And then Lucas had ridden away from me. He had not looked back.
A chunk of hail smashes into my shoulder and brings me back to the rock where I’m sitting. I put my hands on my cheeks. Despite the wind and ice, they are warm. I realize I am crying. And then something snaps inside of me. Big, horrible sobs wrack my chest and my lungs. I tighten my hands into fists around my hair. Alone. I am alone.
I wait for Lucas’s voice to come. To comfort me and tell me what to do. But instead, there is only silence.
His voice is gone.
“Toby. Toby, get up,” I tell myself. I’m speaking out loud, in the rain. “You can do this without Lucas.”
No. No, you can’t, says the part of me that is small and cold and scared. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. I’m drowning in my doubt. I can’t even get up to save myself.
A furry snout burrows between my chin and my heart, and a long, stinky tongue licks my cheek.
“Hey, Moose.” I put out a hand blindly and pat his rain-drenched side. I close my eyes. “I can do this,” I tell myself.
It should have been you instead of Lucas, last summer. The awful voice of doubt is relentless. He was the stronger one. The better one.
I fold my arms and tuck my hands under my armpits, rocking back and forth.
Screwup, the voice whispers.
I stare into the hail as it gathers around me. Something twists inside me. I’m not going to accept my bad luck anymore. “Screwing up and giving up are two different things. Life is messy. Like Denver and his brother’s eye. Or Arsenic in the war, or my parents and their stupid divorce. But all those people keep on going. And I’m going to, too.”
You’re worthless, the voice hisses. So what if you kept going. You lost your map. You ran out of food. You couldn’t keep Moose from getting skunked.
I shake my head. “But I found my way again. I’m pointed in the right direction to Katahdin. I found food. I’m keeping Moose alive and clean and fed. I’m finally learning to trust myself.” I rear back and scream with all of my might. “So screw you!”
I wait for a reply, but there is none.
A chunk of hail slips past my hood and trickles down my neck. It is ice-cold. Numbness creeps into my fingers and toes.
Moose whines and nudges my face. He is shivering.
I’m not sure I can save myself. But I am going to save this scrawny mutt of a dog if it’s the last thing I do. I stand up and shake pockets of hail off my backpack and my coat. It’s time to start hiking.
MY KEEPS LIST—to keep warm, hydrated, fed, and mindful of the sun—is almost completely shot. But unlike a few days ago when Sean and Denver had to rescue me, I don’t panic. I start off at a half jog to warm up. Moose trots doggedly beside me. After a few minutes, I can feel some sensation coming back into my fingers and toes. I jog until I spot a cluster of boulders that make up a little overhanging cave. Shelter from the lightning and the hail.
I urge Moose inside and skooch in beside him. The two of us barely fit, but we are both covered. I open my pack and dig out all my layers, pulling them on as fast as I can. The only things I don’t put on are two T-shirts. I use one to dry off Moose. The other I wrap around his neck like a little scarf. He could use the extra warmth.
Then I take out my water bottle, gulping down liquid while tearing into a Snickers bar. Moose gets two Clif Bars. We sit and munch and huddle, keeping each other warm while I keep my eye on the weather.
The hailstorm finally lets up, giving way to a swathe of thick fog. It’s still not great weather, but it’ll have to do. I pack up my stuff, make sure the T-shirt around Moose is tight, and together we clamber out of the little cave and back onto the trail. As we hike, I begin to see pieces of sky through the fog. It is a moody gray, but at least it doesn’t feel as though the weather is out to get us anymore.
An hour later the fog clears off, and I see two familiar Osprey packs in the distance. One is hurrying toward the other. Now that the fog is gone, the trail is easy to spot. Rock cairns as big as barrels line the way, making it fairly impossible to get lost.
But the two backpacks are not on the trail. They have veered onto a lone, sharp cliff that plummets into the valley below.
Something is wrong. I begin to run. Moose follows behind, his nails clattering against the slippery rocks.
By the time I get to them, Denver has slung off his pack and is standing at the edge of the cliff. He is so close to falling that the front of his boots are hanging over nothing but air.
“Denver, don’t do this. It’s not your fault,” Sean is pleading.
“Yes, it is,” cries Denver. “Harry is gone. Everything that he was dreaming of for his life died the second his head hit that coffee table. And I did that to him.”
Sean shakes his head. “It was an accident. You were just horsing around.”
Denver’s right boot jerks forward another inch. “I try to tell myself that. Over and over I relive that moment in my mind. And all I think of is that maybe … maybe I meant to do it. Maybe I meant to hurt him. He was Mr. Perfect. Always doing the right thing.” Denver stares into the valley, his shoulders braced against the rising wind. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to live in the shadow of your brother? To live with the guilt that you hurt someone you loved, and may have meant it?”
I do, I think.
I step forward, closer to Sean.
Then I say it. “Denver, I know what that’s like. Listen. I killed my best friend.” It’s the first time I’ve spoken those words. They cut through me like a newly sharpened blade.
“I didn’t mean to, but I … ” I can’t bring myself to describe the scene. What happened. But I force myself to keep talking. “Because of me, he got into an accident and died. He may not have been my brother,” I tell Denver, “but he was my best friend.” Then the three words that had been battering the inside of my brain for months explode out of my mouth, over and over. “I killed him. I killed him. I killed him.”
It was the second-to-last thing on the List.
Despite our fight, we had come so close. Lucas’s dad had told us that he would go with us on the trail. Gran gave her consent. We had all the gear, all the maps, everything. We set our start date—August 3. We were prepared.
And then, on a scorching July afternoon exactly a week before we were to hit the trail, we set out to tick off #9: Jump off the rope swing at the quarry.
The air was sticky hot as we climbed up to the quarry’s edge, humidity clinging to our faces like glue. It had been a brutal summer, the hottest on record. When we reached the rope swing, the muddy water below was the lowest I’d ever seen. It made the rope swing seem even that much higher.
It made me that much more afraid.
But Lucas was never afraid of anything. He peered over the side of the quarry and laughed. “Piece of cake. We’ll be swimming around in that nice cool water in no time.”
And then Lucas said it. Seven words that have haunted me every single day. “Toe, do you want to go first?”
He had listened to me when I had yelled at him. About always being the follower. He wanted to give me the chance to change that. To prove that I could be a leader, too.
In that moment I wanted more than anything to take charge. To be the one who finished number nine on the List first. But then I took another look down at the water so far below, and I couldn’t do it.
“No,” I told Lucas. “You go first.”
And so Lucas climbed up the tall red oak with the rope swing slung around its thickest branch and soared off with the grace of an angel, swan-diving straight into a block of granite hidden a foot beneath the water’s surface.
I slid down the steep quarry walls, screaming his name as I pulled him out of the water. But by the time I got to him, he was unconscious. He had broken his neck. He died an hour later, in the hospital where we had first met.
Sharp explosions of noises snap me out of my memory. Moose is by my side, giving short, sharp warning barks. His yipping pul
ls me back into the present, reminding me that I can’t lose myself to the past when a friend needs help now.
As my eyes refocus, Denver has turned around. He is looking at me. I wait for him to judge me.
Instead, he gives me a look of confusion. Of not knowing what to think.
The whole truth comes spilling out before I can stop it. “I wish it had been me who had died. It should have been me. But it wasn’t, and I’m still here.” I realize only as I’m saying it that it’s true. No matter how guilty and broken I’ve felt, I haven’t given up on Lucas or on myself. No matter how unlucky or dumb I am, I’ve kept going.
“I made a promise to Lucas that I would hike to Katahdin with him, and I’m going to keep my promise.” I am shaking, but standing taller than I’ve ever stood before.
“You made a mistake, too. But as much as you think your brother must hate you, he wouldn’t have wanted you to jump off a cliff. And he’s still out there.” I swallow a lump in my throat. “You could still work things out with him.”
“That’s not true,” Denver says quietly. “When he lost his eye, when he found out he would never be able to see if a baseball was an inch or a mile from his head for the rest of his life, he told me he wished I were dead. And then he disappeared.”
“Screw Harry,” Sean says. “Screw his career and his eye and the guilt he put on you.”
“I know what it’s like to live with so much guilt that … that you can barely go on,” I say. For a quick second, the past year flashes through my mind, dim and hazy and gray. Taking an ax and destroying the tree house we had built while screaming bloody murder. Not being able to eat a blueberry or see a worm without breaking down into sobs. Lying in Lucas’s backyard for hours, numb with memories and grief.
“But here’s the thing.” I take a step closer to Denver. “We live through it. We survive. And we learn to forgive ourselves.”
It is quiet now, off the trail. There is only the gray sky, the rocks and the cliffs, and us.
My words echo through my head, and for the first time, I wonder if I really can fully forgive myself someday.
Denver stands completely still for a moment. His hands are shaking. He takes a step away from the ledge.
And that’s when a gust of wind hits him like a wrecking ball square in the chest.
MOOSE HOWLS AS Denver stumbles backward. His arms go wheeling over his head as Sean lunges to grab him. Their hands just miss.
Denver teeters, his arms flailing, his eyes wide with surprise and fear.
And then he falls.
There is the sound of a body scraping against dirt and rock, and then an awful thud. Moose barks frantically as Sean and I scramble to the edge of the cliff.
Denver is twisted up in a heap on a ledge about twenty feet down. He is motionless and his eyes are closed. His face and front are smeared with mud.
Sean yells Denver’s name. Nothing.
Sean yells again.
Denver cracks an eye open.
“Ow,” he says.
The breath I had been holding comes whooshing out. I know it’s wrong, but I start laughing. Big, whooping gasps of relief come snorting out of me. Denver is alive. He is alive.
Denver peers down at himself and untangles his body until he is sitting up, his legs dangling off the narrow shelf that he has miraculously fallen on.
“You okay, man?” asks Sean.
Denver starts moving different parts of his body one by one. After his arms, he does a little chest shake and prods his legs. When he tries to move his foot, he winces. “I did something to my ankle,” he says. He touches it and yelps. “I think it might be sprained.”
“Anything else hurt?” asks Sean.
Denver completes his self-inspection. “It’s just my ankle, I think.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get you back.” Sean goes to his pack and takes out his bear bag rope.
He wraps one end of the rope around a boulder at the top of the cliff. Then he loops the rope around itself every sixteen inches, making little handhold knots.
When he’s done, he tosses the rope over the side. It whips down and slaps loose a couple of pebbles next to Denver’s shoulder. Sean grabs the rope near the boulder and yanks it, hard. The rope tightens but doesn’t snap. Sean walks back over to the cliff’s edge. “Denver, can you climb up?”
Denver grabs onto the rope. Using the handhold knots, he pulls himself up three feet, then four and a half feet, then six feet. But when he gets to seven and a half feet he stops. His feet dangle helplessly in the air. With a groan, Denver lowers himself back down to the ledge. His face is white as he looks up at us. “I don’t think I can pull myself up to you guys. I can’t use my feet to brace myself.”
Sean studies the cliff. He is silent for a long moment. “If I went down there, do you think you could piggyback on me while I bring you up?” he finally asks Denver.
“Yeah, I think I could hold on. But I’m no featherweight, Sean.”
“You be quiet.”
Holding the rope, Sean walks to the edge of the cliff. He turns around and leans back. The rope holds. “Here goes,” he says. He takes a step down, bracing his foot against the side of the cliff. Then he takes another. Hand over hand, he starts shimmying down. Right before his head lowers out of sight, I see him stare down with a look of utter terror on his face.
In that moment I realize that Sean has no idea what he’s doing. That the way he took control of the situation and told Denver he would rescue him was just a front. He’s still a kid, just like me.
The rope sways back and forth as Sean continues his descent. I get on my hands and knees and crawl to the edge of the cliff. When I peer over, Sean is halfway to Denver. His knuckles have turned white from gripping the rope.
“You’ve got this, buddy,” says Denver.
Sean takes another step. His foot slips on a smooth patch of rock. His other foot slides free, and he smashes into the cliff. When he pulls away, a line of blood trickles down from a gash on his cheek.
He doesn’t bother trying to put his feet back on the cliff. Instead, he dangles and lowers himself in a panic using just his arms and his hands. His chest slides across a couple of rocks that tumble free. They seem to bounce forever on their way down.
With a gasp, Sean crumples next to Denver. He wraps his hand around the rope and leans forward, his forehead just touching the rock. His shoulders are trembling.
When he moves again, it is to look up at the cliff he is going to have to climb with his best friend on his back. It looks terrifying. But I don’t want him to feel my fear, so I give him a thumbs-up.
“All right,” Sean says to Denver. “Up you go.”
Sean slowly turns to the side and crouches next to Denver. Denver wraps his arms around Sean’s neck, balancing on his good foot and wrapping one leg around Sean’s waist. With a little hop, he is on Sean’s back.
Sean’s knees wobble for a moment, but then they hold steady. He looks up. I see his eyes and know he’s going to make it. Time stretches out forever as I watch him put one hand above the other, pulling more than three hundred pounds of weight off the ledge. Every time he pulls himself up and brings his arms down to his chest, he wraps the rope around one leg and traps the rope between both his boots, taking the weight off his arms. I understand now why it would have been useless for Denver to try to climb the rope. With a busted ankle, there’s no way he could have used Sean’s technique to get off the cliff.
Sean starts fast, grunting every once in a while as he powers through, but otherwise there’s no sign that he’s under any sort of pressure.
But then, two-thirds of the way up, Sean begins to slow down. Even though it’s chilly, beads of sweat gather at his temples and roll down his face. He pauses, and suddenly he’s breathing fast and short. He is hyperventilating.
“Keep on moving!” I yell to him. Sean’s hand slips, and he and Denver drop a foot. Denver reaches out and grabs the rope to try to take some of his weight off Sean. His injured f
oot brushes against a jutting rock, and he gives a short, sharp yelp.
I reach down, but my hand is still far from where Sean and Denver are. I try to pick up the rope and pull on it, but it doesn’t budge. I am no match for the combined weight of two bodies. “Hang on,” I yell to them. My palms begin to sweat as I look around desperately for anything that will help.
Sean’s trekking poles are lying next to his pack. I grab one of them and run back to the cliff edge. I get on my stomach and lower the pole down. It’s just within reach of Sean and Denver. “Denver, grab on!” I say.
Denver shakes his head. “You’re half my size. I’d pull you over.” He grips the rope and swings himself on the other side of Sean. He starts hauling himself up, using his good foot to push up from the cliff wall.
Sean has stopped climbing. His hands slide an inch. “I don’t how much longer I can hang on.”
“Don’t you give up.” I drop the trekking pole and race to my pack. I pull out my bear bag rope, the one that Lucas and I got at a yard sale for three dollars. It’s flimsy, but it’ll have to do. I fling one end around the boulder next to Sean’s rope and tie a square knot to keep it in place. I run back to the cliff edge and tie a bowline around myself.
I wrap the rope around my right leg a few times and get back on the ground. Denver is only a foot from the edge, gasping with effort. I reach down. “I’ve roped myself to a rock up here,” I tell him. “You’re not going anywhere.” I hope it’s true.
Denver reaches up, and I grab his arm. I pull hard while he lets go of the rope and uses his other arm to push-up himself over the cliff edge. His chest flops onto the ground. I shift my grip to both his armpits and drag him until the rest of his body has made it safely over the edge.
Denver is already swiveling on his belly when I let go of him. “Sean!” he yells.
We scramble to the edge.
Sean has slid all the way back down to the ledge. “I don’t know if I can make it,” he says. He holds up both of his hands. Thick slashes of angry red skin cut across both his palms. “My hands are really messed-up.”
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