One Last Summer

The idea had been Hana's, which meant it was either going to be the best thing they'd done all summer or a complete disaster, and everyone had agreed to go anyway because that was more or less the definition of being friends with Hana.

"Five days before we all leave for different cities," she had said, spreading a map on Yuki's kitchen table with the energy of someone announcing a military campaign. "Mountains. Camping. Campfire. No parents. No obligations. One last thing before everything changes."

She had looked around at the four of them with the particular expression she got when she had already decided something and was now waiting for everyone else to catch up.

They had caught up within approximately forty seconds.

They drove up in two cars on a Friday afternoon — Hana and Yuki and Sora in Yuki's old hatchback, Ren and Taro following in Taro's truck with most of the gear in the bed. The mountains came up slowly out of the summer haze, the road winding through dry foothills and then into pine forest, the temperature dropping pleasantly as the altitude climbed. Sora had made a playlist. Hana had made a packing list that she had sent to everyone three times and which nobody except Yuki had fully followed.

"Taro," Hana said into her phone, somewhere near the second hour of driving. "Please tell me you brought the tent poles."

A pause.

"I brought the tent," Taro said.

"That's not what I asked."

Another pause, longer.

"I'm going to need you to define poles."

Hana closed her eyes.

They stopped at a hardware store in the last town before the campsite and bought replacement poles at a price that Taro described as highway robbery and Hana described as the entirely predictable consequence of not reading the packing list, and they arrived at the campsite in good spirits and fading afternoon light with everyone already in the particular mood that comes from five people who know each other well enough to have survived a two hour drive without anyone saying anything they'd regret.

The campsite was good.

A clearing in the pines, elevated enough for a view of the valley below, with a stone fire ring already in place and a flat area of packed earth for the tents. A creek ran through the tree line to the east, audible but not visible, providing a pleasant background sound that Sora described as meditative and Ren described as making him need to use the bathroom.

They set up camp with the chaotic efficiency of people who had never actually camped together before but were all too proud to admit it. Taro and Ren assembled the tents with the poles that had cost forty dollars in a hardware store, arguing companionably about which section went where. Yuki organized the food supplies with the focused competence she brought to everything, sorting and labeling and creating a system that everyone agreed was impressive and which would be completely abandoned by the following morning. Hana built the fire, which she was genuinely good at, and Sora sat on a log and provided moral support and commentary.

"You're not helping," Hana said.

"I'm helping spiritually," Sora said.

By the time the sun dropped behind the mountain ridge the tents were up, the fire was going, and the five of them were sitting around it with food and the comfortable looseness of people who had nowhere to be and nothing to manage and several hours of good dark ahead of them.

This was, Yuki thought, looking at the fire and her four friends arranged around it in the pine-scented evening, exactly the right way to end a summer.

The ghost stories started, as ghost stories always do, because someone said let's not tell ghost stories and someone else immediately said okay but have you heard the one about—

That someone was Ren, who had a talent for horror stories that was slightly disproportionate to his general personality, which was cheerful and practical and not obviously the type. He told them about a campsite two mountains over where a hiker had vanished in the seventies and been found three weeks later in a tree, and about a road in the valley below that was supposedly haunted by a woman in white who appeared in headlights on foggy nights, and about something that he called the Hollow Thing which he admitted he had made up on the spot but which he told with enough conviction that Sora threw a marshmallow at him anyway.

"You're going to make me hear noises all night," she said.

"You were going to hear noises anyway," Ren said. "The forest is full of noises. I'm just giving them context."

"That's the worst possible framing," Yuki said.

The fire crackled. The creek ran somewhere in the dark to the east. Above them the sky had gone full dark and the stars were extraordinary — the kind of density of stars that only existed at altitude, away from towns, that always felt slightly unreal, like someone had tried too hard.

Taro leaned back and looked up at them. "We're going to look back on this night when we're forty and think about how easy everything was," he said.

"We're eighteen," Hana said. "Things are not easy."

"Easier than forty."

"You don't know that."

"I'm making an optimistic assumption."

"That's very unlike you."

"It's the stars," Taro said. "They're doing something to me."

Sora laughed and Yuki laughed and the fire popped and sent a brief column of sparks up into the dark, and for a while nobody said anything because nothing needed to be said.

It was Hana who saw the eyes first.

She said it quietly, which was what made it effective. Not a scream, not a gasp — just a low, careful "hey" that made everyone stop what they were doing.

"There," she said. "In the trees. To the left of the big pine."

They all looked.

Two points of light, roughly at head height, catching the firelight and throwing it back. Yellowish. Unblinking. Spaced the right distance apart to be eyes.

The group was silent for approximately three seconds.

"Animal," Ren said, with the slightly-too-quick confidence of someone reassuring himself as much as anyone else.

"What kind of animal," Sora said.

"A normal kind."

"Can you be more specific."

"A deer," Ren said. "Probably a deer."

"Deer eyes don't glow like that."

"All eyes glow in firelight."

"Not like that."

They looked at the two points of light. The two points of light looked back. Neither party moved.

"It's not moving," Taro said.

"Deer freeze," Ren said.

"It's been thirty seconds."

"Deer really freeze."

Then something shifted in the trees — a branch moving, a soft sound of something large adjusting its weight — and the two lights vanished and the tree line was just a tree line again, dark and ordinary, with the creek running behind it.

Everyone breathed.

"Deer," Ren said, with less confidence than before.

"Sure," said Sora, in the tone of someone filing a disagreement for later.

They went to bed at midnight.

Or they tried to go to bed at midnight, which was different. Hana and Yuki shared the larger tent, Sora had her own small one, and Ren and Taro had the tent they had assembled with the forty-dollar poles, which was slightly lopsided but structurally sound.

Yuki fell asleep first, which she always did, and which Hana had long since accepted as one of the fundamental unfairnesses of the universe. She lay in her sleeping bag and listened to the forest and thought about the eyes in the trees and told herself they had been a deer and almost believed it.

The footsteps started around one in the morning.

Not dramatic footsteps. Not the crashing, obvious approach of something large and careless. Quiet footsteps — a deliberate, soft, circling sound that moved around the outside of the tent cluster with a patience that was, if you were lying awake listening to it at one in the morning in a forest, significantly worse than something loud would have been.

Hana lay completely still and listened and told herself it was the wind.

The wind did not have footsteps.

She unzipped her sleeping bag by increments and leaned over and put her mouth near Yuki's ear.

"Yuki."

Yuki made a sound that was not a word.

"Yuki there's something outside."

Yuki opened one eye. "Mm."

"I can hear footsteps."

Both eyes open now. They lay side by side in the dark and listened.

The footsteps continued. Circling. Patient. Close enough to be real and far enough to be invisible.

"That's footsteps," Yuki said quietly.

"Yes," Hana said.

"Okay," Yuki said. Then: "Okay."

They lay there for another thirty seconds.

"Should we wake the others," Hana said.

From Sora's tent, perhaps six feet away, a loud whisper: "I'm already awake."

From Ren and Taro's tent: "We're also awake."

A pause.

"How long have you all been awake," Hana said.

"Since the footsteps started," Sora said.

"Why didn't anyone say anything."

"We were hoping it would stop," Ren said.

It did not stop.

What followed was, in retrospect, one of the least dignified hours any of them had ever spent.

It began with a whispered argument through tent walls about whether to turn on the flashlights, which Taro argued would reveal their position and Ren argued they were in tents which had already revealed their position, and which ended when Sora simply turned hers on because she had been holding it for twenty minutes and her hand was getting tired.

The flashlight illuminated the interior of Sora's tent and threw her shadow large against the canvas wall and scared Hana badly enough that Hana made a sound she would spend the next three years denying.

"That's my shadow," Sora said.

"I know that," Hana said.

"You screamed."

"I did not scream. I made a surprised sound."

"There's a recording," Ren said.

"There is no recording."

"There will be when I tell this story."

The footsteps had paused during this exchange, which everyone noted and nobody found reassuring, because something pausing to listen was worse than something simply moving.

Then something scratched against the side of Ren and Taro's tent.

The sound was slow and deliberate — a long, dragging scrape against the canvas, from the bottom of the tent wall upward, the kind of sound that, in the context of everything that had preceded it, suggested something with claws testing the material with the focused intention of something that had decided the time for circling was over.

"Nope," said Taro.

"Nope," agreed Ren.

Both of them came through the tent zip in approximately one second and stood in the campsite in their sleeping clothes holding flashlights, and Hana and Yuki and Sora emerged within moments behind them, and the five of them stood in a cluster in the dark forest campsite with five flashlight beams pointed in five different directions and the fire reduced to low coals and the trees all around them black and absolutely full of potential.

"Okay," Ren said, in a voice pitched to convey calm and mostly conveying the opposite. "Nobody panic."

"I'm not panicking," Sora said.

"Good."

"I'm simply very alert."

"Also good."

"My heart rate is probably two hundred."

"That's the alertness."

Something moved in the tree line to the east.

All five flashlights swung simultaneously toward it.

A branch. Moving in a light wind that had started up from the valley, swaying against the canvas of Sora's tent — which was positioned closest to the trees — with a slow, scraping, rhythmic drag that sounded, in the dark, with the right amount of prior anxiety applied to it, almost exactly like something with patience and claws.

They stood and looked at it for a long moment.

The branch scraped against the tent canvas.

"Oh," said Yuki.

"Ah," said Taro.

"That's—" Hana started.

"Yes," said Ren.

They continued standing there, because knowing the source of the scratching sound resolved the scratching sound but did not immediately resolve the footsteps or the eyes or the general ambient conviction that had been building for the past hour that something was out there specifically interested in them.

"The footsteps are probably also a branch," Yuki said.

"Probably," Taro agreed.

They listened. The wind moved through the pines with a soft, irregular sound that included, if you were listening for it, something that could reasonably be described as footsteps circling a campsite.

"Hm," said Sora.

"Yeah," said Ren.

"We've been—"

"Let's not say it yet," Hana said. "Let's wait until morning."

They did not go back to sleep.

They rebuilt the fire instead and sat around it in their sleeping clothes and blankets and drank the emergency hot chocolate that Yuki had packed and which everyone had made fun of on the packing list and which was now the single most important item anyone had brought.

The woods continued being woods around them. The wind moved the branches. The creek ran in the dark. An owl called twice from somewhere in the upper pines — a low, resonant sound that carried through the trees, and whose eyes, if it happened to be sitting on a branch at the right height and angle to a campfire, would reflect the light back as two small yellowish unblinking points.

Nobody said anything about this for several minutes.

Then Sora said: "The eyes were the owl."

"Yes," said Ren.

"The scratching was the branch."

"Yes."

"The footsteps were the wind in the pines."

"Almost certainly."

A long pause.

"We spent an hour," Hana said carefully, "completely convinced that something was stalking our campsite."

"We did," Yuki agreed.

"Because of an owl. And some wind."

"And a branch," Taro added helpfully.

Another pause.

"I made a surprised sound," Hana said, "because of Sora's shadow."

"You screamed," Ren said.

"I made—"

"Hana."

A very long pause.

"I screamed a little," Hana said.

Sora started laughing first, which set off Yuki, which set off Taro, and within thirty seconds all five of them were laughing around the rebuilt fire in their sleeping clothes at two thirty in the morning in the mountains, the kind of laughter that comes from relief and absurdity and the specific hilarity of having been genuinely frightened by absolutely nothing.

"We're going to tell this story forever," Taro said, when he could speak again.

"We are never telling this story," Hana said.

"We're going to tell it at your wedding," Ren said.

"I'm not getting married."

"At Yuki's wedding then."

"I'll tell it myself," Yuki said. "I'll tell it better than any of you."

They slept eventually, a few hours before dawn, and woke to full morning light and bird noise and the completely ordinary beauty of a mountain campsite after a clear night. The tents were fine. The fire was cold ash. The branch that had scraped Sora's tent was visible in daylight as exactly what it was — a low pine bough reaching out over the tent's corner, its tip worn smooth from repeated contact.

Yuki made coffee on the camp stove and Taro found the bag of breakfast supplies and Sora sat on her log and watched the morning light move through the pines with the satisfied expression of someone who had survived something and knew the survival was mostly funny.

The raccoon revealed itself while Ren was retrieving the food bag from where it had been hung in the tree.

Not the bag itself — the evidence of the bag, which had been accessed during the night by something with small capable hands that had managed to extract two granola bars and a bag of trail mix through a gap Ren had not tied completely closed, leaving the wrappers on the ground beneath the tree in a small scattered radius.

Ren stood and looked at the wrappers.

"The raccoon," he said.

"What raccoon," Hana said.

"The raccoon that was knocking around our campsite last night making footstep noises."

Everyone looked at the wrappers.

"The raccoon that we thought was—" Sora started.

"Yes," Ren said.

"The raccoon that caused us to—"

"Yes."

"A raccoon," Hana said flatly.

"A raccoon," Ren confirmed. "Wanted our granola bars. Got two of them. Probably watched us stand in the dark in our pajamas pointing flashlights at the woods for forty minutes."

A silence.

"The raccoon," Taro said slowly, "had a better night than we did."

They hiked that day and swam in a mountain lake that was cold enough to be briefly terrible and then wonderful, and ate lunch on a flat rock in the sun, and nobody mentioned the night before for several hours because they were too busy being eighteen and alive in the mountains at the end of a summer that was ending whether they were ready or not.

But on the hike back, when the trees were long shadows and the light was going gold through the pines, Sora fell into step beside Hana and said quietly: "I'm going to miss this."

Hana looked at the path ahead.

"Which part," she said.

"All of it," Sora said. "The part where we can do this. Where we're all still — here. In the same place."

Hana was quiet for a moment.

"We'll still be friends," she said.

"I know." Sora kicked a pinecone off the path. "It'll just be different."

"Different isn't over."

"No," Sora said. "It's not."

They walked for a while in the comfortable quiet of two people who had known each other long enough that silence was never empty.

"For the record," Sora said, "I was genuinely scared last night."

"So was I," Hana said.

"Like actually scared. Heart-pounding scared."

"Same."

"Over an owl and a raccoon."

"And a branch," Hana said. "Don't forget the branch."

Sora laughed. Hana laughed. Ahead of them on the trail Ren was explaining something to Taro with large hand gestures, and Yuki was watching him with the expression she always wore when Ren explained things, which was fond and patient and slightly tired, and the trees moved in the late afternoon wind, and the mountains were gold and grey and very old above them all.

They drove home Sunday afternoon.

The same two cars, the same roads, the music lower on the way back than the way up — not sad exactly, but with the particular quiet of people carrying something they hadn't had at the start of the weekend.

Three weeks later Hana left for university in the north. Yuki went east. Sora went to art school two cities over. Ren and Taro both stayed local for a year, which felt like a gift.

The story of the camping trip entered the group's permanent mythology within approximately the first week of everyone being in different places — circulated by text message, embellished by Ren, defended against embellishment by Hana, and eventually settled into the version that was mostly true and completely funny and which everyone told slightly differently depending on who was listening.

In Hana's version, she had been the calm one.

In Ren's version, she had screamed loud enough to wake the raccoon.

In Sora's version, which was the most accurate, they had all been equally ridiculous, equally frightened, and equally saved by hot chocolate and the slow arrival of daylight, and the whole thing had been perfect, and she was glad they had gone, and she was glad it had happened exactly the way it had happened, owl and branch and raccoon and all.

That was the version that was true.