Chapter 3

Within the hour, the four of them were back on the road. Sam and Lilith were both half asleep still, and Ezra only wasn’t ‘cause he was already downing Red Bulls. Breakfast had been gas station snacks. Ez didn’t care that much about things. Lilith liked that about him; he didn’t comment on her face at all, either.

But Lilith hadn’t gotten much sleep last night; four-and-a-half hours, tops, and she was feeling bleary-eyed. Samuel wasn’t much better, leaning against the door with his eyes closed. She scooched around to lay down across the back seat, her head coming to rest on his lap.

“Hi,” she murmured, looking up at him. She closed her eyes, and a few moments later, she was startled as Samuel started absentmindedly combing his hand through her hair. She felt a surge of warmth, hummed contentedly and soon fell asleep.

———❧———

Upon their arrival at the cabin, Annette made it clear that “the kids”—meaning Lilith, Sam and Allie—were to share a tent outside.

It was obvious to Lilith that their stepmom’s original design had involved all the not-her-kids sharing the tent, and Allie getting the extra bedroom in the cabin ... but Ezra was an adult man and Annette couldn’t really make him do anything, not to mention it would be kind of weird. So one short, tense standoff later, he was carrying his bags inside.

Allie, for her part, was ecstatic at sharing a tent with her siblings. “Are you gonna tell ghost stories again, Lills? You’re so good at those.”

Lilith could barely remember what her little half-sis was even talking about. That had been two years ago, which felt like another lifetime. Back-then-Lilith had been a bit less sullen and more talkative. The current-day Lilith was far more concerned with what the tent situation would mean for her and Sam doing ... stuff.

For some reason, she’d assumed that the one nice thing about this trip would be ample opportunity to try and convince Sam to take her virginity. She’d figured they could fool around in the tent at night, but ... with Allie there, she wasn’t so sure.

To its credit, the tent was pretty large; it was probably meant to contain a whole family of five, not three teenagers, so it fit them comfortably enough. Still, there was not going to be a lot of privacy to be had between the three of them, which became clear quickly as they began pitching the damn thing.

But the inside was divided into two separate sleeping compartments with a bit of space in-between the middle. That was quite promising. “So, Allie, we share one,” she murmured, “And he gets the other, right?”

“Yup!”

Allie was unreasonably excited, and Lilith felt a general sense of dread. Sam, for his part, seemed determined to spend as much of the trip on his phone as possible, in silent protest; so Allie’s excitement was at least useful in that it carried most of the work of setting up.

An hour later, their half-sister had also somehow befriended various kids from all over the campground. Sam was predictably unimpressed with an increase in 14-year-olds, and Lilith had crippling social anxiety, so together they took a rain check on whatever the hell Allie was doing, to just hang out by the tent.

They ended up in a hammock Dad had spun over the cabin porch, gently swaying in the breeze. Lilith was sort of halfway draped over Sam, for once glad for her small frame. Just enjoying each other’s presence like that, without fighting, was something they’d not done in years.

The wind blew. It was quiet and peaceful, and they stayed there, hardly moving, for several minutes. Just being close to each other. The gentle sway of the hammock lulled Lilith to a drowsy state.

She only realized she’d dozed off in his arms when she noticed she was drooling on the side of his neck. Mortified and flushed, she wiped it with her sleeve. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. God.”

“ ... Not the first time your spit’s been on my neck,” he intoned.

“Won’t be the last, either,” she promised, blushing.

Of course that was when Allie and a bunch of unknowns came down upon them with all the hubbub of a meteorite impact event. Lilith froze up, embarrassed. “Hey, guys! This is Jory, Katlyn, and Madison! They’re all siblings.” Allie gestured at her newfound friends, and introduced, “This is my sister, Lilith, and my brother, Sam.”

The gaggle, led by the ever-energetic Allie, immediately disappeared again.

The moment their voices receded into the distance, Lilith relaxed. “Man, I hate people,” she muttered.

“Don’t worry. People hate you, too.”

She swatted at him. Soon, they were in a full battle for dominance over the hammock, which unfortunately ended with both of them plummeting to the ground.

———❧———

Hiking. Restaurants. Shopping trips ... Lilith could only stomach so many forced activities. If given a choice, she’d opt out of everything and just stay behind in the tent reading fanfiction on the iPad, but of course no choice was given. If her stepmom and half-sis were to be believed, performative family bonding was stimulating to the human spirit, but the reality was just the whole fam getting progressively more annoyed at each other over the course of the day.

Lilith herself usually shambled quietly at the tail end of the group. She found perverse satisfaction in observing the rising tempers and the plummeting vibes; her own mood was already too gloomy by default to be brought down further by any of them, except maybe Sam, but aside from constantly pulling her hair he’d been downright nice to her today. Unsettling, really.

Dad always spent the entire trip trying to act like he really cared about outdoorsy stuff to impress Annette ... but he wasn’t fooling anybody, once the huffing and puffing and complaining started, and the day wasn’t even halfway through. As the CEO of a mid-sized regional importer of plastic cutlery and disposable containers, he didn’t get a lot of exercise in; Dad wasn’t fat, but he was definitely the fattest he’d been.

Similarly, he pretended like he was a present father-figure during these trips, offering unsolicited life advice to Sam and Ezra, which was pretty funny to listen to. Lilith never got advice, because clearly Ben Ripinski had no clue how to raise children of the female species. He left that to Annette.

Allie, meanwhile, was the one keeping everyone from eating each other alive by being plain happy and excited about everything, as usual.

When they finally returned to the campground after another one such pointless adventure, Samuel pulled her aside by her sleeve while Dad and Annette retired to the cabin. “Hey, Lilly, so y’know how there’s this big campfire every night where everyone goes to drink and get high and whatnot?”

“Yeah, have fun with that.” Lilith rolled her eyes. He couldn’t possibly be inviting her along? Socializing was a nightmare, and other people’s insistence that she engage in it constituted the bane of Lilith’s existence. Especially after a whole day of mandatory “fun”, there were about a hundred things she’d rather be doing.

“So anyway, I was thinking ... look,” he continued, as though he hadn’t heard her. From the corner of her eyes, she watched him ruffle around in his bag and produce the liquor he’d bought on Friday, the bottles with suspiciously bright and soda-esque looking contents, one pink, one blue. He handed her the blue one, keeping the pink for himself. “ ... I think tonight’s your night, sis.”

The bottle felt heavy in her hands. “ ... My night?” she asked. “What does that even mean?”

He pulled her hair, and she swatted the bottle at him with more force than strictly warranted. He wisely dodged; a second later he was on top of her again. “Yeah, tonight, Lilly,” he told her in a low voice. “I wanna see you drunk. You just need to loosen up a little. I guarantee you’ll have fun.”

Lilith bit her lip. It was very embarrassing that she was suddenly more inclined to agree just because he’d pinned her to the ground. Curse these feelings.

“ ... Maybe,” she allowed. “Can’t we just, like ... drink alone? Why do I have to go down there?”

“That’s just what people our age do, Lilly.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe tonight was ‘her night’, vis-à-vis her virginity etc.; she’d already crafted some one-liners pre-emptively just in case he’d object to things. “Yeah sure, it’s illegal. Big deal. So is smoking weed and underage drinking, buddy.” So she was well-prepared. And if she had to suffer a classic high school-esque gauntlet of terror before being able to shoot her shot, she could endure that.

———❧———

Gravel crunched under Lilith’s worn-out combat boots as she bounded down the hill, off the campground, towards the creek. In the twilight she could already make out the fire in the distance; momentarily, she imagined herself walking straight to hell.

She scowled, clutching her blue-colored booze like a lifeline. Like all the liquor Lilith had ever tasted, it had roughly the flavor of cleaning detergent, in spite of the deceptively cute coconuts on the label ... but Samuel had bought it for her, and so, she drank it bravely, holding her nose. The bottle was already a quarter empty just from sipping in the tent; she’d hoped that would calm the blaring anxiety around peers and parties that normally prevented her from doing this sort of thing.

At the edge of the treeline, Lilith came to a sudden halt as she registered the fact that it was dozens of people down there. Multiple dozens. Pop music blasted over tinny Bluetooth speakers, and she was indeed put in mind of an outdoor high school cafeteria experience, only with a big fire in the center. That had to be one of the rings of hell for sure.

She fiddled anxiously with the belt loops of her shorts. Shorts! What on earth had she been thinking? She didn’t have the body to pull off this kind of outfit ... She’d tried hard to look nice tonight, her hair done up in two little buns, but she felt so naked without a big sweater or something to cover her arms—