Until It Hurts to Stop

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Nick moves up the rock, finding ripples and notches, sometimes using his hands at the steeper spots. Behind us the void yawns; the wind howls out of it. I take an extra minute to gather myself before I follow Nick.

  Every step takes me higher into uncertainty, higher into the unknown. My legs and fingers tremble. I’ve never felt this scared on a trail before—not even in the rain last week. I search inside myself for the inner steel I’ll need to make this climb, for the joy I’ve felt on trails before. I think of those T-shirts from my dad’s company. And how, at the moment, I’m not feeling my Mid-Regional POWER.

  A hawk shrieks, its voice bouncing off the walls of rock, its screech like a cold talon slicing down the back of my neck.

  Don’t slip, I tell myself, my mouth dry.

  And now I can’t stop thinking about slipping, tumbling down the trail. Flying off the mountain, crashing all the way to the valley floor.

  All the mistakes I could make, all the missteps I must not take, fight for attention in my head—so many of them that I have no brain cells left for climbing.

  I stop and hold on to the rock, my stomach feeling like I’ve swallowed live frogs. And for all the air up here, I can’t get any into my lungs.

  I’m stuck.

  “Maggie!” Nick calls. He’s somewhere above me, but I can’t look up. I can’t look anywhere but at the rock right in front of my face. I fix on it, convinced that this is the only thing keeping me alive. If I look away, I’ll die.

  “Maggie, you okay?”

  I close my eyes.

  I know this feeling of utter helplessness—I had it every day back in junior high—but it’s never happened on a trail before. I’ve always been able to talk myself through tough spots. Right now my inner voice only screams, We’re gonna die!!! Which is not helping at all.

  Boots scrape against rock, the sounds descending toward me. Nick must be coming back.

  “What’s wrong?” He’s right above me now.

  “I can’t move,” I say, my voice high and thin.

  “Why? Are you hurt?”

  “No, it’s—vertigo or something.”

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  I want to believe him. But my hands and feet cling to the mountain as if magnetized.

  “Can you move one of your feet?” he asks.

  “No,” I pant.

  “Just one foot.”

  I open my eyes. With three of my limbs hanging on to the mountain, I move my right foot. My throat closes when that foot leaves solid ground, but when I put my foot down again, a little higher than it was before, I think, Okay, I can move now.

  “Now one hand,” Nick says.

  My right hand inches up, confidence trickling back into my veins. And then a gust of wind hits us, blowing my hair into my face.

  I close my eyes. The hawk screams again, and I can’t control my limbs. The voice in my head switches back to, You can’t do this! You can’t!

  “You’re doing fine,” Nick says. A lie. But I love him for that lie.

  He climbs down beside me and rests a hand on my back, which is soaked in sweat.

  Panic clutches the controls of my brain, jerks the steering wheel. “I have to go down. Now.” Something in me kicks loose, and my limbs move.

  I finally break free of the mountain—not to climb upward, but to retreat.

  I scramble down the slope on legs that don’t feel fully connected to my body. “Maggie, hold on,” Nick calls. And since I’ve hit a flat spot, I wait. But some internal clock urges me to escape, as if there’s a time bomb buried on Crystal. I twist my body to face him, but my feet are still pointed down the mountain.

  “We can do this climb,” he says. “Take a breath. We can go as slow as you want.”

  “I need to get down.” I raise my hand to brush a loose strand of hair from my face, and nearly poke myself in the eye.

  His eyes follow my trembling fingers, and he doesn’t say any more. He follows me down.

  “What happened up there?” Nick asks when we’re back at his car, standing by the open doors, waiting for the pent-up heat to dissipate.

  “I don’t know.” I can hear the tears in my voice, and I tamp them down. All I need, to lose any last scrap of self-respect, is to start blubbering. It’s not like I broke a leg. “It was a—panic attack or something.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” How can I explain the swirling inside my brain? The feeling of isolation, the sense that I’d lost half my hiking team? Nick is here with me. Even if a piece of his mind seems to be with Vanessa, it’s unfair of me to resent that. And how can I explain that the shrieks of the hawk felt like judgment, sounded like a voice screaming that I couldn’t do it— exactly like every other screaming voice I carry in my head?

  Nick’s staring at me, but I can’t meet his eyes. “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  Nick slides into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. I get in, and we roll down the windows. The car is a hand-me-down from Perry, and the air-conditioning is broken.

  “So we have a little glitch in our mountain-climbing plan,” I say, trying to be cheerful. “The glitch of me not being able to climb a mountain.” I raise my water bottle for a sip.

  “You’ll do it. You made it up Eagle, right? Crystal will just take practice. Lots of people don’t make it on the first try.”

  First try? I nearly choke on my water as I realize: good Lord, he expects me to go up there again.

  Hiking is one of the few things I’m good at, one of the few things I know how to do. Even before I met Nick and Perry, I already loved the patch of woods behind my house. I knew trees better than I knew people. I would stroke the chalky white bark of birches, and marvel at how trembling aspens really did tremble. After the mitten-shaped leaves of sassafras turned scarlet in the fall, I pressed them between dictionary pages.

  When Perry brought us out onto the trails, I discovered a new home outdoors—with rock and waterfalls, secret pockets of ferns and moss. The back country has always been a good place, a place I belong.

  Until today, it’s never thrown me a challenge I couldn’t meet. I have to fight to keep from veiling my face with my own long hair, as if that could hide me from Nick, as if sheer willpower could make me disappear. Because even though he seems to think this is just a temporary setback, I’m not so sure. I don’t understand what’s happening to me, or what I can believe in now.

  sixteen

  When I get home from Crystal, I head down to the basement to work on the wooden box I’m making for Dad’s birthday.

  A couple of days ago, I put on the hinges. Now I open and close the lid, marveling at the smoothness of the motion. The lid isn’t crooked; the hinges don’t balk or wiggle. I made one of these for my piano teacher when he stopped teaching me, as a good-bye present, and that time it took me forever to get the hinges right. At least there’s something in the world that I’m getting better at.

  Thinking of my piano teacher reminds me of what he used to tell me when I had trouble with a piece of music: go slow, break it down, practice it over and over.

  And then I realize that’s exactly what Nick was coaching me to do, when he told me to move one foot at a time, one hand at a time. If I’d stayed with it, if I hadn’t insisted on turning around, would I have broken through?

  Maybe. I’m not sure I could have forced myself to stay in that terror. Even now, with no mountain under my feet, nervousness tickles the back of my throat, threatens to trigger my gag reflex. I swallow.

  I send Sylvie a series of texts describing my panic on Crystal, asking what’s wrong with me, asking if she thinks I’ll get over it. When she doesn’t answer, I call her.

  “Oh—Maggie,” she says. “I got your messages. I’m sorry you had such a bad day.”

  I launch into the story again, trying to make her understand the height and steepness of the rock, the close
ness of the edge, the power of the wind. She reassures me, says all the right things, but her voice is thin and uncertain, distracted. “Are you busy?” I ask her.

  “Sorry, I’m—kind of—upset. I had a fight with Wendy last night.” She laughs uneasily. “It was so ridiculous.”

  “What about?”

  “Honestly? It was like—whatever I said all night bothered her. She wasn’t happy with anything. But the actual fight was about whether a dessert fork goes on the left side of the plate or at the top of the plate. My cousin’s caterer had put the forks on the left, and—well, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “I know, right? It’s insane. I wish I knew what’s wrong with her lately.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “Of course! She keeps saying there’s nothing wrong, that she just has a lot of homework and a lot of commitments.”

  “I’m sure it’ll blow over. Maybe she had a headache or a test coming up, or something.” I can’t really understand why Sylvie is worried. Everything has a way of working out for her; everyone loves her. She’s been with Wendy for more than six months, and they’re perfect together. Unlike some people I could name, Wendy did not avoid her for two days after their first kiss, did not leap gratefully on a “let’s be friends instead” message. It’s going to take a lot more than dessert forks to tear them apart. “It’ll work out.”

  Sylvie sighs. “I hope so.”

  “So listen, do you think I’ll get over this panic attack or whatever it was?” I ask, and we talk about that for a few more minutes before hanging up.

  My mind is not on colleges, but at dinner Mom reminds me she’s waiting for my list of the ones I want to visit this year. “I’ve started looking,” I say. “But I don’t have a list yet.”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “Relax, Mom, we have time.” I wish Dad were here—he might act as a buffer between us, get her to ease up a little. Remind her that it’s only September of my junior year. But he’s working late, tending the grid again.

  She clanks the serving spoon into the dish of macaroni and cheese. “You need to get on this, Maggie. There are travel arrangements to make, and time off isn’t always easy for me to get, with my work schedule.”

  “I k now.”

  “Maybe you should make a table or a database, with all the pros and cons of the different schools.” That is undoubtedly what she would do. Her eyes glow like Christmas lights when she says the word database.

  I can’t tell her I’ve been distracted by Nick and the whole kissing fiasco, or by watching Raleigh for signs that she might threaten me. As much as Mom wants me to be involved in social life at school, she’s always said that grades come first. She would tell me to keep my brain where it belongs.

  “Aren’t you looking forward to it?” she says. “This is the most exciting time of your life. So many new changes coming. So many opportunities.” She gazes at the cabinets as if they’re screens showing reruns of her own years at nursing school.

  I’ve heard all about those days: how she would go to classes, work for a plumbing business in the afternoons, and study at night. When she started doing shifts at the hospital, she was often on her feet for twenty-four hours or more. “It felt like the bones were coming right through the bottoms of my feet,” she’s told me. She lived in a dorm, surviving on ramen noodles and tuna, hanging her wet clothes on a line strung across the room instead of paying to use the dryers in the laundry room. “Every time I crossed the room, I’d end up slapping myself in the head with a soggy bra or towel,” she’s said, laughing. None of that sounds like fun to me, but she loves to reminisce. Maybe she’s just proud of having survived it. When she gets together with friends from nursing school, their laughter fills the house. “Remember how old McLaughlin always tried to mess us up during the practical exams?” “And how Lily passed out the first time she had to give an injection?” “Remember when Katie singed off her eyebrows in organic chemistry?” Taking care of sick people, saving lives, and backing up new doctors in training has made them unshakable. They all have that capable-warrior look, as if they could handle the apocalypse with nothing more than a screwdriver, some duct tape, and a plastic bag or two.

  “I struggled so much to pay for nursing school,” Mom says now, over the macaroni. “I want you to have an easier ride, if we can manage it. Scholarships, maybe, instead of so many loans.”

  “I’m keeping my grades up.”

  “I know, but Phoebe and I were talking to some of the other nurses today. They say good grades aren’t enough for colleges anymore. You need activities, too.”

  “I did that internship last summer. I hike, I play the piano—”

  “I mean organized activities. Clubs and sports teams. Phoebe and I notice that you and Nick don’t belong to those kinds of groups.”

  I imagine Nick’s mom must be having this same conversation with him right now. Except that Nick has the basketball team. And student council, too. Nick got elected as his homeroom rep last year because he was absent on the day they voted, and he got reelected this year because of inertia. Maybe at other schools the council matters, maybe the kids are into it and they do important things, but at our school the administration squashed the life out of the students ages ago, and the council has no power. All it means is that once a month Nick has to eat lunch in the council meeting. According to him, they argue over such fascinating issues as whether to hold two School Spirit Days a year, as they always have, or take the bold move of upping that to three.

  Also, he says they sometimes fight over nuances in Robert’s Rules of Order.

  “Six hours of school and three hours of homework are enough,” I say. “My days are too long already.” And that’s true, but it’s not even the biggest reason I’ve never joined a club. Clubs and teams are like the worst parts of school, magnified: a place where people don’t even have to pretend to accept you, the way they have to pretend in class. Clubs mean spending more time around people like Raleigh and Adriana, who join everything in sight.

  Mom spears a piece of broccoli. She brings it toward her mouth but then holds it there, as if it’s a beacon lighting my way on the path toward higher education. “Well, there must be some activities at school you could join. What about the school newspaper?”

  “We don’t have a newspaper.”

  “No newspaper? I am getting old. What do you have?”

  “There are a bunch of sports, none of which I’m good at. There’s a marching band, which doesn’t use a piano. A chorus, but I don’t sing. Student council, but everyone was elected the first week of school.”

  “I was in the drama club,” she says. “That was always fun. By the time I was a senior, I even had a couple of leading roles.”

  Sometimes I wonder if I was switched at birth in the hospital. How can my mom and I be related, but so different? “When I give an oral report in history class, the teacher complains that I don’t project past the second row,” I say. “I doubt I’m meant for the stage.”

  She takes a slice of tomato. “Well, Maggie, you need to find something. I’ve always thought you should have more of a social life, and colleges won’t consider you if you’re not wellrounded.”

  I think of woodworking, and the trails, and my piano music. My life is “well-rounded,” even if it doesn’t fit into neat little college-application slots. Nick and I get so much out of hiking, even though it isn’t a formal activity, and he gets nothing out of student council, which is. I don’t want to join things just so I can list them on an application.

  I know how expensive college is. And I love that my mom wants to help me get there, no matter what.

  But . . . if only the school had a club that truly meant something to me.

  What would that be, though? A mushroom identification club? Even if I could manage to start one myself, I doubt anyone else would join, or that it would put me on Harvard’s musthave list.

  “There must be something for you,” Mom say
s.

  I shrug.

  “Maggie, you can’t live inside a shell for the rest of your life. You can’t rely on other people to do all the work in social situations. You have to approach them. Join in. Take some initiative.”

  I go numb for a second, and then it’s as if someone has poured hornets through a hole in the top of my head. They swarm and sting, filling my blood, replacing my bones. Because what I hear is, If you don’t fit in, Maggie, it’s your own fault for being so . . . So shy? So cautious? So different? So clueless? For being so me?

  I’m shocked to find a block of compressed tears choking me. Old, concentrated tears, left over from junior high. I drop my fork and push away from the table, wooden-limbed, hot and cold.

  I don’t cry. I go up to my room and struggle through homework. I pore over the mushroom guide, reading about chanterelles, which are supposed to be delicious and fragrant, apricotscented.

  Mom knocks on my door. “Can I come in?”

  “I guess.”

  She opens the door, walks in, and sits on the bed beside me. I can’t meet her eyes.

  “You seemed upset by our talk earlier. Did I say something wrong? I was only trying to help.”

  “Well, I guess you can’t help it if I’m a loser—but neither can I.”

  “Maggie, you’re not a loser. And that isn’t what I meant.”

  “If you don’t think I’m a loser, why are you always trying to improve me?”

  “We all have things we can improve. That’s why I take those extra certification classes. And . . . I’ve been trying to lose ten pounds for ten years now.” She laughs uncomfortably and extends her hand, though not quite daring to touch me. “I believe we can always make ourselves better. That doesn’t mean I see any of us as losers.”

  “What if I don’t want to be friends with a million people, the way Sylvie is?” I say. “What if I like being quiet and having a lot of time alone?”

  “That’s fine, but you have too much time alone.” She pauses. “Maggie, I love you and I know you’re a smart, talented, wonderful girl. I just wish you would give more people a chance to discover that.” She kisses my forehead and gets up. “Okay?”