Tips for Taking Over Summer Camp Chapter 21: Link: Whiney, Lost, or Another Rowan?

Chapter Twenty-One: Link: Whiney, Lost, or Another Rowan?

I ran towards Link as fast as I could, eager to get to him so I could find out where he went or how he got this far into the forest.

“Link! Link!” I shouted eagerly.

Link stopped and gave me a small smile that perished almost as soon as it arrived, replaced by a wide-eyed look of terror.

I stopped as well. “What’s wrong?”

Link grabbed my shoulders with sweaty hands. “I-it was awful! They w-were terrible!”

My face fell. “What is it, Link?” Maybe there was something terrible in this forest after all. Psycho killers? A cult of people who cut off their limbs for fun? The way the other cabins treated us?

He shoved his face mere millimeters from mine. His eyes were wild and he bared his teeth at me in form of a frown. “They spoke English.”

He then sat on a nearby rock and buried his head in his hands. He was breathing quickly, much like that of an exhausted dog’s.

“Link…” I started before trailing off. Was I right to start off like that? He seemed in pretty bad shape, mentally, of course. Had he gone mad from almost a whole day in the woods alone? No, that wasn’t possible. He would have to have been alone for a lot longer than that. But going by the way that he was acting, he probably hadn’t been alone at all.

I cringed as his eyes darted from me to the ground and back.

“Link,” I tried again. “Link, all of our cabin is looking for you and I should have been back a long time ago. I don’t know what they are doing now, but we need to get back.”

That was when Link let out an ear-busting scream and started to scrape the dirt with his heals and flailing his arms around like a non-swimmer in the middle of a stormy ocean.

I plugged by ears and stepped back. Is he having a seizure? I thought. I had no idea what to do if someone was having one but being lost in the middle of the forest really wouldn’t help.

He then stopped and began staring at me, his mouth opening and closing. He was reminding me slightly of Rowan, but this was definitely more grave.

I took my hands away from my ears. “Ar-are you done?”

He nodded and got up. “Which way to camp?”

My gaze shot towards the ground, knowing that I didn’t know where the heck CALAC was or how to find it.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

Link’s body started to shake and squirm as if his bones had been replaced with snakes and his eyes began twitching like one of those flies that sometimes landed on the windowsill at home. He then started flicking his tongue in and out of his mouth and scraping his nails on the rock.

“Link?” I asked, backing away slowly. When he didn’t respond and continued to be weird, I shouted, “Link! Stop! It!”

That made him stop. He stared straight at me, his body as straight as a stick. Just as I began to wonder if he was going to resume that stick position forever, he dashed forward and reassumed his shoulder-hold on me.

“Don’t you see?” he whispered.

When I shook my head, he let go.

“Link, do you need help?” I took another step back before he could do another strange thing.

Link turned, his back to me. “THEY NEED TO BE GOOOOONNNNEE!” he shouted, his voice sending three crows taking off with frightened screams. To add to that, the deranged bird called again, loud and slow.

I concluded the that yes, he really did need help. A lot of it. And a lot more than Rowan needed it.

“Link,” I attempted, “if you follow me, we can get away from whatever’s bothering you.”

He then turned to face me with yet another wild gaze and nodded his head rapidly.

I then continued walking in my previously planned direction, hoping that Link would follow. He did and we began walking though the forest, hopefully to camp.

Everything was starting to turn scarlet in the dying light by the time Link decided to say something. The shadows were growing longer and more narrow, their nimble fingers pointing us away from the sun. It could have been their dark trap, but we continued on hopefully in their direction.

“Why aren’t we there?” he whined, destroying my daydreams of writing poems by firelight.

“Uh, because we aren’t?” I replied, making it sound more like a question.

“But I’m hungry.”

“Well I can’t help you there.” I hated to sound so passive, but he was really getting on my nerves.

“And I need to pee.”

“There are bushes.”

“I want to go pee.”

I wanted so badly to tell him, “Shut it! Nobody cares!” However, that would make me enemies that I didn’t need. Besides, being aggressive was Silvia’s job. However, being hungry didn’t smooth my temper. My stomach had been rumbling all evening like an angry monster who had been trapped in a cage for a thousand years while little village kids yelled insults at him just for being a monster.

“Well, you have options,” I seethed.

Suddenly, the trees thinned out into scrawny birches and tall, leafy plants. They were closer together now. Between the trunks, I could barely see a small dirt road in the distance. I abandoned Link and ran forward, breaking from the forest and onto the crimson-painted path. It was plagued with tire tracks and footsteps, but I knew that it would definitely lead us back to CALAC.