The One Without Words

❀ chapter forty-six | teenage initiation ❀

All Seth wanted to show us was another trail he found. It probably led to one of the waterfalls cascading above the one we were just swimming under.

"Who wants to come with me?" Seth asked.

"It doesn't look like the trail is marked," Eli said. "What if you get lost?"

"So what? The path's clear enough." He gave Eli a nudge. "Come with me?"

"But we don't know where it leads to..."

"I'll go," Anika said.

Seth's face broke out in a grin. "Hell yeah! Finally someone who wants a motherfuckin' adventure." He raised his hand to high-five her, but she didn't seem to quite understand the gesture, so he was left with his arm awkwardly in the air.

"Rude of you to assume I don't want an adventure," I said, stepping onto the overgrown path. But honestly... less than adventure, what I really needed was a distraction from whatever that was with Jack.

Good thing him and Eli stayed behind at the waterfall, giving me time to compose myself. Eli sat himself down on the rocks, pulled out a notebook from his backpack, and started drawing.

"Do you know that Anika's a witch?" I asked Seth as we ventured deeper into the greenery, dodging overhanging branches and leaves. "I've done a few spells with her. You'd be the perfect human sacrifice for the next one."

Definitely an upgrade from that poor chicken.

Seth's grin widened. "Damn, that makes this even more fun."

"You have the energy of every guy who dies first in horror movies," Anika told him.

"You're saying I should start being careful, then?"

"Maybe. But it's quite amusing."

At least this time there'd be no horror movie killer to jump out from the trees to scare us.

"You're already clocking me as the dude who gets murdered first," Seth muttered. "But I don't know anything about you. You're kinda like Jack. Quiet."

"I'm an open book," Anika said. "All you have to do is ask."

If the trail led to another waterfall, we should be walking at an incline, but the path stayed relatively flat.

Seth paused to smack a mosquito on his arm. "Tell us something you've never told anybody."

Now she paused, her breath steady despite the walk in the heat. "There's not much I could say that would surprise Romy."

"That's so not true," I said. "I had no idea what you and Penelope were up to half the time."

I'd only brought up her name twice this whole trip, and while Anika had freely talked about her back at Goodwill, now she looked away. It was like she shut down whenever I mentioned Penelope's name.

After a long silence broken only by the buzzing bugs around us, Anika admitted, "Something no one knows about me is that I enjoy anime."

Seth's eyebrows raised. "Really? You should talk to Eli. He loves that shit."

"It's a guilty pleasure," she said.

"Why guilty?" I asked. "It's no different from TV shows. But I guess watching TV doesn't fit your mystical witch aesthetic, huh Anika?"

"Some anime have very mystical concepts," she said, then glanced warily at Seth. "Your turn."

"I really, uh, like dinosaurs. I wanted to be a, what was that word? Archaeologist? No, the one that digs up bones. Paleontologist! Yeah. That's what I wanted to be when I was a kid."