Karen has an alarm on her phone set for midnight, just loud enough to wake her up without running the risk of her parents noticing. She has it set because she doesn’t have her homework done, and at nine PM she was panicking and couldn’t think, and she knows from experience that no homework is going to get done in that state, so she shut the books and curled up under the covers and gave herself three hours to ignore the problem. But now it’s midnight, and terror at the thought of failing another class drags her out of bed and to her desk.

She still can’t focus. She taps her pencil on her math homework and tries not to panic as the numbers and symbols swim before her, complicated and apparently meaningless. This is no good. She can’t focus in this stupid room, with its stupid bunk bed that hasn’t held more than one person in more than five years, and its stupid mess of notebooks full of stupid, stupid stories, and her stupid parents sleeping in the next room, or maybe still awake, in which case they could come in at any minute. Probably they’re not awake.

She rests her head in her hands and thinks about what someone who was going to get an A would do. They’d - well, they’d find a way to do their homework. Find a way not to let all her parents’ effort go to waste.

She shuts the book. Opens a window. And she grabs her survival pack, because that's where her flashlight is, slinging it over her back, and then putting her actual backpack full of stupidly heavy books on over it. And she climbs out the window and jumps, landing softly on the wet grass below. She’s not going to go anywhere. Not anywhere real, not like her sister would have. Just into the woods, where it’s quiet, and easy to think, and there are no parents. She’s not actually sure whether the woods will have all of those qualities at this time of night, but hey, her room definitely doesn’t. She heads out, not absurdly quietly, but hopefully not loudly enough to tip her parents off about anything.

The backpack is mostly full of books and junk, and once she takes her textbooks out and plants her math textbook at the top of the pile, it’s mostly just full of junk - there’s a college lit textbook that she's been lugging around because it's so much more interesting than her actual textbooks, and there are the splash goggles she keeps with her for chemistry class, some wrappers and empty plastic baggies, a couple pads, an empty and crushed plastic water bottle, slightly ridiculous number of pens and pencils, pair of gloves, hair tie, pocket pencil sharpener shaped like a frog, sticker sheets, bag of skittles, and assorted multicolored paperclips. Like ten of those little toys that come in tiny little pills, and that you’re supposed to put in water so they turn into much larger sponges shaped like animals (well, or like something else; they’re not labeled, so it’s hard to say). There’s a little golden mummy keychain in one pocket, the one she used to pretend to herself had magic powers that would keep monsters away from her at night. She always has been scared of the dark, although these days she doesn’t lie to herself about it or about anything she could do about monsters that aren’t real, and just accepts that she’s kind of a whiny coward.

She doesn’t know most of that’s in there; she hasn’t been through all of this thing’s pockets in years. She is aware that her old GameBoy is in one of the pockets, nestled in its charging cord near a bubble-wrap baggie that contains her four best games, because she actually cares about that. Of course, that pocket also has more junk in it: pocket mirror, metal bookmark in the shape of a butterfly, Tide To Go pen, assorted pokemon cards that probably don’t come out to a deck, St Martha medal that she was hiding from her parents and subsequently lost, rosary with pale crystal beads, St. Michael prayer card, pocket notebook, tiny elephant figurine she doesn’t remember where she got, chipped little ceramic dragon figurine that her father must have given to her ages ago, before her sister disappeared. She doesn’t know any of that’s in there, either; it can’t come out to much more than a pound, all together, so she never has occasion to notice it, and hasn’t bothered cleaning any of it out.

The survival kit is actually a sensible survival kit, not that she ever uses any of the pieces besides the flashlight radio (and the granola bars, which periodically get eaten and are therefore not present, after an hour of sitting in the woods). There’s a charging cord to hook the radio up to her phone, which is in her pocket right now. There’s a water purification straw, there’s a Swiss army knife that her father gave to her for Christmas one year, and there’s a power bank (also a gift from her dad, who notes that she has trouble keeping her devices charged). There’s a compact first aid kit, a separate dental first aid kit (because she read too many historical anecdotes about people dying of tooth infections), a bottle of ibuprofen, a tiny compass, a small roll of duct tape, a paracord bracelet, some fishing line, a travel bidet, a magnifying glass, some matches in a waterproof container, a couple mini-lighters, three garbage bags, a metal mug, a wire saw, a whistle, a space blanket, a little sewing kit, a cheap analog wristwatch, a tiny little four-ounce camp stove with four ounces of fuel, a deflated inflatable pillow, and a deck of playing cards with wilderness survival tips on them instead of pictures. It’s been a while since she was really into the idea of being able to stay alive under hostile conditions, but for a while it was something she could share with her dad, and she wasn’t going to not do research on what you really wanted to be able to have with you in a survival situation.

She’s also not thinking about any of that stuff. She grabbed the pack today because it was easier than digging just the flashlight out, and because it’s a habit, when she wants one thing, to grab the whole pack instead.

She’s doing her homework. Actually doing it, at least a little, even though the woods are actually really dark and scary at night, which she really should have anticipated. She tells herself that her house is, like, a couple hundred feet away, tops, and she calms down a little. She has to read the algebra passage several times for it to even begin to make sense to her, but she thinks she’s maybe starting to get it, thinks she can maybe write enough problems out by morning that her teacher will at least give her close to full marks for effort. Of course, then she has to do her Spanish homework - pity she can’t take Mandarin, that’d be so much easier, although it would kind of also be cheating.

She doesn’t get to her Spanish homework. She leans back, away from her textbook, grabbing her bags to herself, and looks up at the few stars she can see between the tree branches above her, trying to give her brain a break and go back to thinking about algebra in five minutes. If she paces herself, she can at least finish that. Probably. Don’t think about probably. Think about being the kind of person who - no, don’t think about that either, don’t think about anything. Think about the stars. 

And then she feels a wave of sickness spread out through her, and the stars are gone.