in a thin line. “Rain’s supposed to start next week, and if you want to stay dry, you’re going to have to learn to make better shelter.”

  Dawn stares at Amber, then down at her not-good-enough tarp. “Everyone else gets a tent,” she says. “This wouldn’t even be an issue if you’d just give me a tent like the rest of the Pack.”

  Christian kind of snort-laughs behind her. “Gotta earn your tent,” he says, turning to leave.

  Amber and Dawn watch him go. Then Amber turns back to Dawn and her expression softens. “Keep working at it,” she tells Dawn. “If you can tough it out with the tarp for a good solid week, we’ll get you a tent next time we resupply, okay?”