The midday sun beat down on the backs of the students in the field school and threatened to dry up even Elliott’s endless well of patience. The air cracked and shimmered with heat and the only sounds were the endless buzz of cicadas, the gentle scratching of excavation tools spread out through the side, and the occasional grunt of a student hauling off another bucket of soil. Elliott was digging and hauling too, occasionally doing a round to check her students’ progress and technique. She was extremely proud of this particular cohort’s endurance and energy during this record-breaking summer scorcher. They had made a lot of progress on the dig in just two weeks and each individual showed a lot of promise.
Elliott looked up from her work and wiped her forehead with the back of a dirty glove. Her ever-present wide-brimmed hat and wet handkerchief did very little to keep her cool, but she was savoring every moment of getting to teach on a terrestrial site. During this field school, she was only required to dive on the weekends, and she was making the most of her time in the sun with the students. She checked her watch, stood up, and called out “Hydration break!”.
A dozen sets of tools plunked down simultaneously and a dozen grateful students paused to stretch their sore muscles and started to head to the wide tent that covered their coolers. Parts of the dig were covered too, but it wasn’t enough to keep everyone in the shade. In weather like this, it was absolutely essential that everyone take a rest and water break every hour. These were hardy young people, true, but they were mostly Scandinavian and more adept at withstanding the cold, not the soaring temperatures of this historic heatwave. Elliott was vaguely aware that there had been some sort of festivity last night amongst her young team, and several of them were clearly a bit hungover. She may play the part of the stern headmistress at field school, but Elliott knew firsthand what it was like to endure a day of digging with a hangover and was more sympathetic than they knew.
Elliott was particularly worried about one of the girls, a slight blonde named Kris, who had complained of nausea and a headache early on. As the rest of the group headed to the break tent, Kris had started to lag behind. Elliott noticed and waited for her.
“How are you, Kris? Is it your stomach again?”
“Yes,” she responded in a strange voice, “it really hurts. But I’m strong now. Pain is a path.”
“Are you on your period? Do you need to lie down for a while? You know if you have endo or fibroids we’ll make arrangements. You can tell me what it is, I promise.” Elliott was alarmed to see that Kris was sweating far more than she ought to be. Her hair was soaked through and her shirt was clinging to her frame. Plus, she wasn’t making any sense.
“No. It’s nothing. I’ll be fine. I feel fine. I even feel a little cool now, see?” Kris chuckled with a labored breath and raised her arm for Elliott to see. Her skin was indeed showing some goosebumps, but she looked like she was about to pass out. “Oh,” she spoke again, “Seeing some spots now. Oops.”
“Kris, stop. Sit down. I need you to listen very carefully. You’re overheated and we’re going to fix it.” Elliott began to fan Kris with her hat and yelled ahead to the group, “Jan! Andrew! Help me!”
The two young men carried Kris to the tent while Elliott stripped off her shoes and socks and poured her water bottle over the younger girl's feet. They laid her gently on the ground. Elliott was eerily calm in her crisis management.
“Jan, please continue fanning. Andrew, find something to elevate her feet on. Josie, come here and sponge this entire bottle onto Kris’ head, neck and stomach. Here’s a cloth. There you go, good girl. Kris, sweetheart, I need you to drink some water.”
“No…” Kris smiled weakly, “I don’t need it. I’m strong now.”
“That’s right, sweetheart, you’re very strong,” crooned Elliott, unnerved by Kris’ resistance, “and this will make you even stronger.”
“Pain is a path,” she repeated, but gulped down a mouthful from the bottle Elliott held to her lips.
“This shouldn’t be happening to me,” she choked as tears started to well up in her eyes.
She was becoming more agitated, so Elliott said, “This is also part of the path. It has happened to everyone. I promise. Now drink.”
That evening, she and Pike were sprawled out in Elliott’s living room, greedily soaking up the breeze from the box fan on the table.
“You probably saved the little idiot’s life, you know,” Pike said.
“Maybe,” answered Elliott tiredly.
The paramedics had said the same thing to her and asked how she learned to recognize and treat heat exhaustion.
“Just common sense,” she’d lied. In truth, it was something she had learned from Heath, the college boyfriend who she’d been madly in love with. The one who’d suddenly dumped her after two months, dropped out of school, and moved to Costa Rica to work at a zip-line ecotourism resort. The one who’d left her humiliated and heartbroken. She wasn’t about to tell Pike or the unnervingly good-looking paramedics any of that.
“Seriously,” Pike continued, “that was really quick thinking with the shoes thing. I didn’t even know that. You’re grace under fire. Literally. You probably saved her from having a stroke. Protected what few brain cells she even has. She really hadn’t eaten anything all day?”
“Nope, nothing.” Josie, who shared a room with Kris, had tearfully confessed to Elliott later that Kris had been acting really strange in the last week and that she had stopped joining them for meals.
“Fucking idiot,” Pike sighed slowly. “New rule: no more anorexics at field school.”
“I’m not so sure that’s what it is,” Elliott said. “She doesn't have any of the other signs, and her friends from school say she’s small but that she eats like any other person. They said she drinks beer and likes gross bar-food like the rest of them. They all acted like this no-eating thing was completely new. Plus, she was spouting off the craziest nonsense, you should have heard her. Things like ‘pain is a path’ and talking about how strong she was and she kept saying ’this shouldn’t be happening to me’ and that ‘he said I was strong now’ and then she just started babbling in Swedish. Jan said that she was begging to be taken to ‘him’ to be healed, but he didn’t know what she was talking about either. What was all that about? Who is ‘he’? What’s so special about Kris that she thinks she’s immune to heat exhaustion?”
“Hmm…” Pike considered, “that all still sound like mental illness to me.”
“I agree, but anorexia? This seemed more like some sort of paranoid delusion. She seemed to be genuinely confused by the idea that her body needed food and water to continue functioning. What could have happened to her that she was that far removed from reality?” Elliott was frustrated by having only small pieces of what seemed like a larger picture.
“Well, I suppose the only way to find out is to talk to her about it,” said Pike, “Now, I am going to go into your kitchen and I am going to use every bit of your ice to fix you a gin and tonic and you can do nothing about it. You saved a moron's life today, and we are celebrating.”
Elliott smiled at her loyal friend gratefully. What had she done to deserve the love of this fearsome woman?
The next day, Elliott wandered over to the students’ dormitory. She had given them the day off from the dig, but instructed them to each do some first aid research with threats of an actual quiz the following day. While none of them had panicked yesterday, they hadn’t known what to do either, which was just as dangerous in Elliott’s view. She knocked on the door to the girls’ room and was greeted by Josie. She was surprised to see that Kris was not in bed resting as she’d expected, and that in fact she wasn’t in the room at all.
“Where’s Kris?” she blurted to Josie.
Josie looked confused and said, “She left this morning. I thought you knew. Well, we all thought you did it, actually.”
“Did what?” asked Elliott.
“Well, Nik came to talk to Kris last night. She was crying when she came back in and said that she’d violated the contract and had to leave. She packed last night and left this morning. I though she meant the part in the field school terms about ‘maintaining our health and following safety guidelines at all times’ but she wouldn’t tell me anything else. I’m sorry, I really thought you told Nik to kick her out.” Josie started to look uncomfortable at the realization that there were clearly some kind of tense politics going on above her that she didn’t understand.
“Of course not. She made a mistake, it happens sometimes,” Elliott felt her temperature rising. "I’m going to talk to Nik about this. She shouldn’t have gone anywhere for several days- she should have just been resting. And he had no right to kick a student off of my dig. I’m calling a dinner meeting for tonight. Let the others know,” she snapped and stalked off to find her boss.