One Was Lost(19)

“How do we know if it’s poison?” Lucas asks.

No one answers, but Jude chuckles. “I guess you wait to see if I die.”

He hasn’t died so far, but how long has it been? Ten minutes? An hour? No way to know, but I’m pretty sure I should wait a little longer. The problem is, I don’t know if I can. I dig my fingers into the dirt and feel like my mouth is turning itself inside out. All I can see is that bottle at Jude’s lips. All I can think about is ripping it out of his hands and pouring it down my own blistered throat.

“Screw it,” Lucas says, caving with a quick swipe of one of the bottles near Emily’s lap.

“Go slow,” she warns him, but she grabs her own bottle.

I fumble for one too, cracking it open with clumsy fingers.

“Slow,” she says again.

I try. I really do. The first sip turns me into an animal. I’m sure I’ve never known thirst like this, never understood the way a few swallows of water can taste like the best thing I’ve ever had. My throat soaks it up like a desert. I’m sure it doesn’t even hit my belly, just soaks into all the parched places on the way down. Another swallow and another, and I will never think of water the same again. I will never take this for granted—

It’s ripped from my hands, and I gasp. I’m winded. Queasy.

Lucas’s face looms in front of me, worry creasing his brows. “Easy.”

I reach to snag my bottle back, but it’s half-gone. My stomach rolls. Emily was right. I close my eyes and wait for the sloshing to settle.

“OK,” I say, opening my eyes when Lucas doesn’t give my water back. He raises his brow, and I glare. “I’m fine.”

I’m actually nauseated as all hell, but I snag the water back and take a sip to spite him. I go slower now, feeling my cramped joints go loose, that dull ache that’s spread through my head relenting.

I don’t pass out midway through my second bottle. Neither does Lucas, who’s had two, or Jude, who is starting his third.

No one talks about the fact that it’s getting darker. Maybe two hours of daylight left, and it will be night. The last night carried more than darkness on its shoulders, but we don’t talk about it. We just sit around Mr. Walker’s tent, stinking to high heaven and looking at each other like one of us is a rabid dog and we’re just waiting to see who lunges first.

But if someone’s going to lunge, it isn’t going to be one of us. My eyes drag to the trees, where trunks, thick and thin, smooth and rough, rise up from the forest floor in lazy rows. Limbs twist toward the sun, reaching here and there overhead. I see things move out of the corner of my eye. Leaves. Squirrels.

A killer maybe.

A sudden, awful thought blooms: What if Madison and Hayley and Ms. Brighton aren’t dead? What if they are over there, alone and terrified but not able to make noise? Did someone leave them water too?

My heart pinches. I think of my dad helping me drop off lemon chicken soup at the downtown church. We used to go as a family. I refuse to let my mother take that from us too, and Dad refuses to let me drive down there alone. The soup is easy, and the drive is short. It’s the rest of the experience that makes me flinch.

“How do you put up with this?” I look at the women who watch us too closely as we pass, smiles tight enough to tell me they’re more interested in where he was born than who he is. “You have to see how those women look at you, like you’re dangerous. I’m sick of it.”

“I see very well. Well enough to see my daughter feeding hungry people.”

“Dad.” I form the word with my lips, and my throat feels thick. Dark eyes, brown skin, the lilt of his accent that turns my name into a song—did I ever say anything that mattered to him? Did I thank him for staying? After my mom left, he could have gone home to Beirut. Did he want to?

“My parents would freak if they saw me like this,” Jude says, so I must have said it out loud, picked at his worries too.

I don’t know what he calls them. Are they both Dad? Maybe I ask that out loud too because he swirls the water in his bottle and nods. “Tom is Dad. Brady is Pop.”

Pop. The word makes me smile, but I’m not sure Jude would appreciate that, so I hide it behind my hand. “My dad’s a worrier,” I say. “Probably because it’s just me.”

“Divorced?” Emily asks softly.

I laugh, but it’s not funny. “Very.”

When Mom left us for Charlie, Dad got a set of divorce papers and I got pneumonia. He didn’t talk about it, and I was too sick to push. Instead, he brought me endless bowls of oversalted soup and cups of undersweetened tea. A week later, I climbed out of bed and brushed the worst of the tangles out of my waist-length hair.

He asked me if I knew how much I looked like my mother. And then I asked him if I could cut my hair.

“What are you staring at?” Jude asks.

I shake my head, jarred back to our ugly reality. “Sorry. Thinking of when I had pneumonia when I was younger.”

“I don’t have pneumonia,” he snaps.

“I know that. I just—”

“I’m not sick.”

“Unless asshole is a disease,” Emily mutters, but I smile, hoping to disarm him.

It doesn’t work.

“What is your problem with me?” he asks me. “You think it’s charming I have two dads? Does it make you feel more evolved to know me?”