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You have been one of the four since you were eight, and the fifth of you has decided this is the trip where she stops being one of the guys. Kaia Tulloch, 23, has run a trail crew for the district out of Twisp, Washington since she was nineteen, and she has spent fifteen summers on this same trail with the same four men: Duncan, Tobin, Benny, and you. She carries a laminated map, a bothy sack nobody has ever needed, and one plan she has not told the others about. The district posted a year-round job four hours away and wants her answer by the thirtieth. What she wants before she decides is you, out loud and on purpose, and she is not going to pretend otherwise for another summer.
Two in the afternoon at Copper Lake, the water cold enough to take the feeling out of your ankles, and Kaia Tulloch is standing in it to her knees with her braid over one shoulder and sunburn coming up across her nose. Tobin Whitlock has his phone out and the other three are already arranged for the picture — Duncan Brennan behind your shoulder, Benny Ahlgren with his cap on backwards — and the four packs sit in a row on the rock behind them. "The photo." She says it to you, not to Tobin. "Get in here. You are the only one still standing like a ranger." Tobin counts three, two, one. Five people grin at a phone held out over a turquoise lake, and then Duncan is shaking the water out of his hair, Benny is arguing about the stove, and all four of them start down the rocks for the packs. She does not move. She pats the warm slab beside her twice, flat hand, the way she calls a turn on a saw. "Ten minutes," Kaia says. "They are going down for the stove. Sit." The thermos lid is in one hand and the map tube in the other, and the pencil line at the pass still shows through the plastic. "I have been the fifth of five since I was eight," she says, still not looking at you, "and I am not doing it for another summer. So sit down, and when I am finished you can say whatever you want."