It was totally her fault. Rilla squeezed her eyes shut and winced, forcing the words out. “I’m so sorry.”
Caroline just laughed. “Ah, don’t worry about it. We can make it work. Look.”
Rilla opened one eye.
Caroline was pulling two smaller nuts out and held them up. “You’d be surprised how often this happens—something happens—and you need to figure out how to use the gear you have, instead of the gear you need.” She laid the nuts on top of each other, their flat sides flush. “Just stack them to fit into the space. You’ll need to be careful it’s in there. But this will work.”
“I’m really sorry,” Rilla repeated. It was easier now that she’d said it once.
The harness cut into her legs and her back. Her arms below her elbows felt useless. Sweat rolled between her breasts. But she clipped the first bolt and scrambled up to the ledge she’d be following, a long string of rope behind her.
This part wasn’t climbing—not technically. It was mostly walking up a rocky ledge to a pair of bolts that waited at the end. But with each step, Rilla felt the edge. Like the ground below, she heaved as she moved, and at any second she could be shrugged off the cliff. Her legs felt heavy. Each step got smaller and smaller until she found herself stopping.
Deep breath.
She was okay. She was doing it.
Her fingers shook. She checked her knot, and kept on. In a few minutes, Rilla clipped the bolted anchors with an intense surge of relief. With the relief came the accomplishment, and the pride and the glory and the wonder of doing it, and it was wildly fun again.
Caroline explained how to place gear along the next pitch she led, and Rilla listened with serious attention. All she wanted in life was to make it out of this climb without embarrassing herself any further. It went about as disgustingly and terrifyingly as the rest of the climb, but it went.
The afternoon sun shifted from white-hot into intense umber. Rilla was drenched, her sports bra chafing on the edges. The gallon jugs they’d brought were nearly empty, but the bonus was it made the haul bag easier to haul after each pitch.
The last pitch was her turn to lead. Heralding the top . . . an obvious, tall, hunter-green pine tree.
Caroline patted her on the back. “Have fun!”
Rilla nodded, helmet bobbing on her sweating head as she looked up and began to climb.
It might have been fun for Caroline, but it all felt awkward to Rilla. She kept trying to have one foot on each wall and shuffle up the corner. But gravity kept yanking on her body. The stemming—her legs splayed like a little kid inching up a doorway—was easy one second and flat-out impossible the next.
Annoyed, she jammed her feet into the crack and tried to wiggle her way up. She regretted this day. She regretted ever finding it fun. What the hell was ever fun about this?
She sniffed and inched upward. Nothing felt right.
“Can you place a piece?” Caroline asked from below.
Shit. She’d forgotten. She had to place a piece or she was going to die. Never mind the pieces she’d placed farther down that would hopefully hold. Never mind that Caroline was below, on belay. Die. She was going to die.
The fear combined with the effort required to keep herself on the wall worked out into her fingers, and the cam clanked wildly against the rock. She fumbled—
Zzzzzzzip.
Oomph. Her next piece caught with a teeth-jarring and gear-shuddering jerk. She blinked and—
Zzzzzzzip.
Thwack.
She smacked against the wall, terrified and eyes wide, still clutching the piece she’d been trying to place. Shit. Shit. Shiiiit. Scrambling, she jumped onto the wall, clutching at anything she could touch. What happened?
“You okay?” Caroline called. She wasn’t far below now.
Rilla looked between her legs. “No,” she wailed.
“Does anything hurt?”
Rilla quickly took stock. Her heart pounded out of her chest. Her eyes watered. Fingers shook. Her breath came fast and shallow.
“I’m okay,” she squeaked, wishing she believed it. She was not okay.
“Congratulations.” Caroline sounded more chipper than Rilla had ever heard. “You lost a piece and didn’t panic!”
Rilla stared down in mild horror. This wasn’t something to celebrate. “I’m gonna panic, bitch,” she yelled.
Caroline’s eyes widened and she blinked.
Shit.
Caroline busted out laughing.
“Stop laughing,” Rilla screeched. “Help me.”
“Okay, okay. Look. You’re at peace now. Check it.”
Rilla whimpered, forcing herself to reach out and tug on the cam. It seemed solid, but so had the others.
“Can you slide in a nut to back it up?” Caroline asked.
Rilla felt sick, seeing herself reach for the gear on her sling and falling off.
“Just throw anything in,” Caroline said. “It’ll help you feel better.”
Rilla gritted her teeth and forced herself to reach for a nut, slide it into the crack, wiggle it down, clip in the draw, and drop in the rope. Only after she did it did she realize she’d automatically done something she’d basically just learned. “Got it,” she said, feeling a slight thread of relief.
“You were climbing hard,” Caroline said from below. “You didn’t even anticipate that you were falling. You blew a piece and kept your cool. You are the motherfucking shit right now, Rilla.”
Rilla closed her eyes and shook her head. “I want to get down.”
“When you place a piece, pull out when you’re checking it. Not just down. Finish this pitch and then we’re done.” Caroline’s tone was that of a much older girl. Thea the way Rilla kept wanting her to be. Someone in complete control. “Take a minute to regroup.”
Rilla’s stomach twisted and tightened, but she lifted her chin and focused above—not on the fact that she hung in a couple straps of nylon and tiny bits of raccoon fodder stuffed into thin cracks six hundred feet off the ground. She had to get control of herself. She couldn’t lose it. There was no escaping this—this is where giving up meant she would lose all the work she’d put in, not only on the wall today, but in all the days she’d shown up to climb.
Drawing a deep breath in, she held it in her lungs for a half second longer and then eased it out in a long, controlled breath, imagining all that knotted her body easing out with it. “Help me,” she called.
“Shake out your hands,” Caroline replied immediately.
Rilla took one hand off and shook out the arm, then the other. She took another extra-long breath and swung back around to look at the wall.
“Try putting your hands into the crack on the side and pull that way,” Caroline continued.
Rilla followed her instructions, angling herself out of the corner. “Like this?”
Caroline nodded. “And your feet up on the opposite wall.”
Rilla put her foot up. “Oh.” She almost laughed. It still felt awkward and horrible, but the forces twisting and pulling at her eased. Making her body into a right angle that in some way mirrored the right angle of the dihedral, she got back into the position and looked up.
“Shuffle your hands up. Don’t try to go hand over hand like you were. Stem if you can, though. So much easier. And don’t use your muscle here, hang on your bones.”
Rilla frowned. What?
“Straighten your arms.”
Rilla had thought they were straight, but she obeyed and locked out her elbows. “Oh!” She laughed. Now the bones of her arms did the work of holding her into the crack, not all her muscles, like when her elbow was bent and her arm was flexed. It was still hard—but not impossible.
She could do this.
Twenty minutes of shuffling later, she pulled over the ledge, past the tree, and clipped the anchors.
Caroline followed, and they hauled up the bag and spread out on a wide ledge under the shady boughs of an eighty-foot ponderosa pine, four hundred feet off the ground.
<
br /> Rilla leaned against the wall, still clipped into the anchor and her eyes lifted with relief to the granite above her she did not have to climb.
“Have a treat.” Caroline handed her an apple.
“Thanks.” Rilla bit into it, tasting both the sweetness of the apple and the salt and grit on her lips. It was terrible. And intoxicating. “Goddamn, I’m going to do this again, aren’t I?”
Caroline laughed. “Why wouldn’t you? You were great.”
“It was horrible.”
“But wonderful,” Caroline said with a dreamy grin.
Rilla closed her eyes and groaned. It was true.
“Want to know something?” Caroline said, wiping at the sweat on her face and leaving a smudge of dirt.
“Absolutely,” Rilla said, perhaps a bit too hastily.
“My first big wall climb was up here, on a route just over there.” Caroline gestured down the wall. “And I was so nervous and it was so hot that like ten pitches into it I got diarrhea.”
Rilla did a double take. “That uh . . . is not what I expected you to say.”
Caroline laughed. “I can’t ever walk past here without thinking about it. I was in such a rush and so sick, it was all I could do to get my pants down. I just had to pray there was no poor soul walking below.”
“Oh my god.”
“I know!” Caroline shook her head and gave a little shiver. “I shit into the air!” She laughed. “I was so embarrassed at the time. Now it’s just kind of funny and horrifying.” The ocean of streaked granite and blue sky reflected in her sunglasses. “Did you climb in West Virginia?”
Rilla chewed her apple and stared out at the massive view. “No. I didn’t know anyone that climbed at home. Plus, like, I’m a Skidmore.”
“What does that mean?”
She probably shouldn’t explain. If she’d been on the ground, she would have remembered this truth was not what she wanted anyone in California, least of all Caroline, to know. But up here, things felt different. She unscrewed her Nalgene and took a drink, looking up at the shadowed parts of the white granite cliff. “You know that family back home in Ohio that like . . . lives by the railroad tracks and has trash in their yard and rides a four-wheeler to the store because they have DUIs—you can get another DUI that way, sidenote—and they’re always in trouble and their kids are always in trouble, and all the other parents are like yeah, I don’t want you hanging out with that kid and if you play in their yard you are never allowed inside the house?”
Caroline squinted with one eye open. “Mm-hm?”
“That’s a Skidmore.” Rilla dropped her water bottle and pulled her T-shirt straight down. “This is actually my mom’s T-shirt from the strip club dollar Thursdays.”
Caroline squinted at the shirt. “Southern X-Posure?” She looked confused. “Oh, I get it!” She laughed. “I hope she taught you some moves. Always good to have a career to fall back on for extra cash. Stripping seems like an international sort of skill.”
Rilla snorted.
Caroline unfolded her legs. “Well, so what?”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Rilla said, hearing her mom again at the bus stop. Girls like her didn’t get chances like these.
“None of us are.” Caroline laughed and leaned back. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but where you come from is part of what makes you, you. When I first left Ohio and started traveling for climbing, it was amazing, but also overwhelming. When you wake up every day wondering how you got there, even if it’s in a good way, it’s exhausting. But, the thing is . . .” Caroline paused a moment, staring out at the Valley. “I don’t know. At first it felt like I didn’t belong, like everyone would figure it out and send me home. But then I realized, all those things that made me afraid I didn’t belong were all the reasons I was there in the first place. Everyone has a different path.” She glanced at Rilla. “I’d go in your house,” she said confidently. “I’d probably live next door.”
Rilla smiled and tucked the apple core into her small trash bag. She wanted to hug Walker for giving her something so valuable as this climb with Caroline. The ease and elegance of Caroline’s style seemed less a threat and more just part of Caroline.
Rilla’s smile was real, her position on the wall was earned, and it didn’t matter if she was special, or mediocre, or boring, or a Skidmore, because right now it felt like she had climbed above all that.
“Here, let’s take a picture,” Caroline said, fishing a camera out of her bag. “Your first lead multi-pitch!”
Rilla leaned in and smiled wide.
Caroline shaded her eyes and looked. “Cute.”
“Can you take one of me with the view? I don’t have any pictures . . . I want . . .” She gulped and forced herself to keep going, since she’d started. “Just to prove to everyone I’m not out getting wasted all the time. Which is definitely what they think I’m doing.”
Caroline waved her hand. “Say no more. Want one of you climbing too? I can rig it up and . . .”
“No. No.” Rilla flushed. “I just. I’m just being petty.”
“It’s not petty. It sucks when people assume the worst.” Caroline stood, pulling out some slack in her rope to have freedom of movement on the ledge. “Here, stand back off the anchors and we’ll get the background.”
Rilla leaned back, weighting the anchors and smiling. She gave a big thumbs-up, but then it felt dumb, so she put her hands down on the rope. It was awkward—to have Caroline Jennings taking pictures of her. She looked down, trying not to seem embarrassed. The ground was far away, but she barely noticed. “Okay, thanks,” she said, pulling back onto the ledge.
“I’ll text them to you tonight. They look good. The light is nice.”
“It’s crazy that a tree can grow this far off the ground,” Rilla said, tipping her head into the simmering blue afternoon and the wavering shade patterns across her face, still feeling awkward about the photos and rushing to move on. Even though Caroline seemed fine, she couldn’t help but hear Petra’s derision about Caroline’s photos in her head. All she wanted was to shove it once in everyone’s face back home.
“Back in the fifties some naturalists tried to get up here to see what kind of tree it was. They put in a bunch of bolts and gave up,” Caroline said, over bites of her apple. “A group of climbers made it up here, and reported back that it was a Ponderosa. They looked farther up and said it was ‘a real opportunity for future rock engineers’*, but no one climbed above this point for the next twenty-six years.”
Rilla twisted and looked up the wall. It was surprising to see how vast it looked still—especially after spending all day climbing to this point. It hardly looked like they’d made any progress at all. “Engineers? That’s a weird way to describe it.” Watching Caroline felt like art.
“The majority of climbers that made this Valley what it is, were white-boy engineering majors from Stanford coming down here on summers and weekends. I mean, the guy who said that was a German major, but same diff.” Caroline brushed some dirt off her pants and stuffed the apple core back into her plastic bag. “So yeah, engineers. Because clearly the future of climbing was full of white-boy Stanford engineers.” She caught Rilla’s eye. “Definitely not a skinny girl from southern Ohio.”
Caroline offered her a fruit cup, warmed from the sun and liquid sweet. She savored the soft peaches, leaning against the wall. In the silence and the wind, a tree frog began its song in the boughs above them.
Rilla looked up, eyes wide.
If this tree and frog could be places no one thought they belonged, maybe she could too.
* Allen Steck, Camp 4, Steve Roper, 133.
Twenty Four
They walked back into Camp 4 at sunset. Dirty. Covered in a thin film of dried sweat and dust. Rilla’s fingertips were rubbed raw. Her palms blistered and cut from the last pitch of shuffling her way up on lead. All she wanted was to take off all her clothes and go bury herself in the Merced.
Of course, when she wal
ked into the campsite, Walker was leaning back on the picnic table with his radio sitting by his arm. He looked up, gaze flickering over the length of her in one quick glance before he swallowed and looked away.
A tremor of excitement fluttered in her stomach, and her exhaustion was forgotten.
Caroline took her pack and handed her another gallon of fresh water.
“Just in time for dinner. I’m almost done,” the old man said from where he worked over a camp stove on the end of the table and a pan set over the fire.
“They’ve returned,” Adrienne said, pushing out of the screen door of one of the canvas tents. “We were starting to get worried, but then we remembered you were with a newbie.”
“That newbie,” Caroline loudly declared, dropping her hands onto Rilla’s shoulders and pushing her forward for the crowd, “took a zipper fall on the last pitch and got right back on it. Like a champ.”
It wasn’t something anyone would brag about, but she recognized the praise Caroline was giving her was for having the tenacity to go on and not tap out. It was praise meant for a newbie, but she couldn’t help but give a salty, dusty, cracked grin, and try very hard not to look at Walker, though she was dying to know what his expression was.
“Oh. Yeah. Right on.” The old man smiled. “Did you have fun or have you sworn off it forever?” He looked at Caroline. “That’s the true test. If she’ll do it ever again.”
“Let’s go right now,” Rilla said, her voice cracking halfway through. “Whatcha got?”
Everyone laughed. But differently than anyone had laughed at her before. And she hadn’t even known there was a difference until right that second. This was the way she wanted to prompt their laughter—not because she said things that made people uncomfortable.
“I gotta get a ride back up to the Grove,” Caroline said, sinking into a chair with her water. “Any good calls today?”
Hoping it wasn’t too obvious, Rilla gingerly sat on the other end of the picnic table beside Walker.
Walker said, “Someone fell into the Merced.”
Caroline grimaced. “Did they come out?”
Old guy nodded. “Took over an hour.”
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