Valley Girls

by Sarah Nicole Lemon

  The rain pattered on her hood and dripped down her arms. The clouds still hung heavy and foggy around the cliffs and she wondered if any climbers were still stuck up there in the storms. Shivering, she wrapped her arms around herself.

  On the stone bridge, the river rushed muddy and thick with brush and bramble. Rilla leaned on her elbows and gazed over the edge, mesmerized by the lulling rush of water, current of rain, and dull roar of wind high in the mountains.

  She pulled her phone out and hit the messages in Instagram, staring at the message from Curtis. She wanted to reply, but she shouldn’t have even sent the first message. It wasn’t lost on her that she didn’t miss him until she felt alone. Her chest squeezed and she stuffed the phone back in her jacket and closed her eyes. She’d only ever gone out with him because no one like him ever liked a Skidmore. He was hot, he was a running back on the football team, he was well-liked. He made her more than herself. How selfish could she be?

  Behind her eyes, she focused on the picture hanging in the mountain store—the woman with her gaze fixed higher and bigger and bolder. But it kept getting replaced with the view of her feet, bracing the wall, and the rope disappearing between them. It felt like she was destined to fuck everything up. Her home. Her sister. Climbing.

  Keeping her eyes closed, she straightened off the bridge and walked, splashing through the puddles by feel. The first few steps were easy. The next, harder. The farther she went, the more she knew she might not be going somewhere she wanted. That at any second she’d bump . . . her eyes flew open and she was still on the path. Empty and forlorn in the rain. The road was empty, beside her. The river roaring and the falls pouring.

  She walked through the meadow, past the emptied Camp 4 and the empty SAR camp under dripping tarps. Sometimes she closed her eyes and tried to see how far she could go. Mostly she walked with her eyes open. This place that was never seen so empty, and she got to see it.

  El Capitan rose over the trees. Its head in the clouds, its prow emerging from the silver and diving into the pines. She didn’t know the way, but there must be one. Somewhere. And when a soggy pine-needle-covered trail led away from the asphalt, toward the monolith, she ducked into the trees.

  The path wound and rose through the incline of scrubby oaks and soaked leaves that looked like rose petals wet underfoot. When she came out of the trees, she stood at the bottom of the white granite monster and looked up. The thrum of the mountain beat in her heart. The top obscured in the heavens. It felt, for one strange moment, as if she was standing on . . . beside . . . something alive and warm and singing to her. Like it could lift her limbs and she would float to the top, having finally reached something beyond herself.

  The rain dripped in her eyes and rolled under her hood and dripped on her hair and she grew cold. But still she looked. Tracing the endless lines of its art. Its blank page littered with secret paths.

  The rocks rolled to her left and she jerked away from the wall.

  Walker stood under the trees. A look of understanding and knowing so thoroughly on his face it made her pulse beat toward him in a way she had never felt.

  “It gets under your skin, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  She ducked her head and clambered over the rocks to stand under the awning of black oaks beside him. “I’ve just never seen anything that big.”

  “That’s what all the girls say,” he said.

  “Ugh . . .” She wrinkled her nose and slapped his arm. “Gross.”

  He leaned on a tree trunk and looked down at her over his shoulder, a devilish grin twisted on his mouth. “You walked straight into it. I couldn’t resist.”

  “I just . . .” She bit her lip and looked into the gaze that was teasing her. Adeena and Petra were real climbers with lives that had never crossed hers until now. Caroline was otherworldly, even if she was Walker’s sister. Walker was from southern Ohio. He wasn’t Caroline and admitted it readily. He knew of a Rilla back home, she was sure. All she wanted was for someone who knew her to say she could do it. Walker felt as close as she could get.

  “You want to climb it,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing.

  She nodded, expression pleading for him not to laugh.

  “You’re not going to get there top-roping the bunny crag with Dee and Petra.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I can’t ask for anything more.”

  He looked confused. “Why not?”

  Because she was already getting more than she deserved. Because who would want to waste time on a person who wasn’t very good? On a person who ruined everything. Who was terrible to her only sister. A person who sucked at everything. Especially at climbing. She sighed and put her hands in her pockets. “How did you get here anyway?”

  He dragged his hand through his hair and gave a half growl, half yawn like an overgrown mangy cat. Finally, he answered, “I started volunteering for my local fire department when I was fourteen. And climbing with Caroline in Kentucky. I came out here with her.”

  Rilla held up her hand. “Wait.”

  He stopped.

  “Why’d you guys leave Ohio?”

  He folded his lips and looked up at the cliff. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. “I don’t really talk about it,” he finally said. “My mom died the year before. There were six of us and my dad just had too much going on. Caroline left, and I went with her, to get out of his hair. She’s in a different universe than I am as a climber, but we were always really close and . . .” He sniffed.

  “Do you still talk to him? Your dad?”

  “Oh yeah. And my younger siblings. It was all good. Just . . . time. I wasn’t as focused as I am now. We had a lot of bills and like, seventeen-year-old me ate a lot. I still eat a lot.”

  “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  He nodded, cheeks sunken like he was biting them. “Anyway, my first summer out here, I met your sister and she was the ranger working with the SAR team and got me kind of interested in that path. After that, we moved to Colorado and I finished the number of climbs I needed to get my AMG mountain guide certification while Caroline was training there, did some swift water classes and certifications that would help, and applied for a position on the SAR team.”

  He didn’t look at her through the whole thing.

  “Well.” She sat up straighter and crossed her arms. “I also am very accomplished.” She paused for dramatic effect. “I once did cocaine and it made me go to sleep. So, you see, I’m really special too.” It was a one-time thing. And stayed that way.

  He couldn’t seem to settle on an expression. “That is special,” he said.

  “I’m a winner.” She meant for it come out peppy, like a cheerleader on that cocaine that put her to sleep, but it ended up a little more desperate and high-pitched. She wanted to crawl under a rock and die.

  Mercifully, he moved on. “Petra mentioned you were really great on Snake Dike. That you’re talented.”

  She had? Was Petra just saying that? “I don’t know?” She shrugged, uncomfortable under the compliment. He didn’t know she’d climbed in front of Caroline and dropped the rope.

  Walker nodded. “Yeah, that’s why it’s so impressive. You don’t know.” His radio chattered. “Thea’s looking for you,” he said, touching the bulge of the radio on his hip under his jacket. “She said to go home and wait for her.”

  She nodded. “I fucked that up too.”

  “Sisters are hard,” he said.

  She chuckled, warmed to have a companion in sister misery. “Yeah.”

  “You can do this,” he said, nodding toward the cliff. “I mean, not right this second. But you’re here; and if you want to work and find your people, you can. By the end of the summer even, you could climb The Nose if you wanted.”

  Rilla laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m totally serious,” Walker said.

  She looked down. “It feels like all I can really do is fuck up. Did you hear I dropped the rope yesterday?”

 
He laughed. “Yeah. I heard.”

  “Don’t laugh! Your sister had to rescue me.”

  “Listen. Is that what’s getting you down?” He straightened off the tree. “I mean, fucking up is an integral part of climbing.”

  She frowned and side-eyed him. “Stop bullshitting me.”

  “It is!” he insisted. “If you aren’t falling, you aren’t climbing hard enough. If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t progressing. If you aren’t getting in over your head, you aren’t exploring. You try and not fuck up in a way that will kill yourself or someone else, but everything else . . .” He smiled. “Climbing makes failure a friend, not a foe.”

  Never had she wanted to kiss a boy more in her life. But beyond that she wanted other things more than she’d ever wanted them. She wanted to climb, to say she was sorry, to not have failure mean such big things in her life. She didn’t want to be afraid of messing up—even if she didn’t have much more to lose. Abruptly she tightened her fists and turned down the path.

  “Wait. Where are you going?” he said with surprise.

  Rilla shouted over her shoulder. “Tell her I went home to do my homework.”

  Walker’s reply echoed off the cliff. “Copy that.”

  She was going to climb El Capitan.

  She was going to stay in Yosemite. She was going to outrun that ranger every time, and she was going to push herself until she was scraped, and she was going to get back up when she fell, and she was going to keep her eyes open to look for where the thin path swung away from the wide asphalt, and in doing all those things—in pursuing this thing that was so much bigger than herself . . .

  She was going to transform.

  Twenty One

  For two days, the Valley was quiet except for the rain drumming the roof as Rilla worked. Her eighteenth birthday came, and just when she was ready to throw all her books out the window and post something passive-aggressive about being forgotten on Instagram, Lauren came home with two chocolate cupcakes and a piece of dry spaghetti stuck in the middle of one and lit on fire as a makeshift candle.

  “Don’t tell Thea, I forgot to get her one,” Lauren said, licking icing off the top after Rilla had blown out the spaghetti.

  “Thea probably forgot anyway,” Rilla said.

  Lauren snorted. “Sure, and how do you think I knew it was your birthday?”

  Oh yeah. Rilla made a face.

  “Well, how does eighteen feel?”

  “Like seventeen,” Rilla said over a mouthful of cupcake.

  Thea came home later with more cupcakes, and a new fleece Patagonia jacket.

  Rilla clutched the jacket, her smile real.

  She finished all of her trigonometry before the rain stopped, the waters receded, and tourists flowed back into the Valley.

  Morning dawned—bright and simmering heat in the thick shafts of golden sunshine slotted through the pines. The river ran high, but within a week a fire had lit in the high Sierras and the wind shifted, bringing the smell of smoke with it. Rilla would have imagined Thea surely had something to do with forest fires in the park, but Thea just layered on more sunscreen and listened with a morose look on her face to the fire reports and the radio chatter.

  “You hate your job, don’t you?” Rilla asked one morning. They hadn’t talked about the conversation during the flood. But resumed tentatively, as if it had never happened.

  “I hate parking cars,” Thea said, without lifting her eyes from the massive swift-water rescue handbook she was reading. “But I’m not going to be parking cars forever.” She swallowed another bite of cereal. “How’s school?”

  “Uh. Great. I finished all of my trig.”

  “Great job! Keep at it,” Thea said. “Mom called. I told her you’d call today.”

  Rilla nodded, still torn between being angry at Thea for criticizing Mom and angry at Mom for being that way in the first place. “Yeah, okay.”

  “All right,” Thea put her bowl in the sink and reached for her Stetson. “Pray I don’t get run over by an angry tourist,” Thea said, and then was gone, leaving Rilla sitting at the table in an empty house.

  She hadn’t seen anyone since the day she dropped the rope, on purpose mostly. Even though she knew she wanted to go back to climbing, going back out to show her face and ask to lead was a . . . hurdle. She looked at her phone and wondered if Mom would even be up. Probably not.

  Taking the computer, she opened up a blank document, determining to knock out a paper on the book she’d only half finished reading. The clock ticked loudly. The quiet in between the ticks seemed to carry a noise. After ten minutes on the couch, her body was sore from sitting still. She should just bite the bullet, go back out, and ask. No one was going to be in Camp 4 today, especially not this late. She could go and try and find a stranger to climb with—people often signed up for partners on the ranger board—but any partner would be able to tell right away she was a fake. She couldn’t lead! Rilla groaned and leaned forward with the computer. She started writing and barely even knew what she was saying, she just kept her fingers moving. After filling a page, she figured it was time for a break and clicked over to movies, propping up Thea’s Wilderness First Aid on her knees to page through.

  Ten episodes of Vampire Diaries later . . .

  Shit.

  Rilla looked up, realizing the light had turned amber and her whole day was gone. She closed the computer and unfolded herself off the couch just as Lauren came in the door.

  “Hey girl, busy day?”

  Rilla smoothed her hair and tried not to look guilty. “Yep. You?”

  “A squirrel got into the Half Dome Village store.” Lauren sighed and sank in the recliner, unlacing her boots. “I swear, if I get the plague . . .”

  “The plague?” Rilla said, stashing the computer under the couch and trying to think what she could do to make it look like she did something.

  “Yeah, don’t touch rodents. They’ll give you the bubonic plague.”

  “Are you serious? The actual plague. Who touches rodents?”

  “You’d be surprised how many people try and pet those mangy bionic rodents.” She pulled off her socks and sighed. “What have you been doing all day? More Vampire Diaries?”

  Rilla blinked.

  “It shows what you’ve been watching.”

  “Oh.”

  Lauren laughed. “Oh indeed.”

  “I did get all of my trigonometry done,” Rilla defended herself.

  Lauran waved her hand. “That’s a fight for Thea. I do not care about a few episodes of Vampire Diaries.”

  Rilla’s shoulders sagged in relief.

  “We need to talk about what happened during the evacuation.”

  Shit. Rilla studied her hands.

  “I guess you’ve talked with her about it, right?”

  Rilla stayed quiet.

  “Yeah,” Lauren said like she’d just proved a point. “I know your situation is complicated. I’m not pretending I understand the dynamics that are unfolding there. I know for Thea, it’s been difficult to figure out boundaries and how to move forward, and I imagine you will need to learn the same things. But here’s the thing.” She pulled her legs off the chair and leaned on her knees. “You cannot, under any circumstance, tell a gay person she must come out. Even to your sister. Even to her mother. You crossed a line.”

  Rilla’s face felt like it was burning up. “It . . .” She swallowed. “It wasn’t about coming out. It was about her and my mom.”

  “It was about coming out. I don’t care who is involved. It was about exposing something intensely vulnerable to a mother who has never been safe for Thea. A mother Thea has always had to take care of. It’s not even remotely your business. Only Thea gets to decide that.”

  “But our parents are . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, Rilla,” Lauren said. “What matters is you need to respect Thea and her decisions about how to handle her family. Thea deserves an apology from you.”

  Rilla kept her h
ead ducked. “I mean, she knows . . .”

  “Not unless you tell her. She loves you and is here to help you. She was the one who suggested bringing you out here. When she heard what happened with that boy, she spent hours on the phone with your mom, convincing her that you needed to leave West Virginia.”

  That ache started up again in the back of Rilla’s throat.

  Lauren looked at her, waiting.

  Rilla exhaled and closed her eyes. “I didn’t know,” she croaked. “I thought my mom asked her to take me.”

  “Nope.” Lauren shook her head.

  The silence was deafening.

  Rilla felt sick to her stomach. All this time she’d thought Mom had wanted her to go, and Thea had just been the closest person. She hadn’t realized Thea had been convincing Mom . . . wearing her down, getting her to see how serious it was. That definitely made more sense. Ugh. Rilla put her face in her hands.

  “Need in the bathroom? I’m getting a shower,” Lauren said, standing up.

  “I’m good.” Rilla bolted for the door. “I’m going to get some sunshine.” Closing the door behind her, she sat on the porch and put her chin in her hands. How could she fix this mess?

  With a sigh, she slid off the edge of the porch and started walking for Yosemite Village. As she left the meadow and joined the asphalt path, someone whistled behind her.

  She turned as Walker pedaled up behind her in shorts and a fluorescent T-shirt with SAR printed in bold, black letters on the back. “Climbing today, Rilla?” He stopped and leaned the bike between his legs.

  She tried not to grin like a goober, awkward conversation with Lauren forgotten. “Not today. You on call?”

  “Just got back from carrying a hiker down from Half Dome,” he groaned. “I’m going to eat before something else happens. You going that way?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, hop on then.” He straightened the bike and Rilla gleefully stood on the back, hands on his shoulders. She was pathetic, but it was okay, she’d accepted that about herself.

  “I know you’ll probably say no, but . . .” He pedaled toward dinner. “Want to lead tomorrow?”