What the Other Three Don't Know Read online

  © 2020 Spencer Hyde

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  Visit us at shadowmountain.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hyde, Spencer, author.

  Title: What the other three don’t know : a novel / by Spencer Hyde.

  Other titles: What the other three do not know

  Description: Salt Lake City : Shadow Mountain, [2020] | Audience: Ages 14. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: When a loner, a jock, an outsider, and an Internet influencer go river rafting together for a school assignment, the four strangers end up sharing their secrets and relying on each other when the trip turns dangerous.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019038747 | ISBN 9781629727325 (hardcover) | eISBN 978-1-62973-885-7 (eBook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Rafting (Sports)—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Rivers—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H917 Wh 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038747

  Printed in the United States of America

  Lake Book Manufacturing, Inc., Melrose Park, IL

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover illustration: Danny Schlitz

  Book design: © Shadow Mountain

  Art direction: Richard Erickson

  Design: Sheryl Dickert Smith

  Other Books by Spencer Hyde

  Waiting for Fitz

  For Brittany, my bright star

  “Stories of life are often more

  like rivers than books.”

  —Norman Maclean

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  My mother once told me that when a star implodes, it can shrink to the size of a wedding ring and still weigh two thousand trillion tons. That’s what I thought about as I turned her wedding ring in my palm before dropping the necklace beneath my shirt. I felt the weight around my neck, the cold silver chain it hung on.

  My dad left us ten years ago and is now commercial fishing somewhere off the coast of Alaska. My mother died two years ago rafting the Snake River, though her knowledge of physics didn’t keep her from that sink.

  Seventeen. Parentless. Ill-fated. No-win. Cursed. Call it what you want, they were gone, and I was still kicking rocks and living with Grandpa in a trailer the size of a nickel in a town the size of a postage stamp.

  Tetonia, Idaho. Population: 300. Just outside the bustling town of Victor. Population: 2,000. Two of those people in Tetonia were an old man and his jaded granddaughter.

  The old man was my grandfather, Aldo Lutz, the town mortician in Victor. I’m the granddaughter—Indiana “Indie” Lutz. My parents named me Indiana because I was born on the roadside next to a weathered, warped green state sign that read Now Leaving Indiana. I’m sure they had no idea how prophetic that sign would be. Everyone left me.

  At this point in my life, only a hero could save me, and I wasn’t the hero type. I couldn’t save myself from the dark thoughts, the quiet moments of guilt and loss, the manic shouting into the ether that everything had been taken from me. Wherever I went, something felt like it didn’t belong. But more and more, that something was starting to have my name, my face, my life.

  I leaned against the hearse parked in front of our trailer. We didn’t live in a funeral home because with so few people in town, we only needed a small space for cremation or prepping bodies for viewing before they went into the ground. It wasn’t necessary to have an entire house dedicated to the whole pageantry of death. Plus, the spectacle of grief was more than I could bear.

  I wrote on the back window of the hearse with my finger, ghosting the words into the collected dust: It’s Not You (Yet). It’s Me. And then I walked around the side of the car and wrote something else on the passenger door: Dead Inside.

  “Usually,” said Grandpa as he stepped out of the trailer, pointing at my message. “Thankfully, Bury will be the only body in the back today.” He patted Bury’s head as the giant Bernese Mountain dog trotted alongside him.

  I looked at our old trailer, the siding curling away in places, a drooping front porch, and the small windows reflecting light back onto the landscape. The trees towered over the trailer and rained leaves in the fall, so much so that we used the same shovel in the fall for the leaves as we did in the winter for the snow.

  Some nights, I’d sit under the giant ash trees and watch the stars throw themselves in bright arcs and fizzle out into black. I used to stargaze with Mom. She would tell me how we were just a tiny speck on a giant map of billions and billions of galaxies, each one filled with those little burning lamps overhead. She said that Aristotle talked about the stars like they were just a grouping of crystal spheres on some crankshaft.

  I shouldered my duffel bag in what was a surprisingly cold summer morning. It had been a heavy-clouded winter and a no-clouded summer. The branches of the aspens swayed in a morning breeze. The sun emerged, throwing long shadows in front of Grandpa’s rattletrap truck. I wished we were taking the truck instead of the hearse, but the hearse was better for long drives. As if there weren’t enough rumors about the old mortician and his granddaughter.

  Grandpa walked to the car and yelled at me to get in. I stared back at our little stamp of earth we called home as the hearse rose over a ridge and dipped past other homesteads. Bury nuzzled my arm before situating himself in the back seat.

  We drove through the spanning shadows of the Teton mountain range. The French called the range Les Trois Tetons, or “The Three Breasts.” Typical French. The range had already shed most of its snowpack under the summer sun. The white walls of the aspens towered over the roads, their arms touching, a tunnel of green and white, with red-naped sapsuckers pecking at the bark.

  I wondered if I’d packed correctly for the river trip. Five days on the water in Hells Canyon. An eight-hour drive to the drop-in point.

  I was on my way to meet up with three other students from Mrs. Wixom’s journalism course. Only seniors were allowed to take the course, and in order to enroll, you had to go on what she called “The Summer Scoop.” Dumb name, but Wixom was the coolest teacher at Teton High School, so we did what she said.

  There were four groups this year, each with four or five students. One group was on horseback in Jackson, one group was rock climbing in the Wind River Range, one group was fly-fishing near Henry’s Fork on the Snake River. Our group was running the river in Hells Canyon. All groups were camping.

  Mrs. Wixom said she wanted each person to write a human-interest story about one other person on the trip. “Experiential learning is how you bond,” she’d said. “It’ll make for a strong class for the entire senior year.”

  Whatever. I wasn’t about to write a human-interest story.

  My plan was to write about the commercialization of the outdoors and how it was ruining the wild. I wante
d to become a journalist in order to reveal the truth of the world to people—that it’s cold, that people don’t care, that you’ll find yourself halfway down the rabbit hole before realizing you’ll never see the light of day again. Take the pills. Drink the potion. Walk into a world that’s just as lost as this one. That’s what I wanted people to know. That was the truth as I saw it.

  I had been interested in all-things-journalism since my freshman year, after I won an award from our mayor for my local reporting on the water levels of the dam and how they affect fly-fishing during our busiest tourist months. Dad loved to fly-fish, so I wrote it thinking I could send it to him as some last effort at connecting or something. Did it work? No, but that’s how it started.

  I asked Mrs. Wixom if I could do a sequel to that piece and go with the fly-fishing group—I wanted to spend days on the river, full of sky and flies and the slow eddies where the fish wait patiently for their next bite—but she said the groups were assigned at random and we had no say in the matter. Well, at least I thought it was random until I got the rest of the story from the others.

  I checked on Bury, who was on his back, belly up and legs splayed, covering the entirety of the back seat. I was glad Grandpa allowed him to get in the car with us. I have trouble saying no when it comes to rescuing animals, and Bury was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. I’d picked him up six months earlier from the vet in Victor, half his face rubbed off because some negligent driver had been too drunk to remember his dog was tied to the tailgate. Even if Bury took up a lot of space, it was space that needed filling.

  I kind of felt like Bury at times—taking up too much space, unwelcome except by a select few people, and always in need of help from others, my past a wash. A rescue dog, but with less hair and more freckles. I hated that. I wanted to be on my own and earn my own keep and not rely on anybody, not even Grandpa and his stoic ways.

  If I were to describe myself, I would say that I was intelligent and ambitious, but also overly—and overtly—cynical as a way of pushing others away. I spend most of my time reading books or fly-fishing, even if the weather is frigid, because it makes me feel closer to my parents. I’m barely five feet tall with hair just curly enough that it tries my patience most mornings. I keep it pulled back at all times. Oh, and I’m a pessimist with way too many freckles. My face is like a connect-the-dots of all eighty-eight constellations.

  And perhaps I’m too focused on what’s coming next instead of what’s happening in the moment, but I can’t help rolling my eyes at the clichés hanging in the halls of my school: Live in the moment. Seize the day. If you don’t risk anything, you risk everything.

  Maybe I needed to risk more. I hadn’t had anything published since that dam article three years previous, though not for lack of trying. I’d written an article on the minimum wage in small towns after working as an assistant to a big-game vet, calving in the fields for two months. I’d also worked as a vending-machine stocker in Driggs and written about the energy suck those machines are, and I’d waited tables in Jackson to study the way tourism bolsters the economy at the expense of the land. No hits. No interest.

  I was now technically a senior and needed one more big publication. Something that could go viral. All I wanted to do was publish a journalism piece that garnered national attention, earned me an academic scholarship, and offered me an escape from the small-town claustrophobia I felt in Tetonia. I was tired of living in a nothing place and having nobody. I needed out. That’s what I wanted. Out of this gorgeous hole. Sure, I could be mad all day about being in the place, but the beauty of it was too much to handle sometimes.

  Those who have not grown up in the West might not understand how the world looks like it can go on forever, like the blue sky will never end. They wouldn’t understand the grand feeling of those mountains and the unimaginable vistas that have become a normal, everyday sight for most in my town. Perhaps that was one of the oddest parts about living in a beautiful place: beauty became common, even boring; expected, even ignored.

  Despite its beauty, sometimes it seemed that Tetonia wanted to remind me that I couldn’t leave. It was almost like memories and fears and loss and grief were aligned with the physical borders of our little town. Like, if I could just cross into a new place, new geography, I might feel lighter. I might feel less beholden to some pressure pushing inward. Like, maybe memories made in the town weren’t really mine. Maybe those many years in Tetonia belonged to somebody else.

  And those who have not grown up in a trailer without their parents might not understand how the world also feels like everything is underwater, and that you’ll never have enough guts or energy or optimism or downright strength to kick your way to the surface. I’m not growing gills over here, though I’ve been trying for years. I have this dream that Aquaman will swoop in and pick me up at some point, but my sea legs are lost in the trailer and I’m tired of looking for them.

  We’d made good time on our trip, because Grandpa had insisted on leaving at six in the morning, even though I didn’t believe that anything in the world even existed at that hour. I imagined the earth as some kind of Minecraft map, putting itself together each morning before I woke, one pixelated block at a time. But how could anything be in place by six a.m.? I figured it must be nothing but a blank map and some shovels resting against the dark void. It made me think of how kids play hide-and-seek—if they cover their eyes, no one can find them. Life stops. The windows darken. The doors lock.

  I started to doze off, and when Grandpa nudged me, I kept my eyes closed.

  “You were moving slow as the government this morning, Indie.”

  A few response options presented themselves, their sole purpose to provide otherness, or choice, right?

  1.Tell him I was awake and listening, then fade back into my dream world where Aquaman rescues me with his shirt off and his wit on.

  2.Mention I have a flesh-eating bacteria and cut off my hand as proof, thus forcing him to drive me to the hospital instead of making me go on the river trip.

  3.Roll out of the car and escape to camp in the mountains by myself.

  4.Answer him, step up to the past, and face the day like I should.

  After Mom died, I started seeing options present themselves before my face as if they were being projected right in front of me, like I could literally scroll through the available choices of how to respond or what to say. I think that maybe it happened because Mom’s accident would never be on any list like that, and after she was gone I felt like I needed options, a way out. Maybe some large, saloon-style doors that opened into some other existence.

  I chose response option number 4, of course. I opened my eyes to face the day. “The government is a well-oiled machine, Grandpa. You know that. Finest bunch of people in these United States.”

  “Government is nothing but crap where we should have apple butter.”

  We kept things light to keep from talking about the heavier stuff at our feet, the stuff we dragged around with us, the weightier matters that made us upset or even depressed. We didn’t talk about those things. We made corny jokes and stupid puns or talked about odd phenomena or things I knew got Grandpa all flustered—like the government. Humor displaced grief. Anything to keep us from facing it.

  With my head against the window, I watched as we passed the cemetery in Victor. It made me think of elephant graveyards and how, according to legend, older elephants wandered off from the group when they knew they were going to die. Maybe it was a myth, but the truth was just as interesting, if not more so. My science teacher, Mrs. Weyand, said that when an elephant dies, other elephants wait around and pick up their friend’s or family member’s bones and walk around with them for a while before moving on.

  I often wondered if elephants said anything to the bones of the dead. I liked to imagine them softly touching the skulls of their lost brother or sister or mother and whispering things to them in their own lang
uage.

  Mrs. Weyand also said that when elephants walk past places they have lost loved ones, they stop for a few minutes, silently. I’m inclined to believe her. But I didn’t realize that the entire town visiting Mom’s gravesite was nothing more than a herd of elephants. A bunch of elephants in a small town in Idaho. A zoo of grief.

  Years ago, Grandpa promised my mom—Joyce—that he’d watch out for me if anything ever happened to her. At the time, she brushed it aside. “We have our own place in Victor, and we’re doing just fine, Dad,” she’d said. She taught physics at Teton High School, so everybody knew my mom and how she was the greatest. Way better than me. Example: I was known as Joyce’s daughter. She wasn’t known as Indie’s mom. Then things got real.

  I mean, we all end up as ash anyway, right? Body to ash, heat moving from one thing to another. That’s what Newton was on about, right? The friction. The heat. The way energy moves and flows like a river.

  I nudged Bury, and he nuzzled my arm again, so I took his snout and pretended I was shifting gears. One—three—six. I hummed like a race car as I moved his nose around. I felt the shape of his skull, the way his ears dipped and turned, and the way he yawned and softly growled before licking my hand and rolling away. I wiped my hand on my ratty jeans.

  “Did I forget anything, Bury?” I said, eyeing my go-bag.

  I’d only be on the river for five days, so I didn’t want to overpack. I’d made sure I had some crossword puzzles in my bag and something to write with, as well as my fly-rod—because Grandpa taught me that fly-fishing is the only way to experience eternity, and he was right.

  A mountain bluebird lighted on an aspen branch and blurred as the car cruised past. Options presented themselves—how I might talk to Grandpa about where we were headed, how I might get out of what my therapist was calling “Exposure Therapy” and what Grandpa was calling a week of “Cowboy Up and Face It,” but I didn’t know what to choose or what to say.