“I was only with them for about a half hour after we left you.” She laughed to herself. “Joel, naturally, was against anyone else getting separated, but I didn’t give him a choice this time.” She looked at Tom now. “What was it like, being left on your own over here?”

“You mean besides being bitten by a venomous snake?” She laughed and he said, “Scary, even before that. The trails were all going in the wrong direction, so to get back this way I had to go into…” He shook his head. “I had to break through these colonies of spiders, like a curtain of web that was maybe twenty or thirty yards, thousands of spiders…”

“I’ve seen them! We saw them on vacation once. Like clouds of cotton candy.”

“Yeah, so that was pretty wild. And just wondering whether I’d get back to you guys. And then there was the snake. What did you call it?”

“A fer-de-lance. It’s a kind of pit viper. They kill so many people.”

“And you think that could be what killed Toby?” Kate nodded, and Tom thought of him, of his stricken face as Chris had carried him up the hill. “I didn’t know him.”

“He was a jerk.” She shrugged. “I know, you shouldn’t speak bad of the dead, and I’m sorry that happened to him, really I am, but he was still a jerk. He used to make smart-ass comments about me and Emma all the time.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, classic homophobic stuff—he was a little backward like that.”

Tom glanced up at the orange sky hanging low overhead, and could tell it would get dark in the coming minutes, and was intrigued briefly that he’d already learned to detect that subtle shift. But there was something more pressing in his thoughts.

“But you two aren’t together, are you?”

She gave him a crooked smile, an indication she’d slightly underestimated Tom, and said, “I guess I should have known that you’d spot that, for all your indifference.” There was a teasing note in her voice but she grew serious again. “Emma’s gay. I’m not. We’ve been best friends for so long, and I think it makes it easier for her that a lot of people think we’re together—you wouldn’t believe how many kids out there act like Toby, people who haven’t woken up to the twenty-first century yet.”

He nodded, impressed that friends would look out for each other like that, maybe even more impressed than by Kate’s willingness to set off into the jungle on her own to find him. It probably said something about how screwed up his life was that he could understand taking a risk for another person, but the intricacies of friendship still seemed strange and a little confusing to him.