Girl in a Bad Place Read online

  A defensive burn settles into my stomach. We’re not only learning the government’s agenda. I know plenty of things.

  “Our school isn’t teaching us any kind of agenda,” says Jackson, echoing my thoughts. “They’re teaching us facts.”

  “Facts can be spun in all sorts of ways,” Firehorse says. His tone is absent, almost bored, like he’s had this conversation with people a million times and he’s so over it. “The government has been pushing its version of the truth for so long, people no longer know the reality. Everyone’s been so propagandized that it’s hard to question what we’ve been told.”

  Jackson looks blown away by this. I’m not nearly as certain. Not that I don’t understand his point. I know that there are layers upon layers we don’t dig into about wars and civil rights and the founding of our nation and everything in history, basically. But it sounds to me like what Firehorse is implying is deeper than revisionist history, and on that front, I’m just not sure.

  “Where do you get your meat and stuff?” Cara asks. “Do you hunt?”

  “We don’t eat meat. We’re all vegans here,” says Firehorse.

  Uh-oh. I reach reassuringly for Gavin’s hand. His parents’ ranch is populated with beef cattle; he is not a fan of veganism.

  “So … no ice cream?” Cara’s eyes widen.

  Firehorse chuckles. “No, but where do you think we’d keep the ice cream anyway?”

  “That’s fair.” Cara grins.

  “I have to ask about your name,” I say, because I’ve wanted to ask since the moment Alexa said it, and if I hold in the question any longer, I’ll explode.

  Firehorse smiles, which is a relief. I feared he’d be defensive like Alexa. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that question. I know it’s a unique name, but the name I was given at birth was so plain, I wanted something memorable.” He pauses for a long moment. “I wanted something no one who heard of me would ever forget.”

  “Mission accomplished,” says Cara approvingly.

  Suddenly, Firehorse’s eyes flicker to something above my head. My spine tingles with that sensation you get when it feels like someone’s right behind you, reaching out …

  I turn. No one’s there, of course. But people are streaming down the steep hillside. Quite a few of them. It’s as if they appeared out of nowhere. They move slowly, carefully, across the uneven terrain, like a shambling zombie militia.

  “Are those the other members?” I ask. It’s a dumb question, because obviously.

  Firehorse nods and continues to watch them make their way closer with a deep fondness in his eye. If nothing else, this guy is definitely way into the commune and all its members. That much, anyone could see.

  “Those are my Colonists,” he says proudly.

  As the others approach the camp, they surround us wordlessly. The smell of body odor is strong, which I guess is to be expected after a whole group of people has been out working in the sun on a hot day. They’re all dirt-streaked and glistening, and many of them carry things like saws and axes. Most of them are women. I only see four guys. Everyone’s face is serious. Given how smiley Firehorse is, I expected them all to be a little friendlier.

  Firehorse stands and holds out his arms in a sweeping motion. “We have guests!” he says. “Let us greet them warmly, please.”

  The serious expressions disappear, and choruses of “Welcome!” echo from all around us. It actually makes my skin crawl a little. Just the hive-mindedness of everyone welcoming us almost in unison, and on command.

  I accidentally meet the gaze of one of the boys. He can’t be much older than I am, and his face hasn’t transformed like everyone else’s has. He wears a permascowl, much like the expression Jackson had when we first got here, before he decided he was kinda interested. It takes a while for the boy to tear his eyes away from me, and when he does, it’s to look down at his ax. He brushes his thumb across the sharp edge, almost lovingly, and then walks away, toward one of the shacks.

  Only when he’s gone inside and shut the door behind him do I realize that I’ve basically been staring unrelentingly at some random guy for a full minute with my boyfriend sitting right beside me. My boyfriend who definitely noticed the staring. He’s frowning at me.

  “I think we need to head out,” he says.

  “But we just got here!” Cara protests. “And everyone else just got here, too.”

  “Yes, there’s no need to depart yet!” Firehorse exclaims. “Stay, meet everyone!”

  Gavin is beyond uncomfortable, but Cara is so into this. My stomach hurts a little, torn between the wishes of two people I both want happy. “Just another hour,” I tell Gavin.

  “Fine,” he says thinly.

  But when Cara and Jackson get up to mingle with all the new arrivals, Gavin doesn’t follow. He wanders away, back toward his truck. I’m torn again. I want to talk to these people, find out what it’s like to live someplace like this. When am I going to get an opportunity again? But I also feel like Gavin’s mad at me, and I don’t want him to be mad at me. So I follow him.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, when we’re out of earshot of everyone else. “I know you want to leave, but Cara has been so … it’s nice to see her interested in something.”

  “I know. It’s fine, really.” His tone belies his words. “I just think this place is kinda creepy.”

  “Are you maybe being a little hard on them because they’re vegans?”

  His mouth twists, fighting a smile. “No.”

  I tilt my head.

  “Okay, maybe.” He loses the fight against his smile and kisses me. “One more hour, though, that’s all I’ve got in me. That guy calls them Colonists. And you saw his necklace, right?”

  “I saw.”

  Gavin’s family doesn’t live on the reservation—which is quite a ways north of us—but they are tribally enrolled Blackfeet. His heritage matters to him, and he’s taught me a lot about cultural appropriation. It’s been really eye-opening. It’s crazy how little thought we give things sometimes, just because they don’t affect us directly. Some particular least-favorites for Gavin include: Native American Halloween costumes (especially the “sexy” ones), anything dreamcatcher-related (especially because they’re so mass-produced and improperly attributed these days), and headdresses on hipsters.

  We return together to the group. I spot Alexa with a couple other people, down near the water. But we don’t head toward them, we head toward Cara and Jackson, who are in the food preparation area with a few girls, including little Avalon. It’s a three-sided wooden structure with a dirt floor. There’s a big, long table that takes up most of it, with knives and silverware and other utensils scattered all over. Giant cabinets take up the whole back wall.

  Cara is chopping up a very robust-looking bell pepper. I’m suspicious about whether this thing was homegrown. Maybe I’m not outdoorsy, but I’ve seen my mom’s vegetable garden, and it’s never produced anything like that pepper.

  “Where do you guys plant all of this?” I ask.

  One of the girls looks up at me. She’s slicing potatoes. “Didn’t you see it? The garden’s pretty big. Most of it’s behind this building.”

  Gavin and I both go look. I had noticed the garden before, but hadn’t seen how far it extended. It’s expansive, with nice, healthy-looking plants. But big enough to sustain all of these people through all the seasons? All the way through a Montana winter? I realize that I have no idea how you’d survive the winter while living off the land, especially without meat. But I’m also not a survival expert.

  “Do you kind of get the feeling this living off the land thing is a load of crap?” Gavin asks me quietly.

  A throat clears behind us, and we jump around. Firehorse is standing there. Well, this is awkward.

  “Our garden sustains us just fine,” says Firehorse with an unhappy gleam in his eye. “And it is not our only source of food. We do a lot of foraging. And, young man, I understand that you came here for your girlfriend’s s
ake, but we do not need this kind of negative energy here. Your skepticism is exactly the sort of thing we all came to the Haven to elude.”

  “I’m sorry if you feel I’m being negative,” says Gavin tightly. “But I think the both of us are going to just have to accept that we have some philosophical differences.”

  “Your close-mindedness is very unfortunate,” says Firehorse. “Don’t be angry with me for caring about our planet. I cannot make anyone believe. You have to come to it on your own. But this might help.”

  He hands us each a business card. They’re blank except for the address of some website, handwritten in neat, even lettering.

  “What’s this?” I ask. I’m not the one who was rude, but I feel guilty nonetheless. Firehorse seems so nice—if a bit quirky—and I don’t want his feelings hurt.

  “It’s my website,” Firehorse says. “I don’t maintain it anymore, now that I live here, but the information is still accurate. It explains a lot about who we are and why we do this. And it summarizes the problems I have with our current world. You don’t have to look at it if you don’t want to, but I would hate to think that you were too set in your ways even at this young age to open yourselves up to a new and well-researched viewpoint.”

  I put the business card in my pocket, a little embarrassed by how unpleasant Gavin’s being. It’s usually me who blurts out all my thoughts, not him.

  “We’ll definitely look at it,” I say, even though it’s more likely the card will end up in the wash and the ink will bleed out of it and I’ll never think of it again after that.

  I promised Cara we’d stay another hour, so we do stay another hour, but it’s pretty awkward after Gavin and Firehorse’s confrontation. Cara and Jackson get into the thick of things—cutting up and roasting vegetables, learning how to make bread, chopping firewood—and I try to be involved, too, but I feel like no one wants me here anymore. Because I’m Gavin’s girlfriend, we are obviously the same person with all the same thoughts and I can’t possibly want to help them with anything if he doesn’t. I’m tempted to go join Gavin, who’s sitting alone on the dock with his toes in the water.

  But then Alexa approaches me.

  “Everyone gets into their routine,” she says. “We’re not used to having new people, and I don’t think anyone quite knows what to do with this many new people, either. But here, let me show you something.”

  I follow her, curious. She takes me to the other side of the encampment, where there’s a really big, metal trapdoor in the ground. It has a logo carved into its surface. The letter H with a circle around it, and the word verum running sideways up the left side of the letter. I’m pretty sure that means truth in Latin. Alexa lifts it open. Inside, a ladder leads down into the earth.

  Um. No way.

  Alexa must sense my apprehension, because she points to the underside of the trapdoor. “Don’t worry, it has a safety release! We can’t get locked in.”

  She starts down the ladder, and I don’t want to be a wimp, so I follow. We leave the trapdoor open, and sunlight flows in through the opening. The walls are rock, and the floor is dirt. I try not to think about spiders or earwigs or other crawling things.

  “This is our root cellar. We store preserves and roots and beans and all kinds of stuff down here.”

  She gestures, and I see what she’s talking about. Once we get away from the entrance, there are shelves everywhere. Jars of preserves, labeled containers.

  “And this”—she goes on as she opens another trapdoor, one made of wood this time, and points—“is where we put the stuff that needs to be kept extra cold. It’s an underground freezer. Reach your hand down and feel the temperature.”

  I obey, and I’m surprised how chilly the air is. “Wow. This is actually pretty neat.”

  She smiles. “I thought you might think so. I know you probably had an idea of what this place was going to be. Maybe a part of you came here with the intent of tearing apart everything about our commune, even if it was subconsciously. But we really do live off the land as much as possible. Firehorse is pretty intense. He can be a lot to get used to at first, but he just has so much knowledge. And people are still always ignoring what he has to say. He gets really passionate.”

  “I’m so sorry if I’ve made you feel judged,” I tell her. “I actually think he seems really nice. And this place is very beautiful. My boyfriend just expected something different, I think.”

  “People usually do. But in the end, I guess they’ll see, won’t they?”

  “Yeah. I guess they—”

  I stop, because I notice something about the trapdoor to the freezer. Its exposed underside is scratched up. Like it’s been clawed at by desperate fingernails.

  “What’s the matter?” Alexa asks.

  “Nothing, sorry. I thought I saw a spider. I’m really glad you showed me this, but can we get out of here? Bugs creep me out.”

  “Sure, of course.” She closes the trapdoor, and I suppress a shudder. It’s probably my imagination. It gets away from me sometimes. Okay, it gets away from me a lot. I am a major worst-case imaginer.

  She stares at me for a moment, biting her lip. “You’re wondering about the scratches.”

  My stomach clenches, and I try to look casual as I step out of easy reach.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I wasn’t going to bring it up because it was a terrible tragedy, but since you noticed … ”

  I swallow, but the dryness in my throat doesn’t disappear.

  “One of our members … she had an accident down there.”

  “She got trapped?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.

  Alexa nods.

  “Is she okay?”

  Hesitation. “No.”

  Oh God. I try to imagine. You’re trapped in a claustrophobic space, so desperate that you dig at a wooden trapdoor hard enough that it looks like a bear got to it. Getting colder and colder until you just … die.

  “This door doesn’t have one of those safety releases on it?”

  “It didn’t.” Alexa frowns down at the door. “Firehorse had one put on right after. We’re only supposed to come down here in pairs, you know? That seemed like precaution enough. But precautions only work if everyone follows the rules. It was hard on all of us, after.”

  Rules or not, I would never in a million years trust anyone, not even Gavin, not even Cara or my brother or my parents, enough to set foot in that freezer. I don’t think I’d set foot in there even with the safety release.

  “I can imagine,” I say softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  I know ghosts aren’t real and all that, but suddenly I feel a chill, like the spirit of the dead girl is here, haunting the cellar, begging for justice.

  Did they really not notice her absence for hours? No one heard her scream or anything? “It was very tragic,” says Alexa, “but it was also … I mean, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but she should have been more careful. It was so preventable. People need to take our supplies seriously, and not—she shouldn’t have come here alone. And she’d still be with us.”

  The shock I feel at her words must be plain on my face, because she rushes on, “Not that I’m saying she deserved to die! I’m just saying, I wish she’d known better, hadn’t made such a foolish mistake.”

  “Of course, yeah. That’s really sad.”

  Alexa’s jaw tightens. “It was a very difficult time for us. Anyway, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make this about a dark thing, and I don’t want you to think of us as careless. Opal was a friend, and I miss her every day.”

  I can relate to that. I’m almost compelled to tell her about Harper, but I try to always let Cara be the one to tell new people about her family history. Even though thinking about Harper, remembering her sweet little face, is hard for me, too. I spent half my childhood bickering with my older brother and begging my parents for a little sister. Harper was born when Cara and I were nine, and to me, my friend having a little sister felt like the next best thing.

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nbsp; Harper and the girl in this root cellar—both were tragic accidents. It’s easy to sweep in from outside the situation and try to assign blame, but I wasn’t here. I don’t know what everyone was doing when this girl got trapped, how far away they might have been at the time.

  And I don’t know what to say, so I reach out and give Alexa’s forearm a comforting squeeze.

  “Thank you.” She smiles tremblingly. “Ugh, I can’t believe I turned your tour of the grounds into such a mess. Let’s just get back up into the sunlight.”

  “It’s totally fine. I’m glad you told me.”

  But I can be understanding and creeped out at the same time, and I make sure I’m the first one up the ladder. She definitely notices, but it doesn’t seem to bother her.

  Cara and the guys and I leave shortly after that. I can’t stop thinking about the scratched-up trapdoor, how sad it is. I can’t decide if I should tell everyone or not. Cara’s in such a good mood, and she’s easily triggered by tragedy. I’ll wait, I decide, and tell Gavin later, when Cara’s not nearby.

  “That was pretty fun, right?” Cara says as we’re driving back along the mountain path.

  I exchange a glance with Gavin, and smile knowingly. “It had its moments,” I say.

  “Not as bad as I expected,” adds Jackson, which is pretty high praise, coming from him.

  “I’d rather castrate a bull by myself than go back,” says Gavin.

  All of us laugh at that.

  Of all the many facets of nature Montana offers, water is the kind I like best. There’s a lake about a ten-minute drive from my house with a great public beach. And an even better thing about the lake is that Jackson’s family owns a lakefront camp there. Since Cara’s been dating him, I’ve been upgraded from public beach to private beach. Way fewer small, screaming children.

  It’s a million degrees out today, so a bunch of us are meeting at Jackson’s camp to keep ourselves from melting. Gavin’s picking me up, and I’m waiting impatiently in the kitchen with my dad. My mom is abysmal at cooking, but she gets home from work earlier than he does, so he spends much of his Sundays preparing meals and writing explicit cooking instructions so that Mom doesn’t burn the house down (as she almost did one time). And whenever he can catch me, Dad ropes me into watching him, because he says he’d like me to be able to at least cook passably enough that I won’t poison myself when I’m off on my own.