Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

peaks from down here. He’d been unnerved at the start, fearing they were going out on some sort of mountain-goat trail where a fall would be your death—even the highway had felt like that; he’d had to pretend he was asleep to keep from watching the switchbacks, with all the other kids awake and talking and laughing about it—but so far the trail hadn’t been bad. Had been, honestly, pretty cool. And he felt safer out here, which was strange. Up in the mountains, he had the sense that nobody was going to sneak up on them. Certainly not on Ethan Serbin, who seemed to notice every out-of-place pine needle. So he was feeling pretty good, pretty secure, and then the loud kid started calling him by his new name, and he didn’t respond.
    By the fourth time Marco yelled the name, they were all watching him. Even Ethan seemed interested. Jace felt a panicking sensation that he’d blown it already, they were onto him, and he’d been reminded time and again that this was the only way it could go bad up here in the mountains. If he let anyone know the truth, let anyone know he wasn’t who he was pretending to be, that was when the men from the quarry would arrive. He thought of them now and heard their voices in place of Marco’s and as the panic rose, it brought with it the realization that he had to explain this somehow, come up with a reason he was ignoring this kid. He couldn’t just say he was distracted or hadn’t heard him. It wasn’t enough. He had to play his role.
    “If I wanted to talk to you,” Jace said, staring right at Marco, “I would.”
    Marco pulled his head back, eyes wide. “The fuck? Hey, man, I—”
    “Stop it!” Ethan Serbin thundered. “Both of you, stop talking. Now. And you’re going to owe me for the language, Marco. You’ll enjoy that once we get back to camp. Hope you like gathering firewood. You can call the logs whatever you’d like.”
    “Man, this kid—”
    Ethan held a hand up, silencing him. Everyone was still staring at Jace, and he felt exposed but tried to keep a tough expression, tried to look like what he was supposed to be: a problem kid with a bad attitude, worse than the rest of them. If he was the worst, they’d leave him alone.
    “Connor? What’s your problem today? Is there a reason you feel the need to disrespect your friends?”
    Got to stick with it, Jace told himself, even though he hated acting the part in front of Ethan Serbin, who had this powerful way of showing disappointment through silence that reminded Jace of his dad. And Jace had to please his dad, because his father worked long hours and he worked in pain and he took pills to help but they never did. Jace had learned early that the more he did on his own, the more problems he fixed by himself, the better. It wasn’t that his dad was mean, or angry all the time. It was that life hadn’t been kind to him, so Jace tried to be.
    So while the Jace half of him said, Please, Ethan, the Connor half of him said, Give him what he thinks you are, and Jace was smart enough to listen to that half.
    “He’s not my friend. We’re not up here because we’re friends. Or because we want to be. Everybody knows that.”
    It sounded good to him, sounded right. Fit the part, fit the part. That had been his dad’s advice. Of course, a key element of fitting the part was remembering your own name.
    “All right,” Ethan Serbin said. “It’s not your choice. I remember being deployed in more than a few places that weren’t my choice either. And in a survival scenario, Connor? You think it’ll be your choice if a plane goes down? Will that be anybody’s choice? ”
    Jace shook his head.
    “So we work with what we have,” Ethan continued. “That’s true with the elements, the weather, supplies, all of it. Certainly, it’s true with your companions. You work with who you have. Not friends yet? Fine. Maybe you will be. Maybe not. But one thing we can’t tolerate—because in a different situation it could