1. Clover

Iwake up with my mouth full of hair. Sputtering, I swat at whatever furry threat is trying to lodge itself in my esophagus and end up smacking the familiar shape of my cat perched on the edge of my pillow.

"Ew, Jinx!" I say once I've flicked her tail off my mouth. "Get off!"

I cringe as I wipe a couple lingering pieces of cat hair off my lips. Jinx stays parked on my pillow, her butt just a few inches from my face, and even has the audacity to start purring.

"We talked about this," I growl. "You stay at the end of the bed, or you don't get to sleep in my room."

She flicks her tail, smacking me in the nose instead of the mouth this time, but before I can get any grumpier, she shuffles around until she's curled up on my stomach. Her front paws knead the blankets, and her purring reverberates through my chest as she gives me a few lazy blinks that seem to demand how I could ever find something as cute as her annoying.

I growl again, but I still slide one hand out from under the blankets so I can give her a couple scratches.

"You're lucky I even brought you here with me," I mutter.

She pushes her head into my hand to demand more scratches, both of us aware of just how empty my threat is. I've been carting Jinx all around Vancouver Island with me ever since I took her in as an impossibly tiny, impossibly sad-looking stray calico kitten with the brightest green eyes I'd ever seen.

Those innocent kitten eyes were her first act of deception in a long line of ploys to get anything she wants.

As I keep stroking her favourite spot between her ears, my eyes adjust to the dim grey light spilling through the gap between my curtains. I've only been back home from university for a couple weeks, and sometimes it still takes me a few seconds to remember where I am in the morning. The log walls of my childhood bedroom surround me, the knots and ripples in the wood as familiar to me as my favourite picture books.

As a kid, I'd lie awake and spend hours looking for shapes in the logs by the glow of my night light, the same way people search for figures in the clouds. There were forests filled with hungry wolves, rivers teeming with leaping salmon, and even a particularly twisted knot above my dresser that, by some miracle of nature, perfectly resembles a duck wearing a crown. I named him Lord Quacksalot and declared him the ruler of the entire kingdom stretched across my walls.

I was kind of an odd child.

My nostalgic moment is interrupted by a thump out in the hallway, followed by a few groaning creaks of the floorboards, which are echoed by the groans of one of my older sisters.

"Shit!" Trish hisses, in what I can only assume she thinks is a quiet voice. In reality, she's swearing loud enough to wake the whole house up. "Shit. Shit. Fuuuuck. Lordy, that hurt."

Jinx has paused her purring to stare at my bedroom door, her eyes wide and alert as Trish's footsteps pause just outside the door instead of heading downstairs to the kitchen. Jinx and I watch as the handle starts to slowly twist, like Trish is doing her best to be sneaky.

The door creaks open to reveal my sister standing there in her infamous fluffy white bathrobe patterned with large red hearts. She squints into the darkness of my room before inching the door open enough to take a step inside. Her eyes haven't adjusted enough to see that I'm staring straight at her. I take a few seconds to watch in silence as she leans forward and peers around the room.

She's just about to take another step when I clear my throat.

"Knock much?"

The resulting catastrophe is as instant as it is disastrous: Trish shrieks, which makes Jinx yowl and dig her claws into my stomach, which makes me shriek, which makes Jinx fly off the bed and leap through the air in Trish's general direction, which makes Trish topple over and crash to the floor.

As if that weren't enough, our family's black lab, Newt, comes galloping out of my dad's room at the sound of the commotion. He collides with a frantic Jinx as she's bolting into the hallway. She swipes at his nose with her claws, which leaves him howling before he races after her down the stairs.

The sound of his scrambling claws and Jinx's yowls have me ripping my blankets off before I've even processed what's happening. I shoot out of bed and leap over a moaning Trish, who's clutching her ankle on the floor. My dad's groggy demands to know what the hell is going on echo after me as I charge down the stairs, shouting futile commands at both animals.

By the time I find them, Jinx is perched on the mantelpiece in the living room. A couple picture frames have been knocked down, lying shattered on the floor, where Newt is leaping up on his hind legs while he barks at Jinx's flicking tail.

Newt is more of a lover than a fighter, and Jinx is too smart for him anyway, but his paws are landing dangerously close to the broken glass as he prances around below her.

"Newt," I call in my most authoritative voice.

He doesn't even perk an ear in my direction.

"Newt," I repeat, adding a saccharine note to my tone this time, like the best head scratches of his life might await him if he listens to me. "Come here, boy. Come on. Come see Clover and leave the devil kitty alone."

He lands on all four paws, missing the jagged glass by a fraction of an inch, and turns to look over his shoulder at me.

"Come on, boy," I continue in the same voice. "She's smarter than both of us. Best to just give in now."

He gives Jinx a final glare before trotting over to me and plopping down between my feet. He rubs his head along the leg of my pajama pants and makes a chuffing sound, like a kid complaining to his mom about how mean his sibling is.

I squat down and give him a few reassuring strokes with one hand while I use the other to guide his nose towards me so I can see if Jinx did any serious damage. He whines but lets me inspect his face and then obliges me in picking up each of his feet to check for injuries from the glass.

"Looks like you're all good, Newty," I declare just as my dad and Trish burst into the living room.

"Wish I could say the same," Trish says with a huff.

She's rubbing her back with one hand, her dark messy bun sitting lopsided on her head. Dad is squinting like he's still half-asleep.

"Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?" he asks, his voice hoarse.

He rubs at his eyes and then drags his hand down to his bushy, grey-streaked beard before hiking up the sweatpants he's got on under a flannel shirt.

I've been told the first impression my dad usually gives people is ‘terrifying and extremely grumpy forest hermit,' but I've never been able to relate. To me, it's always been obvious that he's just a big burly softie, even on the occasions he does, admittedly, look very grumpy.

Such as right now.

"Is there a reason we're all awake at—"

He pauses to squint at the clock across the room and then groans.

"Ten past five in the morning?" he finishes with a glare.

"Ten past five?" I yelp, checking the clock myself before fixing a glare of my own on Trish.

She throws up her hands like she's the innocent one here. "I have bread to bake! We can't all be sleeping in until eight in the morning, or whenever it is you people wake up."

I scoff. Running a campground together means we're the kind of family who has no choice to get an early start to the day. I haven't slept past seven in the morning the entire time I've been home from school, but five in the morning is a completely different story—especially when you've been suffering from insomnia brought on by the panic-inducing finality of finishing your undergraduate degree.

Turns out seeing the whole rest of your adult life stretched out before you like a suffocating black hole of uncertainty every time you close your eyes does not lend itself to a good night's rest.

"What the hell were you doing sneaking into my room?" I demand before turning to my dad. "That's what happened. Trish broke into my room and scared Jinx. The animals could have gotten seriously hurt!"

I sound like a bratty little kid, but I'm too pissed off to care.

"Trish," my dad says, folding his arms across his chest like we really are just misbehaving kids, "did you break into your sister's room?"

She rolls her eyes and plants her hands on her hips. "Break in? Does she live in a fortress? Am I a burglar? I thought I left my slippers in there after we were talking last night. Excuse me for wanting warm feet while I get ready to go bake two dozen loaves of bread before any of you have even blinked an eye open. I didn't know that made me a criminal."

She makes a show out of rubbing her back, and I bite back a jab at how I thought it was her ankle she hurt upstairs. Now that the adrenaline rush is leaving my system, my eyelids are begging me to find the nearest horizontal surface to pass out on, and all I want is for this conversation to end as quickly as possible.

"Whatever. It's fine," I say. "Did you at least find your slippers?"

Trish chews her lip for a second. "Uh, I forgot to finish looking for them."

A sound that's somewhere between a groan and a shriek bursts out of me. I turn on my heels and march upstairs, my stomping feet making the old floorboards creak. The door of my room is still flung open, and it only takes me half a second to spot Trish's ridiculously fluffy slippers sitting at the foot of my bed where she must have kicked them off while we were watching a few episodes of Gilmore Girls on my laptop last night.

The memory makes me soften a little, but not enough to resist grabbing the slippers and chucking them down the staircase before yelling that I'm going back to bed.

I flop down on my twin mattress and yank the covers up over my head. I can still hear the murmurs of voices downstairs, followed by some shuffling around in the kitchen. Usually, I can sleep through Trish's morning routine while she gets ready to head to work in the campground's café and bakery, but today, every thump of the cupboard doors seems to reverberate in my already pounding skull.

I grind my teeth and bury myself even deeper under the blankets. I know I should be able to take the whole situation in stride; this is far from the craziest morning to ever go down in the Rivers household, but the longer I lie in bed, the more I realize it's not my sister I'm so upset with.

It's not Trish making me feel like a knot is tightening in my chest, twisting itself into shapes I don't have a hope of untying, no matter how much I yank on the threads.

I've come home to work at the campground every summer of my undergrad. At the end of the school year, I stuff all my clothes and books into garbage bags and laundry bins, and I pile my life into the car of whichever family member drives down to Victoria to bring me home. When the summer ends, I do the whole thing in reverse and head back for another year of living in a shitty rental apartment with a pack of roommates while working on my Bachelor's degree in environmental science.

Only I'm done now. I've finished the degree, and the rhythm of the past four years has come grinding to a halt in a way I wasn't prepared for. Things shouldn't feel this different. I'm going back to start my Master's in the fall. I'll be living in the same city. Hell, I'll still be going to the exact same university.

Yes, half my friends will have moved on with their lives and headed somewhere else. Sure, my work as a Master's student will be new and challenging, but none of that should make me feel like I've got a doomsday countdown floating above my head, filling my ears with an incessant tick-tick-tick that's left me on edge and snappy even when my family doesn't deserve it—although this morning, Trish totally did.

I don't even notice I've started tearing up until my pillow turns damp beneath my cheek. I sniffle and squeeze my eyes shut, like I can will the water back into my tear ducts, like I can force down all the feelings threatening to swallow me whole.

I'm only a couple seconds into the process when I hear a light scratching on my door. I flip the blankets off my head and sit up as Jinx's scraping plea to be let back in fills the silence of my room.

I pad over to the door and crack it open enough for her to slink inside. She follows me back to my bed and leaps into my lap as soon as I tuck my legs up into a cross-legged seat. I stroke my hand along the orange and black calico patches on her back while she purrs.

It's only when she lifts her head in protest of the droplets splashing onto her fur that I realize I've started crying again.

I manage to doze in and out of sleep a couple times before my alarm goes off at half past seven, but I don't feel any more rested. If anything, my head and my mood have gotten worse. Even Jinx seems to sense my fried patience and has steered clear of my pillow. I swap my pajamas for some leggings and a frayed, oversized hoodie with the Three Rivers Campground logo on the front.

Given that there are three of us and our last name is Rivers, people always assume the campground is named after me and my sisters. The real story is that my grandfather named the place after the three actual rivers in the area, the same ones behind the name of the nearby town of River's Bend. The fact that Grandpa's last name was Rivers was kind of just a bonus, but it's worked out great for advertising.

Down in the kitchen, I find a note from Trish waiting on the table. Her wide, loopy handwriting tells me there's breakfast keeping warm in the oven and coffee left for me in the pot, followed by a request to come out to the café before I start work this morning so she can talk to me about something.

For a second, I wonder if the breakfast is just a bribe to get me to come listen to some dramatic speech about how my cat ‘attacked' her, but then I remember she wanted to talk to me about something last night. We got distracted when she saw I was watching one of her favourite episodes of Gilmore Girls. One episode turned into four, and by the time we finally managed to evade the temptation of auto-play on Netflix, we'd both forgotten why Trish walked into my bedroom in the first place.

Some of my moodiness melts away the second I open the oven. The greasy scent of fried eggs and veggie sausages is enough to wipe away the worst of my headache, and the rest of the pain fades as soon as I've had my first few bites. Trish isn't an award-winning chef for nothing; she's a miracle worker when it comes to food, and the fact that she went out of her way to make a vegetarian breakfast for me has me swallowing down any harsh words about this morning along with my food.

I head outside as soon as I've cleared up my dishes. Soft yellow light spills through the towering treetops of the fir forest our campground is nestled inside. Birds twitter and coo. A warm, early-May breeze shifts the branches they sit in, the creaking of the trees joining their songs.

I don't bother looking up at the splendor of nature this morning. Instead, I shove my hands into the pocket of my hoodie and trudge up the path from the house to the dirt road that weaves through the property. My rubber boots squelch in some mud leftover from a heavy rainstorm a couple days ago, the pungent scent of wet earth filling my nose.

I pass by the tiny A-frame where my oldest sister, Emily, lives on her own next door to the two-storey log house we all grew up in. There's no sign of her or my dad; the two of them are probably deep in the grounds already. While the campground is technically open for the season, we don't get flooded with guests until at least mid-May, which means Emily and my dad have been flying around like maniacs, triple-checking that everything is running perfectly before we get swamped.

I continue up the road, my boots getting sucked into puddles every few steps. I fill my nose with deep breaths of air, hoping the scent of the forest will steady me like it always has before, but it's no use. If anything, the familiar smell of fir needles just reinforces the fact that I should feel normal, I should feel fine, I should feel like myself, not this twisted, testy little knot of uncertainty.

By the time I'm halfway to the café, I'm regretting my decision to walk instead of borrowing my dad's truck. It's less than a five minute drive out to where the Riverview Café and Kitchen sits next to the highway on the edge of our property, but the walk always feels like it takes way longer than it should, and the mud isn't helping.

By the time I spot the smoke curling out of the chimney, the bottom of my boots are so caked in mud I look like I'm wearing extremely dirty snowshoes. I'm panting from the effort to unstick them from the ground every time I take a step, and I've started sweating under my hoodie.

I groan when I reach the café and see most of the dirt parking lot has turned into mud, with a puddle the size of a small pond blocking me from my destination. Trish's station wagon is parked next to the building, the sides of the car splattered with yet more mud.

I consider skirting around the perimeter of the puddle, but the mud looks thickest and slimiest at the edges. I figure fate will be less tempted to trip me up if I head straight through the water.

Calling upon all the fortitude that four years of field studies in the wilds of Vancouver Island have given me, I take my first step into the murky water.

Then my second.

Then my third.

My fourth step is when fate decides to pull the ultimate ‘gotcha.' My foot slides directly into a hidden pothole.

I wobble. I sway.

I fall.

Shrieking curses that echo through the treetops, I tumble all the way down to my knees and have to twist to avoid snapping my ankle, which is still caught in the pothole. The awkward manoeuvre sends me rolling onto my side in the dirty, frigid water.

My hoodie and leggings get soaked. So does my hair. Water streams down the sides of my face and into my spluttering mouth. Streams of it trickle down over the tops of my boots and turn my socks into a squelchy, freezing mess.

By the time the shock subsides and I'm able to push myself up to stand on shaking legs, my teeth are chattering. I'm caked in dirt, twigs, and fir needles all the way from my toes to the top of my head. I have to wipe mud out of my eyes and blink a few times before I can bring the café into focus.

I'm still standing in the middle of the puddle like a dazed plane crash survivor when a strange buzzing sound draws my attention to the highway. The buzzing becomes a whirring, and I squint at the vehicle that comes into view.

It's a golf cart. Someone is driving a golf cart up the highway—only it's not just a golf cart.

It's a bright yellow golf cart that's been painted to look like Spongebob Squarepants. His signature buck-toothed smile grins at me from where it's painted on the front of the cart, along with a pair of round, eerily soulless eyes and his trademark dorky red tie.

I'm so busy trying to process how and why anyone would make a Spongebob Squarepants golf cart that I don't realize the driver has turned into the parking lot and rolled to a stop until the engine cuts out.

A pair of black Converse shoes land in one of the only semi-dry patches of dirt left in the lot. The shoes are attached to a pair of long legs clad in torn-up denim shorts it's still too cold to be wearing. The shorts are topped by a bulky, black zip-up hoodie that manages to look fashionably oversized, and somehow, somehow, before I've even looked at her face, I know who this woman is.

Even though I haven't seen her for almost four years.

Even though there's absolutely no logical explanation for why she's here, now, in a fucking Spongebob Squarepants golf cart.

For a brief second, I wonder if I hit my head in the puddle, if I'm lying in the back of an ambulance dreaming this whole scene, but then my gaze finally slides up to her face, and I know.

I know this is real.

Nothing has ever made me feel as real as the way Neavh Beaudoin looks at me.

I've spent almost four years trying to forget that.