Page 21 of My Star-Crossed Summer

He jogs over to the group, and I ask, “Where the heck were you?”

He blinks at me and shrugs. “I had to pee,” he says, as if Occam’s Razor should have led me to that answer first.

A ten-ton boulder has been lifted off my chest. But that was also the closest call ever and just more evidence that coming here was the worst idea that ever popped into my brain.

I can barely keep a cactus alive—what made me think I could be in charge of tiny humans?

“Okay,” I tell them, keeping my voice calm. I take a deep breath because they are fine, and no one is lost forever, and this is on me. “First rule of camp: use the buddy system. When we’re in unfamiliar places, you always take someone with you. Don’t go away from the group all by yourself. Deal?”

“Even to pee?” Ethan says.

“Yes.”

They all nod in agreement. Even Ethan, despite the eye-roll.

“Sorry,” Derrick says, staring between his shoes.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You didn’t know that rule yet. But now we all do, and we’ll always make sure there’s someone with us, agreed?”

“Yeah, dude,” Ethan says to Derrick. “What if there was a bear out there? Or a mountain lion?” He pauses and grins. “Or Bigfoot?”

Derrick’s eyes widen, and he looks at me. “There’s mountain lions here?”

“No,” Priya says, frowning. “They don’t live on the east coast.”

“But there are bears,” Layla says. Her eyes twinkle like she’s hoping to see one.

“Correct,” I say, “So, buddy system.”

They pile back into the car, debating the likelihood of seeing Bigfoot while I check my phone. There’s a text from Sophie asking how things are going with a string of smiley-face emojis.

I quickly reply:All good! Headed back now.

She sends me a thumbs-up immediately, no doubt answering texts from her laptop, since the service on the mountain is so spotty.

Once we’re back on the road, Priya starts the music again and hums along while Derrick and Ethan compare their knowledge of North American cryptids.

“You can’t prove that Bigfootdoesn’texist, though,” Ethan says. “Logically, you can’t prove the absence of something.”

“Sure you can,” Derrick says. “We can prove that Bigfoot is not in this car.”

“You can gather data to indicate that something doesn’t exist in a certain set of conditions,” Ethan argues. “He might not be present in this car, at this moment—but we can’t say he doesn’t exist anywhere on the planet or in the multiverse.”

Derrick groans.

“It’s the scientific method, dude,” Ethan says.

“Sort of,” Priya says.

I glance at the car’s GPS as the dot that is us shifts over into the uncharted green of the map. Our blue dot hovers in that mysterious space in between where we are and where we should be until the glitch finally corrects itself after the next turn.

Never has a map felt so accurate for my life.

When we pullup to the institute, the kids start firing questions at me, curious about every detail of this place. Their faces are plastered to the windows as they take in the big radio telescopes, the towering evergreens, the wide blue sky.

They’re full of excited chatter now, and I’m still humming with adrenaline from our roadside adventure. Because it’s nearly five now, the kids will just barely have time to get their bags into their rooms before orientation starts.

I park by the cabins and haul the luggage out double-time, telling them to meet back right here in fifteen minutes. When they’ve all disappeared into the cabins, I collapse against the car and lay my hands on the roof, trying to force some air back into my lungs and slow my hammering heart.

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