Carol is a true friend.

Joanna will not slam her head on the table, but she will delicately and gracefully allow it to rest on the table.  "Soph, what do I do?  This is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, and he is smart, he is sensitive, he is funny, he is completely obsessed with me and I want to be obsessed with him but I just - " She waggles her fingers a little, to gesture at flailing her arms in frustration without whacking anyone in the head.

Yeah, Sophie knew this was coming.

People ask her for advice all the time and she honestly doesn't know why.  All she ever says, just about, is "At the beginning you said you thought you knew what you should do, and you're right, you should do that", or "You should go to that other person and tell them what you told me", or sometimes "Wait a few days and see if this still seems like such a big deal".  Joanna's problem today obviously wants Solution #2, like most of her problems do.  She reaches over and pats Joanna's hand sympathetically.

"Did you tell him you didn't like the fireworks?  Does he know you had a bad time?"

Aw, look at that little smile!  Joanna is an amazing friend.  She leaves her head lying on the table.  "I mean I didn't tell him but I think he knows, I wasn't trying that hard to hide it and the ride back was so awkward, I wanted to die.  He texted me this morning just saying he had a great time and I read it, it has a read receipt, I have to text him back."

Carol reaches over and pats Joanna's other hand.  "A rookie mistake."

"I knoooooow!  I was flustered!"

"It's ok, you can fix this.  Don't tell him you had a great time, because you didn't.  Just tell him that you like him," Sophie doesn't know why she bothers saying that, no one ever listens to her when she suggests it, which is weird because it worked out great when she tried it, "or if that's too much, just tell him you want to go on another date and suggest something you actually want to do.  Once you've been out a few times you can tell him you hate fireworks, and then it won't be a big deal because things are more settled, it'll just be a funny story the two of you have."  Let's see, does she know something Joanna would actually want to -- ah.  "There's this sushi place that opened in Epping, I think you'd like it.  I went there with my parents once."  That last sentence is so close to being true!

She looks up from the table, just a little.  "I've never had real sushi, just that takeout stuff they have by the Rite-Aid."

"That doesn't count.  You'll like the real thing, I promise."

"Okay then.  Plan decided.  Thanks, Soph, you're a lifesaver."  She pushes herself back up into a sitting position, and pulls out her phone.  "How...about...next...time...we...get...dinner?  My...friend...says...the...sushi...place...in...Epping...is...good...want...to...try...it?  Smilie face.  No!  Kissing face!  And send!"  She gets the "message not delivered" notification, but Raymond is like that; it'll get through eventually.

"And just like that, the heroine was saved from a lifetime of tinnitis."  Carol wants to do more than just throw in sarcastic remarks but it's early, sarcasm is all she's got.

Sophie laughs anyway.  What are friends for?

Everyone eats their fill, and then a little more just because, and the morning naturally evolves into small knots of friends talking to each other.  This is the town passtime, and over the centuries they've gotten pretty good at it.  The adults congregate in the school cafeteria; the kids, who spend way too much time in school as it is, are naturally drawn to the grassy fields around the parking lot.  The wind is still intense, but it's not cold; if anything the breeze is weirdly warm.  The clouds are starting to pile up in the northern sky, but nothing's actually hit yet; you just have to pop your ears from time to time.  A lot of the younger are running around yelling, as younger kids do.  Against that backdrop, it isn't immediately obvious that anything's wrong when Emily Merrill goes charging through the undergrowth into the forest that surrounds the school.  Sophie might be the only one who even notices her.

It takes Sophie a minute to realize that this is is an opportunity, and another minute to talk herself into doing anything with it.  If you can't do something smart... she's on her feet before she really knows she's planning to move.  "Cover for me if my dad comes looking?  I just have something I have to do real quick."  She starts walking away before her friends can ask any awkward questions, like "Huh?", or "Where?", or "Why?"

Carol doesn't like the look of those clouds but obviously she'll support whatever this is.

Joanna would probably approve of this if she understood it, sure.

It should be calmer inside the dense New England forest than on the open field, but it's not; somehow the tree trunks just break up the gusts enough that they can hit Sophie from every possible angle.  There's no sign of Emily.  No birds or squirrels, either.  Everything sensible is under cover.

Well, that's what she signed up for, isn't it.

Her plan here isn't totally insane, she doesn't think.  She may not know where Emily is but she bets she knows where she's going: back to her house, two doors down from Sophie's, cutting across Flint Hill instead instead of going around its three sides.  Sophie's done that plenty of times.  Teachers hate it when you do this but it's not like Flint Hill is dangerous: it's barely a mile across and half of that is hiking trails, so it's not like you can get lost, and aside from the river and a couple of little cliffs there aren't really any ways to hurt yourself.  Her own dad thinks it's fine.  It's fine.

Anyway, Sophie is also taller than Emily is, so the plan is to follow her same path, but faster, help her with whatever problem sent her out here, and then tell her her brother isn't dead hint that things might be better than they seem honestly describe her subjective sense as best she can she'll have to figure it out in the moment, apparently.

There aren't any trails on the west side of the hill but it's still not difficult, and Sophie can spend a few minutes jogging through the underbrush without any real problems.  The wind does keep trying to blow her around, and it's pretty dark under the trees, but Sophie's done this hundreds of times.

Then, suddenly, there's a sharp crack of thunder, almost directly overhead, and a rattling sound in the leaves.  A pea-sized hailstone smacks Sophie in the eye, blown up at her by another stray gust.

OW!

Okay, new simpler plan: just find Emily and get her back to the school.  They can have their heart-to-heart someplace with a roof.

How nice, she has a little while longer to figure out what to say.  In the meantime, she'll just keep following her route home, yelling "Emily!  EMILY!"

The hail and wind get more and more intense; it's like shouting out of a moving car.  Emily doesn't respond.  After few iterations of this Sophie hears herself think, "She's off to the left a little more, under the big tree on the other side of that slope!  Hurry, she might be hurt!"

Absolutely not.  Sophie knows exactly what her mental voice sounds like, that definitely wasn't it.  She doesn't have any kind of guess at all about what it was, but it wasn't that.

Rather than do what the mystery voice says she will stop, look around behind her, and try to figure out what she heard.

Behind her, about twenty feet away and mostly concealed behind a big pine tree, is a smallish black bear.  Well, small for a bear; it probably weighs about three hundred pounds and it's taller than Sophie when it's standing on its hind legs, like it is right now.  Its expression, if you trust your ability to read bear expressions, is pure panic.  It begins to back away, still on its hind legs, forepaws waving frantically.

Sophie hears herself think, "That's not a dangerous kind of bear!  There's no reason to worry about it!  Just go help your friend!"

...does it, by any chance, look like a human wearing a bear suit?

All bears kinda look like humans wearing bear suits.  This one no more than most, though.