Page 58 of Pas de Don't
On a blanket a few paces away, the two sisters matched in purple plaid pajamas and fleece robes. As Craig settled onto his own blanket and pulled on a beanie, Marcus returned from the bathroom and lay down next to her, his arms folded under his head and his thigh pressed gently against hers. Warmth blossomed through the fabric of her leggings where they touched.
“How’s your ankle?” she whispered.
“Not bad,” he replied. “I’m not going to outrun any snakes on it, but I feel a lot better than I did a few weeks ago.”
“You don’t need to outrun the snake; you just need to outrun one human. As long as it’s not me.”
Marcus chuckled and turned to look at her. She could barely make out his face, but she could see he was grinning. He shook his head.
“What?” Heather asked.
“Nothing,” he replied, the smile in his voice clear, “I just—”
“All right, ladies and gents,” Craig started, and Marcus fell quiet. “If you look up and give your eyes time to adjust, I can give you a tour of the southern sky tonight. In winter we’ve got several planets visible to the naked eye, including Saturn and Jupiter. I’llbe sure to show you those, but let’s start with the most famous of the Australian constellations, the one that appears on our national flag. Can anyone tell me what it’s called?”
“The Southern Cross!” the younger girl called loudly. Her sister shushed her.
“That’s right.” Craig pulled out a laser pointer and switched it on. “If you look at this very bright star here”—he directed the pointer into the air—“and follow this line of stars down, you’ll see the cross right there, quite low in the sky tonight. Four large points here”—he drew a long cross with the pointer—“and one little one on the side here. That’s how you know it’s the real Southern Cross, and not the false cross that sometimes tricks people.”
It never really occurred to Heather that the southern hemisphere had entirely different stars from the northern hemisphere. She supposed if she’d stopped to think about it, she wouldn’t expect to see the northern lights in the southern sky, but then, she’d never stopped to think about such a thing. In New York, she rarely saw the stars anyway.
Marcus nudged her. “He’s talking to you,” he whispered, and Heather sat up.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was the question?”
“What’s your star sign?” Craig asked, sounding a little miffed she hadn’t been listening.
“Oh, uh, Sagittarius, I think? December second,” Heather replied quickly. “But I don’t think any of that stuff is real.”
“Well, neither do I,” Craig said, “but the stars are real.” He unfolded a piece of paper and laid it on his lap, then shone the pointer onto it. “Sagittarius,” he said, consulting the map closely and then pointing the light upward to the left of the Southern Cross, “is right here. The Archer.”
Heather looked up politely and nodded.
Craig consulted the paper again. “Incidentally, that means you’re ‘adventurous, impulsive, and brave.’” He looked at Marcus, who had sat up at her side. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” Marcus replied, at the same moment Heather scoffed, “No.”
They turned to look at each other. Despite the dark, Marcus’s eyebrows were raised in what looked like surprise. She frowned slightly, trying to read his expression, and he gave a little shrug, as if to say,What? It’s just the truth.
“Well,” Craig sounded amused. “Sounds like you two are very compatible.”
Marcus gave a good-natured chuckle, but Heather said nothing. Her throat felt tight, and tears prickled her eyes. She stared at her knees in the dark, willing the tears away. At the sound of Marcus’s answer—no, at the sound of the certainty and admiration in his voice when he answered—two startling realizations had tumbled, one after the other, into her mind. The first, which had made the tears threaten, was that for all the compliments Jack had ever given her—he had praised her looks more times than she could count, especially at the beginning—he had never called her adventurous or brave. The second, the one that tightened her throat, was the realization that somewhere beneath her routines and her rule-following, she might in fact be both those things.
Heather had always been capable of cartwheels.
When Craig’s presentation finished up a few minutes later, he handed each of them a flashlight and told them to turn in for the night. “Early start, remember,” he warned as they climbed to their feet and headed toward their tents. “We’ll be on the koalas’ schedule in the morning.”
When they’d arrived at the campsite, Marcus thought the mattresses in the tents looked pretty comfortable. Now he was actually lying on one of them, though, he realised how wrong he’d been. He shifted in his sleeping bag, trying to pull more of it beneath him to cushion his hip against the hard wooden platform. It didn’t help much.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Heather. “This isn’t great. Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“Maybe,” she whispered back. Her voice sounded a little strained, like she was in real discomfort. “But if I do, I’m just going to have nightmares about creepy crawlies, so it’s probably for the best. The koalas better be extremely cute tomorrow.”
“You don’t need to worry about that; I put in a special request for extra cute koalas,” Marcus replied.
“Oh, really?” she asked, turning from her back onto her side. In the darkness, he could just make out the silhouette of her head propped on her hand and her sleeping bag pulled up to her armpits.
“Yeah, they made all the un-cute ones leave before we got here,” Marcus said, smiling. She shifted again, and his face fell. “I’m sorry this isn’t as glam as you were promised.”
