Valley Girls

by Sarah Nicole Lemon

  He looked pale and sweaty. He shrugged.

  “He has a pump?” Petra asked. “So, it shouldn’t be his insulin, right?”

  “Sometimes altitude fucks you up when it didn’t before. Can he get down?” Adeena asked.

  “No. I mean, yes he has a pump. No, it shouldn’t. I don’t think I can get him down though. Maybe with your help. You guys were the climbers ahead of us, right?” He didn’t look up from his partner.

  “But we can’t hike him out,” Petra said. “Can he walk?”

  “Barely.”

  Rilla sank down to a rock, her stomach tight and the nausea heavy. It felt like she could see the curve of the earth on the horizon and it made her almost feel the sensation of spinning through the cosmos. The sick man sat across from her, looking like she felt. The voices of the more experienced climbers blurred together, muffled by the wind. “Shit, if we can’t get him to walk . . . could we contact someone?”

  He must be terrified. She’d be terrified. His mouth was open a little. Brown eyes glazed. As if he too felt the world spinning in space and couldn’t stand upright against those forces. Rilla’s granny had been a diabetic. No pumps—just shots, so many shots. One day, when Rilla was nine and helping in the garden, Granny had sat down, unable to move anywhere else. Looking pale and sick, just like this man. She’d swatted at Rilla’s hand. “I’m fine, girl. Just this heat.” She’d fanned herself and the air had smelled like the warm, sharp scent of tomatoes. It hadn’t been the heat.

  “It’s his diabetes,” Rilla heard herself say. She crawled forward, feeling like she might puke. Her head throbbed, but she wasn’t sick like he was.

  “He has a pump, but that’s to keep his blood sugar from going too high. But it’s probably too low, because he’s working hard. Does he have one of those of blood sugar stick things?”

  Adeena looked to the other man. Petra looked to Adeena.

  “I don’t know . . .” The guy who’d ran to get them whirled around and started digging through what Rilla assumed was his partner’s bag.

  “It’s okay. We’re going to figure this out,” she said, surprised how calm and relaxed she sounded. Her heart raced.

  The other man looked up from the shambles of a backpack. “This?” He held up a little thing that looked like a step meter.

  “That’s it.” Rilla grabbed it and stuck it into Rob’s limp finger. In seconds the readout showed it was too low.

  “Does he have glucose tabs? Petra, do you have those gummy bears? We have to give him a little at a time.”

  The guy looked confused. “I can get it.” His words came out raspy and dry. He tried to reach out for it.

  Rilla stopped him. “I’ll bring the bag to you,” she said.

  Someone shoved the bag to her. Opening it wide, she looked at the sick climber—Rob. He nodded. In a few seconds, she’d found the little packet of glucose tablets in an interior pocket. She kneeled on the rock and took a deep breath, breaking one out of the package and closing it into his mouth.

  He shut his eyes in relief.

  Petra handed him a bag of gummy bears.

  He took the bag, but didn’t eat any.

  “How long have you guys been climbing together?” Petra asked.

  “We just met the other day. I didn’t even know he was diabetic until we started. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  “Usually it wouldn’t be. He was prepared for it,” Rilla said. His partner wasn’t. If something had happened to Petra or Adeena, she’d have been the one unprepared. Rilla didn’t want that to happen again.

  In fifteen minutes, she checked again, before giving him another dose of glucose and repeating until he was on his feet, color returned to his face. He gave each girl a warm hug in thanks—along with his partner—and they all headed toward the descent.

  Rilla walked backward down to the sub-dome, slowly feeding the cable through her gloved grip as she lowered from board to board, like Adeena instructed. Trying to keep from puking.

  Halfway down the back side, it was as if someone snapped their fingers and Rilla woke. The nausea lifted. Her heartbeat calmed. Her fingers were cold but not buzzing with numbness, and the heaviness left her body. The cold wind kissed her cheeks, and she carefully walked down the face, staring blissfully at the fathoms of open space. Adrenaline flooding the places the sickness had left vacant in her blood, sweeping her spirit back up into heady ecstasy.

  She was alive.

  •

  Rilla continued to die and come back. Her feet were freezing in the sub-dome snow. But swelled once they warmed. Her legs and arms and back stiffened and gnarled. It was just hiking down; but down had its own woes. After the first four miles, her toes pushed against the front of her shoes so much they were numb and aching, and her thighs trembled from supporting each step.

  “How did you two meet?” she asked Petra as they descended the never-ending turns of the forested trail.

  “Um . . . what was it, that comp?” Petra asked, looking to Adeena.

  “Yeah,” Adeena said. “At a climbing gym in L.A. I did this competition, and Petra came up and started talking. She was putting together this group for the summer, and offered a spot in the house. So . . . we kept in touch. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do this summer, but figured Yosemite was a chance I couldn’t pass up.”

  “We climbed together after the comp too . . .” Petra said.

  “Oh yeah, that’s right.”

  “Adeena is new to sport climbing,” Petra said.

  “Well, not new. But yeah,” Adeena said.

  “What’s the difference?” Rilla asked, hobbling around a boulder.

  “Alpine uses a variety of climbing tools and techniques to climb a mountain. Ice, snow, just plain hiking . . .” Adeena said. “Or climbing like we did today.”

  “Sport climbing,” Petra said. “Or traditional climbing is more like a blank sheer wall. In sport climbing you always clip into bolts. In traditional climbing, you place the protection along the way. It’s shorter and more intense than alpine.”

  “It’s not more intense,” Adeena said. “It’s just a different kind of intensity. It’s more like a sprint and alpine is a marathon.”

  “We used a bit of gear today,” Petra said. “But mostly just quickdraws for the bolts.”

  Rilla nodded, still not sure she understood. “How did you get into climbing?” she asked Petra.

  “I didn’t actually climb until the end of high school. I was a soccer player,” Petra said. “Until I busted both my knees.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Petra shrugged. “I started climbing during rehab. It’s hard and required my brain to engage in a way that let me forget I couldn’t play anymore.”

  “Is that why you’re so competitive?” Adeena asked. “Your American sports complex?”

  “I’m not competitive,” Petra said.

  Adeena snorted. “Okay. That’s why you told Caroline you got the Pink Panther redpoint?”

  Petra narrowed her eyes. “I did.”

  Adeena stepped ahead and didn’t say anything else.

  “Anyway,” Petra said to Rilla. “Climbing pretends it’s not competitive. But it is.” She stepped over a fallen tree. “How did you end up here with your sister?”

  Whether it was the way they’d all climbed together, Rilla trusting them as much as they trusted Rilla, or the exhaustion starting to dull her defenses, Rilla opened her mouth, and wearily confessed the truth.

  “I got in a fight.”

  “With your mom?” Petra asked.

  Rilla stepped over a fallen log and shook her head. “Not my mom. It was with my boyfriend, but it wasn’t like you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, Rilla,” Adeena said, stopping abruptly, mid-trail. Her look was so concerned, it made Rilla cringe.

  Petra frowned. “What?”

  “No. No.” Rilla took a deep breath, trying to slow her heart. “That’s what I mean. It wasn’t like that.” She closed her eyes, wil
ling her heart to calm, but behind her eyes it was red and violent and she heard herself scream and Curtis’s arms grapple after her. Her eyes burst open. “No,” she repeated. “It wasn’t like that. I started the fight and it was all mutual. Yes, we got out of hand. Both of us. And in the school parking lot . . .” She sighed and resumed walking. The two other girls had no choice but to follow as Rilla explained. “So, it blew up into this whole thing. They took us both to jail, and then wanted me to press charges. I didn’t though, because it wasn’t like that. No one would listen.”

  Adeena shook her head, eyes down.

  Petra’s face was smooth—her eyes free of that private judgment so many people had when they looked at Rilla. “So, you came out here? After that?”

  Rilla nodded, following the twisting trail. “My mom called Thea, I guess. First time in my life my mother’s overreacted to anything. I mean, it would have been fine. It was over. But . . .” Rilla shrugged. “That’s what happened.”

  “Well, it’s good you’re here now,” Petra said, linking arms with both her and Adeena and pulling them close. “Both of you.”

  “Tragedy can birth new beginnings. I lose sight of that sometimes,” Adeena said softly.

  “I’m not tragic tragic. Just tragically dumb,” Rilla said.

  “No. You are neither,” Petra said, so confidently Rilla felt it must be true.

  “You helped that man today,” Adeena said.

  Rilla shrugged. “It just happened that I knew a little about it, is all.”

  Adeena shook her head. “It doesn’t always work like that. You did great today. You should feel proud.”

  And Rilla did, a little. Somewhere deep inside. It was a spark that was highly likely to be snuffed out, but it warmed her for the moment.

  The afternoon shifted into evening, flooding the cedars and the snow with beams of light so thick she could taste it. A coyote ran across their path, looking at them over its shoulder like it was rubbernecking at an accident. It shook its shoulders, mangy gray fur shivering, and slipped soundlessly into the trees. In those moments, she forgot about her agony and only remembered what a privilege it was to exist in this wild, cruel world.

  Then Petra grabbed the back of her pack and pulled her along.

  She ran out of water in Little Yosemite Valley, and Adeena showed her how to fill her water from the Merced and make it drinkable with tablets.

  The sun sank behind the mountains. Darkness unspooled in the trees. They passed the place they’d turned off the trail in the morning, and even Adeena and Petra seemed tired. The same canyon walls bore different shadows and their steps wound eternally down. Rilla stumbled through the mist, soaked again in the heavy clouds of silver.

  In the purple alpenglow, they finally hit the paved trail. And in twilight, Rilla’s numb body staggered back into the Valley.

  It had been amazing. But she was never going to do that again. Never ever.

  Ever.

  Twelve

  The pulse of hot shower water on her shivering, tight body was as pure and raw an ecstasy as Rilla could ever imagine. The sound of her cot sighing as she crawled in and lay, stomach down, in the soft flannel sheets and fleece blanket, another.

  The white Christmas lights she’d strung in the rafters glowed softly, making the dark attic warm and pleasant and dreamy as the waterfall roared outside her window. She closed her eyes and her body felt as if it still stood on that little ledge on Half Dome, viewing the waterfall from across the Valley. She was grateful. Deeply grateful. For every bit of pain that had brought her to this moment of knowing how grateful a person could be for the simplest of things. This raw aching that looped back into delight that was the most pleasure she had ever experienced. And . . .

  She fell asleep.

  Thirteen

  Sixteen miles. Eight pitches of climbing. Rilla turned the numbers over on soundless lips, listening to the ceiling fans hum above her as she stared at her phone’s desperate attempts to snag Internet. Sixteen. Eight. Sixteen. Eight. A blank screen with a winding wheel stared back. Never mind yesterday, this was looking into the abyss.

  She sighed, sinking deeper into the corner of a worn leather sofa in the Half Dome Village lounge—a sparse rectangular building filled with couches and comfortable chairs arranged around a stone fireplace. Most everyone sat, staring at their own slow-moving phones. A few people read books, or whispered over a guidebook. One or two napped. The air was warm and drowsy, and clear sunlight streamed through the windows.

  It’d taken Rilla a half hour of gentle, slow walking on tender feet to cross the Valley, and she didn’t plan on moving—it was the only place she could sit, all day, and be steps away from food, coffee, and a bathroom. She’d even brought a schoolbook.

  She was the only high school student in the little Valley school, and when she’d met with the principal to pick up her books, she’d also been given a ten-page, single-spaced letter detailing what she needed to complete in order to be reinstated into her senior year in the fall—whether it was here or in West Virginia. Everything was due by a date in August. So far, all Rilla had done was put the pile of books on the floor by her cot and let it gather dust. But today, she’d brought a book.

  Her swollen and bandaged feet were propped up on a battered coffee table, in her softest pair of wool socks, and the only shoes able to adjust for the swelling—sandals. She didn’t even care that the blue wool socks came to her mid-shin, her shorts were men’s boxers patterned with lobsters, and her only clean hoodie was from middle school and basically three-quarter sleeves. She was never repeating yesterday again. Sixteen miles. Eight pitches. Not a single picture. Did it even happen?

  Not that Instagram was loading anyway. Switching over to her messages, she stared again at the few and brief text conversations she’d had with friends from home. People, she amended, with an empty feeling in her stomach. Not friends. No one had told her people could break your heart like this. Cutting you out and discarding you. If they could just see Rilla as a climber, they’d want to be friends again.

  “Looking like a climber already,” Hico said as her cushion suddenly tilted the wrong way and he smashed into her tender side.

  She winced and shifted upright. “Uh, hey guys.”

  “Stop manspreading,” Gage said, kicking Hico’s knee with a battered flip-flop.

  Hico moved and Gage sat beside him, crunching the three of them onto the two-seater.

  Both boys put their feet up on the table. Hico wore rainbow socks, black basketball shorts, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and dug into his strawberry yogurt with a fork. Gage, in a plaid button-down and pants, unwrapped a sandwich on his lap and pulled packets of hot sauce out of his pockets, before painstakingly cutting a packet open with a little pocketknife from his keychain. She remembered him out of the shower and again found herself looking away and blushing.

  People snuck glances at their little group, as if her friends’ presences were disrupting the quiet. Rilla shifted and tugged her shorts down.

  “Nice lobsters,” Hico said, over another fork of yogurt. It dripped on his chin and he licked it off. “Heard you did Snake Dike yesterday.”

  “How’d it go?” Gage asked, dousing his sandwich in hot sauce.

  A man to the left in a cloth chair cleared his throat loudly and lifted his eyebrows at his tablet screen.

  “How’d it go?” Gage repeated in a whisper almost louder than his original question. He took a big bite of sandwich and waited, chewing.

  “I can’t walk,” Rilla whispered back. “I might be dead. I’m not positive.”

  Hico snorted. “Well, you made it back on your own two feet, so that’s a win.”

  “Is that how you decide a win?”

  “More or less,” Gage said. “Sometimes just alive is good enough. Feet are incidental.”

  “Incidentally, my feet are busted,” she said.

  Hico muffled a laughing at the sight of her wool socks. “We can see, girl. We know. But your cat-eye is lookin
g . . .” He winked and clicked his tongue in approval, and Rilla felt her spine involuntary straighten. He was cute. They were all cute, in individual ways. And she was goddamn susceptible.

  “What?” Gage asked.

  Hico pointed at her eyes. “Her makeup. I got three older sisters. Do you know how hard that shit is?”

  Gage narrowed his eyes and studied her face. His eyes were dark and deep.

  Rilla’s pulse fluttered. “Why is Hico eating yogurt with a fork?” she asked Gage, feeling strange at the scrutiny of her makeup.

  “I’m catching a judgmental undercurrent in your whispers,” Gage said. “Hico, why don’t you enlighten her as to your fork.”

  “I could only steal a fork,” he said sulkily. “The spoons were out of reach.”

  Rilla snorted.

  “This is how you do me after my compliments? At least I’m not wearing my underwear in public,” Hico said.

  “These aren’t underwear,” Rilla whispered furiously.

  “Dude, you can pee through the hole there.” He waved circles at the general area of between her legs, yogurt going along for the ride.

  “Watch that,” she said, grabbing his wrist and moving his yogurt fork back to where it would drip somewhere else. “If I had a dick, dick. I don’t. Therefore, not underwear.”

  “Excuse me, can y’all keep the language down,” a woman said in a friendly tone Rilla recognized as being cutthroat church lady.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can imagine that is quite disconcerting to hear. We’ll be more careful,” Hico said with a tone so earnest, the woman looked suspicious.

  “It’s almost ten thirty,” Gage said, crumpling the wrapper from his sandwich and standing. “You ready, man?”

  “Where you guys going?” Rilla asked, wishing they would ask her along. Even if she could barely hobble.

  “Getting wilderness permits to head into the backcountry for a climb called Pharaoh.” Gage looked at his phone. “It’s far enough out we’ll have to camp overnight. Heard it’s rad, though. A buddy did it last summer and I can’t get it out of my head.” He held out the phone to show her.