I thought I was the only one awake in the van. There were six of us – my brother, me, and the four girls with that false-looking skin, the ones we had met the week before hiking in Lincoln. The van was theirs. They could have been sisters; I didn’t know, I never really looked them straight in the face. But they were asleep, I thought, and they had long limbs which were placed precisely against one another. It was elegant, the way they slept on those car seats.
My forehead was against a window, the way when the car’s moving it makes your head hum really low, and sweat was pooling down my cheek and jaw. It was a game, not moving my head away, not wiping the sweat, and I don’t know why but I wasn’t trying to fall asleep. I was just trying to be awake there in the car with these sleeping girls and my brother. It was cool, as New Hampshire is no matter what month, in those certain hours we inhabited. One door of the van was open and even in my stillness I didn’t feel anything, no movement of air.
I still can’t really name what noise it was. It wasn’t artificial. It was old. An old noise. And it began not quietly but suddenly, a little flat, like if pressing your palm against a wall made noise. We were at the base of a mountain, an unimpressive one, and there were small noises but not like this one. I heard it. There was me, hearing it, thinking I was the only one awake, until my brother pulled himself upright with his long arms and slid the door of the van closed. He held its edge with his palm so it wouldn’t slam and wake the one pretty girl. It was for her, I know it. He’d wanted to block that strange flat noise from her ears and he closed the door quietly against it.
That girl, she looked like the others only prettier. I don’t know how. Her arms held each other on the widest seat, her legs flung in no pattern across the seam of the old fabric. When that door closed, her eyelids didn’t flicker but she held her arms more carefully. That’s all. So I knew she was awake.
Diana Kole is a Comparative Literature student currently living in Manhattan.