by Roxie Noir
I stand at the edge, looking down. The light is just starting to fade and I swear it’s darker now than it was two minutes ago, though it could just be my imagination.
Don’t think, just jump.
Just jump.
I stand there, frozen, my body refusing to do what I keep telling it to.
Use your good foot to push off of, there’s a nice little ledge-thing right there, maybe if you got a few feet of running start…
I back up, wondering if that’s the best way to make it across the ravine, with a running start.
But if I try that, maybe I’ll hit my bad ankle wrong and then I’ll trip or fall down and then I’ll be really screwed…
I come back to the edge, look down into the darkness.
“It’s not that far, I promise,” Wilder says, standing on the other side, feet braced, one hand out. “Come on, I’ll catch you.”
I shift my weight, calculating. If I jump off my good ankle then I stand a better chance of making it across in the first place, but then I’d land on my bad one and I might really break it this time and then I’d be screwed for the rest of this stupid journey, but if I jump off my bad ankle then I might just go into the pit of despair and then I’d never—
“Imogen,” Wilder says, but I barely hear him over the noise in my own head.
—make it out, and that’s definitely worse but at least it wouldn’t prolong my suffering, right? Better to just die instantly and be eaten by wolves than to limp through the wilderness for another day or two, making Wilder drag me—
“C’mon, Squeaks,” Wilder says, and my head snaps up.
He’s grinning. The fucking asshole is grinning at me, like he knows I won’t make it and he’s ten seconds away from not having to haul me for miles and miles through the snow. He’s grinning like he gets to call me whatever the fuck he wants because he thinks it’s funny, like even out here he’s above me somehow, like he can ruin my life however he wants—
I leap.
I don’t think about which foot I’m jumping off of and I don’t think about the wolves and spikes below, I just think about how there’s no way I’m letting Wilder be the only one to survive this and before I know it I’m on the other side, his strong arm around my back holding me steady as my ankle tries to buckle underneath me.
I grab onto a waist-high outcropping, catch my breath.
“Told you,” he says.
“Fuck you,” I say, standing on my good ankle, my sprained one held off the ground.
He just laughs. Laughs.
“Even here?” I ask.
Now that I’m on this side, nerves shot, I’m near tears, forcing myself to hold them back because I’ll do almost anything not to cry in front of him.
“You can’t go without reminding me of that dumb fucking nickname even now when we’re stuck out in the middle of God knows where?”
He puts a hand on my shoulder and I shove it off, furious.
“I moved a thousand miles to escape you,” I say between clenched teeth. “The least you can do right now is pretend we’re strangers.”
“You got across, didn’t you?” he asks softly, hoisting a pack onto his back.
“That’s not the point,” I growl, testing out my ankle, facing away from him. “The point is that I want you to go one single day without bringing that shit up, because you probably don’t know this, but I arranged my entire life around getting away from you and now I’m gonna have to start that over.”
I hear the snap of a buckle closing behind me, and I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to force myself not to cry.
You’re tired and hungry and et cetera, et cetera, I tell myself. Plus, it’s probably below zero here in the shade, if you cry the tears might just freeze to your face and think about how miserable that would be.
“You gonna start getting away again right now?” Wilder asks, something sharp in his voice.
I bite my lip, test my weight on my ankle, don’t turn around to look at him.
“Or were you gonna wait until I caught you when you jumped? Maybe you were gonna wait until we got down off this mountain, then you were gonna pretend like we’re strangers who’ve never met?”
“You’re the reason we’re here,” I say quietly, staring off into the distance.
There’s a slight scraping noise, and I turn to see that he’s picked up my pack as well, slung it over one shoulder. His eyes are blazing, the wind beating a few strands of hair around his face, underneath his hat.
“I’m the reason we’re alive,” he says. “Anytime you want to say thanks for that, just let me know. Otherwise we gotta get moving before sunset.”
Wilder turns and starts walking. We’re still stepping from boulder to boulder but from here, the steps get smaller and smaller until the rocks give way to a wide, flat snowy patch, the snow halfway up our calves.
I jam my hands into my pockets, feeling furious and guilty all at once. I’m not wrong and I know it, but then again, neither is Wilder, who’s up ahead of me carrying eighty pounds of our gear while I follow along behind him carrying nothing.
Don’t think, I tell myself, despite the fact that trying not to think has literally never worked for me. Just get through this, get to the tree line, find some shelter from the wind and eat your disgusting MRE and make it through the night.
I follow behind Wilder, stepping in his footsteps when I can, and we don’t say anything to each other for a long, long time but I keep thinking. I think about mistakes I made ten years ago, I think about mistakes I made today.
I think about arctic foxes and musk oxen, telephoto lenses and permafrost. I think about dropping the folder of pictures in front of security at the Solaris airport and how that seems like nothing now.
And I think about what I told Wilder to get him to take me on this plane flight: that I’d get him fifteen thousand dollars in compensation.
That fifteen thousand feels a lot worse right now.
Chapter Fifteen
Wilder
Carrying both packs at least warms me up, and it’s not long before I’m starting to sweat, little rivulets running down the back of my neck and into the t-shirt I’m wearing underneath the other fifteen layers I’ve got on.
I know Imogen hates being called Squeaks. Of course I know.
But it worked, didn’t it? She’s trudging along behind me, through the snow, instead of stuck back there on that boulder thinking herself into tears, and that’s what matters.
We’re gonna get to the tree line before it’s dark, and we’ll find some sort of shelter and have some minor protection from the elements, all of which is way better than being stuck on the side of a mountain, out in the open.
“Wait,” she calls out, and I stop in my tracks, take a deep breath, look up at the sky. The sun is low, just about to go behind the mountain, and that means it’ll be getting cold before long, but I turn to look at her.
She’s standing there, hands on her hips, panting for breath. Glaring at me from behind her glasses.
“Is my water in my pack?” she asks.
I sling it to the ground, find a water bottle, toss it to her. We’re running low, and I’m a little worried, but not too much. There’s water down below us, and at worst we can melt snow.
“Thanks,” she says, and guzzles it between gulps of air. I drink some of my own water in the meantime, looking down at the tree line. It’s another half hour away, maybe, but it’ll be darker once we get there and we still have to find shelter.
“I’m not used to the altitude,” Imogen says, still short of breath. “I lost my lungs for it when I moved to Seattle. I can take my pack, though.”
She moves toward me, stepping in the footsteps I’ve left behind myself, holding out one hand.
“I’ve got it,” I tell her, shouldering it again.
Imogen looks at me like she’s about to argue with me, but then changes her mind.
“Thanks,” she says simply, pushing at her glasses. “Sorry to be a burden.”
> I smile. I can’t help it, because it’s such a ridiculous phrase, so dramatic for something this simple.
“A burden?” I tease. “Who are you, my great-grandma from the old country?”
Imogen makes a face, but then it softens, and she wrinkles her nose at me.
“You’ve got my pack, so you’re literally carrying my burden,” she points out.
“Only because you’re an out-of-shape gimp who’d slow us both down if I didn’t,” I say. “Don’t tell me you’ve got asthma, too, because I’ll just leave you right here in the snow.”
“That’s one classic nerd affliction I escaped,” she says, trudging ahead of me, her heavy boots crunching into the snow. “I got the astigmatism, terminal clumsiness, and hand-eye coordination of a newborn panda, but no asthma, at least.”
I fight the urge to say good to hear, Squeaks, just to see how she’d react.
“I’m surprised you never got contacts,” I tell her. “I figured that in ten years…”
You’d have realized how hot you are and ditched the glasses.
“I thought about it,” she says, the two of us trudging downward. “I even tried them for a while, but…”
“But?”
Imogen sighs, her breathing starting to pick up again. Hiking through snow is hard, and doing it at around twelve thousand feet is beyond taxing.
“But poking my finger into my eye gave me the heebie-jeebies so I couldn’t do it,” she admits.
I start laughing, because of everything I know about this girl, that’s somehow surprising.
“What, you’re surprised that I got weirded out by something?”
“I once watched you slice into a dead frog’s eyeball and hardly move a muscle when it squirted all the way to the ceiling of the bio lab,” I say. “I’m surprised that eyeballs weird you out.”
“Not eyeballs,” she says, starting to pant. “Poking my own personal finger into my own personal eyeball is what got me.”
“I bet that frog eye is still up there,” I say.
“Depends on how often they clean the ceilings at Solaris High.”
“I don’t think it’s too often.”
Imogen is quiet for a few steps, her breath whistling in and out of her lungs.
“Think the fetal pig blood is still on the doorframe where Alicia Petroski screamed and smacked it out of your hand that one time?”
Even though my lungs are burning, half with cold and half with altitude, I laugh.
We were in eleventh grade biology, and I’d engineered getting paired with Imogen as my lab partner. I told my friends that it was because obviously she’d be the smart one who did all the work, and I’d just tag along for the easy A.
That day, we were dissecting pig fetuses, and for once I was to class early. I was a dumb teenager, so I decided to see if I could scare Imogen, shake loose her stony cool exterior for once.
So I hid behind the door with a pig fetus, and when she came in, I shook it in her face and shouted, the dead pig eyes level with hers.
Imogen jumped, but she barely blinked, more annoyed than anything. But Alicia was right behind her, and Alicia’s why I got two weeks of detention.
She screamed, smacked the pig out of my hand, stared at her own hand, screamed again, started crying hysterically, and then ran down the hall waving her hand over her head, like it was tainted or something. Alicia was always kind of dramatic, but it was a whole fucking scene that ended with three teachers trying to get her out of the girls’ bathroom before calling her mom to come get her and take her home.
Imogen, on the other hand, was irritated that I’d been manhandling the pig, which might make dissection more challenging.
“That they probably cleaned,” I say. “And I thought you said it wasn’t blood, it was the dye they put to highlight the veins or whatever.”
“There was probably some blood,” Imogen admits.
“Now you tell me.”
“Would it have stopped you?”
“Not a chance,” I admit.
“Poor Alicia,” Imogen muses, a hint of amusement in her voice. “Terrorized by a dead pig when she came in that day only expecting to slice one from stem to stern.”
I watch her back for a moment, the unsteady way she’s walking through the snow, lifting her feet high and plunging them back in, and I lick my lips, watch my breath expel in a puff.
In two steps I’m caught up to her and I turn, looking at her face, her brown eyes glinting with some dark amusement behind her glasses. The sun’s gone behind a mountain now, and the shadows are turning everything blue, making her look even paler than she is, her lips even redder.
“You thought it was funny,” I say.
Imogen doesn’t answer right away, just lurches right and then left, watching the tree line get closer.
“I would never,” she finally says, but the way her lips twitch give her away.
“You would,” I say, plowing into my ten-year-old memory of high school, a memory that’s both not about Imogen and about nothing else. “Come on, the way she ran down the hallway waving her hand in the air?”
Imogen bites the inside of her lip, looks at the ground in front of her.
“I might not have minded watching her get taken down a notch,” she finally admits. “You know she got an A in English that year because she agreed to let Dan Ramirez grab one of her boobs if he wrote all her essays for her?”
I just laugh.
“Only one boob?” I ask, thinking of the things Imogen and I got up to a couple of months later, things that went way beyond single-breast touching.
“Through her clothes. Two-minute limit,” Imogen says, exhaling hard in a cloud of steam. “Because she was the kind of girl who’d trade sexual favors for homework and also the kind of girl who’d be a stingy bitch about it.”
“So if she’d let him grab both boobs, it’d be a different story.”
Imogen exhales, and I can’t tell whether she’s laughing or not.
“Dan and I were in Mathletes together,” she says. “After he got her the first A on a paper I told him he should use that as leverage and negotiate, but he never did.”
There’s a twinge, a turn, a twist deep inside me as Dan’s face floats to mind: dorky glasses, bad haircut, scraps of a mustache that didn’t do him any favors.
“You two were friends?” I ask, my voice five percent sharper than I want it to be, but Imogen just laughs, her eyes sliding over to me.
“We were,” she confirms. “We talked about boob grabbing all the time, though. Just boobs, boobs, boobs. Mathletes was a really wild time.”
I’m silent for a moment, not at all sure what to make of this new information.
“I’m kidding,” she finally says. “Dan dragged me into an empty classroom at a competition once and then swore me to absolute and utter secrecy before stammering his way through the situation with Alicia’s boobs.”
“You mean boob, singular.”
She just laughs.
“You ever trade grabs for grades?” I ask. Not because I think there’s a chance in hell that she did, but because we’re talking instead of fighting for once and I think I like this.
“Please,” she says, crunching through the snow. “I got all my own A’s. Even in gym, all you had to do was put on those stupid shorts and look bored while you pretended to try kicking a ball.”
“Hey, I was good at gym,” I say.
“And you got a B in biology, didn’t you?”
I go quiet, because there’s a slight edge to Imogen’s voice. Things like that are coming back to me: the way she sounds when she wants to talk about something and doesn’t, the way she sounds when she’s in a group and forcing herself to be brave, the way she sounds when we’re alone and she’s like this, normal and sharp-witted and relaxed, not nervous or anxious.
“True,” I say. “B plus, actually.”
“You’re welcome,” she says.
There’s a moment where my gut reaction is to be angry, furi
ous that she’s like this again, high and mighty and acting like she’s Queen of Smart Things.
But then I look over at Imogen, cheeks and lips mottled and red, breath puffing in front of her face, and I realize she’s smiling. Teasing me. The anger drains just as fast as it came, and I’m left walking down a mountain and remembering junior year.
We had study sessions together, and that’s where everything started. Well, not exactly. It started when I went up to Imogen in class one day and asked if she’d be my lab partner.
She blinked at me. Pushed her glasses up. Looked around, like she was trying to see if there was anyone else she could possibly pair with, then back at me.
Sure, she said, her voice clipped and shrugged.
Then we were lab partners. She wasn’t even a very good one first, always annoyed with me, bad at explaining things, never even bothering to make eye contact when she ordered me around while doing everything in lab so I wouldn’t fuck it up.
But after I got detention for sending Alicia into hysterics, Imogen warmed up to me a little, and then a little more, and then one day I asked if she’d help me study and she surprised me by saying yes.
Her parents were the relaxed hippie types, mine just wanted me to have better grades than I did, and my girlfriend Melissa couldn’t have cared less that I was hanging out with the school dork, so we could study alone together, whenever and wherever we wanted.
And believe it or not, I did actually learn some biology, though I also learned a lot of things that were way more interesting.
For example, she tasted like raspberry chapstick and had a tiny mole an inch above her left nipple. She’s ticklish behind the knees. She likes being on top.
Then, the shit hit the fan.
Imogen and I go quiet, the only sounds the crunch of our boots trudging through the snow and the gasp of air in our lungs. My shoulders start to ache from carrying the weight of both packs, but I don’t say anything.
She’s wounded. She’s not used to this, and I am.
And I can’t deny the deep-down truth much longer, the truth that I don’t hate Imogen. Not really. I couldn’t see that ten years ago, and I’m not exactly Mister Insight now, but I’m finally starting to realize that.