You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

with Dirk to be able to find out how he’d ended up in the Scouts in the first place. His presence there, among the gentle and shy preteeners who marveled over a butterfly’s wings or camouflaged insects, seemed completely random. Maybe his parents had enrolled him as some form of punishment? Maybe to force him to be more down-to-earth? Dirk lived in Amsterdam and went to secondary school there—one of the private ones, she heard—and he was a wrestler, or had been. That made sense. Being a Scout didn’t.

Since no one was answering, she tried again, only much louder: “Haallooo? We need to figure out where we are and where we’re going.”

This finally stopped Dirk in his tracks. If he’d stopped any more abruptly, he and Margot would’ve banged into each other, like an old slapstick act in one of those black-and-white TV shows her mother watched. “I thought you knew exactly where you were at all times,” he said, not hiding his sarcasm.

Karin shrugged. “Well, even if I did, you’re not exactly following me,” she said. “But anyway, I don’t want to be the leader. Dropping rules say we’re supposed to find our way together.”

“Dropping rules,” he said with a laugh that sounded more like a grunt. “You’re such a rule follower. I say it can’t be that hard. There aren’t so many trails.”

Karin knew that was wrong. “There are, like, more than a hundred trails in this forest. Like, tons.”

That seemed to convince Dirk, but he didn’t backtrack, just waited for Karin to catch up to him and the other girls. The Scout leaders had given them one map, but they didn’t know who had it. They all had to check their backpacks, and it turned out to be in Lotte’s. “I’ve got it!” she cried out, like she’d won the lottery or something. She unfolded it carefully, gift wrapping she planned to reuse. It was too big to hold open by herself, so Margot held one side and Lotte held the other. Karin and Dirk hovered over it, but Karin was stuck looking at it upside down.

“Where did you say we drove in?” Dirk asked Karin. “Stud something?”

Karin paused for a weighty second before she said, “Stag’s Wood. Seems like we must have driven in through the Schaarsbergen entrance,” Karin said. She knew from coming here with her father that there were three car entrances to the park and two places where you could pick up white bikes to cycle around. The south entrance was where you went if you wanted more nature, the west entrance if you wanted to go to the museum, and the north one took you to this kind of weird castle-like house where the people who once owned the whole forest used to live, back in the 1920s or something.

“That would be here,” said Lotte, stabbing her index finger onto the P in the little box that indicated parking. “But we’re not there anymore. I don’t know if we went north or west or what.”

Karin turned around and saw the sun on the horizon, orange and blazing, and backed by a ribbon of purplish blue. “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west,” she said, trying really hard not to sound pedantic. When no one said anything, she added, “So that’s west,” pointing.

“Uh, duh,” Dirk said.

Karin, embarrassed, looked at the others to see if they agreed. Margot wasn’t exactly paying attention. She seemed to be using the moment of gathering around the map to press her boobs against Dirk’s arm and looked like she was daydreaming about something completely unrelated.

“I agree with Karin,” she put in chirpily. “She’s the one who knows what we’re doing. Let’s just follow her.”

Dirk looked over his shoulder at Margot. “I’m not following her,” he said.

Margot took an uneasy step back.

“Um, should we use our compasses?” Lotte suggested.

“Good idea,” agreed Karin, pointing to Lotte.

They all found their backpacks again, Dirk and Margot groaning, and fished around for their old-fashioned metal disks with spinning metal arrows inside. Using the magnetic force of the world, they tried to orient themselves. For Karin, it just confirmed that west was in the location of the setting sun, as it should be, but at least it was quiet for a little while.

Lotte used due north to find where they might be on the map. “Could we be here?” she said, mostly to Karin.

“I’m kind of in a bad position to see it,” admitted Karin. “Can I come around over there?”

“Oh, I thought for sure you could read it upside down and backward,” said Dirk.

“And standing on your head,” said Margot, trying to win back some of Dirk’s favor.

They jostled and moved, with Lotte still holding one side of the map and Margot holding the other, and somehow in the commotion to let Karin take a look, the map ripped in two. Margot fell over, kind of overdramatically, with her half, and Dirk swooped down and grabbed it, putting a hand out to lift Margot. “Hey, cool,” he said. “Now we have two maps!”

Without any warning, Dirk took off in a sprint, and Margot followed. “I guess you’ll have to catch us if you want the other half!” Dirk yelled back to Karin and Lotte, who stood glaring from a distance. He panted up a big grassy hill and disappeared over the other side.

The two girls stood looking at each other. “What the…?” Karin said.

“He’s such a…” Lotte said quietly, not finishing with whatever curse word she would never allow herself to say. Then she let out a heavy sigh. “I guess we’d better chase them, then.”

“Really?” said Karin, feeling defeated already. She could not believe this. It would be a really, really long night if they kept up this way. But then, after Lotte took off in a sprint, she ran.

The two of them bounded over a sandy hill covered with tall grasses, which scraped against their ankles. Karin figured they’d see Dirk and Margot as soon as they