Brave in the Woods Page 8

  If Lena was alarmed by her question, she didn’t show it. “Spell casting is serious. What do you need a spell for?”

  Juni worried that even Lena might not believe her, or worse, decide she didn’t want to interfere with a curse.

  “I need help finding something that’s been lost,” Juni finally said.

  “Do you want to tell me what it is?”

  Juni glanced at her friends and then whispered, “My brother.”

  Lena closed her eyes and nodded once. “I can give you a spell to recite by the light of the moon. A ritual meant to call things back. You will need something of his. Something small and personal.”

  Juni had purposely left everything of Connor’s behind, not wanting a single possession to be lost or broken. She’d left his nine letters to her stacked in her nightstand drawer. His room full of clothes and books and paintings. The college flags hanging on his wall: Stanford, UCLA, San Diego State. The childhood army men in a line on his windowsill.

  “I have his cell phone.”

  Lena shook her head. “More personal. Like a necklace or good luck charm. Maybe a book.”

  “What about a watch?”

  “Perfect.”

  Juni’s heart sank. She should have been happy to have it, even if it was lost somewhere in the station wagon. But she’d wanted to leave the watch until Connor came home. She liked imagining him plugging in one of his 8-tracks and, while Ray Charles sang “Georgia on My Mind,” turning to Juni and saying, “Hand me the socket wrench and let’s find that watch.”

  It kept her going some days.

  “You should know before you do this, Juniper, that not everything is meant to be found,” Lena said. “Not every secret is meant to be uncovered.”

  “I understand.” She did not understand.

  Lena opened a drawer in the claw-foot desk. She flipped through folders and gathered several sheets of paper. She placed a few items—herbs, maybe, a candle—along with the papers inside a brown paper bag and gave it to Juni.

  “These instructions are meant as guidelines. Spells are like prayers. Everyone does them a little differently. One thing I’ve done when I’ve lost something is go to the trees and ask for help in calling it back. Trees are a community. They speak to each other, passing messages along.”

  Juni thought of Anya taking her sorrow to the trees. She thought of the juniper that had watched over her as she took her first breath. The way fairy-tale characters always found themselves in the woods, searching for lost things.

  “We should get going,” Juni said. “We still have a long way to go.”

  “I’ll whisper to my own trees for you,” Lena said.

  Juni couldn’t help it. She flung herself at Lena, who caught her, expertly, as though she’d been catching people all her life. She smelled like sage and candle wax.

  “Thank you,” Juni whispered.

  On the way out, Juni saw Luca slip a Madame Ophelia business card into his pocket. He smiled at Lena. He smiled at Juni. He smiled at the bat on the wall.

  Juni paid ten dollars for the crystals and the magic spell. Lena refused any more. She even threw in a small jar of pear jam from her trees and asked Juni to let her know how things turned out.

  As Luca drove out the way they’d come, he turned right on Bucks Lake Road instead of left, which would have taken them back to Highway 89.

  “Where are you going?” Juni said. “We don’t have time for any more stops.”

  “The PCT crosses Bucks Lake Road a couple miles from here. I’m going to leave more tamales.”

  Juni wanted to argue—she wanted to go, go, go—but instead tried to find a tiny sliver of room in her heart for what Luca was doing. She knew it had to do with Connor, the same way she knew she had to go get Elsie, and besides, there was something fairy-tale-ish about leaving tamales along the PCT like a trail of bread crumbs.

  As Luca set out the aluminum-foil-wrapped tamales on a large boulder in the shade with a sign that said “For PCT Hikers,” Juni realized he had prepared for this more than she’d realized. Juni knew how much Connor and Luca had looked forward to the Domingo Springs trip each year. How much they loved sitting with the thru-hikers and listening to their stories. The first year Juni had gone with them, after she’d heard one hiker named Apple Pie talk about getting sick, being hit with hailstones and watching a lightning strike start a brush fire, she’d asked Connor, “What sort of person hikes for two thousand six hundred and fifty-nine miles after all that?” And Connor had answered, “A person who doesn’t give up.”

  That was Connor. He didn’t give up on anything or anyone. Neither would Juni.

  When they drove back onto Highway 89, Juni hoped the rest of her journey would go as smoothly as this first stop. By tonight, if all went well, two of the tasks would be complete: the magic spell and retrieving Elsie. The sacrifice would be all that was left.

  Completing her quest was within reach. Too easy, Juni worried.

  Because fairy tales were never easy.

  THE DONNER PARTY 2.0 (MINUS THE SNACKS)

  MASON REACHED ACROSS the seat and twisted his pinkie through Juni’s again. She noticed the freckles on his knees, how they looked like brown sugar crystals.

  Juni wanted so desperately to tell him, to tell all of them, what she was really doing. She wanted to tell them the curse was real, and not just some dramatic story passed down through her family. She wanted to say she could feel Connor through the antler bone, like she’d tuned him in on a radio station. She wanted to know if Gabby had felt it, too.

  Even though Juni was surrounded by her best friends, she felt alone.

  They’d been on the road just past three hours now, and Luca had selected Perry Como to sing to them “Catch a Falling Star.” Which was only slightly better than “King of the Road.” The Caprice didn’t have air-conditioning, and when they came out of the shade of the woods, the hot air blasted against Juni’s face through her open window. She thought of Anya on her journey that first day with Teddy and Abigail.

  It was nearing twelve thirty, and they had made it as far as Truckee, home of Donner Memorial State Park and lake, named for the unfortunate Donner party. Juni was beginning to feel just as doomed as she waited for the phone to ring.

  “You know, Donner Lake is haunted,” Mason said.

  “How could it not be haunted?” Gabby said. She grabbed juggling balls out of her backpack. Practicing dexterity was part of her athletic training. “They ate each other.”

  “Why does everyone only talk about that one thing?” Mason said.

  “Because they ate each other,” Gabby said again.

  “Well, that’s not the only thing that happened on their adventure,” Mason said.

  “Only Mason Harold Wheeler the Fourth would call what happened to the Donner party an ‘adventure.’”

  Juni had never understood how a bunch of bad planners who made a bunch of bad choices and ended up eating each other deserved to have a state park and a lake named after them.

  They’d come to visit the Donner Memorial State Museum in the fourth grade and learned that Truckee was named for the Paiute chief who had helped settlers navigate the Sierra Pass into California. Tru-ki-zo had been his name. There must have been more men like him they could memorialize instead of cannibals.

  “It does seem really weird,” Juni said. “I mean, didn’t a whole bunch of other people come through here and actually, I don’t know, live?”

  “A lot of people survived the Donner party. Forty-two people, to be exact, lived through four months in a nonstop blizzard,” Mason said, “and for your information, Gabby, they didn’t all eat each other. Almost half of them survived, which is pretty extraordinary, in my opinion. Considering they only had shoe leather and bark water to survive on.”

  “And each other,” Gabby said.

  Juni snorted.


  Mason had been obsessed with the story since the field trip, and when they’d started studying the California Gold Rush in social studies and everyone was supposed to build a mining camp, Mason asked for special permission to do a diorama of the Donner party on the trail west. Mrs. Blankenship encouraged them to follow their interests, but she did draw the line at the bloody bodies Mason had carefully glued down. Bothered by Mrs. Blankenship’s censoring of true history, Mason built a hollow boulder in the middle of his diorama and stuffed the bodies inside.

  Connor’s phone began to ring in Juni’s back pocket.

  They all went silent. Because this was it, of course. This was the moment Juni had known was coming since they’d left three hours earlier.

  She slid the phone from her pocket and tapped the screen. Mason and Gabby sat frozen in their seats.

  “Hi, Dad,” Juni said. She felt strangely calm.

  “Juniper,” he said. She could always tell his mood by the way he said her name. It wasn’t going to be good. “Do you have any idea what this is doing to your mother? Any idea?”

  He’d shouted the words any idea.

  “Do you have any idea what this is doing to me?” Juni said. At least she didn’t shout.

  There were a few seconds of silence on the other end.

  “You will stop this instant and tell me where you are. I’m coming to get you,” Dad finally said, less shouty. The phone’s tracking app must not be working in the mountains.

  “We’re almost to South Lake Tahoe,” Juni said. Luca met her eyes in the rearview mirror, and she shrugged. It was sort of true.

  Mason whispered, “Don’t make it worse.”

  “How can it get any worse?” Juni whispered back.

  “Put Luca on the phone,” Dad said.

  At that moment, Luca’s phone rang in his lap. He pulled over onto a wide shoulder beside the trees.

  “Uh-oh,” Gabby said. “We’re in big trouble.”

  Luca answered his phone and climbed out. He walked along the shoulder in front of the car, his free hand running back and forth along the top of his short hair.

  “I can’t. He just pulled over and took a call outside.”

  There was swearing on the other end.

  “I want to talk to Anya,” Juni said.

  “You are not in a position to make demands right now!” Juni heard voices in the background. Mom and Anya. Possibly the other parents.

  Juni considered hanging up on her father and wondered if this was what it felt like to be a teenager. Like for once you didn’t care what your parents wanted because what you wanted was the most important thing on earth—in the universe, even. It was uncomfortable, scary, but also exciting. Which felt all wrong, like wearing someone else’s shoes.

  “Can I please talk to Anya?” Juni tried again.

  A few moments passed.

  “Juni,” Anya said.

  “They can’t.” Juni’s lungs began to swarm.

  Think about the bee smoker, Juni. The way it quiets the bees.

  “I’m coming, too,” Anya said. “Don’t lose hope, my girl. Meet us at the Stag’s Head Bookstore in Tahoe.”

  “You are not coming,” Dad said away from the phone. Into the phone he said, “I’ll be there in three hours.”

  He hung up.

  “But we’re not in South Lake Tahoe!” Mason said. “Why did you tell them we were?”

  “South Lake Tahoe is a little past halfway between home and Mammoth. Maybe if we’re closer to Mammoth, I can talk Dad into going the rest of the way.”

  Luca got back into the car, the driver’s seat springs squeaking as he sat. “Well, the score is four to three,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Juni said.

  “Mom, Anya and Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler think we should keep going.”

  “Oh my gosh! Mom and Dad never disagree on anything,” Gabby said. “Go, Mom!”

  Luca went on. “Your mom and dad and our dad are ‘very disappointed in our choices.’”

  “So we keep going. Four to three means we win!” Mason said.

  “Nope. They decided unless they all agreed, we had to go home.”

  A car whooshed past now and then, making the Caprice shudder.

  “It’s a little over an hour to South Lake Tahoe. By the time we get there, we’ll have a plan,” Juni said.

  Luca turned around to look at her. “I’ll take you to the end, Juni. No matter what.”

  Mason took Juni’s hand and held it tight. “I’ll be with you until the end, too.”

  They each looked at Gabby.

  “This isn’t a disaster movie, guys. Jeez,” Gabby said.

  Luca switched on the turn signal and drove onto the highway. “For Connor!” he shouted.

  “For Connor!” the rest of them shouted together.

  And suddenly, Juni wasn’t as angry at Luca anymore. She felt the weight of it lessen, draining away, like water from a bathtub.

  THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM

  AS THE SUMMER-DRY pines closed in on the highway and then opened into fields of honey-colored grass, Juni’s thoughts about her quest took a similar path. The idea that this was wishful thinking—a dream pressing in, keeping her from seeing the truth—would give way to hope and the wide-open fields of possibility.

  Mr. Wilcox, Juni’s pre-algebra teacher from last year, had once told the class about the infinite monkey theorem. How a bunch of monkeys hitting typewriter keys at random for infinity would almost surely, eventually, type an actual story. Like My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, or The One and Only Ivan. When everyone laughed, he said the trick was in the term almost surely. Because really, the probability that all the monkeys in all the world for all of time would type Captain Underpants was so tiny, the chance of it happening was next to impossible.

  But technically, not zero.

  So technically, even though Juni had absolutely no proof she could break the Grimm family curse, that didn’t mean she shouldn’t try. Even Mr. Wilcox would tell her that although the probability of breaking the curse was extremely low, it was not zero. It was almost surely possible.

  Bing!

  “That’s a Facebook notification,” Luca said, pointing to Gabby’s lap.

  Gabby tapped the screen of Luca’s phone a few times, then quickly turned around and gave it to Juni. “Captain Wilder accepted the Facebook request!”

  “What do I do?”

  “Click on his picture and it will open his profile. You should be able to scroll down and see his posts and pictures,” Mason said.

  Captain Wilder had an American flag as his background image, and the profile picture was of his family, Juni assumed. Three smiling daughters and a wife.

  And there, in the very first photo Juni scrolled to, was Elsie, sitting on a blue blanket, her golden fur brushed and shining.

  Juni held the phone to her chest and steadied herself.

  The photo was one of three Captain Wilder had posted. In the second photo, Elsie looked across the smooth water of a lake from the bow of a boat, her longish hair blowing in the wind. The last photo showed Elsie posed with three girls near Juni’s age: one younger, one older, and one who looked to be her age exactly. Each of them sat on a wide stretch of green, green grass and leaned into Elsie like she was the best thing ever.

  And Elsie. The way she gazed at the oldest. As though she was her very best friend in all the world. The same way she’d looked at Connor.

  Juni’s heart broke a little bit, which surprised her. She thought it had already broken clean through and would stay in two pieces until Connor came home.

  Those girls loved Elsie, and Elsie clearly loved them back.

  Juni must have made a small sound because Mason took her hand, and Gabby turned around. She reached for Luca’s phone.

  “How about we read more f
rom Anya’s story?” Gabby said.

  “In a couple of minutes,” Juni said.

  Charley Pride’s “Did You Think to Pray” played on the stereo as they drove along a ridge overlooking a golden valley lit by the early-afternoon sun. Thickly forested mountains sat in the distance with their tippy-tops still capped in snow, and Juni was overcome with the need to draw antlers. She felt them twisting their way from deep inside, through her heart, and making her head thump where the antlers had come in. She knew this feeling wouldn’t leave until she put them on paper.

  Before Connor had gone missing, the nearest Juni had come to a compulsion was matching her socks to her T-shirts. Red T-shirt, red socks. Yellow T-shirt, yellow socks. No exceptions.

  She remembered how Connor sometimes came to breakfast wearing socks that not only didn’t match his shirt, but didn’t match each other. He’d lift one pant leg, then the other, which sent Juni chasing after him, around the breakfast table and into the yard, where she’d tackle him, refusing to move until he agreed to change his socks.

  Drawing the antlers helped. It helped with the sock-matching memory and so many others: Connor and Juni shoved into the old saddle Connor had fastened to their juniper tree, watching the sunrise on every birthday; Connor taking Juni’s waffle right out of the toaster and running off, late for school; the way he’d encouraged her, when no one was looking, to guzzle milk straight from the container.

  Those distant memories clogged her thoughts and her heart and her lungs until she felt she’d scream and burst and suffocate all at once. The antlers were the only way out.

  Where is he where is he where is he?

  Juni turned to a blank page at the back of Anya’s book, the place she’d said Juni should write her own story, and used Mason and their intertwined pinkies as inspiration for a twisty pair of antlers, the left side different from the right in honor of Connor’s mismatched socks. Every once in a while she glanced out the window, knowing Connor’s beloved Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t far.

  Connor had said the people who thru-hiked the trail were on a quest, each of them having different reasons for giving up five months of their lives to walk through the highs and lows of deserts and mountains, to endure the grueling heat and snow, the blisters and starvation. Juni had often wondered what in the world must have happened for those people to up and walk off into the unknown that way. Now she understood and felt connected to each and every one of them.