“Why don’t you have any food?” Red said through her bottom teeth. “What the hell is in your pack if you don’t have any food?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Adam said. “I thought we were all going to divvy up stuff in the kitchen but then . . .”
He trailed off.
“Adam,” Red said. “You spent half the morning putting shit in your pack. And it’s completely filled to the top. Where were you going to put any food even if the plan was to divvy up supplies?”
Adam shrugged. He looked like a little kid all of a sudden, a little kid who’d done something senseless and impulsive and didn’t really have a reason why except “because.”
“Adam!” Red said, and she heard the yell and tried to dial it back because the forest was so quiet and yelling could attract attention and she was trying so damned hard not to attract attention. “For crying out loud, you’ve gone backpacking before. You know how important weight is and about leaving enough room for essentials. This is not new information for you. For Mama, yes. For you, no. So just what the hell is in your bag?”
“Stuff I didn’t want to leave behind,” Adam said, his mouth flattening. “Do you have any goddamned food or not? Because I am starving and I am not walking another step unless I eat.”
“I am not walking another step until you open your bag and show me what nonsense you have in there,” Red said. “And then you’re going to throw out anything useless and make room for things you actually need to survive.”
Her mind was racing ahead. They would have to go into someone’s house, or into a town. She had enough food for herself for two weeks—she’d calculated it very carefully, every meal and snack. Red had known that at some point they would have to scavenge, but she hadn’t expected it on the first day. That town they would pass through wasn’t much of a town, though she supposed the gas station would at least have snack food.
Assuming it hasn’t been raided or destroyed.
“You are not taking a damned thing out of my pack,” Adam said, breaking into her thoughts.
“Yes I am, if you want to eat,” Red said. “I’ve got the food, so I make the rules.”
“You think I can’t take that pack off you?” Adam said. “I could take it and run away and you’d never catch me.”
He didn’t say, Because you can’t really run with that leg, but it was definitely implied.
Red felt that trench she’d dug in her heart earlier, felt all the barbed wire going up around it, started mentally stockpiling grenades. But she didn’t throw them at Adam, the way she longed to do. They’d always had a squabbling relationship, always quick to point out the fault of the other. It would be incredibly easy to fall into that again, but this time there was an undercurrent of anger that had never been present before.
Adam blamed Red for their parents’ deaths. He’d said that, right to her face. And it lay there between them, a dirty thing neither of them wanted to touch but couldn’t fully ignore.
So she could make another angry remark, and this could escalate, and each would probably end up trying to wrestle the backpack away from the other and likely they would separate. Red didn’t want to separate. Adam was her brother, like it or not. And Mama said they should stay together. She hung on to that. Mama said we should stay together.
Red bit her tongue and silently pulled her pack off and dug around until she’d found a protein bar. She held it out to Adam but it didn’t feel like a white flag somehow. It felt like unexploded ordnance.
He looked from the protein bar to her face and then looked away, something like shame in his eyes. “Thanks,” he muttered.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and started hiking again.
She didn’t repeat that they were going to have to find supplies soon because he’d been an idiot who hadn’t packed any food. Once Adam had eaten the bar and his brain stopped badgering