Valley Girls

by Sarah Nicole Lemon

  The tents were made of dirty canvas, built on raised platforms, with steps and screen doors. On her way across the Valley earlier, she’d seen similar ones by the Merced, filled with tourists. But these looked different. Some of the canvas was patched and doors were ripped. Steps were draped with clothes and rusty bikes were propped against the sides.

  “This is summer employee housing,” Jonah said. “Not like the fancy ranger houses.”

  She thought of her cot in the attic, shoved in between the storage boxes, and nodded. “Why is it called HUFF?”

  “They used to throw hot coals off the top of Glacier Point right there.” He pointed to the trees and Rilla lifted her chin. Unease rippled through her chest to see the massive wall looming over them, smoky gray and shadowed in the late afternoon light. It was bigger than anything she’d ever seen.

  “They called it the Firefall.” He snorted. “They stopped doing that in sixty-eight, but this is still called housing under Firefall. Or HUFF for short. Rilla, say hello to everyone. Everyone, say hello to Rilla.”

  Rilla tore her eyes away from the cliff, to a circle of people in camp chairs all staring at her. An open bag of chips and hummus sat in the middle of a piece of beige carpet laid in the dirt.

  Rilla swallowed and lifted her balled sweatshirt fist in a wave. They were all older than her—college age. She tried to look mature and experienced. When they asked her where she was working, she shook her head. “I live here.”

  “Like permanently?” A girl leaned forward. “Really?”

  Rilla shrugged. “For now.” She didn’t know what would happen. How long Thea would tolerate her. The breeze stirred her ponytail, and she shrugged, throat tight because she had no real answer.

  “Where are you from?” Someone asked.

  “West Virginia,” she said quickly, thankful for a question she could answer.

  Another snorted. “Wow, I didn’t know they had pretty girls in West Virginia.”

  Should she react to that as a compliment or an insult? It felt like both. Rilla’s smile stayed frozen in place, as she pretended she hadn’t heard it. “Do all y’all work here?” she asked, sitting in the chair Jonah pulled up for her.

  Everyone nodded, staring back at her with the unmistakable look of standing in the warm house and looking out at the person left in the chill.

  Alone. A shiver ran up her spine. It was a feeling of emptiness in the air where she kept clutching to find something that she’d always thought would be there. A sudden expansion of a room, where she expected to find a wall, a door, something to hold on to, but the dark kept going.

  “So, what’s West Virginia like?” a boy with an Australian accent asked. “Is it like the Beverly Hillbillies?”

  Jonah rolled his eyes and reached for the chips. “This is how Brock is seeing the country, by getting drunk and asking people the most offensive things about their state.”

  But Rilla didn’t care. Everyone’s eyes were on her for a moment, and she wanted to make the most of it.

  “West Virginia is not like the Beverly Hillbillies,” she answered. “It’s like the Beverly Hillbillies meets the Fast and the Furious. With trucks.”

  A flicker of laughter ran through her audience. But she was only getting started. “I know this guy, right. His name is Depraved. No, that’s his actual name. Yeah, that’s a different story—how Depraved got his name. He buys wrecked trucks, like wrecked titles, and fixes them. Three years ago, he bought this wrecked duck boat from World War II. The kind that can go in water and land . . . you know.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, that’s not the story. The story is he had this snake.”

  Out loud in California, she made it funny and real as she told the story of Depraved and his big python, Samwise, that often sunned itself in the window of his souped-up Duck Truck, eventually surprising some boys from her high school who tried to steal the truck-boat as a prank. Rilla’s eyes danced, her hands leapt, and she pulled the story up and down in a bright rhythm that melted the chill of being an outsider and brought her into the center. It gave her a sense of power, and the warmth of an audience chased away the chill of being alone.

  Their laughter made Rilla laugh, and once she started laughing, she laughed so hard she slid down in her chair and wiped tears from her cheeks. She’d paid her way with a story—for the night at least—but deep inside, the feeling of shit and shame grew, as if their laughter was another insult and compliment. Everyone had made fun of Depraved’s Duck Truck for years, but when Rainelle flooded last spring, Depraved drove down and spent an entire night ferrying people to safety. Rilla closed her eyes and wiped her tears, remembering the sound of water in the streets and the scared faces of the Monroes as they sat, wet and dejected, clutching the only belongings they could hold in their hands in the back of Depraved’s Duck Truck.

  And suddenly, Rilla wasn’t sure whether she was laughing or crying.

  A cute boy with dark curls, dimples, and an honest-to-god French accent passed a joint in her direction, and she shoved down her feelings and reached for the familiar unlacing of all that had been cinched tight the last few hours of sobriety. “California has the best weed,” she said through her grin, knees pulled up in the chair. Someone handed her a beer and she opened it and held it between her knees.

  Jonah laughed and took the joint. “That’s the altitude. Careful with it. It’ll wear off in a few weeks.”

  Now that her stomach was full, spine unlaced, and the sound of something like friends rang in her ears, Rilla noticed how it didn’t smell like West Virginia, but like something newer and less complicated. The wind sang a song of dry dust and pine. It pushed into her bones and blood, and urged her onward—into something also newer and less complicated. As soon as she found her way back to Thea’s house, she was going to start again. Tomorrow would be better. Less terrifying. Rilla would start over, for real this time.

  She abandoned her broken chair to wind herself along with the music in the cute French boy’s lap. His green polo shirt wrinkled in her grip. His curls smelled like girl’s shampoo. His hands braced her thighs. It felt so good to be touched. To be wanted.

  Night fell and the little canvas neighborhood moved along at its own pace—people were dancing, laughing, ,moving in and out of the circle as they finished the hummus, did laundry, and went for showers. The screen doors to the canvas tents swung back and forth in perfect cadence with the mountain wind.

  After Jonah left to shower, Rilla bummed a smoke and wandered away, spilling out of the line of tents to stand under the trees and away from the crowd. A few tourists passed on the path, carrying shower caddies and toothbrushes for the bathroom. They didn’t notice Rilla or the slivers of light coming from the row of tents just beyond them. She lit the smoke and the cold wind caught in her chest, wrenching her out of the warm haze.

  The dark felt enormous. The granite wall behind her even more so. The trees moved in the wind, as if they would shift and crush her without ever hearing her cries. At home, she was a villain. Here, she was nothing. This was a mistake. A horrible, wretched mistake.

  Thea. She’d be home by now, wondering where Rilla was. Digging for the map in her pocket, Rilla unfolded it and squinted, trying to simply find her place.

  Rilla flicked her cigarette away and stepped back toward the crowd, clutching the paper in the wind to ask someone.

  “Hey, you,” an authoritative voice yelled.

  Rilla didn’t realize he was talking to her, until he grabbed her elbow. “Stop.”

  She turned and blinked at the face of a park ranger.

  “Did you just drop that cigarette?” he demanded.

  “Uh. No.” The lie was out like breathing. Always deny, everything. It was one of her mom’s most repeated rules. She swallowed and tried not to look guilty. She was a Skidmore—they never did well in front of law enforcement.

  His features hardened. “I watched you. Don’t you know how dangerous that is? Go back and pick it out of the grass, before you burn dow
n the whole Valley from your carelessness.” He let go of her elbow, and she wobbled unsteadily for a second.

  “Have you been drinking?” He looked past her, into the alley between the tents and the crowd beyond. “How old are you? What’s your name? Do you work here?”

  “Twenty-one,” she said, struggling with the rapid-fire questions. “Priscilla Skidmore. I haven’t been drinking, though. I didn’t know about the cigarette. I don’t want to burn anything.”

  But he was already moving on. “I’m going to do a series of tests. Touch your nose with your pointer finger.”

  Rilla touched her nose. Heart pounding in her ears.

  “Now with the other hand.”

  She swung her other hand up and poked herself in the eye. Shit.

  “How much have you had to drink tonight?”

  Did it look like she just fell off the turnip truck? “Nothing. Ossifer.” She licked her lips and tried again. “Officer.” That time she nailed it. How much had she had to drink? Her nervousness lit a fire to the two beers she remembered.

  “You’re slurring.”

  She was not. She was nervous. “Stop making fun of my ass-sent.”

  A white light blinded her eyes. “Place your hands on top of your head.”

  No. No. No. This couldn’t be happening. It felt like her wrists lifted of their own accord.

  Don’t get into trouble. But she hadn’t meant to. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be alone.

  He took one hand off her head and wrapped it behind her back with the cuffs.

  Rilla was definitely in trouble.

  Three

  Even in Rainelle it felt like everybody reacted to a version of Rilla that she herself couldn’t see. In Yosemite, she thought she’d be set free from that—able to get out from the shadow of her own caricature and find the real Priscilla Skidmore. But if this night was any indication, her shadow had followed her here. It was the only thing that explained why she was in jail for drinking and a little bit of pot. In California. Of all states.

  Rilla wrapped her fingers over the edge of the old pew bench, shivering uncontrollably under the gaze of the two park rangers who had busted the party and were now processing all the arrests. Shame watered in her mouth, stronger every time the rangers glanced in her direction. They had to call Thea. They knew who she was. They probably knew what had happened in West Virginia, and it’s why they looked at her with so much derision as compared to everyone else.

  Rilla tried not to let them see she noticed.

  Thea walked in a little after 5 A.M. With her straight shoulders and a thrown-back head, she marched to the empty desk beside one of the rangers.

  “Martinez?” he asked without looking up.

  “Miller,” Thea said, opening a drawer and looking through it. “I’m going to take Rilla home.”

  Rilla slumped. Just when her life couldn’t get more shameful.

  “Oh, are you?” Ranger Miller asked dryly.

  “She’s been through enough. She wasn’t driving or making a scene—”

  “You need to talk to the judge first,” he interrupted.

  Rilla froze, feeling Thea’s eyes on her.

  “What?” Thea retorted. “She looks sober. She’s sitting there completely calm and alert.”

  “Well, she is drunk.” Ranger Miller’s facial expression didn’t change throughout the entire conversation. Did it ever change? He had the face of a hot guy who wasn’t actually that hot and didn’t look like anything but a not-that-hot dick. Rilla narrowed her eyes: Dick Face. Ranger Dick Face.

  “She blew a .07.” He began clicking his pen, studying Thea.

  “She’s terrified and exhausted and a child,” Thea said sharply. “These kids are all way older than her. Right now, she just needs a safe place. I’m taking her home. If the judge has anything to say about it, you tell him to come talk to me.”

  “Go ahead,” Ranger Dick Face said, waving his pen. “It’ll just make the decision this fall that much easier for everyone.”

  “You’ll be as liable as me, Miller,” Thea said over her shoulder. She held her hand out for Rilla to take.

  Rilla stared at Thea’s open hand and didn’t move. Never had she felt this shitty. Not even when she sat in a Rainelle jail with her bloody nose and swollen eye.

  “Oh, trust me. I’ll make sure everyone knows what happened,” Ranger Dick Face said.

  “That you were harassing vulnerable children?” Thea asked.

  “That you were insubordinate,” he barked.

  Rilla burst up. “Stop being an asshole to my sister. She didn’t do anything.”

  “Rilla.” Thea pulled on her arm. “No. It’s fine . . .”

  Rilla shook her off and took a step toward Ranger Dick Face. “I was just an easy target.”

  He frowned and looked straight past her to Thea. “Maybe work on getting her to take responsibility for her actions.”

  “Rilla,” Thea snapped. “Let’s go.”

  “Thea didn’t ask for this,” Rilla said as Thea tugged her out of the room. “Leave her alone.”

  “Come on,” Thea said softly, squeezing Rilla’s hand.

  Rilla’s skin crawled with the horror of her sister being so kind. It made her hate herself and everyone around her.

  “Go to hell, Martinez,” Ranger Dick Face said as they went out the door.

  “Meet you there,” Thea said before letting the door slam shut behind them.

  Thea kept a firm grip on Rilla’s hand until they were outside, in the glimmering blue-gray of coming sunrise. The moon hung low, nearly resting on the top of cliffs that walled in the narrow valley, and winking as if it hadn’t lost sight of her since the bus stop in Merced by the Japanese maples.

  “How dare you?” Thea finally asked. “I had you one day. I got home and you were gone. I was worried you went back to West Virginia, or had fallen off a cliff somewhere and would die before I found you. Why the hell did you do that?”

  “It was an accident. I just got . . .” Rilla ducked her chin. “Lost,” she said in a near whisper.

  “Didn’t you stop and think that after everything that had happened I might be worried when you fucking disappear? You didn’t answer your phone or text me back. What if that guy—what was his name, Curtis?—had followed you out here?”

  “Oh my god!” Rilla snapped. “Stop. That’s ridiculous and not how it was at all.” She cringed just to think about how Thea had probably talked about her. “Anyway, my phone is dead and I’m out of minutes.”

  “Mom didn’t . . . ?” Thea stopped. Frustration clamped her features into lines, and her words were clipped and tight. “Ugh, of course she didn’t send you out here with anything but a burner. Forget the phone. You didn’t think, even once, that maybe you should come home? You were gone all night!”

  “Just send me home,” Rilla said quickly. The end of Thea’s rope was much shorter than she’d even expected, but there was relief in not having to wait all summer for this moment.

  Thea threw her hands up in exasperation. “Why would you even want to go back?” Without waiting for Rilla’s reply, she stormed ahead.

  Rilla glared at Thea’s back. Well, there was the sister she once knew. The one who got angry and left. Rilla needed to go back to West Virginia, before she did any damage to her sister’s pristine new life. Before Thea started regressing to smashing fake blood bags over her head while screaming about futility.

  They walked in silence between the shadowed cliffs, and Rilla forced herself to look up.

  She’d seen pictures of Yosemite, of course. After Mom had bought her bus ticket and California turned out to be real and not just a threat, she’d sobbed under her pillow and then googled Yosemite National Park. A mile wide and roughly eight miles long, the Merced River wound through a grassy meadow and woodland floor. The Internet was full of photos of tall waterfalls lit in sunlight, the Valley spread through wide-angle lenses, with the famous cliffs keeping watch on each end: El Capitan an
d Half Dome.

  What she hadn’t seen—hadn’t understood—in all those pictures was the scale.

  How it kept going, on and on. Beyond the limits she didn’t even know her mind had placed on trees and rocks and sky. It was as if she’d walked into what she thought was the world, and suddenly it grew up around her, lurching from the depths of the earth to push tall and proud toward the stars. The whole world was bigger than she had imagined it could be, and she much smaller in it.

  “Drugs?” Thea asked, falling back in step beside her. “Weed? Something else?”

  It took a second to realize Thea was asking if she’d done them. Rilla’s throat tightened and she kept her face even. “No.” No more. Not after last night.

  “Have you talked to someone about what happened? At home?”

  Rilla didn’t respond. She was sure if she opened her mouth, she’d cry. Her face flushed hot and horrified. A flash of tightness crossed her collarbone, a blur of heat and anger pressing into her skin, and she had to look down. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over. No one listened in the first place.”

  “I’ll listen,” Thea said.

  Rilla rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay. It wasn’t like you think. It wasn’t this huge thing Mom is making it into.”

  “You’re saying Mom . . . our mom . . . overreacted?”

  Rilla tightened her jaw and glared at her. This was exactly what she feared from Thea. From anyone. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Thea sighed as they crossed into the open meadow. “Fine. But what good does it do anyone if you come all the way out here and just keep doing the same things?”

  Rilla swallowed. Her throat ached. “I’m trying.”

  Thea snorted. “If this is trying . . .” She shook her head. “Girl, I can’t keep you if I don’t have a job. This is a seasonal position. I just got here two months ago. There’s one opening for a permanent park ranger. At the end of the season they’re going to decide between me and Miller.”

  Rilla blanched. “Ranger Dick Face?”