 I keep running the events of this weekend over and over in my head, even though the doctors, my friends, and my parents, and my own better judgment have all implored me several times not to. I can't help it. I can't shake this sense of doom, of guilt. My friend is dead, and despite the fact that I'm still just as clueless as everyone else as to exactly how she even died, it somehow feels like it was my fault. But it can't be my fault, right? I didn't do anything wrong. When Kara came back from her summer in Canada, and both Jason and I immediately picked up on the fact that something was very off about her, I did what a good friend is supposed to do. I bombarded her with memes and consistently invited myself over to her house after school and brought her the occasional frat before first period. And when my usual moves didn't seem to shake her out of the weird twitchy funk she apparently found herself in, I ramped my game up a notch and organized a camping trip. This strategy usually worked. Kara had always been outdoorsy, and I'd planned day trips to bust her out of her bad moons to great success before, both after the disaster that was junior prom, and that time she completely flunked Trig a year back. Kara, being the kind of granola chick rock climber through climber, human labrador she usually was, had never struck me as very emotionally complicated. Generally, if you took sad Kara into the woods for a day or two, let her breathe some fresh air and eat some tinfoil dinners, she'd emerge at the end of the trip as emotionally recompobulated Kara and eventually would go back to normal. Though I guess what I was dealing with at this point wasn't the sad Kara I'd seen before. She wasn't moody or pouting or brooding or whatever. From the moment Kara got back from her trip, she was very deeply off. She seemed both restless and totally exhausted at the same time. She'd do this thing where maybe a few minutes into a normal conversation, her eyes would drift from the face if whoever was interacting with her and start darting around the room. She'd stop paying any attention to whoever she was talking to and just openly stare at nearby windows and doorways. She hung blankets from curtain rods in her room to make what I guess were makeshift blackout drapes. And she absolutely refused to go out with me or Jason or anybody after dark. Sure, I guess at some point I could have asked her what specifically was wrong, but that wasn't the way I operated. And it sure as hell wasn't the way Kara operated. I think Jason reached out to her about it at some point. But as far as I can tell, she just pretended not to know what we were talking about. So I invited her camping and considering how cagey and weird she was being, I kind of expected her to say no. But when I texted to ask her about it, she responded with a sounds good basically instantly. And when Jason and I pulled up to her place in my mom's van at 6am last Friday, she was packed and ready to go. She was pale as hell. Her pack was barely thrown together. She looked like she was going to war, but she was there. I could see her mom staring at us from her bedroom window upstairs. And I remember thinking that she had that same twitchy, nervous look in her eye that Kara did. But I didn't think to ask about it. Idiot. I'm a moron. Why didn't I ask? Something was clearly going on, something bad. And I was too scared to ask. We drove up to the state campground about an hour north of our suburb. And we broke out the town I got from Home Depot and the death trap grill that Jason snagged from his dad. And we tried our best to pretend that it was just a normal trip. And everything was fine. We ignored the fact that Kara, whose usual move was to get immediately blitzed on whatever cheap beer we'd bring and scramble up the nearest attractive tree, spent basically the entire night huddled in front of the fire. We ignored how she jumped and swiveled and stared, anytime a pine cone so much has dropped within a hundred feet of us, like she was expecting someone to burst out of the woods at any point and ambush her. We ignored how, very briefly, when Jason and I were talking about the movies we were looking forward to coming out next year, she looked like she was going to burst into tears. We ignored her very transparent efforts to try install once the sun went down and Jason and I started yawning. How she tried to start conversations, she clearly didn't have the attention span or energy to maintain just to keep us from turning in for bed. We ignored it all. Every red flag. Then we went to bed. She climbed into the tent and she asked us to leave the electric lantern on. I shrugged and Jason said it literally didn't make a difference to him either way. I woke up at one point in the night. I think I can't tell if I dreamed this or if I made it up after the fact or if it actually happened. But I vaguely remember being woken up. I remember that it was weirdly windy, or at least it sounded windy, like the trees were all swooshing around outside, louder than they had all night. I remember that I could barely hear Kara crying, or almost crying in a half choked, suppressed sort of way. I was two days to turn over and ask her what was wrong. I was half asleep. Still, I should have. I should have tried to talk to her. I think in between hitched breaths. I heard her whisper something along the lines of, I'm sorry, there's still a good chance I dreamed all of that made it up to make sense of the trauma or whatever I really hope I did. I woke up around dawn and I noticed that Kara's sleeping bag was empty. I stepped out of the tent and shuffled over to the edge of the campground where we tied our food up to keep it out of reach of bears. I started fumbling with the pulley connected to the bear bag, and I felt the drop of water splash the back of my neck. I looked up to see if it was raining. And I looked up to see Kara way high up in a tree, 85 feet, I think is what I ended up hearing the official measurement was way high up. She wasn't sitting on a branch. These were big old ponderosa's. They didn't have branches thick enough to sit on, not that high up. She was impaled, stuck onto the tree like a fly on a pin, eight stories up. And she was bleeding on me. I fainted, which I've never done before. And apparently I cracked my head pretty bad on the way down. I woke up flat on my back about an hour later with one of Jason's shirts pressed onto a gas just below my hairline. I'm lucky Jason found me at all. He woke up maybe 15 minutes after me and made the same beeline for the food that I had. He basically tripped over my body. It wasn't long after I woke up that he asked me where Kara was. I explained to him what I had seen, what I could still see if I looked straight up. He believed me right away. Despite how completely insane the image I was describing was, must have been something in my voice when I told him, I guess. By the time the cops got there, the bleeding on my head was slowing down. We got ushered out of the camp pretty fast. They told us that it was because I might have a concussion and needed medical attention immediately. But really, because they seemed deeply freaked out by what they were looking at and getting us out of the way was the only thing they could do to even begin to look like they had a handle on the situation. I got set up in a hospital room, had some x-rays taken, talked to some doctors, then talked to some cops, detectives, technically, who seemed as clueless as me. They asked the basic questions, how I knew Kara, if she'd been acting strange lately, if I knew anyone who might have meant her harm. Yeah, officer, now that you mention it, she left Landon from Home Eck last week. So maybe he followed us out into the woods, dragged my friend a million feet in the air, and skewered her onto the top of a tree like a Christmas star. Sounds like a lead to me. My parents, of course, are out of town. Work conference. I called, told them I was okay, didn't really give any other details. They'll probably hear all about it on the news soon anyway. I don't want to go home alone. I'm very deeply freaked out. I don't know if it's because there's probably a mountain of fresh trauma bubbling in my subconscious, or if my little spill actually knocks something loose in my head, but I absolutely cannot look out the window in my hospital room, can't even glance in its direction. I'm on the fifth floor, but I keep expecting something to pop its head in. I keep expecting to see something staring at me from the other side of the glass. There's woods near the hospital. And when it gets windy, I can hear the leaves brushing up against each other. I sometimes hear something that sounds like my name mixed into the sound just faintly enough that I can't tell if I'm making it up or not. Deep down, I feel like if I go home alone, this feeling is only going to get worse. I really hope that I didn't actually hear Kara crying that night. I hope I made it up. I hope it was a weird post-traumatic fever dream. And if it's not, and it did happen, then I desperately hope that I didn't actually hear her say sorry. As if she did, I have this sinking feeling in my gut that she was apologizing to me for something, something that hadn't happened yet. Something very, very bad.