Dawn doesn’t like the ridges. They give her a bad feeling. But the rain forest isn’t much better, or the rough rivers they have to balance across on fallen tree trunks, the cliffs they have to scramble their way up and down, tottering for balance with their heavy packs, the marshy meadows with their sticky, stinky mud and their lingering mosquitoes and blackflies, the loose rocks and slippery bare roots on the trails that give out from under you, twisting your ankles, then uneven ground under your sleeping pad that hurts your neck when you’re trying to sleep, the too-cold night and the too-hot daytime, the taste of the lake water even after you filter it, the dirt on your clothes and your smelly, unwashed body, your limp, stringy hair, the blisters on your feet and the bug bites on the rest of you, the way Christian makes fun of you and how Evan and Brandon whisper to each other when they look at you, the weird sounds in the forest at night, and the wondering what you’d do if Christian and Amber suddenly died or you got separated and had to survive by yourself and,

above all,

the loneliness.

Chapter 16

DAWN HAS A LOT OF TIME to think while she is enduring the Out of the Wild forced march regimen and the sensation of slowly starving to death.

Most of the time, she’s pretty homesick. Not so much for Cam, of course, and she’s still mad at Wendy, too, because any mom who’d kidnap her daughter and send her out into this bullshit doesn’t deserve to be missed.

She misses Bryce, though, her little brother. And her nana, her grandmother on her dad’s side, who lives in Chicago and who Dawn doesn’t get to see very often but who she loves more than anyone else in the world, except maybe Bryce.

Dawn tortures herself, thinking about her nana.

She thinks about how she went to visit her nana in Chicago the summer before this one, how she always used to visit her as a kid and it was the most fun ever, how they’d walk along the lakeshore and go to the museums and eat pizza and just, you know, hang out.

And she thinks about how she didn’t visit Nana this summer because she bailed on her parents and was crashing at Julian’s and she kept meaning to find a way to get in touch with Nana and go visit without her mom finding out but there was always something else more important and she just never got around to it and now it’s too late and she wasted her summer.