Read Sadie Walker Is Stranded for Free Online Page B

survival—not just because I was still alive and kicking despite zombies and food shortages and little-boy tantrums, but because my dad was the consummate outdoorsman. You can’t live in the northwest and not catch the bug to hunt, fish, camp or hike at some point. My dad, Alan (but come on, who really calls their dad by his first name?) was your typical weekend warrior. Which is why it’s more than a little surprising that he’s … well, not still around. Sore subject? Yeah, you could say that. Because everyone just loves talking about their parents’ untimely demise, right? And yes, I said parents , plural.
    Pardon the sidebar, but it’s now or never, or rather five empty pages while I collect myself and stop bawling like a tween outside Joe Jonas’s dressing room. Dad—Alan—no, Dad , liked to hitch up the trailer to the SUV on weekends and head for the nearest patch of prime camping ground. He rarely, if ever, washed that stupid trailer. Mom would get on his ass about it, asking why he insisted on leaving a grubby, mud-splattered disaster zone in the garage. There was limited space in there, and she didn’t want it taken up by what ultimately looked like an overflowing toilet. I was on my dad’s side in this. I liked that the trailer was messy and rugged. I liked showing my grade school friends, swaggering into the garage under the pretext of getting a kickball and just happening to show them how totally outdoorsy and badass my dad was. And how cool was it that sometimes I got to go with him? Street cred. I had it.
    He taught me about making fires, tying knots, all of the father-daughter bonding a former Boy Scout can stomach. Or are you a Boy Scout for life? Who knows? Anyway, Mom approved of this, to an extent, despite the fact that it meant putting up with a grungy trailer and more poison ivy rashes than you can shake a bottle of calamine lotion at. It was our time, and through mosquito invasions that made Normandy Beach look tame and collapsing tents and overcooked, cindered hot dogs, I learned to love it. It was misery as entertainment. Survival as a badge of honor. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, the less I grumbled on these trips the more swag I got from Dad upon returning home. If I was quiet and uncomplaining there was Dick’s Drive-In for me on the way back, and that’s massive motivation for any little kid. Or anyone. Period.
    But my dad was always better at the whole camping thing, more of a natural. He could put a stale Swedish Fish on the end of a line and haul in a ten-pound whopper. Me? I could bait that sucker with the highest quality lures, night crawlers and worms and fucking diamond earrings around and I wasn’t going to get so much as a nibble. Thems the breaks, I guess, but it leaves a mark. I was never as in tune with nature as my father. He couldn’t draw to save his life, which always amused me and was one tiny thing for me to gloat about, but damn it if he didn’t seem like Paul Bunyan and Grizzly Adams and all those legendary woodsmen rolled into one. Mom accompanied us on these trips occasionally, but just like me, she didn’t have that survivalist gene. It was Dad’s area of expertise and he embraced it with the power of a thousand REI employees.
    And Dad should have made it and Mom, too, but that’s another story with another chance to send me into paroxysms of weepy regret.
    More important than my seasickness or wishing my father was there to help, was making sure Shane wasn’t one foot over the line of irreversible trauma. A quiet kid to begin with, it just didn’t seem likely that he would take being kidnapped and seeing Andrea and me going berserk well. And really, the sort of person who did take that kind of thing well would probably grow up to become a serial killer. Lucky for me, he wasn’t exactly hard to keep an eye on when trapped on a tiny boat. Well, that and the huge mess of curls on his head made him easy to spot from outer space. Or from an inch away, where