Page 53 of I'll Be Waiting

Roddy gets up and walks into the forest. He doesn’t say a word. He just stands up and walks into the darkness.

Heather and I had gone after Patrice that night. It’d seemed simple enough to catch up, but in our haste, we hadn’t grabbed our flashlights, so we were staggering through pitch-dark forest. The obvious answer would have been to return for a light. At the very least, we should have stopped to listen for her. We were too panicked for that, too certain she had to beright there.

While it probably only took ten minutes to find Patrice, it felt like hours, stumbling and smacking into trees and calling her name. Then there’d been a whistle, and we’d run toward it and found Patrice still marching through the forest.

When we caught up with her and shook her, she…

I can’t say she snapped out of it. That would imply she wokeabruptly. Instead, she half surfaced from whatever world she’d been in, just enough to acknowledge us.

Confused and docile, she’d wordlessly followed us to the car. We all had our licenses—you could get them at fifteen in Alberta—but only Heather really drove. She dropped me off at my place first.

I should have insisted on helping her take Patrice home. But I’d only been relieved that I didn’t need to explain anything to Patrice’s parents.

I was racked by guilt for letting Patrice take those mushrooms. I’d been sure the drugs had put her in that state. All those antidrug lessons left me with one message: Drugs bad. Drugs could mess you up permanently. Just one dose, and if things went wrong, you’d never come back from that trip.

I know better now, but at the time, I’d been convinced the mushrooms did that to Patrice. As for those voices and footfalls in the forest? No one was talking about that.

It was a week before I saw Patrice again. A week where she’d been kept home from school, and we weren’t allowed to visit, and I overheard my parents whispering about “psychiatric issues,” but when I asked, they only said Patrice was unwell and I could see her as soon as her parents allowed it.

Then she appeared at school, standing on the edge of those damn woods.

At first, I thought I was imagining her or, worse, seeing her ghost.

She certainly looked like a ghost, pale and dressed in oversized sweats. I grabbed Heather, and we hurried over to see her. The closer we drew, the worse Patrice looked, her white skin nearly translucent, her eyes fever bright, the brown nearly black.

“We need to go back,” she says, her voice a croak.

“Hey,” I say. “Are you okay? We’ve been worried—”

She grabs my arm, ragged fingernails digging in and making me wince. “We need to go back. Undo it.”

“Undo what?”

“It… got into me.” She claws at her throat. “Need to get it out. Send it back.”

“Send it back?”

At the time, I’d felt weirdly calm, as if this were a normal conversation. Now, looking back after twenty-two years, I don’t see a calm and collected teenage Janica. I see a girl in shock, fixated on how sick her friend looks, unable to comprehend what she’s saying.

In that moment, I would have done anything to help. Whatever happened in that forest was my fault. I didn’t stop my friends from taking the drugs, and now something had happened to Patrice.

“Please,” she says, tears spilling over her cheeks. “Help me get rid of it.”

Get rid of what? That was the obvious question, and I’ve always wondered why I never asked. Now I realize I didn’t want to ask because I suspected the answer. Patrice thought we’d raised something in that forest. Like the kids at that bonfire twenty years before us. We’d raised whatever had possessed Roddy to murder his girlfriend.

I knew Patrice was wrong. The only thing that got into her was those drugs. Drugs and the power of suggestion, and if we’d heard something that night, something that sounded like Roddy calling Samantha, it was a shared hallucination.

A shared auditory hallucination.

“What do you need us to do?” I ask.

“Come back to the forest with me. Tonight. Help me get rid of it.”

I look at Heather, silent until now. She nods mutely, her eyes dark with worry.

I don’t want to go back into that forest. Forget the fact that I had neatly explained away what happened. My brain might say Patrice was suffering the aftereffects of a bad trip, but my gut told me never to step in there again.

I didn’t have a choice, though. Not if I wanted to help Patrice.

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