Stray

Chapter 1

The sun dappled leaves of the canopy shook in the gentle breeze of a late summer's afternoon.

The pages of Luna's book curl up in the wind, but her hand catches the edges before they can cause her to lose her page. She smoothes out the pages and adjusts herself so she can hold them in place. She lays on her stomach, stretched lengthwise across her dad's SUV, facing out the open hatchback. I lean against the frame of the hatch, my feet perched on the opposite windowsill and my legs poised over her back. I've spent the last few minutes going through the pictures I took of our camping trip which now comes to an end at this last stop before heading down the mountain.

Pictures of trees and rivers break up the multiple selfies we took together in front of this view and that. But there are a few I took of just Luna, back toward the camera as she gazes out at the horizon, or her face lit by the light of the campfire. She insists I stop taking her photo but if I didn't, she'd never have any profile pictures to post, so I continue, aware that what I am doing is totally necessary. She always offers to take my photo as well, but I politely decline, half out of wanting her to feel special, and half out of the full knowledge of how many I delete off my phone what seems like weekly.

I consider taking her photo again, glasses reflecting the sun's last few rays as it flings color across the sky, signaling both the end of the afternoon, and the end of our trip.

As if on cue, Luna closes her book, yawns, then smiles contently toward me.

"Happily ever after?' I cock an eyebrow.

"Yeah, actually," she jests, "Whole story wraps up in two chapters. The rest is just appendices and author Q&A I think." She mock flips through the remaining two thirds of the book, which is, admittedly, more pages than I've ever read.

"If I wrote a book, I'd just do three hundred pages of Q&A. Then I would only have to write, like, half the book."

"You've just described a biography," Luna laughs.

"Ha!"

Another breeze passes through the open sun roof and out the back of the car. Luna closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

"Ugh," I let my head rest against the frame of the hatch, "I don't want summer to end."

"We've got a couple more days yet," Luna almost whispers to the wind.

"Yeah, to pack. I haven't even started yet."

"Just wash the clothes you brought camping and shove them in a suitcase. That's eighty percent of what I'm gonna do," she suggests. I can hear the sarcasm in her tone, but actually yeah, that's not a half bad idea.

She stretches her arms and legs, striking a sort of superhero flight pose, then falls limp, her head resting against the blanket below her.

"Well," she says, her face smushed against the blanket, "Time to get up."

We spend the next thirty minutes or so packing up our camp, which isn't so bad considering we put the tent away this morning. All that was left were a few camping chairs and the cooler which now is filled with half melted ice packs doing their best to chill the remaining cans of sparkling water, and soda along with half a dozen recyclable bottled waters.

The trunk closes with a thunk and I climb into the passenger seat. The cold blast of air from the AC makes my fur stand on end for a moment until I turn it off and roll down the window. Luna glances at her phone, then toward the sky.

"I think it's meant to be raining back home. We'll probably run into it on the way. Hopefully we're off the mountain roads at that point," she says.

"Do you need me to direct you?" I ask, my finger hovering over the maps app.