A Face in the Crowd

pictures showed happy hikers either striding along a forest trail or standing at scenic lookouts, shading their eyes and peering across great wooded valleys at the time-eroded but still formidable peaks of the central White Mountains.
    Pete sat at the table, looking cataclysmically bored, refusing to give the brochure more than a glance. For her part, Mom had refused to notice his ostentatious lack of interest. Trisha, as was increasingly her habit, became brightly enthusiastic. These days she often sounded to herself like a contestant on a TV game show, all but peeing in her pants at the thought of winning a set of waterless cookware. And how did she
feel
to herself these days? Like glue holding together two pieces of something that was broken.
Weak
glue.
    Quilla had closed the brochure and turned it over. On the back was a map. She tapped a snaky blue line. ‘This is Route 68,’ she said. ‘We’ll park the car here, in this parking lot.’ She tapped a little blue square. Now she traced one finger along a snaky red line. ‘This is the Appalachian Trail between Route 68 and Route 302 in North Conway, New Hampshire. It’s only six miles, and rated Moderate. Well . . . this one little section in the middle is marked Moderate-to-Difficult, but not to the point where we’d need climbing gear or anything.’
    She tapped another blue square. Pete was leaning his head on one hand, looking the other way. The heel of his palm had pulled the left side of his mouth up into a sneer. He had started getting pimples this year and a fresh crop gleamed on his forehead. Trisha loved him, but sometimes – last night at the kitchen table, as Mom explained their route, for example – she hated him, too. She wanted to tell him to stop being a chicken, because that was what it came down to when you cut to the chase, as their Dad said. Pete wanted to run back to Malden with his little teenage tail between his legs because he was a chicken. He didn’t care about Mom, didn’t care about Trisha, didn’t even care if being with Dad would be good for him in the long run. What Pete cared about was not having anyone to eat lunch with on the gym bleachers. What Pete cared about was that when he walked into homeroom after the first bell someone always yelled, ‘Hey CompuWorld! Howya doon, homo-boy?’
    ‘This is the parking lot where we come out,’ Mom had said, either not noticing that Pete wasn’t looking at the map or pretending not to. ‘A van shows up there around three. It’ll take us back around to our car. Two hours later we’re home again, and I’ll haul you guys to a movie if we’re not too tired. How does that sound?’
    Pete had said nothing last night, but he’d had plenty to say this morning, starting with the ride up from Sanford. He didn’t want to do this, it was ultimately stupid, plus he’d heard it was going to rain later on, why did they have to spend a whole Saturday walking in the woods during the worst time of the year for bugs, what if Trisha got poison ivy (as if he cared), and on and on and on. Yatata-yatata-yatata. He even had the gall to say he should be home studying for his final exams. Pete had never studied on Saturday in his life, as far as Trisha knew. At first Mom didn’t respond, but finally he began getting under her skin. Given enough time, he always did. By the time they got to the little dirt parking area on Route 68, her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she was speaking in clipped tones which Trisha recognized all too well. Mom was leaving Condition Yellow behind and going to Condition Red. It was looking like a very long six-mile walk through the western Maine woods, all in all.
    At first Trisha had tried to divert them, exclaiming over barns and grazing horses and picturesque graveyards in her best oh-wow-it’s-waterless-cookware voice, but they ignored her and after awhile she had simply sat in the back seat with Mona on her lap (her Dad liked to call Mona Moanie Balogna) and her knapsack beside her, listening to them argue and wondering if she herself might cry, or actually go crazy. Could your family fighting all the time drive you crazy? Maybe when her mother started rubbing her temples with the tips of her fingers, it wasn’t because she had a headache but because she was trying to keep her brains from undergoing spontaneous combustion or explosive decompression, or something.
    To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She took off her Red