the dirt, and as much as I want it to, I don’t think it’s going to come to life like the furnishings in Beauty and the Beast and unpack itself.
Ugh.
With a huff and a grunt, I get up on my knees, unzip the main compartment, and rummage through the inside. One by one, I pull out various items and set them on the ground in front of me. There’s plenty of it. Some of my items, but mostly it consists of all the shit Earl stuffed in there. Frankly, it’s probably all the camping gear a woman would need. But it may as well be essentials for a fucking astronaut to head into space for all I know about it.
Besides the flashlight, batteries, a few bottles of water, food, my magazines, cell phone charger, the golden screenplay, and extra clothes, pretty much everything is unfamiliar.
I grip a package with three tube-shaped objects in my hand and examine it.
LifeStraw is written on the side, and the words personal water filter are scrawled across the top. What does that even mean? I know our bodies are, like, sixty percent water content, but I usually get all of my water from coffee. Could I use this to purify it?
I grab the instruction booklet from just inside the packaging and flip through the illustrations. When I realize they’re painting a picture of a person dipping this tube thing into a lake and wrapping their lips around the top, it hits me—I’m supposed to use this thing to drink water from lakes. Or creeks. Or freaking ponds!
I drop it to the ground like it might catch fire, and Bailey strides over and picks it up in his mouth.
“Bailey, no,” Luca says, but the doggo can tear that package to shreds for all I care. I’m willing to do a lot of things, but drinking water from a creek that animals piss and shit in is a hard limit. Maybe when I get to the mental place where lost hikers have been willing to gnaw off their own arm, I’ll feel differently. But for now, I’ll abstain.
Luca is determined, though, pulling it out of Bailey’s mouth and handing it back to me.
“Uh…thanks.” I take it as politely as I can manage.
I choose dehydration over piss water, but I have absolutely nothing to choose over putting together my tent anymore. Time’s a tickin’.
I pull it from the back of my pack and smile. It’s cute and pink and the only damn thing I actually got to pick out. Earl was insistent about directing me on the rest of it.
With the instructions in one hand and the pink material and support poles in the other, I seek out the best spot to begin—enough feet away from Bailey’s new favorite pissing post and the surly lumberjack’s perfectly set-up tent, but not so many that I’m the first choice for some wild animal’s dinner.
One by one, I follow the instructions.
Lay out and account for all components of the tent. Done.
Lay a tarp over the ground. Done.
Lay tent over the tarp. Done.
I grin victoriously, looking down at my current masterpiece.
Well, look at me, just rocking and rolling through these instructions.
I am a goddess of tent preparation!
Connect your tent poles. Okay, this one is a little more complicated because the poles are tricky little fuckers, wanting to go left when I need them to go right, but I manage, because I am a total badass. Done.
I glance over my shoulder to find Luca’s eyes pointed in my direction.
Ha! And you said I’d regret this! Feast your eyes on my newfound camping skills, bucko!
Confidence straightening my spine, I focus back on the task at hand and read the next instruction—Insert tent poles into the corresponding flaps in the tent.
Flaps? What the fuck are flaps?
I feel around the pink material, searching for flaps.
Oh, wait! Is this a flap?
No. That’s a zipper.
Or this! Is this flap?
Nope. That’s…I don’t know what that it is, but it’s not a flap.
Good Lord, how can a tent be so complicated?
Sweat starts to bead on my forehead, and a heavy sigh escapes my lungs as I continue my search for flaps.
Flippity fucking flaps, where are you? Hello?
“You need some help?” Luca asks from somewhere over my shoulder. I roll my eyes, refusing to look back at him.
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
I refuse to give him any grounds for saying “I told you so.”
My granny was a mean, old, stubborn biddy when she needed to be, and I can be too.
She was also obsessed