The next day, I couldn't relax for a single moment.

Things were as crazy as camp permitted; an argument broke out over the last bowl of Frosted Flakes at breakfast, I yelled at the top of my voice when Tasha shoved another girl, and my cabin continued to shoot for their record of most consecutive days being last into the dining hall. On the outside, it merely fell into the pattern of the last four weeks.

Only I knew I was carrying the weight of a gigantic secret, one that swelled so huge I was convinced people could see the physical strain on my shoulders. In reality, I knew it was just paranoia; there was no way anybody could've heard mine and Seb's conversation over the pounding music last night, or at least anything more than small snippets where the tracks changed. And yet, despite this, I couldn't stop feeling as if I had the plan scrawled right across my forehead in thick, black marker.

Packing proved most difficult. The large rucksack I'd brought with me had spent the last month in the corner of the room, propped up against the wall and doing little more than collecting dust. My belongings would fit, but the hard part was stowing them away without attracting unwanted attention. Where Crystal had previously been busy, she now seemed to be constantly lurking around our shared bedroom, cross-legged on the top bunk or rifling through her own drawers. There was really no reasonable excuse for packing up everything I owned, unless she would believe a newly-acquired phobia of a sudden zombie apocalypse. Instead, I resigned myself to doing the best I could while her back was turned.

Despite the challenges our stroke of rebellion was presenting, I managed to squeeze the last sweater into the backpack before the girls settled down for bed. There had been a strange atmosphere in the dining hall when I had led them over for snack time; maybe it was the sudden realization of what I was planning to do, but a mild feeling of sadness had come over me when I looked over the ten girls bickering amongst themselves. They were in for a frantic morning the following day, when the directors would be rushing around, trying to find my replacement.

I almost felt sorry for them. Then, I remembered the look on Tasha's face as she had poured water all over the cookout campfire, and the feeling disappeared pretty quickly.

Once they were in bed, I retreated to my bedroom, shaking off Crystal with the excuse of needing an early night. It was only once I turned off the light and crawled, fully clothed, under the covers of my bottom bunk, that the reality of the situation began to set in. Seb and I were planning to run away in the middle of the night, sprinting into the unknown while leaving just as much uncertainty behind us. There was no telling how the directors would react; escapee staff were hardly something they bothered writing into the employee handbook. They wouldn't be able to reach us, not once we'd already made it as far as we could, but it was the parental aftershock that was slightly more concerning.

My mom had been mad plenty of times before, but that was on the level of breaking my curfew, or staying the night at Seb's without explicitly asking permission. Breaking out of the camp she'd forced me into was a level I was hardly ecstatic to reach.

It felt as if hours passed from then onward; the tinny voices from Crystal's laptop continued until the darkness grew pitch black outside. Eventually, there was shuffling above me, and she reached over to place her headphones on the upper shelf. A couple of seconds of battling with the sleeping bag, and the bedroom fell into silence.

I suddenly became aware of my nervous breaths, wondering if something so simple could end up being my downfall. Frozen beneath the covers, I hardly dared to move a muscle for fear of not hearing Seb outside. How was he going to get my attention? Surely he wouldn't be stupid enough to walk right in, but my best friend had also been known to do some dumb things in the time we'd been friends. He was, after all, the same person who'd once used Google Translate to write an essay for Spanish and not noticed his slip of the mouse, meaning he turned in a whole paper written in Swedish. Jolted by panic, I tried to push this from my mind and strained to listen even harder.

Another hour passed before the silence was broken. Against the backdrop of insects outside, I heard it just before one of Crystal's snores: a creak of the step outside. Just a tiny noise, not quite the weight of a whole foot, but enough to attract my attention.

With my heart feeling ready to burst from my chest, I extracted myself from the covers, trying to make as little noise as possible. I held my breath as I slipped my feet into the boots at the edge of my bed, tucking the laces inside so as not to waste time.

My rucksack was in the corner, bulging seams discreetly hidden by a blanket. I snatched up the bag, and, hoping Crystal was not the type of sleeper to be roused by footsteps, crept out of the room.

Risking the door to the kids' room was not an option; with the very real possibility of Tasha being awake and catching me in the act, I was not about to toy with fate. Instead, I slipped out of the back exit, emerging in the brisk night air and closing the door behind me.

Seb stood at the bottom of the stairs, his own rucksack slung over one shoulder, watching me with a slowly growing grin. By the time I reached the last step, it looked ready to split his entire face in half.

"Hey," he said quietly.

For some reason, the craziness of the situation chose that moment to hit me, and my own smile tugged insistently at the corners of my mouth. "Hey."

"You came."

My gaze met his, locking us both into place. "So did you."

"Well, you know me. Can't resist an adventure," he said, with which I had to agree. Honestly, with the length of Seb's usual attention span, it was a wonder they'd been able to keep him at camp for so long already. "You ready to get out of here?"

"Only from the moment I stepped off that bus."

Our eyes moved away then, and we both looked around at the same time, taking a moment to survey the surroundings. It was probably not wise to linger, especially as the steps of Squirrel Cabin were in plain sight of several others, but the reality of the idea was a whole lot more daunting when the moment now danced in front of us. Sure, it sounded great: a road trip to New York, the summer of a lifetime. Making it there, unaided, from a starting point in middle-of-nowhere Manitoba, sounded slightly more terrifying.

"You do know what we're doing," I said slowly, feeling it was necessary to check. "Right?"

"Of course." His tone was full of confidence, but it wasn't this I had the problem with; my best friend could provide an endless supply of the stuff. Slightly more concerning was exactly how much of it was justified.

Because, when it came down to it, I had no idea how much thought had been put into this. The idea had been thrown into the open just twenty-four hours ago, but I wasn't sure how long it had been simmering in the back of his mind. It could have been the product of weeks, a plan conjured up almost the minute we set foot onsite. Or, at least, I hoped that was the case. The alternative was a little harder to stomach.

"So where to?"

"Well, the obvious thing would be to head to the main entrance," Seb declared, which seemed to make sense. Back routes were more likely to go undetected, but also came with the very real risk of us being lost in the woods for days. "I've been looking up the area online, and it seems like we can follow the road right into town. That's the way the bus took us, anyway."

"Okay." I shifted my rucksack on my shoulder; the weight was already starting to drag me down, and I didn't like to think about what it had in store for me for the rest of the night. If I made it to the morning without turning into a cripple, I would have to consider it a success. "And how long is this road?"

The look on his face hardly filled me with optimism. "Pretty long," he said bracingly. "We should be able to make it into town by morning."

"Morning?" I realized too late my voice had escaped significantly louder than our previous whispering, instantly clapping a hand to my mouth. Glancing over my shoulder, I scanned for any sign of movement amongst the trees from nearby cabins, but nothing seemed to be out of place. If we were lucky, everybody was sound asleep. "Come on, let's get out of here. This feels way too exposed."

Seb nodded, and together, we set off on the trail that led out of the cabin area. Following the path would take us toward the main camp, where the dining hall sat, opposite the gated entrance. We couldn't get there fast enough.

"So," I said, once judging us to be a safe enough distance away from the cabins to go unheard, "you were saying. We're going to be walking all night. Is that going to be a regular occurrence on this trip? Because when I said I wanted to go to New York, I didn't mean I wanted to hike there."

Seb just laughed. "Don't worry. That's not exactly what I had in mind."

I let out a sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God. I'm definitely not fit enough for that."

"There's a bus station in town," he said. "I already looked it up. If all goes to plan, we should make it there by morning, buy tickets and head off as soon as possible. That way, when everybody here realizes we're gone, we should be far enough away to stop worrying."

"And where are we getting a bus to?"

At this point, he looked over, expression plastered with a knowing smile I didn't like the look of. "Don't worry about it."

"Don't worry about it?" I echoed incredulously. Far enough from the cabins, it felt a little safer to talk louder than in whispers. The directors slept on the other side of the site, and in this middle ground, our voices would easily get swallowed up by the trees. "Are you really telling me that? We're breaking out of camp in the middle of the night, about to set out on a walk that's going to take us until morning, trying to end up a thousand miles away, and you're saying don't worry?"

Seb held up his hands in mock surrender, although he was still smiling. "Okay, okay. Bad choice of words. What I mean is, I'm the one who got you into this. It was my idea. I don't want you to have to worry yourself sick about how we're going to manage it, because we will. Just leave the navigating to me."

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you want that kind of responsibility?"

He shrugged. "Why not?"

"Well, not to bring up any horrific memories, but you were the kid who got lost for the whole afternoon on that middle school orienteering trip. Because, as you later admitted, you were just pretending to know how a compass worked."

A rumble of laughter escaped him. "Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Still, I had a pretty fun afternoon by myself. It got me out of those stupid team building games you had to do, so I'd actually consider it pretty successful."

I shook my head. "That doesn't exactly overwhelm me with confidence for the trip."

Seb waved his hand dismissively. "We'll be fine. Probably."

There was no time to debate this; our footsteps were slowing, and I realized the dining hall had come into view around the corner. The kitchen staff were long off duty, meaning the place was silent, but it still felt a lot riskier to be lurking around than anywhere near the cabins. Here, we would need impossibly good excuses to explain away our midnight wanderings, not to mention the bulging bags on our shoulders.

All it took was a few more steps, and the main entrance came into view. The mere sight had a strange feeling washing over me, like a single shiver of nerves running head to toe. Only once this had passed did I notice the obvious.

"Is that gate always locked at night?"

I had never paid much attention before. All the times we'd been anywhere near the camp entrance, it was either arrival or departure days, when the large wooden gates were thrown open to let busloads of campers in and out. It had never occurred to me that this wasn't always the case, that security reasons meant the site was closed to the public out of hours.

Seb stopped in his tracks, staring at the gate with a look of someone hitting the first hurdle in their plan. "Ah," he said, brows knitting together in a frown. "I may have forgotten about that."

I glanced over. "You still sure about the responsibility of being chief navigator?"

And yet he remained unfazed, in the true Seb spirit of ever-present optimism. "Completely. We might just have to do a bit of improvising."

This hardly carried an explanation, which had me worried. Seb's adventurous tendencies were story starters, sure, but never came with the guarantee things would actually work. The gates stood intimidatingly tall, looped together with a secure metal lock. One thing was for certain: without the key, we were never getting past it.

Which, really, left just one option: one that became a little too real when Seb approached the gate and lifted his foot up onto the first wooden beam, testing its strength.

"You're not serious," was all I could manage.

Balanced on one foot, the other shaking the gate, Seb glanced over his shoulder. "Have you got a better idea?"

"We can't climb that thing!" It seemed obvious in my head, too crazy to even warrant consideration, and yet in the space between Seb and I, my argument sounded a lot less convincing. "Don't they have security cameras or something around here? Or at least some kind of alarm system? We're going to get caught."

He turned around, quickly surveying the area for any obvious security measures. "No cameras. And I'm pretty sure the alarm certain is only set off if somebody tries to enter a building. I got talking to one of the security guys on the staff bus." Pulling his foot back down, he motioned for me to move closer. "You want a leg up?"

I couldn't climb to save my life; this was something I'd worked out in the first week of camp, when a group of staff went down to the rock wall to try it out one evening. I had been the worst of the lot, barely making it halfway before deciding it was too terrifying and demanding to be lowered down. Maybe this would have been less embarrassing if, the next week, every single girl in my cabin had not made it to the top first time.

As much as I was terrified of falling and breaking my neck, especially with the lack of a safety harness the rock wall had at least offered, I had little choice in the matter. Either I climbed the gate and got it over with, or I skulked back to my cabin with the thought of the upcoming two months ringing in my head.

Really, it had to prove how terrible camp was that I moved toward Seb.

"Ready?" he asked, as I placed my foot onto his cupped hands.

"Please don't drop me," I begged, and his laughter was the last thing I heard before I pulled my other leg up, swinging it up to the highest beam of the gate. My other leg quickly went over the edge, until I realized, with a nauseating jolt of the stomach, that I was straddling the top of it.

"That's it! Now down the other side!" I heard Seb call.

It really was that simple, and yet I found myself frozen in position; the top of the gate appeared so much higher when I was balanced on top of it. My huge rucksack, ready to topple me over with the slightest gust of wind, hardly made things better. With my heart in my throat, it was a wonder I had not yet thrown up.

"I can't do this," I called back down, suddenly panicked. "I'm going to fall and break my neck."

"Throw your backpack down the other side," he told me. "You'll balance better."

Though I was half-convinced this would be the struggle that finished me off, his advice did sound sensible, so I began wrestling with the shoulder straps in an attempt to wriggle free of the heavy bag. Once out of its constraint, I let it drop on the other side of the gate, waiting for the thump as it hit the grass below.

I felt more evenly balanced, but my heart was still pounding, showing no signs of letting up any time soon. Seb appeared to sense my panic; seconds later, the gate wobbled, and I looked down to see him mounting the wooden beam alongside me.

"Nice weather up here, isn't it?" he said conversationally, catching my eye for a moment before executing a perfect drop to the ground. It was almost like he'd practiced.

I, on the other hand, was automatically terrible at anything involving coordination. It was probably why I sucked at every camp activity. "Now you're just showing off," I told him, trying to stop my hands from trembling as they gripped the top of the gate.

"Just close your eyes and jump," Seb coaxed from below. "I'm right here. If you fall, I'll try catching you. I mean, you're totally not going to, but just in case."

"You really think you can catch me from up here?"

"Why not?" Looking up, he made a big show of flexing his muscles. "I'm big and strong, aren't I?"

I kind of wanted to point out that big was slightly optimistic; my being taller than average and his being on the short side put us at almost exactly the same height. Most of the time, it made me feel awkward; my limbs felt too long and gangly to be girly, and heels were out of the question if I didn't feel like towering above everybody else. Still, my height had its perks when it came to patting Seb on the head and watching his face fall.

"No comment," I said, mostly because straddling the top of a gate in the middle of a midnight getaway seemed the wrong place for short jokes. "Fine. I'll jump. But I'm blaming you if I die."

Somewhere below me, Seb chuckled, but the sound barely registered against the thumping of my heart. The gate was hardly the CN Tower, and yet it certainly felt like it, with the night breeze rushing past my ears. Falling from this height could surely do some damage; broken limbs had to be a possibility...

But I couldn't think about that. Trying to push all pessimistic thoughts from my mind, including Seb carrying me piggyback-style to the nearest hospital, I took a deep breath. And I went for it.

I landed on my feet, which had to be a good thing, although the resounding impact seemed to shockwave up through my entire body. At first, I stumbled, threatening to teeter off balance before a pair of arms wrapped around me.

"Steady," Seb said, holding on for a few seconds before letting me go. "See. No casualties. No premature deaths."