But she couldn't bear to wait. She wanted to be back on the path and putting these scary ten minutes (or maybe now it was fifteen) behind her as soon as she could. So she slipped her pack over her shoulders again - there was no angry, distracted, but basically nice big brother to check the straps for her this time - and set off again. The minges and noseeums had found her now, so many of them buzzing around her head that her vision seemed to dance with black specks. She waved at them but didn't slap. Slap at mosqui-toes, but it's better just to wave at the little ones, her Mom had told her... perhaps on the same day she had taught Trisha how girls peed in the woods. Quilla Andersen (only then she had still been Quilla McFarland) said that slapping actually seemed to draw the minges and noseeums... and of course it made the slapper increasingly aware of her dis-comfort.
When it comes to bugs in the woods, Trisha's Mom had said, it's better to think like a horse. Pretend you've got a tail to swish em away with.
Standing by the fallen tree, waving at the bugs but not slapping at them, Trisha had fixed her eyes on a tall pine about forty yards away... forty yards north, if she still had her bearings. She walked to this, and once she was standing there with her hand on the big pine's sap-tacky trunk, she looked back at the fallen tree. Straight line? She thought so.
Encouraged, she now sighted on a clump of bushes dot-ted with bright red berries. Her mother had pointed them out on one of their nature-walks, and when Trisha explained they were birdberries and deadly poison - Pepsi Robichaud had told her so - her mother had laughed and said, The famous Pepsi doesn't know everything after all. That's kind of a relief. Those are checkerberries, Trish. They're not a bit poison. They taste like Teaberry gum, the kind that comes in the pink pack. Her mother had tossed a handful of the berries into her mouth, and when she didn't fall down, choking and convulsing, Trisha had tried a few herself. To her they had tasted like gumdrops, the green ones that made your mouth feel kind of tingly.
She walked to the bushes, thought about picking a few berries just to cheer herself up, but didn't. She wasn't hungry, and had never felt less capable of cheering up. She inhaled the spicy smell of the waxy green leaves (also good to eat, Quilla had said, although Trisha had never tried them - she wasn't a woodchuck, after all), then looked back at the pine. She ascertained that she was still traveling in a straight line, and picked out a third landmark - this time a split rock that looked like a hat in an old black-and-white movie. Next came a cluster of birches, and from the birches she walked slowly to a luxuriant nestle of ferns halfway up a slope.
She was concentrating so fiercely on keeping each land-mark in view (no more looking back over your shoulder, sweetheart) that she was standing beside the ferns before she realized she was, you should pardon the pun, overlooking the forest for the trees. Going landmark to landmark was all very well, and she thought she had managed to keep on a straight line... but what if it was a straight line in the wrong direc-tion?
It might be the wrong direction just by a little, but she had to have gone wrong. If not, she would've come to the trail again by now. Why, she must have walked...
"Cripes," she said, and there was a funny little gulp in her voice that she didn't like, "it must be a mile. A mile at least."
Bugs all around her. Minges and noseeums in front of her eyes, hateful mosquitoes seeming to hang like helicopters by her ears, giving off that maddening warble-whine. She slapped at one and missed, succeeding only in making her own ear ring. And still she had to restrain herself from smacking again. If she started doing that, she'd end up whacking away at herself like a character in an old cartoon.
She dropped her pack, squatted, undid the buckles, turned back the flap. Here was her blue plastic poncho, and the paper sack with the lunch she had fixed herself; here was her Gameboy and some suntan lotion (wouldn't need that, with the sun now completely gone and the last patches of blue overhead filling in); here was her bottle of water and a bottle of Surge and her Twinkies and a bag of chips. No bug-spray, though. Wouldn't you know it. So Trisha put on the suntan lotion instead - it might keep at least the minges away - and then returned everything to her pack. She paused just a moment to look at the Twinkies, then dumped the package in with the rest. As a rule she loved them - when she got to be Pete's age her face would probably be one great big pimple if she didn't learn to lay off the sweets - but for the time being she still felt totally unhungry.
Besides, you may never get to be Pete's age, that disquieting inner voice said. How could anyone have such a cold and scary voice inside them? Such a traitor to the cause? You may never get out of these woods.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," she hissed, and buckled the pack's flap with trembling fingers. That done, she started to get up... and then paused, one knee planted in the soft earth beside the ferns, her head up, scenting the air like a fawn on its first expedition away from its mother's side.
Only Trisha wasn't smelling; she was listening, focusing on that one sense with all of her concentration.