The bear sits upright on its hind legs, half hidden in the brush. It watches her. Sam crouches, frozen in astonishment. It sits at about her height, chocolate brown, with a light nose and chest patch. Two button ears twitch curiously. The bear doesn’t appear frightened by her, but maybe mildly irritated, as if willing her to go away and leave it to go about its business.

  Sam looks at the bear and the bear looks back at Sam. Time pauses indefinitely. The birds chirp and the mist rises from the trickling creek between them. Cool water drips from her cheeks and chin. Eventually, it drops to its front legs and walks off through the bushes. Sam sits in the mud for some time, wishing it would come back, wondering if it was real. As the shock wears away, she smiles.

  Logan

  They agree to do it in the morning, before breakfast. Logan knows the horses’ feeding schedule. They are let out to graze before the wake-up bell—this way, it will be almost two hours before any adults come down to the stables, giving Spark plenty of time to escape.

  When the bell rings, Logan and Milly slip out the cabin door with their sweatshirt hoods pulled over their heads. They dart away in the opposite direction of the lawn and sprint until they are alone on the trails. It’s a cool, misty morning. Their breath comes out in puffy clouds. Milly holds her fingers to her lips and blows upward, pretending she’s smoking a cigarette. The way the sun shines through the mist makes it look like the air around them is shimmering.

  The boys meet them on the trail to the barnyard. Max is wearing his sling. Hugo grins from ear to ear like they are setting off on a grand adventure. The two of them look funny standing next to each other, one dark and broken and the other pale and loping and smiling.

  “Are you sure you want to come?” Logan asks Max. He has to be scared of the horses now, she thinks.

  He nods. His hair is pasted to his forehead, still damp from a morning shower—such a strange, serious boy. The four of them hurry down the trail. At the base of the hill, they pause. A little red truck is parked in front of the barnyard gate. Logan hears adult voices.

  “Crap,” Hugo hisses. “I thought you said they already fed them?”

  “I thought they did.” They creep forward until they can see two people in dark blue T-shirts approaching the truck from inside the yard. Logan feels Hugo’s hand on the back of her hoodie; he pulls them all backward, off the trail. They flop down behind an old log—Max with some difficulty. The wood is dry and crumbly with termites. Four hooded heads, four pairs of eyes, peek over the top of the log and wait, listening. Prickly pine needles stab into Logan’s belly.

  The two maintenance workers reach the gate and latch it shut behind them. One of them tosses a heavy-looking tool bag into the back of the truck, laughing at something the other said.

  “Don’t know what they think they’re gonna do about it.” Logan can make out the words.

  “The messed-up thing is,” the other man says, climbing into the passenger’s seat of the truck, “that’s what’s got them all spooked. An animal. As if they don’t have Hugo goddamn Baker running around the place.”

  Logan feels Hugo’s body tense against her side. She glances at Milly, who frowns and shrugs in return. The men laugh, then the truck engine grumbles over the rest of their conversation. With a crunch of tires on gravel, the workers drive away.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  They get up, cross the trail cautiously, and let themselves in through the gate. Then they hurry across the muddy barnyard to the stables. The horses are out, unbridled, grazing from piles of hay. There is Spark, with her perfectly speckled coat, lovely and unbothered. Logan sighs at the sight of her. A sudden, bright vision flashes through her heart: she should climb up on the horse, bareback, hug her neck, and gallop off into the misty morning. Leave Camp and life and everything else behind. They could live in the mountains.

  “You all heard that too, right?” Hugo asks as they cross the stables. Max veers wide around each grazing horse they pass. “You heard them say my name?”

  Milly shakes her head. “Yeah, but it didn’t make any sense. Must’ve been a different Hugo Baker.”

  “I don’t know any other Hugo Bakers,” says Hugo proudly. “I swear. They were talking about me.”

  “Why would they be talking about you? I mean, who do you think you are?” Milly walks along next to him, leading the group. A little tug of jealousy makes Logan jog to catch up.

  They reach Spark and stand around her in a horseshoe shape. She goes on eating. Logan bites her lip and looks the mare up and down—she didn’t think about how they are supposed to move her out of the yard.

  Hugo reaches out a hand to Spark. He touches her neck; she flicks her ears and huffs at him. “Hugo goddamn Baker, that’s who,” he answers Milly in a whisper.

  After some deliberation, they decide to pick up Spark’s meal and coax her to follow them. Hugo scoops up as much of the hay as he can in his long arms and Milly and Logan gather the rest. Max trails nervously behind, adjusting the strap of his sling on his shoulder. Now Spark notices them. She sniffs at the hay dust on the ground and shakes her head, irritated.

  “Come on, girl. This way.”

  “C’mon, horsey.”

  They make slow, backwards progress across the stables and barnyard. Spark walks behind with her neck outstretched toward them. Hugo giggles when her lips reach his arms, prying for the hay. “She wants to kiss me,” he laughs. “Don’t you, horsey?”

  They make it through the gate. Spark doesn’t seem to think much of it; she goes on happily grazing at the pile of hay where they drop it, just outside the fence. Logan latches the gate. They all look at each other unsurely.

  “Is that it?” Milly asks.

  Logan nods. “She’ll leave as soon as she finishes eating. I know she will.” She thinks again about climbing onto Spark’s back and galloping away. It would be impossible, she decides, so she stays right where she is standing on the trail. She swipes at a stray strand of hair and nudges her glasses into place.

  Her last look at Spark will stay with her, she is sure, for the rest of forever. She sees the horse lift her head from the hay to take in her surroundings. Max stands in front of her. He reaches out toward her with his one good arm, shaky fingers open, waiting. Spark meets the hand and lets him pat her on the nose. The boy and the horse stand like that for a moment or two as the rest of them look on and the sunny mist evaporates around them, the chickens chatter and the goats bray and the birds chirp in the trees. Max mutters something to Spark, too quiet to hear.

  “Max, let’s go! It’s almost breakfast.”

  They take off running, back up the hill, past the girls’ cabins, and onto the main lawn. Just in time, they file into line at the base of the mess hall steps. No one seems to notice them. The four horse liberators exchange a serious nod, fingers to lips, before they melt into the crowd.

  Logan looks over her shoulder in the line. Hugo is busy talking to his friends, his cheeks still pink from their sprint. Hugo goddamn Baker. There must be another Hugo Baker somewhere in the world, she decides. His name does ring a faint bell in her head, like something she heard somewhere else, before Camp, before the whispers and gossip.

  Then again, it’s hard to remember much outside of Camp.

  “Ow!”

  She has stepped on someone’s toes. Logan looks up to see Sam, the Hummingbirds’ counselor, holding a little blond girl’s hand. She looks angry. “Watch where you’re walking,” she snaps. As they walk up the steps, the Hummingbird turns around to stick out her tongue at Logan.

  Logan and Milly both make faces back. They laugh at each other, and Logan swells with pride. Everyone else at Camp is pretending to be grown-ups, but not them. They know better. It isn’t actually so horrible here, she thinks. It might not be so bad to stay at Camp forever and never have to grow up.

  week five

  Sam

  “Oh, perfect. Why don’t you take Red with you?”

  Sam looks up, blinking, halfway through the office door. Campbell is staring expectantly at her over the frames of his glasses.

  “What?”

  “The guy called back,” Nick explains, addressing her sandals. He leans against the other desk with the truck keys in his hand. “The horse guy. He’s on his way, but we have to meet him halfway.”

  “Halfway?” Sam repeats. They are in the middle of nowhere—halfway between nowhere and anywhere is still nowhere. “Where’s halfway?”

  “Sardine Flat, I believe he said.” Campbell waves a floating hand between the two of them, distracted by his screen. “You two go together. It’ll be a good learning experience for you, Sam.”

  As they step out onto the office porch, Sam feels the dismay roll off of her in waves. She isn’t sure what to say to him. Whatever they shared in the dark of the office last night, if not exactly intimate, has her mortified. She wishes she had thrown up, fallen, tried to kiss him—anything would be less humiliating than what it was: a teary, clichéd confession of inadequacy. They start toward the stables in silence.

  Oddly enough, they find the speckled mare standing just outside the barnyard fence, on the trail. She swishes her tail and stares despondently back toward her companions in the stables.

  “Weird.” Nick frowns. “That’s the one, isn’t it?”

  Sam shrugs. “Yeah. Maybe maintenance let her out.”

  “Maybe.”

  They speak flatly and get to work. Sam fetches the horse’s halter and lead rope while Nick hitches the trailer to the Camp pickup. She looks at the truck uneasily. Rust-red and iconic, older than God; she can’t imagine their odds of breaking down in the mountains are all that low.

  The horse cooperates reasonably enough, aside from a few playful head bumps as Sam struggles to fasten the halter. Once loaded, they both get in the truck and begin the drive without a word. Sam lets her forehead fall to the cool glass of the window. The bumpy dirt road shakes the entire frame of the truck, rattles her brain and chatters her teeth. They wind uphill, over the bridge, and pull off at the single-pump Smith’s Ridge gas station. Nick gets out. When he comes back, Sam is slowly, thoughtlessly beating her head against the window. She looks up to see him offering her a can of ginger ale.

  “Oh. Yeah, thanks.”

  They leave Smith’s Ridge and weave through the forest, their faces blinking in the flashing shadows of trees. Stiff, staccato conversations about Camp and campers pepper the silence.

  “I had Poppy Warbler in evening music group yesterday,” Nick says.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. She’s a fun kid.”

  “Fun’s one way to put it.”

  “Yeah. Well, she can really sing, too.”

  No shit, Sam wants to say. She nods and sips at her ginger ale. “Yeah.”

  By the time they reach the Sardine Flat campgrounds, the day is clear and hot. They drive into a wide-open valley, dead brown grass like a rolling sea all around them. A little old truck not at all unlike their own is parked at the turnoff already. There, a withered man in a cowboy hat and work jeans waits for them, leaning idyllically against his tailgate with one boot propped up on the bumper.

  Sam lets Nick do the talking. He shakes the cowboy’s hand and exchanges some half-hearted pleasantries, thankful and apologetic like a proper diplomat. Russell Eckart is a caricature of a man, a sketched cowboy stereotype. He has a lip full of tobacco and spits fat smelly globs into the dirt as he talks. He didn’t come with a trailer of his own, Sam notices. She wonders if he is going to ride the horse back to his stables.

  “Yeah, we always knew she was trouble,” he says, nasally, drawling. “Wouldn’t have loaned her out to a kid’s camp. Too dangerous.” He spits and looks at Nick, his bristly lips curling. “But it’s not kids you’ve got out there, anyway, is it?” When Nick doesn’t answer, he turns his attention on Sam. She leans against the side of the trailer, looking over the dead valley through her sunglasses. “How ’bout it, freckles?” He smiles at her. “What’s your name?”

  Sam steps forward to hold out a reluctant hand. “I’m Sam.”

  “Sam?” Russell Eckart repeats, clasping her hand in both of his own. He looks her over invasively. The smell of chew and dirty sweat strikes her stomach, raising the sour taste of her hangover in the back of her throat. “You’re too pretty to be a Sam.”

  “Well.” Sam frees her hand from his grasp. “That’s my name.”

  Behind the cowboy’s back, Nick laughs silently. It’s not the chauvinism he finds funny, Sam knows, but her disgust at it.

  They open the doors of the trailer. The horse sniffs at the dry valley air as they lead her out. She eyes them sideways, smug, owning her title of trouble. Sam gives her a pat on the neck and hands her lead rope to her owner, who looks her over with a sort of dissatisfied finality, a look he might give the scraps of a meal he did not particularly enjoy. He hitches the horse to a signpost at the edge of the grass.

  “You folks be careful with your campfires out there,” Russell Eckart says to them as parting advice. “About to be fire season, you know. They’re saying it’ll be a bad one.” He sniffs, spits. “That’s what they’re always saying.” He opens a tool case mounted in the bed of his truck and begins rifling through it—for what, Sam can only guess.

  Nick thanks him again and they latch up the trailer and clamber back into the Camp pickup in a hurry. Before he turns the key in the ignition, Nick hesitates, then sighs. He looks uncomfortable. Something has gone wrong, but Sam can’t figure out what, exactly, until they have already pulled out of the campground and driven away. The gunshot makes them both jump.

  It takes about an hour to get back to Camp. The air in the cab of the truck is hot and strained and smothering. A few attempts at dark jokes cross Sam’s mind, each of them falling flat before they reach her lips. She reaches up to pat herself in the center of the chest, hoping it will make him smile, or at least breach the awkwardness. He doesn’t notice.

  They park beside the barnyard and sit in the silent cab, neither of them moving to unbuckle. The smell of horse lingers on their clothes. Nick shuts off the engine. Sam checks her watch; it’s already well into lunchtime. Camp is empty and quiet.

  He sighs again, leaning on his elbow against the window frame, then turns to say something to her. His mouth falls open, eyes focused, and he says, “There’s a bug in your hair.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a—come here.” He leans across the center console toward her. Sam stiffens. Her ponytail sits flopped over one shoulder; a tiny beetle is running up it toward her ear. Nick reaches carefully for it. “Wait, don’t move . . .” He catches the bug up gingerly in his fingertips. Still leaning over the console, he squints into his hand. His face falls. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I killed it.” The speck drops dejectedly from his fingers, vanishing into the crevice below Sam’s seat.

  She still has her seat belt on. They pause and look at each other. She drifts, a little nudge of gravity, and then he is kissing her. This is perfectly reasonable, she thinks—this might as well happen, now. Nick is salty with sweat and coarse with stubble. One hand tightens above her knee.

  After a moment, Sam pulls away. They hover. “Okay,” she says, as if in agreement. To what, she isn’t sure.

  Nick nods, clears his throat. “Okay.”

  From the heart of Camp, the bell rings for lunch.

  Logan

  Time is moving faster.

  In the fourth week of Camp, the Ravens are getting ready for their second campout. The trip will take them far away from Camp Phoenix, up a distant mountain to Pike Falls. The view is supposed to be incredible. The Eagles have already gone on their trip, and so have the Hawks and the Falcons. Only Max had to stay behind, because of his cast.

  On their first campout, they went to a flat little campground just outside of Camp called Lobster Point. They roasted marshmallows over the fire and froze in their sleeping bags all night. Logan spent the whole time shivering, listening to the rush of the water falling over the dam nearby, and thinking about Danny McGee’s bloody shoes. The Pike Falls trip, she hopes, will be more fun—more exciting, at least.

  Time is moving faster, and she recognizes herself less and less as the days go by. She still spends most of her time with Milly, but slowly, she’s starting to toe her way in with the other girls, too. Sometimes she sits cautiously at the edge of the group, on the announcement benches, and lets Liz braid her hair. Sometimes she speaks up into the darkness, at night in the cabin, when the infectious giggles and dirty jokes zing between their bunks.

  Saying the right thing is hard. Everything Logan says is spoken with crossed fingers, praying it won’t come out wrong. She has taken to biting her nails and lying awake at night after everyone else falls asleep. She plays out scenarios in her head, imagining what they might do if she said this, wore that. Sometimes it spirals out of control. Sometimes she imagines dramatic altercations: Donna will tell her she is so weird and then she will say something cutting, something mean, and then she will punch her right in the boob, and the whole cabin will cheer . . .

  . . . and then, she thinks, Hugo Baker will be there. He will walk right up to her and put his arms around her. He will say that he never liked Donna, anyway, and then he will look at her like she’s the only girl at Camp . . .