Page 18 of When Glitter Meets Gold

“As much as I want to oblige your request to be alone, I’m afraid I just don’t want to deal with the aftermath of explaining how I let a vulnerable woman die in the wilderness.”

“I’m not vulnerable,” I cry, my voice reaching undiscovered notes.

“Then prove me wrong,” he says. “Go five minutes without falling from heights or screaming at foliage.”

He marches off, muttering inaudibly.

I glare at him from the boulder I’m contemplating remaining on until someone comes to rescue me.

I watch as he hikes into the distance, very aware of how effortlessly the forest swallows him up after only a few strides. And that’s when I realize there’s no way I can go five minutes without falling over or shrieking at leaves. I can’t be out here alone. The depressing conclusion finally dawns on me, I need this terrible man after all.

I curse myself as I kick off the side of the boulder and shuffle after him.

This was not the plan. This is the opposite of the plan.The plan was to be adventurous and daring. And now here I am, clinging to the first available resource to get me out of this mess.

At least Jack is decent enough not to pass comment when I join him again.

Instead, he rummages in the side compartment of his bag before producing an item. “This should make things easier.”

I take my missing shoe from him and jam it on my foot like it’s treasure. “How?”

“Found it when you were swinging from the vines.”

After a few minutes of silence because no, I did not thank him, I clear my throat. “Hey, I thought you said you didn’t remember me?”

“What?” He makes a half attempt to look back, his eyes not quite reaching my face.

“When I told you my name, you saidmaybeyou recognized me.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, so?”

“Well, back there you spoke about the swamp…and then I said I didn’t believe you were going to catch me, and you said you weren’t twelve anymore.” I pause, waiting for him to catch on.

He glances over his shoulder, finally looking at me.

I shrug. “That was the last time we saw each other. I was eight, you were twelve. Sounds like you remember pretty clearly after all.”

9

JACK ‘J’

The clouds overhead are several bruised shades of purple. J predicts they have a little under twenty minutes before the heavens open and something not entirely unlike a monsoon consumes the forest. He isn’t as high as he wanted to be, nor has he found a suitable spot to stop and take shelter. His carefully planned hike is unravelling beyond his control, and it’s all down to the girl from his childhood, Sara.

He pretended he didn’t remember her, withholding the truth, not out of stubbornness—a lie, stubbornness is definitely involved no matter how minuscule the amount—but because the prank they played on Sara all those years ago had resulted in punishment. And to dredge up that memory would mean mucking out other ones too, ones that involved the father he’d been doing a fine job forgetting.

Yet here he is anyway, seventeen years later, reliving the whole damn ordeal.

He and his siblings had been warned by their mother many times that Sara was petrified of bugs and hated getting dirty. He remembers the lecture not to force her to play inthe forest like they always did with the kids of their parents’ visitors.

Naturally, his siblings had spent the morning reminiscing about the time they’d thrown a jar of worms at her, or when they “accidentally” released a spider into her hair. He recalls the plan he’d overheard Georgina and Ty make an hour before Sara arrived at their house, the one that would lure her into the swamp. He wasn’t involved in the scheme, but he didn’t do anything to stop it either.

Instead, he laughed about it over sandwiches and a tub of ice cream their mother had snuck them after their father made them skip breakfast for interrupting him during a phone call.

The truth was, they forced others to enter the forest because it was their safe space. A place away from home, where things like raised voices and punishments didn’t exist. They weren’t aware that the things they did to Sara were a product of the environment they’d grown up in. They didn’t realize they were acting out their own frustrations by bullying others. They’d watched their father pick on the weakest link, their demure and sweet mother, for years. They were merely doing what they knew.

They’d been grounded for a month after Sara returned to the house, covered in swamp filth and bite marks from the ants. Then they’d had to watch as their father yelled that it was their mother’s fault they behaved out of line, their mother’s fault things always got out of hand. The argument had escalated into the night.

The memory wasn’t the worst he had of his father, but it was the most prominent because it was the last he had of him before he took off, never contacting his wife or kids again.

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