Page 82 of Happiness for Beginners

I looked around. They weren’t dancing. They weren’t warming up by the cookstoves. They weren’t anywhere that I could see. It gave me a jolt of anxiety because there really wasn’t anywhere else to go. They couldn’t exactly wander to a bar down the street. There was nothing else to do but stay here—except, possibly, the one thing people sneak off in the woods for.

I told myself not to stand there like an idiot looking around for them, but I did it anyway. That’s when I saw something else—something even more interesting than the absence of Jake and Windy.

Snowflakes.

Chapter 13

“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Snow!”

Everybody stopped to stare at me.

I shook my head and pointed at the air. “Snow!” I said again. That’s when they saw it.

Sure enough. Snow. Plump, ethereal snowflakes, smack-dab on the summer solstice. Fluttering down, backlit by the campstoves’ flames.

“Um,” Mason said. “Isn’t it summer?”

“Ithoughtit felt really cold tonight!” Cookie said, delighted to be right.

We all turned to Beckett, but he was just as amazed as the rest of us.

“What do we do, Boss?” Caveman asked.

Beckett turned to us with anI don’t knowexpression on his face, but then, taking in the sight of the ten people who needed him to have a plan, I watched him turn his brain to the task of making something up.

“Okay, people,” he said, getting into character. “There’s no doubt we’ve got a snow situation.” With that, he started barking orders to everybody. We were to clean up the party site, but keep the stoves burning and boil water for hot cocoa—but he wanted us to melt a spoonful of butter into each cup we drank. “I don’t care if it’s gross,” he said. “You’ll need the calories to keep yourselves warm through the night.” We pulled out the cheese and cut off hunks to eat. We retied the tarps to make one large cover so we could consolidate warmth by bunking together. We put on our pj’s, but then Beckett had us layer our outerwear on top of it—wind jackets included. Anything that wasn’t wet, we put on—from mittens and extra socks to the little fleece head-and-neck coverings they called balaclavas. Then we all piled into our sleeping bags like a middle school slumber party.

I was hell-bent on finding a place to sleep as far from Jake and Windy as possible, but there was a lot of jockeying for position. In the end, I wound up sandwiched between Vegas and Caveman, the two loudest snorers in the group, and as awful as that was, I thought, at least it was better than my worst-case scenario. That’s when I felt knuckles rapping on my scalp like it was a door, and when I arched back to look, Jake’s face was six inches away. His sleeping bag was head-to-head with mine.

He waved. “Sweet dreams.”

Windy was right next to him. She waved too.

“Don’t be jealous,” I said, gesturing to the big guys on either side of me. “And no trading.”

“That’s right, Holdup,” Vegas said, with a note of affection in his voice. “Just think of us as your personal hot water bottles.”

***

The next morning, when I opened my eyes, the blue vinyl of the tarp was about an inch from my nose. We had tied it low, but notthatlow. It had sunk at least three feet during the night under the weight of the snowfall. I lifted my hand to touch it, and it was heavy and dense, like a water balloon. I gave it a push and, over by the edge of the tarp, some snow slid off the side. I was the first person awake. I lifted my feet, still in the bag, and gave the tarp a kick, which caused another avalanche off the same spot. Each time I knocked some snow off, the tarp got lighter and rose a little farther from my face.

I kicked until it was high enough for me to sit up and look around, waking everybody around me in the process. I saw a tapestry of sleeping bags, and, beyond it, a forest as white as Narnia. We were in the exact same spot we’d been in before, but the grassy meadow and the wildflowers and the warm rocks where we’d sunned ourselves the day before were all gone. Every single thing that had not been sheltered by the tarp that night was solid, pure white. It was a summer winter wonderland.

The morning was surreal. We cooked breakfast without any sense of how the day would play out. Maybe it goes without saying, but there was no weather forecast; there was no way to know what to expect. We just had to watch the sky to make our best guess. Beckett wanted to stay put if it was going to keep snowing. If it warmed up, he thought we should move to a lower elevation. We lingered around camp, in a state of limbo, waiting to figure it out.

By noon, the sky was clear, and it was warmer. Beckett announced we’d do a short three-mile hike to a place called Elk Ridge, which had a better wind block in case the temperatures plunged again.

We hiked all afternoon. It was slow going—not because the snow was that deep or physically hard to manage, but because we literally didn’t know where the trail was. Beckett stopped us every ten minutes to double-check positions and landmarks. Before we left, he’d gone over the route on the map with me and had me double-checking our position as we hiked. We hadn’t been moving long before I realized it was actually warming up. The snow seemed to notice it too, because the ground was turning to slush under our feet.

It took the rest of the day to cover those three miles to Elk Ridge, and by the time we arrived it was already dark and most of the beautiful snow was gone.

The next morning, after breakfast, Beckett pointed out to us that we were starting our third and final week of the trip. “This is it, folks,” he said. “Next stop: grand finale.” By “grand finale,” he meant the Solos. Before the week was out, he would send us in three separate groups out on our own to survive for twenty-four hours. He had us make a list of the four people we’d most like to have with us in our groups.

“Take this seriously, people,” he cautioned, raising half an eyebrow. “And be careful who you wish for.”

I took it seriously. I would have loved to hike with Windy, but I felt sure that she’d put Jake on her list—and that Jake, in turn, would put her on his—and I did not want to spend my final days in the Absarokas engaged inwill-they-won’t-theytheorizing like a teenage girl. One basic fact was clear: I needed to get the hell away from both of them.

Other than that, I didn’t care who I Soloed with. Truly.

---