Meet Me at the Summit

by Mandi Lynn

  MEET ME AT THE SUMMIT

  Copyright © 2021 by Stone Ridge Books

  The following is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-953388-02-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-953388-03-2 (e-book)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form, digital or printed, without the written permission of the author.

  Cover Design: Stone Ridge Books

  www.mandilynn.com

  www.stoneridgebooks.com

  ALSO BY MANDI LYNN

  Novels:

  Essence

  I am Mercy

  She’s Not Here

  Non-Fiction:

  How Your Book Sells Itself

  Grow Your Author Platform

  Book Sales That Multiply

  Children’s Books:

  Mr. Moon’s Big Move

  Tabel of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Feeling Inspired to Go on a Hike?

  Acknowledgements

  The Trip Ahead:

  Chapter 1

  When you sign up to work in retail, nobody warns that you have to clean bathrooms. They also fail to include that sometimes those bathrooms may have the occasional vomit spew-out, because the T.J. Maxx you work at is located next to a bar that is all too eager to get people a little more than tipsy.

  After two clean-ups in one day, I’m more than ready to retreat home and try to forget the fact that my manager has yet to do any of the cleaning himself—or even look at the bathroom for that matter. I shove the apartment door open, throwing my bag on the floor as soon as I walk through. My roommate, Lori, has her yoga mat spread out in the middle of the living room. Her body is folded in a way that looks slightly unnatural. Her face is serene and completely at ease, despite the fact that her knee is almost touching her ear.

  She glances up and laughs under her breath. “Oh, I know that look. More vomit?”

  “I’m starting to think people need to take a Breathalyzer test before they’re allowed into the store.” I rush over to the sink and wash my hands up to my elbows. I’d already washed as much as possible at work, but I swear I can still smell it. Shaking my hands dry, I slip into my room to change into sweatpants.

  “It shouldn’t be legal to come in that wasted,” Lori calls out. By the time I step back out into the room, she’s seated in the middle of her yoga mat, patting a spot next to her.

  “I’m fine,” I say, choosing to sit on the couch behind her.

  She frowns and turns. “It might help you de-stress,” she says, braiding her hair as she talks to me, knotting the long auburn curls into a smooth plait. Lori has always had the type of hair that flows down in perfect curls, the kind that shines just enough to make you think she was a model for a shampoo commercial. Meanwhile, my hair is the opposite: dry, shoulder-length, and falling in waves too chaotic and messy to be considered curls. Even when Lori braids it for me, fine baby hairs stick out left and right.

  Lori is my little self-help guru. She spent junior and senior year of high school worshipping every personal development book she could get her hands on. It started after her parents got divorced freshman year of high school. Lori’s mom turned to self-help books, and it rubbed off on Lori, who is now trying—and failing—to rub off on me. That’s how she got into yoga, and from there, things snowballed. These days, she’s dreaming of opening her own yoga studio, so she’s going to college to learn the business side of things while taking classes to get her instructor certification.

  “Can we just watch TV?” I reach for the remote before she can answer. This is our routine every night. Lori is almost ready for her sophomore year of college, while I’m off working at T.J. Maxx, making minimum wage, and hoping my manager doesn’t notice that I’m hiding in the stock room half the time. Then, when we’re both at the apartment, we watch something on TV that makes it impossible for Lori to ask, “How’ve you been feeling lately?”

  Lori frowns when I turn on the TV. “I was looking at the course schedule for next semester,” she says, taking a seat next to me. “The photography class you were enrolled in last year will be running again. I think if we talk to admissions, they’ll let you re-enroll, and you can take some of the classes you started last year.”

  I bite my lip. I knew this conversation would come up eventually. Lori’s been working me up to re-enroll for months. She’s been trying to “help” me more and more lately. Every night, she asks me to do yoga with her, giving me speeches about how it helps my mental and physical health. She’s left her course catalogue on the table, open to the photography class options, and has brought me to multiple campus events, hoping it might spark something in me. I went, willing and eager for a distraction, but it didn’t make me want to jump back into that life again. Even if I did, I’d be a full year behind.

  What Lori doesn’t understand is how life can turn things completely upside-down. Not just, “Oh, you’re having a bad day,” but “There’s no point in trying to look forward to something because life will come knocking and take whatever good you could find for your future and tear it to pieces.”

  “I missed the deadline to apply,” I say. Truthfully, I have no idea what the deadline is for the fall semester, but it’s July now, so it’s a safe bet to say I missed it.

  Lori pulls at her braid, a telltale sign of guilt. “I kinda already asked admissions.” She says the words slowly before she blinks and looks up at me. “They said under the circumstances, you can re-enroll.”

  The circumstances being my dead parents.

  Lori reprimands me for being negative for the past nine months, but there are only so many feelings you can have after both your parents die in a freak accident. They were both driving to come visit me in our college dorm when they got into a car accident at a busy intersection. It was a fifty-minute drive from their house to my dorm room, but it only took twenty minutes to form black ice on the highway. It was the first day below freezing in October, so no one was thinking about the roads freezing.

  To say my parents’ deaths were devastating is an understatement. I don’t remember those first few months. Or at least, I try not to. I was mostly numb. After a few weeks of skipping every class and social opportunity possible, I dropped out of college. No one batted an eye, but now I’m supposed to pick up my life up again, even when there’s nothing left to pick up.

  “Lori, I don’t want to go back to college.” I scroll through Netflix to find a new show to watch.

  “But what about—”

  “No,” I say, trying to end the conversation there.

  Lori
doesn’t say anything while I scroll through the show options, but she’s watching me. She knows TV is my way of coping, or, if I’m being honest with myself, ignoring the feelings. She’s tried pulling me away from the screen time and time again the past couple months, but it always ends in an argument.

  I’m not depressed, at least not in the way that television makes it look. I don’t spend hours in my room crying and looking out the window. If I’m not watching TV, I go out with my friends and let them distract me from this odd void deep in my chest. There were tears at the beginning, but at some point, and I’m not sure when, I decided I was done crying. So I got up, and I haven’t stopped moving since then.

  College was always easier for Lori. She’s known since high school that she wanted to start her own yoga studio someday, so she dove into her business major headfirst. She even enrolled in two summer classes to graduate early. Meanwhile I have yet to have a college credit to my name.

  “But you can major in photography just like you wanted. And you can go back to taking senior photos and portraits to make money like you used to. You don’t even have to enroll full-time. Start as a part-time student. Take it slow.”

  I turn the TV off and set the remote on the side table before turning to Lori. Her eyes are pleading with me to listen. It makes me feel like I’m reprimanding a puppy.

  “I don’t want to go to college, Lori,” I repeat.

  “Then maybe we can post online that you’re taking clients again or—”

  “No,” I say.

  “But you’re so good at taking photos.”

  “And now I don’t want to anymore.”

  Lori recoils as if I slapped her across the face.

  For almost nine months, she’s let me wallow in my grief. We never talked about my parents. I went to parties with her. We had fun. We went on double dates that never led to anything. But never, never did we talk about my future.

  My way of grieving was by ignoring my grief. Unhealthy? Probably. Lori reminds me of my unhealthy coping mechanisms by leaving self-help books on my bed. Most of them revolve around finding yourself after a tragedy. I read the first book she gave to me, but all it did was tell me what I wanted to hear rather than what I needed to hear to get better. The books talk about grief being normal and that you need to work through it. The books fail to include that if you get stuck in your grief, whatever was left of your “normal” life will eventually disappear too. It usually takes a day or two of skimming through the pages to put the book back in Lori’s room.

  Lori visibly straightens and meets my eyes. “Marly, I want to help you,” she says, voice firm.

  I take a breath to collect myself. “You’ve already helped.”

  Lori has helped in more ways than my family ever could. She walked me to every meeting with a counselor on campus after my parents died. She talked to my professors for me when I refused to go to class. She came with me to the registrar’s office when I needed to sign the paperwork to drop out. We lived in a dorm together, and when I had to move out, she moved out with me so we could get an apartment together. I could have moved into my parents’ house—their life insurance paid off the mortgage and then some—but I can’t get myself to go back there when they won’t be on the other side of the door.

  “I just want to see you happy again,” Lori says, her eyes soft.

  I want to tell her I am happy, but we both know it would be a lie. I’m not unhappy. I’m just numb. At some point, when the pain became too much, I found a switch to turn it all off, and now I can’t turn it back on again.

  I try not to think about my parents anymore. It’s not because I didn’t love them. The opposite, actually. It’s usually late at night when my body is tired, but the rest of my mind is still operating at 100 miles per hour, that it begins to wander to that dangerous place of remembering the good memories. There were camping trips, waterslides, board games—and in one day, it was all taken away. So I push away the memories. For now, at least. I usually end nights watching a TV show on Netflix for the one-hundredth time, letting myself get lost in some fictional world, rather than giving myself a chance to deal with my own world.

  “I’ll be okay,” I say, because that’s all I can promise. I’m not happy, but I’m okay. Surviving, just not thriving.

  Lori makes a face, but lets it go as she reaches out for the remote to scroll through our movie options for the night. She’s been insisting on a proper girls’ night since I’ll be gone for a couple of days to visit my mom’s side of the family in Washington state. After my parents died, they had all traveled here to New Hampshire to attend both my parents’ funeral. Instead of reminiscing about good memories with my mom and moving on with their lives, everyone agreed that we’d all get together again the following summer. Funerals. They really bring family together.

  My father’s family is easier. They all live locally, so everyone sees each other for every holiday and has dinner together about once a month. It was my mom who had left Washington to go to college in New Hampshire where she met my dad and eventually set down roots.

  My parents weren’t perfect. Far from it, in fact. They were two people with almost nothing in common—except for how much they loved each other. It was what knitted them together and kept them intertwined all those years. They could never agree on food, activities, or vacations, but they also never fought. They could debate any subject, but always came to a passive agreement. My mom was famous for being quietly unhappy while my dad and I went on some outrageous excursions during vacations. My dad loved to do anything that got his adrenaline pumping, and for as long as I can remember, he took me along for the journey. My mom, on the other hand, loved a good night inside, watching movies and making s’mores over the stovetop. Why over the stove rather than an actual campfire in the backyard? “Because it’s cold, and I just want one s’more,” she’d always say, holding the marshmallow over the burner.

  “Did you already pack?” Lori asks, peeking over to where I’m standing by the microwave, waiting for the popcorn to be done.

  “Yup. Good to go for tomorrow,” I say, pulling the popcorn out and pouring it into a bowl. “You know, for a college student, I would’ve expected you to have snuck alcohol into this apartment by now.” We’re both nineteen and eagerly look forward to the days we can end the night with wine. Especially on days like today when the customers of T.J. Maxx are more wasted than I ever hope to be.

  “What? Did you want wine with your popcorn?” Lori asks.

  “Gotta survive the family reunion somehow.”

  Chapter 2

  The airport is about an hour away, so Lori and I wake up at 6 a.m. I needed to do some last-minute packing, and while Lori could have slept in, she woke up with me, claiming that she wanted to help make sure I didn’t forget anything. In reality, I could feel her checking on me out of the corner of her eye, waiting to see if I would burst into tears or cancel the flight last minute. She hasn’t asked many questions about the reunion, but we both know my mom will be a topic of discussion that will be impossible to ignore.

  I haven’t cried in months, something I’m proud of, but I also know visiting my mom’s family is reopening an old wound that is still very tender.

  “How long will you be gone?” she asks, organizing my suitcase better than I’d ever be capable of.

  “Just a long weekend. I’ll be home again late Monday night.” I glance over at her. She already knew my itinerary—in fact, she probably has it memorized better than I do—but she’s hovering close by more than usual, her forehead creased in worry.

  I hand my pajamas to Lori to fit into the suitcase. We’ve always worked together like this. I’m usually the one running around, doing probably too many things at once, and Lori is right there behind me, cleaning up the mess I make in the process. Lori once described me as chaotic, but in a good way. Meaning I have lots of energy. To me, it just means I’m a mess.


  “Want me to pick you up?” Lori offers, watching me fold my day-bag for hiking, smiling a little while she watches. I haven’t taken it out since my parents died. It had been stuffed away into the back of my closet, but when I was on the phone with Gran last week she insisted I bring it, saying that everyone was going to go hiking. She probably just said that thinking it would make me more eager to come.

  “If you want, otherwise I can catch an Uber.” I grab a few other last-minute hiking supplies from my closet. If I was being honest, I didn’t want to go on a family hike, but I had promised myself I’d make this trip a happy one. So if Gran wants me to bring my hiking stuff, I’ll bring it.

  It’s been years since I visited my mom’s family in Washington state. So long that I’m pretty sure I only remember visiting in the past because my mom took so many pictures.

  Lori and I head out to the car. By now, the sun is already peeking up over the horizon, giving the road a soft glow. We’re about ten minutes into the drive when Lori turns down the radio until it’s just a whisper in the background.

  “You’ll be okay, right?” she asks. I blink a couple of times, turning my attention to her. Is this why she’s been so off all morning?

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is the first time you’re seeing your mom’s family since the funeral. I mean, I’m sure they’re going to talk about it, and talk to you, ask you how you’re doing.”

  “And I’m doing fine,” I interject.

  I can see Lori chewing on her lip, trying to think of how to word what she wants to say next. That maybe I’m not “fine” and that I’m one wrong turn from being a crying puddle again.

  “You don’t think that will trigger anything for you?” Her words are gentle.

  “I see my dad’s family all the time, and I don’t have any issues,” I say quickly.

  Lori glances over, her eyebrows knit together. She looks back at the road without saying anything.

  “What?” I ask.

  “How long has it been since you saw your dad’s family?”