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  “Yeah, seriously. I mean, I don’t have anywhere else to go. This is, like, a life decision for me. But you can have your little vacation and go hiking with Aaron and have your adventure and then just go back home—”

  “Are you kidding me?” I say. I’m shocked. “Go back home? Did you hear the fight I got in with my mom?”

  “Did she kick you out?”

  “I mean, no, but—”

  “Right, you left. So that means you can go back.”

  “Jeff, I dropped out of school—”

  “So get your GED,” he says. “And then you can go to college where Mommy got you a scholarship, and live in the dorms and go to football games and fuck frat boys or whatever the fuck—”

  “Jeff, what are you even talking about—”

  “Some of us don’t have a choice, okay? I have to be here. I’m here. I don’t have somewhere else to go.”

  “You’re being crazy. I don’t want to go home, with my fucking stupid mom, and you know I don’t want to go to UCSB—”

  “Sure, right now you don’t, but what happens when it gets uncomfortable? What happens when it gets hard? Or you get sick of being dirty, and not having any money, and living in the woods, or . . .” He trails off and looks away before he says what I’m pretty sure he’s thinking, which is: when you get sick of me.

  I just stare at him.

  “I don’t know,” I finally say.

  “See, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re either with me, or you’re not. You’re either out here for the long haul, or you’re not. It’s not like there’s some gray area.”

  Jeff doesn’t believe in gray areas. He never has. Things are right, or they’re wrong. People are assholes, or they’re not. That used to feel so safe to me: like the world was a place that I could manage, like there were answers and it was possible to know them. Now I’m not so sure.

  “You’re not answering me,” he says. “You’re not saying what you think. You’re just fucking standing there,” and he’s right. I feel paralyzed. I flash back to rain beating on the asphalt driveway, that feeling that I couldn’t say anything. That whatever I said wouldn’t do any good.

  “Jesus, Alison. Just take a fucking stand.” The mad in his voice cracks just enough for me to hear the hurt beneath. “What do you want?” I think maybe he means who.

  “What do you want?” he says again. “For real.”

  The quiet swells between us; I hear twigs crack in the distance.

  What I feel is gray area, but I don’t know how to say that.

  He won’t understand.

  Then, from where I heard the twigs crack, I hear Sage’s voice.

  “Alison!” she calls. “Hey! You got a sec?”

  Jeff and I lock eyes. He knows he’s not getting an answer, not now.

  But the question isn’t going away.

  “Go ahead,” he says, and takes the shovel from me. “I don’t need your help. Just go.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sage leads me farther down the road. Since we got back from town, she and Aaron are suddenly doing a lot more things: handing out tasks, putting people to work. Nutmeg’s building barricades; Exile’s rigging up a tripod down the mountain—three PVC pipes hitched together, with a platform, that someone locks in with a bike lock on their neck. She’s even got some of the school-bus kids doing little stuff when they’re out and around—but not anything important, nothing she and Aaron need to count on.

  Now she needs my help stockpiling wood.

  We walk down the road, closer to the main roadways. “You can go where you want, you know,” she says as our feet crunch the gravel. “You don’t need his permission.” I guess she heard him tell me, Go ahead. Just go.

  “I know,” I say, embarrassed. I don’t want her to think I’m weak. Even though I think I am.

  She walks over to the gear pile and picks up two axes. “I’m not sure when we’ll be able to go into town for firewood again, so we gotta do it ourselves.” I hear the same tone that was in Aaron’s voice when he said, Cascade is planning to dig in; we should too. “Anyhow this way we can use wood that’s already fallen. In town we buy cut logs, which is kind of ironic, considering that’s what we’re trying to stop.”

  “Right,” I say, but it makes me think. I mean, we build a fire every day, because we need to cook. Everybody has to cook. Most people have jobs: they don’t have time to pick up branches off the ground and cut them up. They don’t get their heat from a fire; they have to pay for electricity, from a power plant. That can’t make them bad.

  It makes me wonder what Sage and Aaron really think about people, whether they’re judging everyone; it makes me wonder, if I were out there, whether they’d judge me. By the side of the road there’s a clearing, a big stack of branches piled up. “So—if we couldn’t cut our own wood, do you think it’s wrong to buy it?” I ask Sage.

  “Pretty much the root of the problem, huh?” Her eyes crinkle when she smiles. “Here, set this on that stump there,” she says, handing me a log. And then: “I don’t know the answer.”

  That freaks me out. Someone’s supposed to know the answer. What are they all fighting so hard for if they’re not even sure? “But I mean, then—what are you guys doing here?”

  “Well, I know what the answer isn’t,” she says. “I know it’s not just to burn through everything and cut it down, which is what we’re doing.” She tapes up her hands.

  “But like—people have to have jobs, and live in houses, and stuff.”

  “Yeah?” she says, like, Go on.

  I think of my parents when I was just born and Andy was little. “People can’t just all come and, like, live in the woods. Our food comes from stores, right? And we need to buy stuff, and have electricity and gas for cars.” I think of the cashier at the health food store Aaron and I were just at, the fluorescent lights that lit the space, the plastic bags the rice came in. “That can’t be all, just, bad.”

  She looks at me for a minute, taking me in. She looks sort of weirdly proud of me or something. I can’t quite decode her face. “It’s not,” she says.

  I feel relieved hearing her say that. Jeff and his friends are always all “Fuck civilization!” but I’m pretty sure I like civilization, mostly. And those guys certainly haven’t presented any viable alternatives.

  “And you’re right,” she goes on, “it’s a privilege, in a way, to be out here. None of us has kids we have to feed, right, or a sick grandma whose rent we have to work a job to pay. We’re all healthy; we’ve got tents, and warm-enough clothes. That’s not true for everyone.”

  “So what’s everyone else supposed to do, then?” I ask. I don’t ask what’s really in my head, which is What are we even doing here? I don’t want her to be insulted. But that is what I’m thinking: what good is it to do all this, if there’s only, like, twenty of us out here and everyone else still has to do all the same stuff back in the world? There’s a lot more world out there than there is up here.

  “I’m not sure, exactly,” she says. “But I think we could figure it out if we would slow down and try. Humans are pretty amazing—we’ve figured out a lot of stuff before. If we can, like, put airplanes in the sky, and invent computers, I feel like we should be able to figure out how to live without destroying the planet, right?”

  “I guess.” She has a point, but she still hasn’t said anything about how.

  “But the first thing is, we have to admit we’re destroying the planet. Which is kinda scary, you know. Most people don’t want to think about that. Because of everything you’re saying—like, What else are we supposed to do? So that’s one reason I’m out here—to try to get people to think about it. If we can get people to pay attention, maybe more people will start to care. But also I’m just here to keep them from cutting shit and burning it down, where I can, lik
e at least this one forest, this one place. Just to slow the whole thing down.”

  “But aren’t you trying to stop the whole thing? It’s still destroying the planet even if they do it slower, right?”

  “Sure, but like you said, there’s a lot of big things we’d need to structure differently. We can’t just stop everything without having any alternatives. So I figure if we can slow them down, we can buy enough time to figure out a different way.”

  I try to picture my mom or my teachers sitting down and “figuring out” how to have electricity in a way that doesn’t cut down forests. It seems ridiculous. “Do you really think that would happen?” I ask.

  “I mean, we’re figuring it out, right?” she says. “Like you and me, right here.”

  That terrifies me, suddenly, that idea. That all we have is what we figure out ourselves. I feel cut loose, unprotected, in a way I never have before. I guess I always just assumed someone was looking out for everything, protecting us, making sure the world ran right.

  But what Sage is saying makes me realize that that isn’t true. Nobody is just up there taking care of things. It’s up to us. That scares the shit out of me.

  “Here,” she says. “Hold out your hands,” and I do. She tapes them up like she did hers, and hands me an ax.

  She puts the log on a stump. Then, “Watch,” she says, and brings her ax down on the log swift and hard, splitting it. The noise is like a gunshot, loud enough to make me jump. She wipes her brow. “Okay, now you.”

  She sets down another log, then gets behind me and wraps her arms around me, positioning my hands on the handle. Her palms are calloused, her muscles strong; I feel spindly and girlish next to her. She steps away. “Okay, raise it over your shoulder, and—GO!”

  The ax swings down and sinks halfway through. “Good,” she says. “One more and you’ll have it.”

  I’m lifting the ax again when I hear tires on the dirt road, over near the dragons. “Shit,” I say. “You hear that?”

  Sage stops for a second. Wheels crunch on gravel. “Yeah.”

  She doesn’t have to tell me what to do. I drop my ax next to hers and we haul ass.

  CHAPTER 14

  From fifty feet away I can see the sirens on the truck. Cops. Shit, I think. Shit shit shit. They’re gonna fucking send me home. And then I remember: Jeff was digging farther down from the dragons. They would have had to get past him to get here. My stomach sinks. We run.

  When we get closer, I see Nutmeg’s already locked down. Two guys in uniforms are looking down at him. My heart thuds hard in my chest; I crane my neck to see if they’ve got Jeff.

  “Hang back,” Sage whispers, her hand on my shoulder.

  “But Jeff was down the road,” I whisper back.

  “If they’ve got him, there’s nothing you can do right now. And Nutmeg’s already there. Just go slow and let’s watch.”

  All of a sudden my feet on the twigs are loud as bombs going off; my breath sounds like Darth Vader.

  We creep up closer and I see the truck: it says “Forest Service.” “Look,” I whisper. “It’s just Forest Service. That’s okay, right?” hoping she’ll say, Right, it’s totally fine, let’s go chop wood.

  “Maybe,” she says. “There’s different kinds of rangers. Some of them are looking out for fires. But some of them are law enforcement.” Two steps closer and I see their belts: they have guns. “Yup,” she mutters. “Those are the cop kind.”

  My heart goes fast and fluttery, everything suddenly in super-sharp focus. My mind wants to run, but my muscles won’t move.

  “Stay still one sec,” she says, pulling me behind a tree. “Let’s see if we can hear them.” I still can’t see Jeff. Fuck.

  The ranger cops lean over Nutmeg, pissed. One of them has a baton kind of thing on his belt and he keeps his hand there, threatening to pull it out. “Y’all need to get out of here,” baton-cop says. The other one nods, muttering something I can’t hear.

  Nutmeg looks up at them, unblinking. He looks like a kid next to them. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “You will if we arrest you for trespassing,” the ranger says.

  I try to make myself invisible, unsure whether I’m more afraid of getting sent home or going to jail.

  “You could, but you’d have to get me out of this,” Nutmeg says, his arm sunk deep in. The ranger crouches down, his hand still on that baton.

  “We can do that,” he says. The look on his face reminds me of Jeff’s dad.

  Nutmeg is clenching his jaw, brave, defiant, but I know underneath it he has to be at least a little scared.

  I turn to Sage. “We should do something.”

  “We go out there, they’ll arrest us too. It won’t help.”

  Then the ranger cop hits the dragon with his baton, trying to break it. Right by Nutmeg’s head.

  The noise cracks through the forest. Nutmeg buries his face in the dirt.

  The cop hits the dragon three more times, each one harder than the next, each blow closer to Nutmeg’s skull. It still doesn’t break. “Goddamn,” the cop grunts, sweating, “this fucking thing,” and motions to the other cop. “Hold his arm,” he says. The other cop crouches down and pins Nutmeg’s free arm.

  Then the first cop rears back and punches Nutmeg. In the face. Nutmeg yells, I gasp, and Sage grips my shoulder hard. “Get the fuck out of there!” the ranger cop yells. “You hear me?!”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Nutmeg says.

  The cop punches him again. “You like that? Want me to fuck you up?”

  Nutmeg doesn’t move.

  The cop kicks Nutmeg in the face, and suddenly blood is everywhere. I want to throw up.

  It feels so wrong to stand here, hiding.

  “Get up!” the cop yells.

  “I told you, I’m not moving,” Nutmeg yells, face blurred by the red of his blood.

  I’ve never been afraid of cops before. I always thought, Don’t do anything wrong, they’ll leave you alone. Protect you, even—keep you safe. I always just assumed that the people in charge were taking care of everything, making sure it all ran right, that everyone was safe.

  But that’s not what’s happening here. Not at all.

  And they have guns.

  The cop bends down and gets in Nutmeg’s face, grabbing his hair. And then the other cop reaches under his uniform jacket, onto his belt. I look to Sage, panicked. But it’s not a gun; it’s this tiny can.

  The cop points it at Nutmeg’s face and sprays. And Nutmeg screams. I never knew why people described screams as “bloodcurdling,” but now I do.

  “Pepper spray,” Sage whispers.

  “Get out of there!” the cop screams at Nutmeg again. Nutmeg’s eyes squeeze shut, his body contorting around the pain. But he just shakes his head.

  The two cops stand there for a second. And then one of them rears back and kicks Nutmeg in the ribs. I hear a sickening crack. Nutmeg moans, and spits blood into the dirt.

  As they’re getting into the truck, the cop says, “Tell your friends what happened to you. You’ve got three days to get out of here.”

  And then they drive away.

  CHAPTER 15

  Now it’s dark and we’re all back by the fire, burning up wood, trying to decide what to do. Everyone is here: Dirtrat, Stone and Cyn and silent Naya, Bender, Goat: they’ve emerged from their van-and-bus encampment, Popov on their breath, and they cluster with the rest of us, because now it’s serious.

  Jeff is with them. The Forest Service never even saw him: he spotted sirens through the trees, dropped his shovel halfway through a ditch, and ran.

  He didn’t holler up to Nutmeg first to warn him.

  Doesn’t matter, Nutmeg said when we all got back to camp, letting Jeff off the hook. I woulda locked down anyway. Otherwise they would have gotten to the camp and shut all of us d
own. It’s okay. Nutmeg’s face was marked with dirt, his cheek imprinted where it was pressed into the gravel. I remember that feeling on my own face, the lockdown, the refusal, the fear of it, and pride. I remember how Jeff looked at me when I locked in, admiring and jealous, like I was doing something that he couldn’t do. That night I felt for him; I wanted to help him. But now I think: when it comes down to it, maybe he’s the one who won’t stand up, and not just because of his dad. Maybe he’s not braver than me.

  I look across the fire to him, sitting with the rowdy kids with their patches and piercings and vodka breath, interrupting each other, snickering or spacing out. I look around the spot where I’m sitting: Sage and Aaron and Exile focused, ready; Nutmeg wrapped in a blanket, bruised, black eyed, breathing shallow from a broken rib, saying, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here.” Jeff said, What do you want? Just make a choice, and I wonder if I already did.

  “Three days,” Aaron says. “That’s not long. We need a plan.” His voice is calm, but I can tell he’s worried. I look to Sage, wanting her to reassure me or at least explain what’s going on. But she just stares at the fire.

  Sparks flick into our grubby faces, no one speaks up, and finally Aaron tells the group, “Look, Allie and I heard some shit in town a couple days ago.” I see Jeff clock the Allie and hate it. I see purple-haired Cyn clock that and scowl at me.

  “Apparently Cascade sees this as symbolic,” Aaron goes on. “They think if they back down, it’ll set some kind of precedent, and they’re working on deals all over the state. So they have to keep going with the cut here, no matter what, to show that protesters won’t stop them.” Nutmeg and Exile nod, that same sober look Aaron had at the health food store. “They said three days till they come back. That means the rangers are planning to arrest us and clear out camp. That means we have to keep them from doing that. I think”—Aaron looks down—“I mean, obviously we all have to agree on the timing of this. But I think we should go ahead and set up the sit.”