Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 31
On the fourth day after his return, Quinn picked up the girls and took them to the ice cream place.
He’d been here enough times now that the woman behind the counter knew his order: one scoop of vanilla, which Katherine still found to be a weird character defect. The others took their time ordering. Decision fatigue was not a real thing with these girls.
They sat where they always sat, in the big booth in the back corner. Katherine had two scoops of chocolate with a dollop of salted caramel. Sheila had changed her order twice and landed on a combination that the woman behind the counter had assembled with the patient professionalism of someone who has seen it all. Keiko had a single scoop of black licorice, which she’d been pleased to find available and which the others had looked at with the curiosity of people looking at a freak show—horrified but too interested to tear their eyes away.
Quinn placidly ate his vanilla.
“Where did you go? Another of those weird things like last January when you just disappeared off the face of the earth,” Sheila said.
“Canada,” he said. This opened the tale of his summer. He told it in the way he told things to them, much more colorful than the Colonel’s debrief. The version that told them what he had seen. What it had felt like, the hiking and canoeing in wilderness. He could see they equated the Canadian wilderness with the depths of the Amazon jungle: remote and scary.
He told about the canoeing, learning it wrong, and then learning it right. He told about Taylor and all his lessons. He explained the portages with an account of how brutal some of the portages had been. He told about the MREs and about thinking of Maria’s kitchen, the tortilla soup appearing in his mind in full sensory detail during the seventh day of consecutive MRE consumption, the particular quality of longing for food that was also longing for everything the food represented.
Keiko listened with the focused attention she brought to things she was genuinely interested in. She’d spent her summer in Tokyo and was processing the isolation of his summer side by side.
“You got sick?” Sheila shrieked when he told about that.
“Yeah, for two days I was hoping I would die. My own fault; I ate a poisonous mushroom. From now on, no mushrooms for this boy.”
He told about Taylor arriving and feeding him soup and salted water.
Katherine looked at him with the look she seemed to have lately, like she was trying to understand him.
Then he got to the bear.
He had thought about how to tell the bear story on the drive over, not because he wanted to manage their response to it, but because there was a version of the story that was the operational version, the plain accurate account he’d given the Colonel.
He told the version he’d decided on during the plane trip home: walking along the trail, spotting the bear, then the cub.
The three were listening with open mouths, absolutely caught up in the scary drama of the story.
He told about the bear spray and how he had been training with it, then the movement to his hip.
Then he paused.
“Before I ruined her day with the spray,” he said, “I thought of Sheila. What would Sheila do, I asked myself.”
Keiko looked up from her ice cream.
“I said, in my most authoritative voice, ‘BEGONE, BEAR!’ Surprisingly, she did not obey; in fact, it really pissed her off. So I had to use the bear spray. Thankfully, it worked.”
The table was very still for a beat.
Then Sheila made a sound that was a laugh arriving faster than she could manage it, the real laugh, the full one, and it came out in a burst that caused the woman behind the counter to look over with the mild interest of someone who has heard a lot of things in this shop and still notes the genuinely funny ones.
Katherine had both hands over her mouth, snorting and laughing and snorting some more.
Keiko’s tinkling laugh arrived layered over everything, bright and genuine, her composure entirely gone in the lovely way it went when something surprised it out of her.
“BEGONE, BEAR,” Sheila said, in the voice, the full theatrical authority of the character she’d been inhabiting since the school play, and then dissolved again.
He waited for the laughter to run its course, which took a while. Katherine got there first, her composure returning in stages, and she looked at him with bright eyes wet at the corners from laughing. “Was there really a grizzly bear?”
“There was really a grizzly bear.”
He ate his vanilla and let them have the story for a moment, the enjoyment of it, the pleasure of a funny story told to people who laugh at exactly the right things and for the right reasons.
He did not tell them about the loneliness, about the unexplained ache of the seventh week, and the three of them in his mind with the clarity of no time, and the two evenings by the lake with the notebook and the plan assembling itself out of genuine missing.
He waited for them to finish the last of their ice cream.
He waited for the right moment when the conversation had come to a natural pause, the comfortable quiet of four people who have been talking for an hour and are in the warm aftermath of it.
Then he said, casually:
“I’m going to New York City for school shopping before term starts. Taking the Colonel’s jet.”
The statement landed with a thump. He’d hit it perfectly, like it was information, no big deal. He watched them receive it out of the corner of his eye while he enjoyed his ice cream.
Katherine looked up. “When?”
“Next Thursday. Back Monday.”
“Where are you going to stay?”
“I was thinking The Plaza?”