Blast | March 28, 2024

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In Brynne Jones’s “The Troop Leader,” the adult chaperone of a girl scout troop goes inexplicably missing during a camping trip, and the scouts are left to fend for themselves. What ensues is a wilderness powerplay reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and HBO’s Yellowjackets. Jones’s short story is a darkly humorous reflection on what it looks and feels like to inherit a futureless world, a world depleted by the generations that have gone before and abandoned their progeny to a chaos instructive in cruelty and cunning—perhaps the only merit badges that matter in the end.

The Troop Leader

Brynne Jones

 

The troop leader has been missing for an hour, and our predicament is clear. We are lost. We should not be out here on this backpacking trip by ourselves. After all, we are not adults. We are not even seniors. We are only cadettes. Which is not to say that we are unequipped. These merit badges, pricked into our regulation-khaki vests, prove our preparedness.

You will have heard of us because of the cookies, boxes of drizzled coconut Os and minty hard-snap biscuits we peddle on your doorstep. Such industry in young girls, you might say as you take out your wallet, gives me hope for the future. But what you won’t have heard about are the boot camps and battle tactics. The formations we drill to win cookie sales and friendship bracelets. Our fury may be muted by our neon scrunchies and sparkly hairclips, but, trust us, it is always there.

At first, we try to downplay the troop leader’s absence. A mistake, we call it. A brief setback. But the sun is only the breadth of three fingers above the horizon, and we are still a mile from the mountaintop. We cannot wait for her return. Onward we trudge. Pitching camp, starting fire, signaling smoke: these are the things we’ve spent our middle-school years learning how to do. We even think we know where we’re going—until we reach a clearing, some campsite where we have never been before.

We gather in a friendship circle, crossing our right arms over our left. A breeze stirs the thirsty leaves on the trees around us as we wait for Aurielle to speak. The first among us to wear a training bra, Aurielle is cool and curvaceous. Short but mouthy. Her cropped hair is a mottled, bottled blonde, and this year she is our alpha. We’ve had other alphas over the years, of course: Edith, Madhuri, Zara. All of them have been decommissioned, all of them forced out by puberty’s shifting chain of command. Soon after her breasts came in, Aurielle claimed the record for most Tagalongs sold. Then, when the troop bridged from juniors to cadettes, Aurielle was the first to cross. As the troop leader draped the sash over her swelling chest, Aurielle had this look. It was the look of a general. Like she truly believed that duty outranked death. A wartime look, you might say, but then, we are always at war.

In the circle, Aurielle says, “Listen up, y’all! I know we’re tired, but we’ve got to face facts. Ms. Littlejohn has the compass, the water, the travel binder. Without her—”

A whiny voice cuts her off. “My mom says the best thing to do when you’re lost is to stay in one place! That’s the only way to be found!”

Aurielle makes the quiet sign, and Janet, the interrupter, falls silent. Janet’s red hair is pulled back in a dorky French braid, her glasses are thick and goggly, and her pale skin is so translucent it looks larval. Her sick sticky mouth is smeared in lip gloss. Her sleeping bag smells like pee. We all know that she will do whatever it takes, shoulder any humiliation, to get back to her mommy and daddy.

“Sure. We could stay in one place,” Aurielle says, resisting the urge to bite off Janet’s head. “Or we could try to find a bar of service to call and explain where we are. Whatever we decide, we need to act fast. Before it gets dark. Did anyone actually see where we lost Ms. Littlejohn?”

“I saw her sometime after we crossed the river,” says Rachel N. “She told Rachel T she left the marshmallows on the bus. Right, Rachel T?”

“Right, Rachel N.”

“Oh, that’s it. She went back for the marshmallows,” says Aurielle, squeezing the hands of the Rachels. One Rachel is tall, the other is muscular. Athletic in different ways, they are Aurielle’s deputies and forever flank her.

“But she’s been gone for almost two hours. The parking lot isn’t that far.” This comes from Marion, the new girl who moved here last year from Florida, after her parents split up. We make Marion sit on the bus with Janet, even though her shiny, black hair smells like coconut and we all envy her handwriting. How she dots the i in her name with a jagged little heart.

“Don’t be dumb,” Aurielle says, pulling a face that shows us the limits of Marion’s intellect. “Obviously, Ms. Littlejohn is at the campsite. We’re the ones in the wrong place. We need to figure out a way to tell her where we are.”

Magnified by her glasses, Janet’s eyes dart around the murky treetops, scanning the dusk-filled branches. “Are we safe here?” she asks.

“As safe as anywhere,” says Aurielle, though her tone is a question. Soon it will be dark, and none of us have our Night Owl badge yet. None of us knows what lives in these woods.

Whispers circuit the clearing. Perhaps the troop leader intended for us to follow her back down the mountain, Thanh tells Ivy. Perhaps she took a wrong turn and she is the one who is lost, says Larissa. Maybe she slipped on a log and smashed her phone. Maybe she slipped on a log and smashed her head. Her appendix ruptured. Her heart exploded. She wandered off-trail and was eaten by a bear.

Again, Aurielle makes the quiet sign, and the whispers sputter and fizzle. “Okay,” she says. “Say something really bad happened. Say Ms. Littlejohn hurt herself somewhere in the—” But at that moment the sun sinks below the horizon, and darkness wolfs Aurielle’s confidence in a single gulp.

We cry out for light, fighting to remain calm enough to recall our training. Above us, in the center of the clearing, we thread a guyline through the handle of an oil lantern, suspending it between two trees. The lantern’s metal body is painted a deep, flaking crimson, its glass sconce is chipped like a tooth, and we have been carrying it with us for as long as our foremothers have been coming to this mountain. Every year the sconce is a little more broken—blackened more by flame, beaten further by weather. We call it the torch, because it is a memento from the Great Before. Before smartphone flashlights, before electricity. Before wildfire razed the once-forested peaks all around this campsite.

The troop leader liked to hold the torch up by the handle, her face shadow-painted and unhinged as she told us tales of what happens to little girls lost in the woods. The woods aren’t really our enemy, though we make them sound like they are. It’s what they contain. Wolves, axe murderers, frat boys. Men with hooks for hands waiting for you to wander off alone, betrayed by your bladder. Without the troop leader, we don’t know where to concentrate our fear. It doesn’t help that some of us have mothers petrified by all the wrong things: taxes, vaccines, the feastings of Hollywood elites. The flat earth’s sharp edge.

*

Together, we’ve been through a lot. We’ve seen baby teeth wrenched out of mouths by doorknobs, hairs sprouted like cactus needles, titties morphed from buds to bazookas. We’ve felt the sting of snapped bra straps, heard the heckles and high fives of our brothers. We’ve learned how to stilt in heels and where boyhands go when you slow dance. We’ve been catcalled and crotch-taunted by grown men while waiting for the school bus.

All of this, we’ve survived.

But the world is melting all around us, and we fear we’ll melt with it before we get our time. Where we live is all drained swimming pools and Astroturf. Some of us have never taken a bath. This summer, it hasn’t rained in weeks, and all around us the woods are brown and crackling.

*

“Before we do anything else, we should send a search party,” Aurielle says, her voice low and conspiratorial even though we hear nothing but wind in the trees. “To see what’s out there. Maybe we’ll even find Ms. Littlejohn.”

We deem this a good idea. Even if the search party does not find the troop leader, they will be able to survey the area and report back if any nearby campsites are occupied. A call goes out for volunteers. For several minutes, no one moves. Then, Thanh twitches. She rubs her ear against her shoulder, unable to resist an itch. She is smaller than the rest of us, and we look at her all at once, a collective head swiveling on its neck. We wonder how long she can ignore our eyes. How long she can bear the weight of this communal looking. Not long, we think, and we are right. She steps forward, shattering the circle.

“Fine,” she says, with a sigh.

We pretend that she doesn’t have to. We tell her that she is a valued member of the troop, that her good turn is appreciated. That we will not soon forget her brave willingness to charge into the sunless unknown.

“It’s whatever,” she says. “I don’t know how to start a fire.”

A good point, we concur. Anyone with a Level V Camping Skills badge should stay behind, as their expertise will be required at camp. This criterion divides us neatly into two factions: the older girls and the younger. Aurielle, whose birthday is in October, is especially pleased by this show of pragmatism. The terms are ratified, and the six younger scouts step away from the circle, their earth-toned uniforms and determined faces dissolving into shadow.

“Keep your ringers on and watch your backs,” Aurielle calls after them, as the remaining eight of us clump together to begin the work of fire-building. “And leave no trace!”

*

You may think of us as an institution, an American way of life. Perhaps we remind you of your own childhood, the scout you once were. Perhaps this is why you relish stories about groups of savvy, entrepreneurial children defeating the odds. Why, when you become parents yourselves, you pride yourselves on our thirteen-hour days of pushing cookies. Our hard sell. You tell us that you see the future in us, though why that is, we cannot understand.

We do not see our future in you.

The thing is we only have so many predictable seasons left—only a handful of good years until there is no camping. Before you object, we ask you to recall the hottest summer of your youth, the longest drought you faced. How many days of school you missed for bomb cyclones and thundersnow. What the air tasted like before wildfire smoke smothered us in its blanket of everlasting night.

*

An hour goes by, and still the search party has not returned. The tents are up. The lightning bugs are out. The fire crackles and pops like breakfast cereal, making our stomachs riot with emptiness. Our sleeping bags are piled in a great blob next to the fire, our dwindling road-trip snacks stockpiled in the middle. We try to ration, but we make ourselves sick, chasing handfuls of gummy bears and Skittles with shotgunned Pixy Stix. Our molars, already corroded by orange soda from a canteen, are caked in grit.

“What do you think happened to them?” asks Rachel T, picking licorice sinews from her braces.

“Maybe they went to the ranger station,” says Rachel N. Her fingertips are dip-dusted a neon orange that she sucks and smears on her khaki shorts.

This is fair, we reason. Success may have delayed their return. Perhaps they even found the troop leader. We continue to wait, burritoing ourselves in sleeping bags zipped to the chin. Some of us zip our heads inside too, where the air is stale and sweatdamp. We listen to the forest’s rustle. Blood beats loud in our chests, and the dark hums all around us like a massive cicada. Every minute is the minute of their return, until it too ticks by.

Finally, Aurielle says, “Maybe they’re lost now, too. A pair of us should go and check.”

“And then what?” says a voice. We poke our heads out of our sleeping bags.

Marion rises from her crouch by the fire, sharp-eyed and straight-backed. There is danger in her posture. “We send two more and they go missing? You send us out two by two until there’s no one left?”

“Don’t be a baby,” says Aurielle.

Only then do we see what’s wrong. There is nothing babyish about Marion. She is bolder than the rest of us, her straight hair smooth in its bun. Because she is the new girl, the lowest ranking member of our troop, this upsets the order of things.

“Baby,” Marion scoffs, blowing on the coals. “Please. I have more badges than anyone here.” Her face is defiant, beaked nose held high, as she faces Aurielle. “And I’m telling you, this fire isn’t high enough for the rangers to see our smoke signals. We need it higher—as high as we can get it.”

Still in her sleeping bag, Aurielle wiggleworms to a standing position. “No, it’s too dry and windy to risk it. Besides, the search party will find Ms. Littlejohn soon.”

“What makes you so sure she’s still out there to be found?” Marion asks, crossing her arms. “I heard that, in order to bridge from cadette to senior, Ms. Littlejohn just dumps you in the woods with a compass. You have to find your way back on your own.”

“What? That can’t be right,” says Aurielle, her eyebrows pinched low.

“It isn’t right, but it’s the truth.”

Something caterwauls in the woods. Coyotes. Werewolves. Zombies. We’re all thinking it, but only Janet lets out a whimper. Her face is all scrunched, like she’s broken a rule. “I want to go home,” she says. “I want my mother.”

Shut up, Janet, we say.

Marion steps towards Aurielle, foregrounding the difference in their heights. The torch looms over them both. In its light, Marion’s irises merge with her pupils—a void we all might fall into.

“Don’t you get it?” Marion says. “Ms. Littlejohn isn’t coming back.”

“We’re sticking to the plan,” Aurielle says. She squares her ample chest until Marion backs away.

“Stick to the plan,” Marion says, walking backwards. “And we die on this mountain.”

*

For the record, we are not fickle. Our loyalties do not shift quickly or easily. When Marion first foments rebellion, we shun her. We shame her for defying our alpha. When she stokes the fire, we call her “beaky” and “birdbrain.” When she asks for help gathering wood, we pretend that we cannot hear her. That she is invisible. That she is dead. We hoard all the jawbreakers and hide the last stick of cinnamon gum, and finally, when she comes back from peeing in the woods, we hide ourselves.

“She isn’t missing! She isn’t coming back!” Marion calls out, over and over, as she tends the fire by herself. We huddle behind a fallen fir, careful not to give away our position. On the front line, Aurielle floats her phone’s camera lens above the log like a periscope, recording Marion’s solitary craze. We bite our fists to stifle our giggles.

“What a weirdo,” whispers Rachel T.

“Seriously,” says Rachel N. “I bet this is the real reason she left her old troop. Who would want to be friends with someone so—?” She twirls a finger around her ear. We snigger. Marion whirls around, searching for the laughter’s source.

“Think about it,” Marion shouts at the woods. “What does Ms. Littlejohn care? Cookie season is over. We’ve made as much money as we’re ever going to make for her. She’s probably home in bed right now! Do you all really want to die out here, waiting for some selfish adult who isn’t coming back?”

We don’t answer her, but we don’t laugh either. From the way our eyes avoid each other, it’s clear that some of us are starting to listen. Some of this is starting to make sense.

“My troop in Florida used to go camping all the time,” Marion continues shouting. “Did you know that, for a camping group this size, you’re supposed to have at least two chaperones? Why are there no adults here when there are supposed to be two?”

“Is that true?” Janet whines at Aurielle.

Aurielle scoffs. “She’s crazy.”

Janet tugs Aurielle’s vest. “Why don’t we have two chaperones?”

“Get off me,” Aurielle snaps, tugging her vest free of Janet’s clutches.

“Marion, you’re right!” Janet gasps. She staggers out from behind the log, no longer interested in hiding. “My mom wanted to come, and Ms. Littlejohn said no!”

Locating the voice, Marion turns slowly, her neck twisting like a possessed doll. There is no flinch in her depthless gaze as she considers Janet, the deserter. “You,” she says to Janet. “Why is it always you?”

Sensing danger, Janet shrinks back. “Marion?” she asks, her voice cracking as she searches for any remnant of her bus buddy in this deranged-looking thing.

“God, I’m so sick of you,” Marion says.

Janet can’t help it. Terror is as visible on her face as her glasses. She bites her lip. She peels a hangnail until it bleeds. When her right eyelid twitches like a rabbit, that’s when Marion springs and the hostilities begin.

Janet darts into the forest, relying on the wooded darkness to even things out. She crouches behind bushes and ducks behind trees. She shimmies halfway up the trunk of an ancient oak before she notices Marion climbing up after her. Janet’s quicksilver pulse throbs in her neck. In her panic, she loses her grip. Marion yanks Janet’s braid from behind and drags her by the hair down to the dirt. On the ground, Janet curls into a ball, battening her hatches like a roly poly. It’s no use. Suddenly, she is sprawled on her stomach, as Marion pins her down with one hand and clenches her French braid in the other.

“You know what you are?” Marion says as she fondles Janet’s braid in her fist. “A scaredy-cat. And do you know what scaredy-cats do? They meow.” Janet squirms as Marion produces her Swiss Army knife from the pocket of her khakis and flicks it open, resting the blade at the base of Janet’s scalp. “Go on, Janet. Meow.”

Aurielle crawls out from behind the log, now more interested in observing this altercation than hiding from Marion. Following our alpha, we emerge from our hiding place. We circle Janet, who cowers on the ground like the sympathizer she is.

Her back pretzeled and arched, Janet looks up at Marion in disbelief. Marion doesn’t blink, and her tone leaves no room for confusion. She is not joking. Her words show themselves for what they are: a command. “I said meow,” Marion says. The blade glints in the firelight as she pushes it to the rust-colored root of Janet’s hair. It is against our code to cut the hair of another girl scout, another sister, but we suppose what tonight proves is that our code only extends so far. And where it stops is on this mountain.

“Meow, you stupid scaredy-cat,” says Aurielle.

“Finally someone has the guts to say it,” says Rachel T.

Janet’s face crumples. Her lip quivers and she pulls her knees to her chest. “Why do you always pick on me?” she asks, her grimace baring her bottom teeth.

Do as you’re told, we say. Meow, Janet, meow.

It starts as a high-pitched whine, little more than a gargle in the back of Janet’s throat, gathering dimension and depth as it moves forward into her mouth: “Meeeeeeyowwwww!”

Marion slackens her hold on Janet’s hair. “That’s it! Such a good little kitty,” she says. “Keep meowing!”

There are tears in Janet’s eyes, as she curls and uncurls her spine like a cat stretching on a ledge. When Marion finally releases her, she throws her head back and mewls at the moon winking above the treeline. We laugh and clap. Huzzah, we cry.

But after a while, the spectacle of Janet on all fours, meowing at the top of her lungs and scratching in the dirt, returns Aurielle to herself. “Okay, that’s enough,” she says. “We’ve made our point.” But we don’t react, our attention still captured by Janet’s metamorphosis.

Meow, we chant. Meow, meow.

Janet obeys. She meows again and again. She licks her paws and rubs them over her eyes. She kneads her claws on the log’s satisfying bark. She chases the beam of light shining from Marion’s phone. It’s a game, we know. One that Janet demeans herself to play. We won’t admit it out loud, but a part of us is excited. It excites us that we can barely see our fellow scout in this wretched, meowing creature. That we don’t know what she might do. How far she might go to satisfy the troop.

“Who’s my pretty kitty?” says Marion as she bounces the light around the clearing, sending Janet scurrying this way and that.

“I said that’s enough!” says Aurielle. She tries to block the beam with her body, but Marion ignores her until Aurielle leers in her face. “Listen to me, you pathetic weirdo!” Aurielle shouts at Marion. Her face is so close to Marion’s that her breath stirs the babyhairs on Marion’s cheeks. It feels like the prelude to a movie kiss, and we all watch, spellbound.

“You’re not the boss of me,” says Marion. She stares through Aurielle, resolute and unflappable as a beefeater. No one moves. No one except Janet, who prowls the edge of the clearing, sly and timid.

“You’re worse than Janet,” says Aurielle. The focus back on her, Janet sidles up behind Aurielle, believing herself again under the alpha’s protection. Believing herself saved. Until Marion’s gaze settles Janet in her crosshairs.

“We’ll see about that,” says Marion as she darts around Aurielle to get to Janet.

It ends in tragedy. All it takes is one good flick of Marion’s Swiss army knife to sever years of growth. We gasp as the braid tumbles in the leaves. Shell-shocked, Janet feels below her nape, her hands groping at the now-empty air and exposed skin. Her neck is naked, blotchy, and undignified. Her face is covered in snot. But she is different now. Forever changed. She sinks to the ground, lifts up the amputated braid, and drops it on the campfire. The braid flares, igniting into flame. The coyotes are quiet, and so are we, mesmerized by this burning.

We try resting our hands on Janet’s shoulder—the regretful, respectful scouts in us briefly restored—but Janet recoils. She is tight-jawed and hard-eyed, her buglike gaze locked on the fire. Watching her braid shrivel into ash, she swears to us that she will never again grow out her hair.

When the pyre is nothing but smolder, Janet again ascends the oak tree. This time, she does not come down. She does not answer our calls, our pleas for peace. She withdraws from the troop a fallen soldier.

*

This is why we say you expect too much. Under duress, our time here can only be what it is, bloody and imperfect. After all, how can we be more than you who raised us?

*

After Janet’s defeat, Marion’s rank drops lower still, and her malice returns. “This is all your fault,” she spits at Aurielle. She flashes her eyes and bares her teeth, looming at our alpha.

“You are such a freak show,” says Aurielle.

Above them, the torch sways in the wind, pivoting like a lighthouse beam, patrolling the campsite. Unlike us, it silently awaits vengeance. We grow louder and louder. Some of us, overcome by lawlessness, light branches on the dying pyre and trail them through the air like sparklers.

“Seriously. Stop it,” says Aurielle. She glances sidelong at the rest of us—but no one rallies. No one backs her up. Not while Marion circles and leers, flaring her nostrils as she considers angles of attack.

Aurielle’s hair is too short to pull, so Marion lunges at her bra straps. Marion tugs and pulls and snaps wherever she can, while Aurielle twists and writhes. Aurielle’s shirt rides up, as she tries to shield her midsection from Marion’s snatches. Instead, her bra unclasps, and out tumble two wads of crumpled-up tissue. We gasp as Marion skitters to pick up the trash. Then, she turns and holds it aloft for all of us to see: the lie that changes everything.

“I knew it!” she shouts at Aurielle, insane with glee. “You stuff! Do you even need a bra?”

Litterbug, litterbug, we chant, the spasm jumping from scout to scout.

Aurielle collapses on the ground, no longer queen. We join our laughter with Marion’s. We jeer at Aurielle’s flattened chest. Her manipulations and lies.

All at once, Aurielle seizes Marion’s bun from behind. Again, we hear ourselves cheer, slipping into something like psychosis—a violent fantasy that ends in all our deaths. We see the campsite cordoned off by yellow tape, bloody braids and severed pigtails strewn across the clearing. Our troop canonized in hushed tones on the evening news.

“Quiet!” a voice screeches from above. It is Janet. She perches on a treelimb, her head tilted a fraction. She seems to be thinking. Or listening. We are loud, we realize, so loud the whole forest echoes with our uproar. Janet makes the quiet sign. Then, we hear it, too.

A gentle whirring, like wings. A helicopter hovers over us at an impossible angle, as though leaning against the wind.

We abandon Aurielle on the ground. Following Janet’s eyeline, we peer upward at the torch. The helicopter. The sky beyond it. We are shouting again—for rescue or bloodshed, we don’t really know which—as the helicopter circles overhead. From her perch, Janet unknots and yanks the guyline that dangles the torch. It falls in the dirt with a thunk but does not break. Janet drags the torch up into her oak by its line and knots it around the lamp’s handle. Then, she dangles the torch and begins to swing, her glasses steaming up from the effort. At the top of her arc, she lets go and launches the torch into the highest branches of a neighboring tree. There is a savage shatter of glass.

We wait. We look for flames. We sniff for smoke. We hear a cracking noise, followed by a kind of thrum. Bright orange flames lick through the treetops.

Minds snarled, bodies swarming, we charge at the forest with our fiery branches and throw everything we have on the flame. The parched leaves go up like kindling and illuminate the dark woods. This summer’s historic drought means that, within minutes, a wildfire is raging and unstoppable.

This heat is our inheritance. We belong to it, every one of us riled and shrieking.

Marion empties a full canteen of soda on a woolen blanket and throws it on a fiery bush. The sodden blanket puffs out great white loops of smoke that Aurielle and the Rachels fan with their vests. Janet, still perched in her tree, shouts with all the air in her lungs, until smoke fills them and she seizes her chest, coughing terribly.

The rest of us are coughing now, too. There’s another loud crack and someone screams. We are certain the helicopter has fallen out of the sky. Maybe, despite all our badges—our preparations and our bright futures—we just can’t handle the pressures of survival. Through the thickening smoke, we squint, searching for the wreckage. We squint harder, still coughing. Finally, we see them. Silhouettes walking slowly—so slowly, they’re barely moving—their mouths and noses covered, carrying something. The rangers have come for us. Or is it the search party? Perhaps it is the troop leader, walking toward us with a bag of marshmallows cradled to her chest. All around us, the forest is engulfed in flame. Someone shines a flashlight on us, on our tangled, matted hair and our screwed-up faces. On the women we’re becoming.

***

Brynne Jones is a writer from east Tennessee. Her work is forthcoming in the Iowa Review and has been named a finalist in 2023 for the Disquiet Prize, the swamp pink Fiction Prize, and New Letters‘s Robert Day Award for Fiction. She lives in Austin, where she recently earned her MFA in Fiction & Screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers.

 

 

 

 

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Header image: Ringing (1928), Paul Klee