Forest Castles・SAMPLE

Chapter I

in which I do and say many strange things, none of which warrant being kidnapped

I am talking to myself. And I am not just talking to myself, I am talking to a shrub. Of course, I'm speaking in the smallest voice possible, so as not to be pegged as a complete weirdo, but all the same, I am gossiping about my classmates to the clump of dandelions I am trying to photograph.

"I really don't get," I say, adjusting the aperture, "how they can just 'avoid homework, on principle.' Do they not care about grades? Are they rich? Do they just—"

I always stop talking when I have the shot lined up perfectly. Because then it would ruin the photo.

"—not care??" I finish, looking through about fifteen shots of the same flower. And then twenty of another one, somewhere off to my left. And there are a couple of photos of another flower that I found in a puddle, but those flowers are going to be Photoshopped blue for a 'moody effect'. My teacher loves those; she's a wedding photographer with a side job teaching kids to take photos of plants.

Technically, I could be taking portraits right now, or I could be dicking around—we're allowed to go pretty much anywhere in the school to take photos, which naturally means a lot of goofing off from the aforementioned homework-intolerant students. Unfortunately, it does not mean goofing off for me, because I am a normal person who happens to have an unbelievable amount of anxiety about just... fucking around while a perfectly normal teacher thinks I'm doing my job. God. And then what, I lie to her about how class went? I'd rather die.

Five seconds later, I'm back on my bullshit, this time with a rock. It is substantially less animate than the flowers, which I try not to think about.

"It's like they don't—care," I repeat, trying to get an angle that makes the rock look sad. I've tried happy photos, but nobody's going to buy that. What people want is the most depressed landscape photo possible, and fortunately, I know a lot about depressed landscapes. I lie down on my side to get the shadow. "And I guess some of them don't have to care, but are they really just fine with—the idea of not—" I take six consecutive shots, each slightly different from the last, and forget what I'm talking about. Then I sit up.

I'm out behind the school, in what could possibly be called a field if you really wanted to and had never been to the state of Washington before. Somehow, I'm alone again, though I know for a fact that this is the only place, other than the front of the school (which trains a lot of eyes on you), that has anything interesting to photograph. I can't imagine what other people are snapping during this block. The cafeteria? Their hands?

"Juan is the only one who actually knows how to use the studio, so he's all set," I mutter, this time mostly into the air. Then I flick some grass stems and try to get a nice shot of them blurred. My handful of Instagram followers are going to absolutely lose their shit over this, if I can find a caption properly absent of all originality or opinion. I look up and stare, as annoyedly as I can, into the woods.

Right, my school has a woods.

To clarify: we have The Woods. Nothing quite as Twilight-esque as what we could have, and what we probably deserve, but full of enough trees that you can actually call it The Woods and not look like an ass. Other things you can do in there: ask someone out, have sex (this one's a rumor), skip class, get-slash-give a blowjob (this one's confirmed), go and take photos.

If... you are really, really desperate, and you're starting to not care that, a little while ago, they decided that campus does not extend to the woods and therefore students should not go over there to do lawless things!!! then you may enter the woods. Potentially. To take photos.

"Which begs the question," I mutter, snatching a shot of a tree branch with a weird nest on it, "why do they think that people who go into the woods to fuck during school hours are going to stop doing that because they put another rule in the books?" I scroll through the camera's memory, but it doesn't want to capture the nest properly. I lower the aperture.

"'Oh, whoops," I say, leaning in closer, "'sorry, you're so soul-drenchingly hot that I was going to ditch Calculus AB to go have at it with you, but we'd better find somewhere else than the woods to do it because that's against school rules??" I get twelve more photos closer, further away, and also in the same general area. Then I lower the aperture again. "The dedication to fucking that lets you go into the grimy, dirty, pine-needle-covered woods and do it on the ground, covered in dirt alone should imply a certain disregard for obstacles."

This goes on for a while. The gist of it is that I think it's stupid that we're not allowed to go in the woods and it's a pointless rule and my last boyfriend was kind of dumb in the same general region because he was like, we can't make out in the public bathroom because it's a public bathroom, Eliza, and I was like, but nobody's in it and there's no line outside and it's a single stall, and he was all but I care what people think about me and that, among other things, was why I dumped him. I have dumped a lot of people; I like to think I am a woman of quality.

But that's not what I'm thinking about when I go into the woods. It's tangentially related to what I was thinking about when I was taking a photo of a knot of wood on a tree—"and it's not that I care if she has sex with, like, the entire school—even though how can you—do that—when there's only so many people in school anyway—why was I even listening when she told me that—" but now I am thinking two things:

I . Who really gives a shit about this assignment? Do I give a shit about this assignment? Definitely not, so who really does? Does anyone care about this? Because maybe my teacher will give me an A or tell me the school musical is still looking for photographers to make them a poster, but my parents sure as hell don't have time to care, and besides for that, what am I going to do with this once my actual life starts? Will I even have money to buy a camera? Am I going to do this on the side when I have an office job? How is this supposed to mean anything in my actual life, outside of my stupid hobbies? God, I hate being depressed.

II . I'll be gone fifteen minutes; nobody is going to miss me.

And so I walk in. And I look around a bit, and take some more photos—mostly those nice leafy shots where you're looking up at the sky through all the branches—and keep walking forward. I know the rough dimensions of the woods; I've been in them after school. They're maybe two hundred feet across; I'm sure I won't get lost.

That means I'm really surprised when I get lost.

It happens slowly. I walk forwards, and I take little detours to photograph daisies and dandelion poufs on the way. I guess I notice at some point that there are more trees than I thought, but that happens a lot —more homework than I thought, more school than I thought, more time 'til the end of the day than I thought—so I guess I brush it off. And when it gets to be too late to brush it off, I turn around.

There's nothing but trees behind me. For miles and miles on every side of me, there's nothing but trees.

I have no idea where I am.