"Wait, what am I doing here?" I stopped dead in the middle of a clearing, "And why am I asking myself? I don't know the answer any better than I do. Oh jeez, I must be going insane. These woods are doing weird things to my head, and I don't even know how I got in here in the first place. First things first, I need to stop talking to myself."
I glanced around the clearing. It was nothing but a thick arsenal of ancient trees surrounding me, blocking out all light other than a wash of sun filtering through the overhead leaves. I wondered if I was going the right way, not that I had any idea which way would get me out of here.
I continued to walk. The trees were getting thicker and gnarly roots spread across the near existent trail at my feet, forcing me to clamber over branches and diverge deeper into the woods where the path became blocked entirely. Now I was even more lost than before. In fact, I had the feeling I'd been in this patch of trees already. I was going in circles! My legs flopped down and I settled myself on a stump, head in hands, trying to think of what to do next.
"Hey." a voice behind me and I snapped upright again, swivelling around to face them. It was a boy, tall and thin and wearing a blue cape and red cone hat. "Are you lost?" he stepped out from the trees and stopped several feet away. A lantern hung from his right hand. "What's your name?"
"Uh, it's- uhh…" my tongue felt like it was in a knot, "Megan."
The boy in the red cone hat smiled and raised his lantern to his face as he strode gracefully over a high tendril of tree root, "Well, where are you trying to get to? Perhaps I can help."
I stared at him. The light from his lantern fell on his face, which looked friendly enough, but I could see there was something else in his eyes. Was it sadness, or more like sympathy. A few small tufts of brown hair lay on his forehead and by his ears. From my guess, he was at that awkward not-a-teenager-not-an-adult age. In other words, older than me.
"Megan, are you alright?"
"Uh yeah. Yeah I'm fine, just um, well. Where am I?" my words came out so quickly that I doubted the boy caught any of it, "I mean, I'm really lost."
"Don't worry." the boy grinned, "It's easy to get lost in this forest. Come with me, let's get you where you need to be."
And so I followed the boy in the blue cape and red cone hat through the forest.