“Worst they’ll do is make us leave,” Carly says. “Probably.”

And I decide not to worry because I want to do it.

We park in a turnout before the entrance and hoof it in. If we get caught, Carly’s rusty Pacer plays the part of a breakdown well enough to be our alibi. We plan our excuses in whispers as we walk, like someone might be lurking in the dark, waiting to overhear us. It was cold. We couldn’t find a phone booth. We needed the fire.

The moon shines so brightly off the water that we can see where we’re going. Not a single car drives by. There’s no light in the park ranger cabin, and there’s no truck out front either. The lake is ours. The night is ours. If there are raccoons in the dark, they won’t want a battle. There are two of us. We are full of ourselves, ferocious.

The rhythm of our feet on the pavement—Carly’s foot, my foot, Carly’s other one, then mine—is just a little off from a song I can’t quite gather in my head. I work to stay on beat. Carly notices that I’m noticing and holds her pace steady too. By the time we turn into the campground, we’re stomping something complicated. Carly shout-sings “Cecilia!” in her funny gravelly voice. I can’t believe she’s even heard Simon & Garfunkel, but she knows all the words and we sing it together, keeping time with our feet, laughing when we flub a step. I sing around her crackling, off-key melody, and we sound alright.

We march past my old campsite, moving in further, away from the sightline of the main road and away from Tom Bilford’s cabin, in case he comes back. We find a spot by the water, collect left-behind firewood from the sites around it.

“This is really where you stayed?” Carly asks, stacking wood strategically.

“Yeah.” I pick at bark on a neatly split log as I wait to hand it to her. “But I wasn’t like camping. I just slept in my car.”

Carly seems to know how to make a fire and I realize that I could have done this out at the motorhome. I could have dug a pit and drug out some old metal truck bumpers from the trash heap down the road to corral the embers. It wasn’t something I needed my dad to do. I didn’t have to ask permission. No one was there to tell me no. I read somewhere once about animals caged too long staying put even when someone opens the door. I spent so much time in that motorhome before I realized I could go, and while I was there, I never saw the ways I could make it better.