Nat can talk to dead people. At least that's what he says. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, yells for Mr. Splitfoot and then does a general impression of the crying person's dead relative, lover, or whatever.

And even though he's just a character in a book, at the time I couldn't help wondering what his impression of my Dad would be. Maybe he’d apologize, but if he knew anything about my Dad, I doubt it. Or maybe my memory is so skewed by time that even I don't know what he'd say.

I guess it doesn't matter now.

By the time I looked back at my page, it was so dark that I couldn't tell an a from an e. I looked over my shoulder at the hanging towel separating me from Eva. Maybe she had a flashlight. But asking would disrupt the bubble I had made. Only me and my book. Alone for the first time in a month.

I'm not supposed to be alone. It's not something we're supposed to do. We’re supposed to travel in groups of three, we're supposed to participate in every activity, and we're supposed to tell our counselor where we're going. But at that point I didn't really care. All I wanted was the quiet of being by myself after a month of constant watching from other campers, counselors, and the bugs that insist on stealing my blood.

And if the price of that quiet is another day of Margot glaring and having Jaylen try to guilt me into making her life easier, so be it. It was her choice to request me as her camper. She knows who I am.

So instead I rolled over and looked up at the moon grazing in the open sky. The moon looked back and we shared our happy lonesome. 

The interaction made my fingers grip the grass to feel the tension of the earth, to feel the silky green fur of the planet. 

The great eye in the sky looked on, sluggishly blinking. Some may not believe it was happening, but I knew. The thought of the silver sphere closing made my heart race and raised goosebumps on the pockmarked skin on my legs where bugs sank their teeth.

I held his gaze, caught in a staring contest with an opponent who I'll never beat, who takes two weeks to close his eyes. My teeth may have clenched and my eyes might have watered, but something about the white-ish glow made me look on. As if he was trying to tell me something in the blinking stars or the wind that whistles in the forest behind me. Like maybe if I looked close enough or listened hard enough I'd know it. 

The great truth of life. 

The reason we exist.

If he's really made of cheese.

What my Dad would say if we could meet again. 

Why one can feel so alone while being surrounded on all sides.

But all I got back was silence and his continued sluggish blink.

His bone grey shine is the only light left at this point. The campfires across the plain were left as embers, the sticky smell of hardly done marshmallows faint. No voices crowded my ears from the distance. 

Dead air.

My cabin mates were still at the campfire across the forest. If no one had come for me so far I doubted it would happen at all. The thought loosened my tightened jaw and made my head light and dizzy. To be alone in substance and in thought.

I looked to my left.

I looked to my right.

I felt the tension of the grass still in my grip and rolled over, letting go just before taking the fur by the root. I could feel the earth on my face, warmer than the air around me, and I knew the earth was holding me tight like a parent should. I was caught being crushed by the embrace and lifted by the vastness around me. It's a truly wonderful feeling of warring sensations.

So I got lost in it for a while. Mentally drifting happily while pinned to the earth by the same force that keeps the watching eye revolving that same planet. 

I couldn't help but feel that he felt just as I do. Pulled to his planet but still floating in the great beyond. 

Maybe that's the truth the moon tried to tell me, that he and I are of the same mind, separated only by space. It is comforting and terrifying at the same time.

Then someone tripped over me. So absorbed in my thoughts I didn't hear them approach, but they crashed into my space like a meteor upon some planet far, far away. I could hear them exclaim to their friends as they rushed away, offended and surprised. But I stayed still. I shook in my skin.

My cheeks flushed and seemed to itch from the inside out. The grinding returned to my teeth. The tense feeling in my muscles was back. I took three deep breaths. I blinked until the tense feeling in my head subsided enough to shove it to the back of my mind. I flexed my hands and found my grip on the grass had returned. 

How dare they interrupt my bubble? I thought to myself. To think they can walk in and disturb, then just as easily waltz away chattering about it as if I had been the obstruction. It annoyed me to where even now I can feel the phantom pounding in the back of my mind and the tenseness of my knuckles.

I turned back to facing the moon and scratched my arms until they bled from mosquito bites I had collected during my rest. 

Annoyance and rage still crowded my head, a new weight that threw off my careful balance from before. I looked to the moon and apologized. Whether for the interruption or my temper to match my fathers, I'll never know.

But the blinking moon does. He's always watching. And for some reason, I'm okay with that.