Sleepless: Chapter Twenty

A Rocky Start [Is Still A Start]

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It had been a long time since Felix had been camping.

The team had been dropped off on the beach the night before and made camp just within the treeline to escape the high tide. The rolling toil of the ocean lulled him to sleep, and the pattering of rain against his tent walls returned him to the world.

In a way, it wasn’t that different from Camp. Nothing he wasn’t prepared for, nothing he hadn’t seen before. Still, something about being back on the mainland was like a heavy weight had been attached to him, sinking his heart and forming a hard ball in his gut.

They hadn’t landed far from where the teens always did — it was the easiest stretch of beach to get to, after all. The night before, as they walked to their campsite, he’d clocked the exact stretch of open sand Margo had vanished from the last time they were here.

Something about that entire encounter still didn’t feel quite right to him, but he couldn’t put a finger on how or why. The memory was hazy. Adrenaline, he supposed. Hard to get too many details on how it had happened.

He’d said something to Margo, he knew. Something about her staying behind. And then…

A half-frantic voice caught his attention as he exited his tent, Tommy insisting, “I — I swear, Miss Diana, Miss — it’s not mine!”

They’d arranged their tents in a semi-circle facing each other. Miss Diana and Tommy were to his right, and so was a dog — a chocolate lab maybe — that was whining and sniffing around a tattered pile of tent supplies.

“Well, it’s got to be somebody’s dog.” Miss Diana’s gaze broke from analyzing Tommy to interrogate Felix instead. “Did you do this?”