I was fairly sure I was small enough to make it through without getting too banged up. My thick jacket would protect me.
"Hurry up, Lawson," Matthew shouted. "You're being timed."
I didn't bother to look at him or hurry; I just flipped him off—Ben gave a shout of laughter at that—and got onto my knees to duck under the first string of barbed wire. Testing if I could make it through, I didn’t feel any snags and decided to keep going. If I kept my head down, I’d be fine.
Or so I thought, until the constant assault on my stomach had it protesting loudly. That sandwich was not sitting well in there, but no way would it defeat me. If I had to, I’d barf in the mud and keep going. Anything to show Dylan I wasn’t as pathetic and useless as he expected.
Beside me on the course, the other guys were still shouting and fighting and choking on mud in the heavily watered-down sections. None of them even noticed me cruising right on past. And yeah, my face ended up covered in mud because it was the only way to stay low enough not to catch my head on the wire, but that was a small price to pay.
As I continued the monotonous movement—head down, elbow over elbow, wiggling forward—I let my mind go into the place that was my safe zone. It was here I escaped to when Blake beat me or when I lay awake at night in fear—a blank, white wall in my head, a barrier insulating me against whatever terrible shit was happening to me.
Before I knew it, I was at the end, and as I dragged my nauseous, aching body out, I felt a sense of accomplishment, even with my forearms and shoulders screaming at me, because, clearly, neither of them had ever done that shit before. I was pretty sure tomorrow I’d feel muscles I didn’t even know I had.
And the obstacle course wasn’t even close to being over yet.
After the mud section was a row of tires. They spanned the path before me in varying sizes, and it was clear we were supposed to run through them. After ditching my outer layer, thick and weighed down with mud, my second layer of a wool jacket and leggings was, thankfully, still warm enough. And now I could move a lot more freely.
Not bothering to look around, I took off, leaping from circle to circle. And while I was exhausted from the night's events, it was kind of thrilling to be out in the chilly morning air, stretching my body. Sure, my ribs ached, my shoulders hated me, and there was a big-ass graze on my face, but pain was fleeting and this obstacle course was actually fun.
At the end, three huge tires were lined up, blocking the path, the large center holes covered with a mesh. They wanted us to push the tires down the path to get through. Taking a deep breath, I stretched my limbs out before moving to the closest tire and giving it an almighty shove. It swayed but didn't move, and it was only as some of the guys ran up beside me that I figured out at least two people had to shove these to get them down.
It struck me that I had been the first one here, and that was so unexpected that I had to chuckle. Blake had always told me I was useless, clueless, and clumsy. Turned out I just needed to stretch my muscles a little more.
The front row of guys slammed into the three tires, knocking them down, but that wasn't the end of that trial. They had to lift them back up and flip them again, over and over, until the tires went into another mud pit, where we could use them to get across to the other side unscathed.
Of course, none of us made it that far because they all argued so much about the right way to move a tire. Each guy thought his ideas were the superior ones, when all they really needed to do was shut their mouths and use their muscles. No wonder the camp leaders had stressed the need to work together. Teamwork was a skill severely lacking in this group of campers... myself included.
I tried to speak up to organize the situation and encourage three or four of them to work with me to pass this obstacle. None of them listened. None of them even