Page 85 of Happiness for Beginners

Jake shrugged. “Guess I’m more like,What would Bill Murray do?”

“But that’s just it!” I said. “I came out here trying to learn how to be tough and mean, but then I went the other way.”

“Now you’re soft and sweet?”

“No,” I said. “Not the opposite way. Just another way.”

“So who’s your role model now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Annie Oakley.”

Jake raised a finger pistol and shot it into the air. I made a mental note to thank Windy for that nickname makeover.

It was nice to hang out with Jake again. I’d been avoiding him so desperately ever since the evac that I’d forgotten how fun he was to talk to. We joked around so much, in fact, that we failed to pay attention to where we were going. For most of the morning, that was all right, but sometime around noon, it became apparent that we weren’t on the right trail. According to Beckett, our group was supposed to go around the contour of a hill—but at a certain point, as we caught up with Flash, who was literally tapping his boot as he waited for Dosie to catch up, he made a confession.

“Looks like the trail kind of disappears here,” Flash said, gesturing ahead at an absence of trail.

“Disappears?” Jake said.

“The trail can’t disappear,” I said. I looked around. We had been hiking for quite a while under the deep shade of some pine trees. There wasn’t a lot of undergrowth here. The ground was just sandy dirt, which meant that the trail, even if it were there, might be hard to see.

Something hit me, then. “Why are we going over a hill?” I asked Flash. “Our route wasn’t supposed to go over a hill.”

“You’re just noticing that now?” he asked. He turned to share a chuckle with Jake when he saw that Jake, too, was just noticing that now. He shrugged. “We’re taking a shortcut.”

“We’re not supposed to take a shortcut, Mason,” I said.

“Nobody said not to.”

Jake said, “Actually, Beckett said not to.”

I squeezed my eyes closed. “When did we leave the trail?”

Mason thought about it. “Two—maybe three—hours back.”

“Hours?” I said.

Just then, Dosie came ambling up. “This hill is steep,” she said, winded.

I was still gaping at Flash. “You just led us off the marked path, onto a random shortcut, without bothering to mention it?” I asked.

“I figured if you weren’t cool with it, you’d say something.”

“We weren’t paying attention!” I said.

“Well, that’s rule number one, right there,” Mason said.

What can I say? He had me.

“I thought it was so obvious,” Mason said. He pulled the map out of his pocket and showed the oxbow shape of the trail, curving around the half-circle edge of a hill. “Rather than walk all this way,” he traced the distance around with his finger, “why not just cut across?”

“Because there’s no trail!” I said.

“But there was a trail! I followed a trail.”

“A deer trail,” I said, “or an elk trail. Moose, maybe. Not ahumantrail! Not a National Park trail.”

This was the moment for Flash to say,Wow, I’m a complete idiot,and beg our forgiveness. But, instead, somehow, he flipped it the other way. “Why weren’t you guys paying attention?”

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