Page 84 of Happiness for Beginners

I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Hey. Unlike you, I do not come to the wilderness every summer. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me. I have never been here before, and I will never be here again—or anywhere even similar—and even though I am totally and completely out of my element, I am trying like crazy to make it count.”

“I know,” Beckett said, nodding. “I can tell.”

“I’ve done everything you ask. I’ve obeyed every rule. If you said, ‘Go get water,’ I got water. If you said, ‘Carry the litter,’ I carried the litter. I never said no. I never held back. I’ve given this trip every single thing I had.”

“I know that, too,” Beckett said, his voice quieter now.

“And there was one—one—person I wanted to avoid during the very last week I will ever spend in these mountains. Why the hell did you put me with Jake?”

Beckett took a breath, then, and let it out.

He took a step closer and leaned in toward my ear. “I gave you Jake because you’re headstrong and accident prone, and he’s our medic and I trust him to patch you up. I gave you Jake because you’re the best map reader we’ve got, and he’s damn near blind. And I gave you Jake because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.”

***

He gave me Jake. And now it was my job to be grateful for the opportunity.

The morning of, Beckett went over each group’s route with them on the map. Then we all literally waved good-bye, turned in three separate directions, and started hiking.

With luck, we’d all see each other again the next afternoon. And by luck, I meant: not getting crushed by a falling widow-maker, not stumbling on a hungry bear, not suffocating under an avalanche, not running out of water, not drowning in an icy river, not choking on a hunk of cheese at dinner, not accidentally setting someone on fire with the cookstove, not getting lost, and not giving up entirely and just sitting down to die.

All possibilities.

Beckett had given me the shocking news that I was the best map reader in the group, but he hadn’t given that news to Flash, a.k.a. Mason, a.k.a. the Meanie of the Mountains. I had built a fairly peaceful relationship with Mason since we’d been out, mainly by staying out of his way, but people who crossed him always regretted it in the end. Even if they got their way in the moment, he’d find a way to punish them later by, say, pointing out to the group when they had food in their teeth. Or stalking them when they’d walked out alone to go poop and growling like a bear once their pants were down. Or—keeping it simple—just tripping them along the trail. He had a real talent for humiliation and cruelty, and I could not imagine what had inspired Beckett to put Flash, who was incapable of slowing down, in a group with Dosie, who was incapable of speeding up. On the surface, it seemed like a recipe for disaster, but after the insight smackdown Beckett had offered up the night before, I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt.

That said, as we started hiking, Mason literally lifted the map out of my hands, and said, “I’ll take that, thanks.”

I didn’t fight him. He seemed like a competent hiker, although I wouldn’t know for sure, since he was always far out of sight on the trail. I didn’t need to be a big shot, and I didn’t need to assert my map prowess. I knew I was good—now, suddenly—and that was more than plenty.

There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room to our hiking order. Mason took the distant lead, pausing every twenty minutes or so to wait for the rest of us like a restless bull. Dosie took the back, shouting every five minutes or so, “Hold up, Holdup!” when she lost sight of me. And Jake and I walked at about the same pace—a pleasant, conversational pace—together.

“So,” Jake said. “How are you liking the wilderness?”

“In my whole life put together, I’ve never done as many scary things as in the past two point five weeks.”

“But you’ve survived.”

“So far,” I agreed. “And fear is a hell of a lot less scary than it used to be.”

“Now you’re fearless.”

“No,” I said. “But I’m fearless-er.”

“Like Chuck Norris.”

“What?”

“Like all those jokes about Chuck Norris being so fearless. You know, like, ‘Chuck Norris doesn’t take showers. He takes bloodbaths.’”

“How do you know about those Chuck Norris jokes?”

“Everybody knows about those Chuck Norris jokes.”

“I didn’t. Until recently. Ish.”

“You’re a girl.”

“My whole journal is filled with Chuck Norris jokes,” I said. “He was totally my role model coming out here. I was like,What would Chuck Norris do?”

---