Page 59 of The Burning
“Yeah, I suppose so,” Karina agreed. “There are a lot worse things than being lonely.”
The rest of the drive was full of Turner talking randomly and Karina sitting mostly quietly in the back. Turner plugged her phone back into my radio and every once in a while, she would turn the volume up painfully loud and sing along again. No matter what song was playing, I couldn’t stop replaying what Karina had said about Brien. How could she say he was her most recent ex? And right in front of me? When we stopped for gas, she didn’t even look at me as she climbed out of the back of my truck. She and Turner surprisingly seemed to become fast friends as they locked arms and went inside the gas station to pee. I knew she was still really pissed at me and probably wished we had never met, but her denial was ironic; the topic had turned to lying but she’d lied to Turner and basically denied ever being with me. When they returned, Karina held a yellow bag of peanut M&M’s in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.
She also had a small plastic bag of additional snacks hanging from her wrist, and when I began to drive, she silently put a blue Gatorade and a pack of Starburst in my cupholders. She knew from before, during our “not dating” period, that I loved them and it made me soften a little to know that despite her not wanting anything to do with me, she took the time to grab me these things. Turner didn’t seem to notice and was guzzling a bottle of Coca-Cola singing along to a Jonas Brothers song. Her music taste was all over the place—another thing she and Karina had in common.
The small sign to enter the campground was so covered by overgrown brush and unruly bushes that if I hadn’t been following my navigation, I would have missed the small dirt road. The dark green trees were tall and hardly any of the setting sun could pass through their branches. The woods were thick, and the smell of fall was in the air as Karina rolled down the back window and stuck her head out. I continued to drive slowly but kept stealing glances at her carefree, relaxed expression in the side mirror. There wasn’t a paved road in sight now and the dirt under my tires formed a cloud of dust behind us even though I was driving less than twenty miles an hour. We passed a couple rows of small, empty wooden cabins with not a single car parked by any of them; the place looked nearly abandoned. I wondered if Karina would feel uneasy with the slightly horror-film vibe of the place, but when I looked at her again, her face was tilted toward the massive trees, and she smiled softly. She rolled her window halfway back up, I guessed to keep some of the dirt out, but she seemed unfazed. Turner was humming, scrolling on her phone.
“Who chose this place? It looks like shit,” she commented as we slowed down to pass a man stepping out of an RV.
He was shirtless and holding a beer bottle. The setup around his old, rusted RV made me think he was living there, with folding chairs and a table, trash, a grill, and an American flag dangling from the awning. I would bet my life that he was a vet. I could easily spot one, one wounded fucker to another. As we got closer, he waved at us and I nodded back as we passed by. I could see he was wearing a black POW hat; I was right about him. I hoped living out here was a choice, and not because it was his only option. I shook my head to clear my thoughts; I had enough of my own shit to worry about and he wasn’t my problem. I wouldn’t end up like him. There it was: the lingering fear of being one of the thousands of homeless veterans across the U.S. My obsession with saving my money and owning property stemmed from the statistics and my own fear of ending up that way. Owning a piece of land in this country was the only way to ensure freedom. The government could take our bodies and alter our minds, a greedy apartment building owner could increase our rent, sell the building and kick us out, but no one could take away a paid-off home or piece of land. Karina knew that, too, and that’s why she held her home so close to her heart; it was one of the first things I realized we had in common.
There were a few more RVs scattered randomly across a flat stretch of field and a couple of kids who couldn’t be older than ten rode their bikes past us. There was an empty pool with a fence around it and a bigclosed for maintenancesign that looked to be years old hung across the entrance gate. Most of the land was grass or dirt. Finally, tucked in a corner of the field next to the thick woods, away from the campground’s other cabins and RVs, was a small cluster of tents. As we pulled up, I recognized Mendoza’s van and parked a little bit away from it. Since I was going to be sleeping in my truck, I wanted some space. Again, I wondered where Karina would be sleeping and who was responsible for bringing and putting up the tent she would be in. I was eager for Turner to get out of my truck so I could have a moment alone with Karina. I also wanted to grill her about what she had said to Turner, completely dismissing our relationship while indirectly talking about it.
I didn’t want to start the weekend arguing with Karina, but I was more than a little salty about it. Brien being considered her last ex drove me fucking crazy. She drove me fucking crazy. Yards away, Mendoza and Gloria were clearly already enjoying the time being kid-free and that brought an instant smile to my grumpy face. More so for Gloria, who never seemed to get a break. There were a few other soldiers from our platoon, and a few others I didn’t recognize were standing around a firepit, filling coolers with ice and beer, and unloading their cars and trucks with all the essentials.
Turner popped out of the truck and left her bags in the back, rushing over to greet everyone. Karina was much slower, gathering her mental composure, I assumed. She sighed and opened the latch on the door. I just sat there looking down at my half-empty Gatorade bottle and unopened Starburst. When I heard her sneakers hit the ground, I got out of the driver’s seat and turned to her. She was typing on her phone screen and then put it in the front pocket of her jeans and adjusted her hair clip as I watched her from behind. I stared at the back of her neck, remembering how it smelled, how the sweat on her skin tasted early in the morning.
“Why did you tell Turner that Brien was your last ex?”
“Huh?” She turned to face me and pushed her arms through the straps of her book bag. It looked too heavy for her, but that wasn’t my problem. She wouldn’t let me hold it for her if I tried, anyway. She shrugged her shoulders to move it up farther and let out a grunt.
“In the car, you said Brien was your last ex-boyfriend.”
She gave me a look that said a million words, but the loudest one wasand?
“What did you expect me to say?” Karina was walking now, slow enough for me to keep up, but she definitely wanted the conversation to end as soon as possible.
“Well, I thought you would say it was me. I know she works with me, but—”
Karina’s hand shot up to stop me from continuing. “I didn’t say Brien because of you, or whatever your relationship with her is. I said his name because it’s the truth.”
“But what about me, about us?” I began to feel deflated, to say the least. The way she was looking at me was like I had just told her that the sky was green instead of blue.
“Us? We never dated.”
With that gut punch, she approached the small group gathered around and smiled when Gloria handed her a beer from the cooler. She downed half of it in one gulp and I kicked my sneaker against a stump of wood. Why the fuck had I agreed to this in the first place?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Karina
By the time the sun went down, our camping site had become much livelier and more crowded. I worried about who else might be coming. And where the hell were Elodie and my brother? I had agreed to a small trip with the handful of people I’d already met, and had expected to be staying in a tent with Elodie. I had planned to drive here with my brother and Elodie, but somehow got stuck riding with Kael and Turner of all people. And my duffel was still in Kael’s truck. The ride wasn’t as awful as I expected, and Turner was quite funny and kind. Maybe that had a little to do with the fact that she was being much nicer to me than in our previous interactions and a lot to do with the fact that she didn’t flirt with Kael in front of me like I thought she would. My only impressions of her until then were territorial encounters, but maybe that had also been in my head since I was obsessed with Kael focusing his attention solely on me. That, and Turner’s unapologetic confidence that made me realize I was even more insecure about myself than I’d been aware of.
The woods around us were thick, tall trees with massive trunks and leaves scattered all over the ground. Outside of our group, there weren’t many people here, but I liked that. The sky was beautiful, and the trees felt like a shelter from the real world, like we had gone to another state, and not just another county. I was glad the pool was closed, even though it was too cold to swim anyway. When I looked around, all I could see was tree after tree and a few picnic tables a short distance from where we’d set up a fire and a grill that Mendoza and Gloria had brought. I was beginning to feel at ease; my anxious and intrusive thoughts were fading and less frequent. I stopped wondering what would happen if one of the massive trees fell over and crushed our campsite, or if one of the guys got alcohol poisoning and no one could drive him to the hospital. I was finding myself laughing at jokes and breathing slowly, my shoulders falling into a comfortable position as I stared at the crackling fire. Maybe that was because I was sitting next to Gloria on a big, uprooted tree trunk. We’d had beer after beer, and had now moved onto tequila shots. I was on my second one and she was on her . . . fifth?
“See, this isn’t so bad, right?” she asked me, touching her little lime-green plastic shot glass to mine.
I wasn’t sure, but she could hold her liquor like no one I had ever met.
I got the feeling that she could read me better than most people and oddly, it didn’t scare me or make me want to hide from her. Gloria’s company was so easy, though I barely knew her; she had that kind of personality that made you want to be like her, but not in an envious way, and she didn’t make me feel small or out of place. She didn’t force me to talk when I had nothing to say, and so far, she had made sure I was never left alone on the log for too long. She hadn’t said a word about Kael, except during his brief appearance when she teased him for overcooking the burgers, and rolled her eyes when he threw a bun at her. She picked it up blew the speckles of dirt off, and took a big bite, making us all laugh. Mendoza came over at least once every five minutes or so to kiss her, pet her head, rub his hand down her back. He even kissed her neck once in front of us all and neither of them cared. I found my face getting hot and wondered how on earth they kept that kind of passion after so many years.
My parents barely kissed or hugged, and Estelle and my father absolutely didn’t show public affection. I was taken aback by the way I sort of craved it while watching the Mendozas. I thought about Kael walking over and licking his warm tongue against my neck, sucking at the base of my ear while I giggled, and knowing that later when no one was around, it would go even further. How incredibly nice would that be. My ears began to burn and not from the fire, so I stopped thinking about the ridiculous things I would never have in life. I’d gotten a brief taste of intimacy, and it had blown up in my face, so I shouldn’t have been daydreaming about it.
Kael had disappeared after he helped Mendoza grill our first round of food and it seemed like I was the only one who noticed. I scanned the small crowd. Everyone looked slightly different with the orange flames illuminating their faces and bodies. Their voices were louder than before, a direct result of the alcohol. I felt invisible but seen at the same time, The air was getting colder, but I didn’t want to seek out Kael, wherever the hell he went; I knew if I just kept drinking, I would get warmer and warmer. Fall had always been my favorite season, so I didn’t mind.
There were only a few other people outside of our group at the campground—I’d say fewer than ten. Because of this and how vast the woods were, it felt like we had the place to ourselves. I was actually sort of relaxed, which I hadn’t felt in a while, but the more relaxed I was, the more my mind drifted to Kael. Where had he run off to? What a coward, coming all the way here just to hide in the woods somewhere. I scanned the wooded area, analyzed where everyone who I did know was, but didn’t see Turner. Despite our bonding on the ride here, I really, really, reealllly hoped she wasn’t with Kael. All signs pointed to them being alone together somewhere, but I was almost too intoxicated to care.
Almost.
