by Emily France
It was a horse riding group up in Jefferson County that was for girls only. They did stuff like barrel racing at rodeos, trick riding and jumping. It was sort of like Girl Scouts. On steroids. On horseback. Essa could feel the confidence oozing out of the girls’ pores. They all stood so rock steady, their hands stuffed in the pockets of their dusty jeans, their arms strong from wrangling two-ton beasts every day after school.
Chicks who ride horses = badasses.
Badasses, and not big fans of crunchy Boulder girls.
Essa gathered her courage and tapped the shoulder of one of the girls’ shiny purple vests. “Hey,” she said. “Did you happen to see a little girl go past here? Blonde hair?”
“Sorry.” The Westernaire shrugged. Her face was covered with a smattering of freckles brought out by the Colorado sun. “Didn’t see her.”
“Okay, thanks anyway. I—”
“A little girl about this tall?” A middle-aged guy in a straw hat interrupted and held his hand up, indicating Puck’s height. Essa nodded. “Yep, she ran right past me. Headed down there.” He pointed toward a darkened staircase behind a glass door next to the Boulder Cafe. A weathered metal sign hung crooked from the doorknob: public restrooms.
Below it there was a large cartoon hand pointing down. Essa had never been down there; she always used the restrooms that were inside the café.
“Thanks,” Essa said. She pushed her way through the glass door and headed down the wooden stairs. They creaked under her sandals. The hallway was dim and filled with the rotting, fermented smell of stale beer. A lone fluorescent light buzzed overhead at the bottom, casting a pale white glow over the graffiti on the wall. There was a drawing of a yellow-and-black shield with a badger in the center. He had a joint hanging out of his mouth. Underneath, it read, house of hufflepuff.
Essa rolled her eyes and pushed open the door to the women’s restroom. The floor was covered in thousands of tiny black and white tiles and littered with wet paper towels and tissues. The beer smell was still pungent. “Puck?”
Silence.
All Essa could hear was the dripping of water from a leaky sink faucet. She leaned down and looked under all the gray bathroom doors, hoping to see her sister’s tiny feet. She didn’t. “Puck? You in here?”
The bathroom stayed quiet. Essa looked in one of the wavy mirrors over a sink and noticed the paleness of her skin. A knot of worry twisted tighter and tighter in her throat; she worried she might vomit. There wasn’t anything else down here but these restrooms. Where could Puck be? And why did she even come down here in the first place? There was a perfectly nice bathroom on the first floor of the restaurant. The only other place to check down here was the men’s room. But why would she be in there?
A sound echoed through the bathroom, bouncing off the cool plaster walls and the hollows of the dirty porcelain sinks. Essa felt cold, like a late Colorado spring snow had just blanketed every limb and branch of her veins. She realized what it was.
Just her phone.
A text message.
She took a deep breath and pulled out her phone. The message was short: Hey.
Her eyes widened as she realized who it was.
Oliver.
She didn’t think he’d message her again, not after their conversation outside the Zendo. Since then, she’d made sure not to schedule a shift at the store that overlapped with his. Didn’t he get it? She had to work and take care of Puck. And right now she had to find Puck. She ignored him and put her phone away. She had to search the rest of this awful basement.
She put her hand on the bathroom door to leave, but heard a sound. Coming from the middle stall. Just a little movement.
Essa tiptoed toward the stall door and gently pushed. It creaked as it swung wide open and there, standing on top of the toilet in her ratty sneakers . . .
Puck.
“Seriously, you need to wipe that grin off your face ASAP,” Essa said. “This is so not funny. I almost threw up, I was so freaked out.”
Puck’s smile remained squarely in place. “Great hiding spot, huh?”
“No. No, it is not. It’s totally creepy down here, and you shouldn’t be here alone. You could—”
“Watch out!” Puck sprang off the toilet and launched herself high in the air. She landed about a foot outside the stall door, nearly on top of Essa. “Toilet Vault. Perfect ten!”
Her stubborn smile was even larger.
“You know what I should get?” Essa asked. “One of those obnoxious kid leashes. You know, where I strap it to you and walk you around like a little puppy. It would make my life so much easier.” Puck wasn’t listening. She’d jumped up on the counter next to the sinks and was swinging her legs back and forth over the edge. “And wash your hands,” Essa added.
“Why? I didn’t go!”
“If you vault off a public toilet, you wash your hands. That’s just how it is.”
Puck rolled her eyes, but acquiesced. She leaned over the sink to her right and turned on the water. Essa grabbed a wad of paper towels from the stainless steel dispenser on the wall and held them out for her sister to dry her hands.
Puck turned up her nose. “Don’t you see the sticker?” She pointed at the towel dispenser. Someone had stuck a large round sticker on the side that read, these are made of trees. “Use the electric hand dryer, Ess. Everybody knows that.” Puck popped off the counter and positioned herself under the dryer. She knocked the start button with her elbow, and the machine roared to life.
“Whatever, you’re using a ton of electricity. It’s probably just as bad,” Essa countered.
“CAN’T HEAR YOU,” Puck shouted.
Essa knew she could. Puck just wanted to make Essa shout. She was the love of Essa’s life, but also a giant pain in the ass. Essa gave in anyway. “ELECTRICITY. JUST AS BAD.”
“NOPE. LOOK IT UP. DRYERS USE LESS ENERGY OVERALL COMPARED TO MAKING PAPER TOWELS. PLUS, THEY AREN’T PAPER TOWELS. THEY’RE PLANTS.”
Essa pursed her lips, annoyed.
Puck. The littlest Zen master.
Essa felt like trying to understand Zen with her mind was like trying to organize the ocean, jumping in and separating it into individual drops with her hands. But she suspected she knew what Puck was getting at. The idea that our minds try to grasp reality by creating fixed symbols, static ideas and concepts of things. It makes us feel safe, stable, grounded amidst a world in constant flux. Recurring discomfort. Duhkha. Was the towel a towel, a piece of paper, a tree, the water that fed the tree, the sun that filled its leaves with green? Weren’t all those things interdependent, one unable to exist without the other?
She could hear the Zen priest: Words are useful to navigate the world. But not useful to really know it.
It was mindfulness, too. Being aware of what the towels were. In awe of all the conditions that came together to create one. All the life.
Or maybe Puck was just trying to sound deep.
Before the dryer had finished its cycle, Puck wiped her hands on her shirt and started practicing dance moves in the mirror. She spun to the left and then to the right. As she moved on to karate kicks, flicking each leg as high and as hard as it would go, Essa’s phone went off again. Another text message. What’s up?
Oliver again. He obviously didn’t understand. She couldn’t date. She couldn’t flirt. She couldn’t have some summer romance with Chicago Boy. She couldn’t even try to have a new friend. Not one that leaned in like he did behind the Zendo. Not one that looked at her that way. She couldn’t answer his text.
She answered his text.
The usual. Just chasing my sister into creepy underground bathrooms.
?
Long story.
Tomorrow is Saturday, he typed. You going back to Zendo? Can I come?
Essa stared at her phone; her thumbs stayed still. Finally, they started to
move across the screen. No.
She saw three little dots, the ellipses on the screen that meant Oliver was typing a response. But then they disappeared.
Essa hadn’t meant that she was going to the Zendo and that Oliver couldn’t come. She wasn’t going tomorrow. She was headed out with Micah and Anish to the mountains to practice orienteering. But she didn’t want him coming to the Zendo even if she planned to go. And she didn’t want him to come along to the mountains. She didn’t have time for boy drama like her mom had all the time. She didn’t want Puck to see her arm in arm with some guy who would be gone in a few months anyway. She didn’t want to invite Oliver to do anything.
Come with us, she typed. We’re going to the mountains. Games. Mountain Fugitive.
Essa gaped at the screen, barely believing her response. But what was more unbelievable was the heat traveling up her back and down her arms, melting the hard chill that had been there just minutes before.
Sweet. Pick me up? I have no car. He inserted a sad-face emoji.
Essa hated emojis.
Yes, she typed. Pick you up at 7 a.m. Gotta beat the summer storms.
She inserted an emoji. A smiling face wearing a safari hat.
What the hell am I doing?
Awesome, Oliver typed. My aunt’s house is at 426 Vulture Peak Rd.
She inserted another one. A thumbs-up.
A thumbs-up? I HAVE NEVER USED THE THUMBS-UP IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
She put the phone away and sighed. She looked down at the wad of paper towels still in her hand, walked to the garbage can, and almost let them go. But as Puck continued to dance and kick in the mirror, Essa could hear Puck’s voice in her head telling her that the towels weren’t towels; they were plants. All Essa could see now were a handful of tiny trees, the water that fed them, the sun they reached for as they grew. She couldn’t bear to watch them tumbling into a black plastic garbage bag. They didn’t belong there. She couldn’t throw away the sun.
She rolled her eyes. “Know-it-all,” she whispered.
“Huh?” Puck paused, out of breath.
Essa didn’t respond. She walked to the dispenser and gently put the paper towels back in, one by one.
June 17
18
OLIVER
The last time Oliver had been blindfolded, he had been six years old. His mom had thrown him a birthday party on the rooftop of their townhouse, and they’d played a rousing game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The donkey poster was hung from an easel in the center of the rooftop deck, but when it was his turn, Oliver had missed entirely and dropped the paper tail over the railing. He’d yanked his blindfold off and watched the donkey tail float and flutter down a four-story drop.
Now, blindfolded in the back of Micah’s Jeep, racing to who-knew-where, Oliver questioned why his mother had thought it was a good idea to blindfold a bunch of six-year-olds and set them loose on the roof of a building. Especially when the parents were all gathered around a rolling tray of mimosas. But then again, he was currently questioning his own judgment, wondering why on earth he’d agreed to play Mountain Fugitive, which apparently involved being blindfolded, driven into the wilderness, and dropped.
Essa was blindfolded next to him in the backseat, and as her hand accidentally brushed his . . . he remembered why he agreed to play.
“How does this game work again?” he asked, hoping his voice hadn’t climbed several octaves due to the excitement of the Hand Brush.
“Anish will drive us somewhere, lead us into the woods, and then give us a compass and a topo map. We have to figure out how to get to a point on the map that he picks,” Essa said. “You use orienteering skills.”
“Orienteering?”
“And you’ve got to be able to get to your location with sufficient precision, or your getaway van shall not appear,” Anish said.
Oliver turned his face toward the window and felt the early morning sun on his blindfold. It was a red bandana wrapped so tightly his eyes were starting to throb. “But why are we blindfolded?”
“Just makes it a little harder,” Essa said. “This way we don’t have time to scout where we’re going as we drive. Sometimes we do it, sometimes we don’t. Just adds a twist.”
“And the feeling that you could puke any second,” Oliver added, adjusting his bandana.
“You guys need to toughen up,” Anish said. Oliver could feel the car leaning as Anish sped around another curve. “I’m not driving that fast.”
“Think about the sounds you can hear,” Essa said. “That helps. When you can’t see, it’s a little easier to focus on noises.”
She was right. Without his eyesight, the rest of his body was on high alert, like his skin had stopped off at Starbucks on the way. It was hypersensitive, buzzing at every sensation. When her hand had brushed against his for just a moment, he had felt so much. The slope of her knuckle, the smooth surface of the wooden ring on her thumb.
“Dude, slow down,” Micah said, blindfolded in the front passenger seat. “Or at least hit the brakes around the curves. Ollie and I are about to hurl. And if I do, I’m aiming at you.”
“No way,” Anish said. “I never get to drive the Jeep! I’m testing its limits. And if you get carsick, forget listening to sounds. Try a weed lozenge. Works like a charm. I think I have one . . .”
Oliver could hear Anish digging in his pockets and the subsequent squeal of the tires as they rounded another curve. Oliver was tossed to the right, but purposefully leaned a little farther, hoping to “accidentally” bump shoulders, knees, hands—anything—with Essa.
It didn’t work. All he touched was stale Jeep air.
“So what do you mean? Listen to sounds?” he asked her.
“So instead of focusing on your discomfort, focus on sounds. Like right now. What can you hear?”
Oliver tightly pressed his throbbing eyes under the blindfold and listened. He couldn’t even think about sounds; all he could think about was Essa. He pictured her dancing by the bonfire with a hula hoop. Her legs peeking out of her skirt when they sat on the log side by side. He thought about her tattoo, the gentle angle of her collarbone, the swirl of her belly button.
“So?” Essa asked. “Hear anything?”
“Um.” Oliver tried to force his brain away from thoughts of her. At first, all he could hear was the whine of the car engine as Anish gunned the gas. They were definitely climbing into the mountains; his ears popped from the pressure change. He realized that was a sound. The pop of his ears. He’d never paid attention to it before. “The car engine,” he said. “And my ears popping. Does that count?”
“Cool. Yes,” Essa said. “What else?”
Oliver tried again, and a whole world of sounds sprouted around him. He could hear a gentle hum coming from the middle console up front—he guessed it was Anish’s canned energy drink vibrating in the cup holder. He could hear a rhythmic whipping sound—one of the car windows wasn’t closed all the way. The crunch of tires as they hit a gravelly patch of road, the thrum of Anish’s fingertips on the steering wheel, the tapping of Micah’s hand on his leg as he drummed to the beat of a song. A song. The radio was on. Oliver hadn’t even noticed.
Smaller and smaller sounds rose up around him. The delicate whisper of the seat belt rubbing against his shoulder. The tiny clack of Essa’s beaded earrings as the Jeep passed over a small pothole. A whoosh as Essa crossed her legs and the fabric of her hiking pants rubbed against itself. A puff of breath as she exhaled.
You. I hear you.
But he didn’t say that. Because it would be way too creepy.
“I hear lots of stuff,” he said.
“Like what?”
“The engine. And the window’s down a little, I think.”
“I can hear the whistle of the bike rack on top,” Essa said, tilting her head toward the roof. “Hear that? And did you catch the sou
nd of that bug hitting the windshield?”
“No, missed it.”
Essa shifted in her seat. They were quiet among the sounds for a while. “That’s mindfulness, you know,” she said. “That’s really all it is. It’s waking up. Paying attention. It changes your brain. Calms you down. All sorts of—”
“Are we going to RMNP?” Micah asked in the front seat. “My ears are going nuts.”
“RMNP?” Oliver asked.
“Rocky Mountain National Park,” Essa answered. “It’s west of Boulder.”
“Think what you want, fugitives,” Anish said. “Soon your asses are going to be dropped in the wilderness, and I guarantee you’re going to have a hard time finding a decent route out of there. I’ve outdone myself this time.”
A spray of gravel kicked up underneath the tires, clattering against the underside of the car like someone was taking a machine gun to it.
“And why is it called Mountain Fugitive?” Oliver asked.
“Just you wait, Ollie,” Micah said. “If you’re ever in a rough spot and need to rob a bank and become a fugitive in the woods with the loot, you’re going to be happy as hell that we introduced you to this game.”
“Excellent point,” Anish said.
“Thank you, I—” Micah stopped talking midsentence. “That’s it. I’m going to boot.”
“Dude,” Anish said. “You took your blindfold off. Not fair.”
“I’m out,” Micah said. “Looks like a good day to chill in the back of the Jeep with a weed lozenge while Essa and Ollie pick their way through the woods.”
“What?” Essa asked. Oliver could feel the warmth of her body as she leaned closer to him, closer to the front seat. “We can’t go alone. If I get hurt, Oliver won’t know how to find his way out to get help. The first rule of survival is to take a buddy. Who knows what he’s doing.”
There was an awkward pause. Oliver heard four bugs splatter against the windshield.
“I mean,” Essa continued, “no offense or anything.”
“So . . . game off or on?” Anish asked.