Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

Day four we marched in silence again, and instead of a campfire we had individual sessions, one of us at a time versus all four counselors. Versus is my word, of course, but it definitely describes my session. They started off by asking me to tell them in my own words why I was here, but without blaming anybody else. I said in that case it wouldn’t be my own words, would it? Things went downhill from there.

The fifth day was the hardest climb of all, up a steep mountain trail in the broiling sun. By the time we set up camp in a boulder-strewn meadow with a view of forever, even my blisters had blisters. My feet hurt so bad I finally consented to let Dr. O (who was our medic despite the fact that he wasn’t a real doctor) treat them. By then I hated him with a passion, having had all that time to obsess about him and Dusty having sex. It hadn’t happened yet, but if it did, it would be soon. Tomorrow morning, we were told at campfire, our individual vision quests would begin.

These were to be like our final exams. We would be picking out our own campsites, isolated from each other, and making our own shelters, where we were supposed to spend twenty-four hours without eating or sleeping, and thereby obtain Wisdom with a capital Wiz.

There was more to it than that, of course. Among other things, we were supposed to find out what our so-called totem animal was. There was also this deal where we were each given what Dr. O called a MacGuffin, a single candy bar that was supposed to represent our own particular addiction or barrier, sex in Dusty’s case and drugs in my own. (But what if your addiction was candy bars? I joked to Dusty.) And although nobody came right out and said it, if you had half a brain, it was kind of obvious that you weren’t supposed to actually eat the MacGuffin.

I wasn’t buying any of it. All I could think about, that night before the vision quest, was Dr. O sneaking up to Dusty’s campsite tomorrow night, and the two of them getting it on. Oh, god, how I hated that man. If he hadn’t already been on it, I’d have added him to my fantasy revenge list. Instead I had to settle for mentally underlining his name.

Sleep was impossible. My tent was getting smaller and stuffier by the second. I opened the flap and stuck my head out to look at the stars. On the far side of the meadow, I could see all four counselors sitting around the campfire, having one of their endless gabfests, which meant nobody was watching us.

Figuring this might be my last chance to be alone with Dusty, I crawled around to her tent. She wasn’t there. My first assumption was that she was off screwing somebody. But just before I went ballistic, I saw a small darting figure zigzagging across the meadow from more or less the direction of the campfire. I dove into Dusty’s tent, and a second later she dove in on top of me. We exchanged oof s.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

“I was looking for you. Where were you?”

“Eavesdropping on the counselors. And guess what: it’s all bullshit.”

“Congratulations,” I told her. “You just won the Academy Award for Duh!”

“No, I mean the whole graduation, no graduation thing.” She grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt. “They already know who’s going home and who’s not.”

I can’t say I was surprised. “I’m guessing we’re among the nots. ”

“We are the nots. Dr. O said I was ‘continually displaying age-inappropriate seductive behavior’ toward him. They’re sending me to a residential in Orange County.”

“What about me?”

“Military school in Arizona. They had a good laugh about that. Voted you most likely to make the Ten Most Wanted someday.”

“Ten Most Unwanted, more likely.”

She grabbed my hand in both of hers and pressed it flat against her chest. “Let’s go, Luke. Let’s run away, just you and me.”

I could feel her heart thumping like a scared rabbit’s through the thin fabric of her T-shirt and was acutely aware of the nearness of her little breasts on either side of my hand. At least she won’t be fucking Dr. O now, I told myself. “Dusty, we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s what you think!” Turns out we’d been hiking in a circle all this time. According to what Dusty had overheard, we were only a few miles from the little campground where we’d started out. “C’mon, what have we got to lose? At least let’s make the assholes look for us.”

I tried to tell her how dangerous it could be, tramping around unfamiliar mountains in the dark, but Dusty wouldn’t listen. She kind of threw my hand away from her in disgust and said she was going with or without me. Then she reached up and ruffled the soft stubble where the hair was starting to grow in around my Mohawk, and said she’d much, much rather it was with me.

By now Dusty and I were both experts at packing for the trail. Our major problem was going to be food. What little we hadn’t already eaten was supposed to be hanging in bear-proof bags twelve feet high in a tree at the edge of the meadow. I say supposed to be: Dusty and I each had a few protein bars and some trail mix stashed away, and of course our MacGuffins. Also we’d both filled our canteens before bedtime, and since the woods were full of raspberries, blackberries, and elderberries at that time of year, we decided to take our chances.

Our plan, such as it was, was to hike out to the road, then hitchhike to a phone. Dusty said she had a friend she could call in Arcata, but we hadn’t really thought things out beyond that. Not that it would have mattered if we had, because within an hour, we were hopelessly lost.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault: we just guessed wrong. The trail forked, and the fork we chose began to climb and narrow and narrow and climb until it looked like it petered out at a crumbly shale ledge barely a foot wide. Sheer cliff to the right, sheer drop to the left. The moonlight had petered out, too, so I couldn’t tell how far the fall would have been, but I could see with my flashlight that the path widened again on the other side of the ledge.

“I’m going to check it out,” I told Dusty. “You wait here.” Keeping my weight on my toes, I inched sideways out onto the ledge, hugging the cliff with my belly, and feeling as if my pack was going to pull me over backward at any second.

But it didn’t. The path began a gradual descent, then widened to a grassy plateau. I put down my pack and went back for Dusty, took her pack from her, and helped her across the abyss. When we reached the plateau she threw herself into my arms and dragged me down onto the grass, laughing and crying and covering my face with wet kisses and salty tears.

“My hero,” she said. It was the first time anybody had ever called me that.

Dusty and I zipped our sleeping bags together and made love under the stars that night. I didn’t tell her I was a virgin, but I think she knew. She went gentle on me at first. I remember how her little breasts trembled and how my fingers trembled when I touched them. After I got the hang of it, though, things got rougher, which was how she liked it. She made me call her names and pinch her and slap her around, and when the names weren’t dirty enough or the pinches and slaps hard enough, she’d call me names, names like wussy and pussy and faggot.

But no matter how hard I slapped her or how long I screwed her, she couldn’t come. The problem, she said, was that she usually did it drunk or stoned or with poppers. “I need something, or I just can’t, you know, let go at the end.” Then she gave me this sneaky little look. “Would you mind choking me?” she said.

“Choking you?”

“Yeah. It’s something I learned from my minister. He used to make me strangle him with his tie just before he came.”