Adam laughed. "So back to your vision."
"Right," I said. "So my vision was a little ... Charles told me that there was no right or wrong way to have a vision. It just was. Then he told me about some guy who had a vision and found out he could talk to spirits. Elk Spirit came to him and told him he had to serve Elk Spirit and to do that he had to dress only in yellow. Or maybe that was blue. So this guy, he did that for a few years until Bear Spirit came and told him he'd been talking to Elk Spirit and decided that it should be Bear Spirit he listens to. So Bear Spirit told him to paint his face red and walk backward. When Charles's grandfather, the medicine man, met this man, he had been walking backward for years and years. Charles's grandfather heard the man's story, and told him, `Just because you listen to spirits does not mean you must obey them.'" I'd almost forgotten that Charles had shared that story with me. It was a sign, I suspect, of how upset I'd been that I hadn't had the kind of vision quest I had expected--one with eagles and deer who guide me to enlightenment.
"What happened?" Adam asked.
"Your hot dog is on fire," I told him.
He pulled the black thing out of the fire, tapped it on the ground, and it broke into pieces. He got another hot dog and stuck it on the campfire fork, while I ate mine.
"Mercy, what happened to the guy who was walking around backward?"
"He washed his face and started walking forward. After about five steps, he tripped and broke his leg."
"You are making that up," said Adam, pulling his hot dog in for inspection. It wasn't black, so he stuck it back in the fire.
I lifted my hand. "Scout's honor, that's the story Charles told me. You ask him if you can't tell if I'm lying or not." That was sort of a put-down among werewolves. Only a very new werewolf wouldn't be able to sense truth from falsehood. "Charles said that the man never did go back to walking backward, though."
"You have to be a boy to say, `Scout's honor,'" Adam told me.
"Nah-uh. Girl Scout leader, here." I pointed my thumb at my breastbone. "Sort of. When my mom couldn't do it. Anyway, you wanted to hear about my vision."
"Yes."
I opened my mouth to tell him a funny version, but what came out was different from what I'd intended.
"One moment I was sitting alone in the middle of a forest; the next I was walking in a different place. Everything was gray, almost like a black- and-white film except there was no white or black, just odd shades of gray. There was no grass or trees, just endless mounds of sand. It felt ... empty. Like those postapocalyptic horror films, you know? Empty but scary, too."
I could feel it now as I had then: the tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe, the way the hair on the back of my neck had stood up because I knew that there was evil lurking, watching.
Adam pulled his hot dog out of the fire, but instead of eating it, he forced the blunt end of the fork into the ground, so it stuck up like a bizarre garden ornament. Then he pulled me against him, and my tension eased so I could breathe normally again.
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't expect it to bother me so much."
"You don't have to tell me."
"No," I said. "But I want to." It felt right. Charles had told me I'd know when it was time to share what had happened to me. Some people were required to tell their experience to every person they met, but most of us only shared with a few people.
"So I was wandering through this desolate place. The only thing I could see besides sand were remnants of buildings. In the beginning, some of the buildings were modern--tall structures made of glass and steel. On those, the glass was cracked or broken and the steel rusted nearly through. As I continued on, the ruins started to be older buildings, houses. I clearly recall seeing what was left of an old Victorian, tipped awkwardly on its side as if it had been a giant dollhouse some child had kicked over. Then it was like something you'd see on a Western film set, but decades later. Blackened poles from adobe buildings half-buried in the sand, hitching posts and broken boardwalks, with dead weeds poking out.
"I'm the only living thing in the place.
"Eventually, there are only tent poles, and I am walking by them, crying, sobbing, with snot dripping from my nose--the whole wretched business though I don't know what I am grieving for."
"How old were you?" Adam asked.
"That was after Bryan died," I answered. "Just after, I think." Just talking about what I'd seen rattled me, my jaw vibrating as if I were cold, though Adam was warm and solid against me. He was real, but somehow that long-ago vision was real, too. "So fourteen or thereabouts."
Telling Adam was almost like living through it again. The emotions had been real and powerful, maybe the most real thing about the whole vision.
"Finally, I came up to this car--an old Model T Ford buried up to its axles. It was so sad, I could feel its sorrow weighing down my heart, distracting me from whatever had caused me to cry in the first place. I put my hands on it, but there was no way to dig it out or fix it. I explained that to the car, as if it could understand what I was saying because I felt as though it could. I told it I was sorry I couldn't do more. "Then, under my fingers it began to vibrate, shaking until I couldn't hold it anymore. I had to close my eyes against the sand it stirred up, and when I opened them, I was alone in a forest."
I remembered how frightened I had been in the forest. My pulse picked up, and goose bumps covered my forearms. The forest should have been a relief from the dead grayness I'd been in. The forest had been my second home--but the forest of my vision had hidden watchers, dangerous watchers who didn't approve of me.