The Mocanaqua Loop Trail is supposedly a moderate hike but given that the most we walk per day is fifteen steps between prison cells in our office and half a mile back to our apartments down the block, we find it hard to keep up with Amos, bounding along the path in large swoops of strides.

“The waterfall is up here,” he shouts behind.

Indy winces. “I don’t know how he recovered faster than me.”

“You gave him a good time,” Jess says and winks. Indy punches his forearm.

Triple-tiered, long-exposured ribbons of water rush down into the creek. The petrichor residing on mossy rocks and tangled unearthed roots collides with the stench of removed socks and sweaty shirts. We hadn’t seen Amos’ stripling body until now—long, unmuscled torso, dark hair lightly splotching his chest, a birthmark the shape of Virginia stamped on his right shoulder blade.

All of us disappear into the cool water, slinking along the weeds and sediment and tadpoles. Indy has suddenly forgotten to swim and clings onto Amos. We try not to overhear their flirts.

Penelope stares at them and whispers to Jess, “We’re only here for another day. I don’t see the point in her messing around with him. He’ll be crushed.”

“Let him have fun. He’s almost done with his thing, too.”

“He doesn’t deserve to get hurt, though. He might want to go back if this turns out to be traumatizing,” Jess says.

“It’s his life. Why do you care so much?”

“Sometimes I think about leaving the city,” Lucas says.

“You don’t mean that, Lucas. You like the city.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to take a break? Have a life that’s more like this?”

The water stops feeling cold and instead boils like a childhood fever.

“It’s like, if you get stuck doing the same monotonous routine every fucking day, what’s the point? Where’s the progress? Am I always gonna be working for Kozmo and turn into an asshat who’s too good for anyone? I don’t want to feel like someone owns me by having me stuck to a desk in a boring, barely lit office. My eyesight is already worse than it was a year ago. We should accept this break, make it last longer.”

“But we have to go back. Turner barely gave us a week off. We have to keep living.”

“I know. It just doesn’t seem productive is all I’m saying.”

Indy and Amos swim over to us and we replace our frowns with false parenthetical smiles. We don’t know what to say, but they tell us they’re gonna split off and meet back at the tents. We settle on the side of the creek bed and rest against the rocks, trying to dry in the splintering fall sunlight. Penelope doesn’t have the energy to argue, so she naps next to Jess.

 

By the time we return to the site, the fire is hungrily reaching toward the early evening sky. The girls’ tent is zipped up. Penelope huffs and sits by the pit, picking at a charcoaled marshmallow. We had eaten all of our protein in a drunken stupor. Jess searches for any remnant of alcohol but fails to discover a drop.

When Amos stumbles out an hour later, it’s just us men around the ring. He doesn’t look very young anymore.

“Walk with me,” Lucas suggests to Amos. “How you feeling?”

“Like I never want to go back.”

“I get that.”

“What’s it like in New York?”

The city is a clusterfuck of personal atlases indifferently striking against strangers. No one knows what a connection is but find delayed trains a serendipitous significance. Streets are not a dreamy postcard of aesthetics, and yellow taxis are dirtied by slushed rain. Sidewalks operate on pulses of elbow-jams and ankle-clashes. Graduates pick up every spread of classifieds in newspapers scrutinizing for any cheap apartment, any sort of job, anything that can keep them going in the city of broken promises. We got lucky, of course, with the internet seizing our eyes and forcing us to develop a habit of checking e-mails, messages, virtual get-well-soon cards, and we were hired right away despite our lack of technological experiences—no one expected the World Wide Web to become The Thing of the Nineties. Skipped the whole internship phase. Started at $6.25 an hour, made all of our non-business majored friends jealous. We could afford a place with another person and still be able to eat. But none of this is glamorous if everything is stagnant.

“New York is fine. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone like you.”