Alone in the Woods

  Also by Rebecca Behrens

  When Audrey Met Alice

  Summer of Lost and Found

  The Last Grand Adventure

  The Disaster Days

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Behrens

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover art © Levente Szabo

  Internal design by Ashley Holstrom/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Young Readers, an imprint of Sourcebooks Kids

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebookskids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Behrens, Rebecca, author.

  Title: Alone in the woods / Rebecca Behrens.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Young Readers, [2020] | Audience: Ages 8. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: Rising eighth-graders Jocelyn and Alex, former best friends forced together on a family vacation, must cooperate to survive when they get lost in the Wisconsin Northwoods. Told in two voices.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020018456 | (hardcover) | (trade paperback) | (epub)

  Subjects: CYAC: Survival--Fiction. | Cooperativeness--Fiction. | Lost children--Fiction. | Forests and forestry--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B38823405 Alo 2020 | DDC [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018456

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Alex

  Three

  Four

  Alex

  Five

  Six

  Alex

  Seven

  Eight

  Alex

  Nine

  Ten

  Alex

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Alex

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  A Note on the Setting

  Additional Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Megan

  One

  I should’ve known all hope was lost when Alex refused to eat a doughnut.

  There were certain vacation moments that we looked forward to all year. The first being when the huge, slightly creepy, grinning lumberjack came into view at the end of the drive. Clutching an ax so big it shaded the cars in the parking lot, the lumberjack—Paul Bunyan—was there to welcome you to his Cook Shanty restaurant and, unofficially, the Wisconsin Northwoods.

  It wasn’t a real lumberjack, of course. Just a huge wooden cutout next to the yellow sign touting the restaurant’s dinner special (usually walleye, which our parents love, but if you ask me just sounds too gross to eat) and, of course, the “logging camp breakfast” served from 7:00 a.m. till noon.

  That breakfast was why we always left Madison so early—because the drive to Minocqua usually took between three and four hours, depending on how many times our little brothers had to pee and which parents were driving. The flapjacks, camp potatoes, and warm buttermilk doughnuts would disappear from the red-and-white-checked tables at twelve on the dot. One year, we got a late start because Nolan couldn’t find his glasses, and then vacationer traffic was slow along Highway 51, and we didn’t pull into the lot until 12:11 p.m. It was too late; they’d already moved on to lunch—and were out of doughnuts. Alex almost cried. We had to settle for doughnut holes from the Kwik Trip gas station, and that was not the proper way to start our week at the cabin.

  Our families took this vacation together at the end of every summer. It was tradition. “Allard’s Roost,” our cabin on the edge of Buttercup Lake, used to belong to my grandparents. We’ve spent a week there every summer of my life, and after Alex and I became best friends in kindergarten, the Benavides family—Nick, Carmen, Lucy, Alex, and Mateo—started coming along. The A-frame cabin is pretty roomy, with lots of places to sleep, so all nine of us were a tight but manageable squeeze. It helped that Nolan, my little brother, and Mateo actually liked to crash on the musty pullout couch in the den.

  My favorite thing about our week “Up North” was…everything. I loved jumping off the sizzling-hot pier into the ice-cold lake for a swim, stargazing from the Adirondack chairs at night, listening to the loons hoot, and hiking around the woods to collect leaves and pine cones. I even loved the notoriously big mosquitoes because their presence meant being surrounded by the glow of citronella candles every night while we gathered on the patio to grill our supper. Stopping at Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty for doughnuts was just the first favorite thing in a week brimming with them.

  This year, though, everything about the trip was slightly wrong. Like we’d begun singing half a note off-key, and as the song went on, it only got worse and our voices more out of tune.

  Starting with the car arrangements. It took two jam-packed cars to get all of us (and all our stuff) up there, but we didn’t always drive as separate families. Usually, Alex and I begged to be in the same car, so we could play the license-plate game and share chalky-but-sweet Necco wafers—a car-ride candy tradition dating back to when my dad was our age.

  Except this year, Alex slid into the back seat of the Benavideses’ brand-new car, buckled her belt, and announced, “I’m beyond tired so I’m just gonna sleep the whole way up.” Then she put on her headphones and pulled her hoodie down so it almost covered her eyes. It felt weird to climb over Lucy to claim the middle seat, so I rode with my parents and the boys, sitting by myself in the wayback of our messy old SUV. Nolan and Mateo played games the whole ride, and the car was loud, and after a while kind of smelly, and I felt vaguely carsick. Possibly because I was trying to read in the back seat. Possibly because of what it meant that a big bag of groceries—and not Alex—was sitting next to me.

  It’s going to be okay when we get there, I told myself. It’ll be like hitting a reset button. We’ll finally talk about what happened. Then everything will go back to normal. I tr
ied not to think of how far from normal we’d already veered.

  I finally spotted Paul Bunyan (and his famously blue ox, Babe) at eleven thirty, which meant we had plenty of time. The boys cheered as we pulled into the parking lot. Even though my legs were stiff from the drive and I was still queasy, I bounded out of the car.

  “Doughnuts! Doughnuts doughnuts doughnuts!” our brothers chanted as they raced inside.

  “Coffee,” Lucy said with a dramatic sigh as she chased after them.

  Alex lingered in her seat, her fingers flying over the keypad on her phone. So much for sleeping the whole way. I lingered next to the open door, tracing shapes on the sticky-hot blacktop with my sneaker toe.

  “Are you coming?” I finally asked. “They’re going to stop serving breakfast soon.” Everyone else had gone inside but us. My stomach growled.

  “Sure, just a sec,” Alex mumbled, still typing. Then she clicked her phone’s screen off. Before she’d even shut the car door, it buzzed and lit up again with a rapid-fire stream of texts. “Ugh, I haven’t had decent cell service for the last hour. I’m dying.”

  “I’m dying to eat something,” I muttered, moving slowly enough to keep pace with her as she walked-while-texting into the restaurant.

  The lightning-quick servers had already brought platters of family-style food to our long picnic table, and everybody was loading up their plates. My dad stared at his biscuits and gravy with the same loving expression he has in the framed wedding photo of him and my mom on our mantel at home. “I’m in heaven,” he said with a happy sigh.

  The two empty seats at the table for Alex and me were next to each other, like always. I plopped down and grabbed a plate, still warm from the dishwasher. “Pass the doughnuts, please!” I made grabby hands in anticipation.

  When Nolan handed them off to me, I dropped two onto my plate. The first one you gobble up because you’re starving after that long drive. The second is to savor the flavor, because it’ll be a year before you come back. Before the servers clear the platters, you snag a third doughnut and wrap it in a napkin for later, a midnight snack.

  I plopped the first of her two doughnuts onto Alex’s plate.

  “No, thanks.”

  I had just grabbed her second when she said it again, a little louder and sounding slightly annoyed. “I said, no.”

  My hand hovered over her plate, waiting to drop the doughnut like a bomb. “You’re kidding, right—”

  “I don’t want a doughnut, Jocelyn!”

  Everyone at the table quieted, except for Nolan, who is an extremely loud chewer. Lucy frowned. I could tell my mom was sneaking a glance at us.

  “But we have them every year,” I said in a very quiet voice. My face flushed, and I moved my hand—and the doughnut—away from Alex.

  “Well, things change.” Alex grabbed her fork and scratched at her almost-empty plate.

  I didn’t understand why she seemed so angry. I’m the one who deserves to be mad.

  Her mom cleared her throat. “Alex, honey, are you feeling okay? Aren’t you going to eat something?”

  “This food is kind of gross,” Alex grumbled, but she scooped up a bit of the scrambled eggs. “It’s unhealthy.”

  I stared down at my plate, with its two greasy doughnuts staring back at me like wide-open eyes. Suddenly, I didn’t want to eat them, either.

  “I’ll tell you what’s gross: this coffee,” Lucy said, wrinkling her nose. “It needs all the sugar.” Her voice was a touch too loud and upbeat. But it worked—everybody else went back to talking and eating. Except Alex. She pushed her eggs around her plate for a while, eating maybe half of what was there.

  While the rest of us went back for seconds, she mumbled something about looking for a signal and wandered off in the direction of the gift shop.

  “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the car, huh?” her dad said, shaking his head.

  Nobody was looking at me, which made me think they were all embarrassed on my behalf.

  I ate only one of the doughnuts, and I picked at the rest of my food. It didn’t taste right. When it was time to leave, though, I wrapped up two doughnuts in a big paper napkin. Maybe we’d eat them later, sitting cross-legged on the pier underneath the stars, which twinkled so brightly in the Northwoods night sky. After the cabin worked its magic and turned my best friend back into herself.

  I felt stranded in the wilderness, without her.

  Two

  My second favorite thing about our week up north was the inaugural lake jump. By the time we reached the cabin, after another forty-five minutes in the car from Minocqua, we’d be itching for a chance to cool off. That’s why Alex and I always wore our swimsuits underneath our clothes for the drive. As soon as the car crunched to a stop at the edge of the gravel driveway, under the shade of my favorite tamarack tree, we would hop out. We’d peel off our T-shirts and shorts, pull off our sneakers, and then race across the yard, down the footpath, and onto the pier. (My mom would chase behind us with a can of tick repellant, but we never slowed down enough for her to spray us.) We’d start counting to three on the raised slat that’s halfway down the pier, and then we would clasp hands. At the end, we’d raise our linked arms and leap, landing with a huge splash in the deliciously cool water. Blinking my eyes open after surfacing, I’d get my first real view of the cabin, perched above us on the gently sloping hill and surrounded by trees. My heart would swell with happiness. Then Alex and I would climb out and run back up for thick towels, and to actually help lug everything inside.

  Perhaps after the doughnut awkwardness, I should have dialed down my expectations for this year’s lake jump. Maybe, I thought, Alex’s crankiness was just about the food, which, aside from the doughnuts, is not the finest. My dad’s scrambled eggs are way better, and the sausage links can be a little rubbery. At least they used to be—I haven’t had one since I became a vegetarian in fifth grade. But nobody expects haute cuisine up north, the land of “supper clubs.” Old-school food is part of the charm.

  Anyway, why wouldn’t Alex still love the tradition of jumping off the pier?

  Her car had led the way from breakfast, so they were parked and Lucy had already stepped out to stretch by the time ours came to a stop.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” I urged Nolan and Mateo, whose seats I had to fold down in order to escape the wayback.

  I nudged past them and their mess of action figures and activity books, then hopped onto the gravel, squinting at the bright midday sun. The tamarack’s branches seemed to wave hello. Scents of pine and cedar enveloped me. I felt better than I had in weeks, better since the morning Alex had left for her camp. We were at Buttercup Lake, finally. Just us—no Laura in sight. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and adjusted the straps of my swimsuit into place. It was from last year—because I wasn’t doing swim team this summer, Mom hadn’t wanted to spend money for a new suit. My old turquoise one fit mostly fine, anyway.

  “Time for the lake jump?” Mom smiled at me, reaching her arms overhead and rolling her neck, easing away the kinks from the drive. “Should I ready the tick spray?”

  “Oh yeah.” The tie on my drawstring shorts was refusing to unknot. I glanced toward the Benavideses’ car. “Come on, Alex!”

  Thanks to her head start, she should’ve been down to bare feet already. Finally, the knot came loose, and my shorts dropped to the ground. I bent to unlace my sneakers.

  I was shoeless before Alex even got out. I shifted from one foot to the other—the sunbaked gravel was sharp and hot. Normally, I didn’t stand on it long enough to notice. “What are you waiting for?” Maybe it was the lumberjack breakfast making my stomach hurt a little. Maybe it was something else. A hearty serving of worry, garnished with a dollop of anger.

  Alex clutched her phone in her hand. “Sorry, I wanna go in and hook up to the Wi-Fi first.” She paused, then added in a half-hearted tone, “Ma
ybe a swim later?” Alex shrugged, like even she thought that was doubtful, and then she turned to follow my dad up the walkway to the cabin.

  A cloud passed over the sun at that exact moment, but even if it hadn’t, I still would’ve felt the chill.

  * * *

  By the time we got to my third favorite thing, I’d begun to manage my expectations. For dinner the first night of the trip, our dads cooked everything. They grilled, usually fish for all the parents, hot dogs for Mateo, regular burgers for Nolan and Alex, and veggie burgers for me and Lucy (who joined me in vegetarianism once she got her part-time job at the zoo). After dinner, we built a fire in the firepit to roast marshmallows. Alex’s mom always got out her guitar, and we all sang campfire songs and ate s’mores until we could burst. It’s a scene as perfect as a car commercial on TV, but it’s real.

  Alex sat next to me on the wooden picnic bench, but there was so much space between us you almost could’ve squeezed Nolan in there. Or Tampoco, the Benavides family cat (who Lucy named the Spanish word for neither because he’s so contrary). Alex picked at her burger but gobbled about seven pickle slices. Which was weird.

  “You sure you got enough to eat, Alex?” her dad asked while gathering all the s’mores stuff.

  “Yeah.” Her head tucked toward her chin, so her voice was slightly muffled. It was because she had her phone on her lap, below the table. It was lighting up with notifications, as frequent as the fireflies drifting through the trees and yard.

  “Sorry the burger was a little overcooked,” my dad said. “Am I going to have to give up my title of grill master?” He was joking, but there was a hint of seriousness in his voice, like he really felt bad if she hadn’t enjoyed her food.

  “It was great, but I don’t think the buns were organic—ow!” Alex interrupted herself with a loud slap on her forearm. She got the mosquito but too late: a smear of blood spread across her bare skin. This is why up north, you wear long sleeves after dusk. Layers are your friend. No matter how hot and sunny the day got, I always carried around my sweatshirt.