Page 121 of Valley Girls
Rilla glanced at Walker.
Walker shrugged. “Nothing.” He leaned over and stole a sausage from her plate.
Petra pretended to stab him with her fork, and looked to Rilla. “You two together now?” she asked.
Rilla waited, breath tight in her chest.
“We’re eating breakfast together,” Walker said. “If that’s what you mean.”
Petra smiled a small smile at Walker’s evasiveness—like a satisfactory little curl she couldn’t control.
Rilla hid in her coffee cup. She was starting to hate Petra’s competitiveness. Petra didn’t even like Walker. Everything in her stomach turned sour, and she pushed away her plate, trying to look like she didn’t care.
“Please stop asking my brother questions about his love life while I’m eating breakfast,” Caroline said, not looking at any of them. “You’re ruining my food.”
“We were talking on the way down and decided it’s a great Middle Earth day,” Caroline announced, pushing back her hair. “It’s supposed to be a hundred today, so it’s either that, or I’m going to Tuolumne.”
“What’s Middle Earth?” Rilla asked.
“It’s the inner falls of Yosemite Falls—you can’t see it until you’re inside,” Gage said. “It’s so beautiful. It’s literally like you’ve been dropped in New Zealand or a Tolkien book or something.”
“You coming?” Petra asked Walker.
He nodded. “Sure.”
Rilla didn’t know how she felt, but she knew she felt something. She stood with the others, taking her tray back and trying to shake off the awkwardness that had crept up and ruined her breakfast. There was nothing wrong. Nothing at all.
•
Caroline free-soloed up Sunnyside Bench—something Rilla hadn’t even thought Caroline would do. Once Petra saw Caroline did it, she followed suit, leaving the taste of unease in Rilla’s mouth as she watched her disappear up the cliff. Petra could do it, Rilla was fairly certain. But she trusted Caroline to make a better decision on risk than Petra did.
The rest of them simul-climbed up Sunnyside Bench—a new experience for Rilla. It made the easy route go quickly, as they were all attached on the same rope. Gage went first and placed the protection. Walker went last and cleaned it. Everyone else climbed along in between. In that way, they ran up the cliff quickly, laughing and joking as if they were all out for a walk under the brilliant sun.
At the top, Caroline and Petra sat under a tree in the shade, waiting and looking more relaxed together than Rilla had ever seen. The slabs wore down into a faint trail and she fell in step behind the others as they all headed single-file along a great granite terrace, toward Yosemite Falls.
It’d been hot and not rainy, and the falls had become a steady, thin trickle, plummeting well over a thousand feet from the upper edge. The gray and tan-streaked cliffs ran each direction as far as the eye could see. They had spent two hours climbing out of the Valley and had barely made it off the floor. She kept looking up at the falls, at the glisten of the splash of water on granite, squinting under the intensity of the sunshine.
“It never gets old,” Petra said, raising her arms up as the trail wound down to a wide opening at the bottom of the falls. Thick green manzanita bushes flattened and puffed in the wind in between the smooth granite boulders and slab. The trickle of a thousand-foot waterfall turned into a glassy creek slipping around the boulders and falling over the rounded edge of the shelf. Beyond the shelf, the water dove into a narrow fissure—a slot canyon—that kept falling toward the Valley floor.
“We’re going down there?” Rilla asked, equally scared and excited. It was a clear, beautiful day and she was with a team; but she would never forget that hiker in Tenaya.
“Down there is Middle Earth,” Caroline said.
At the top of the shelf, chains were bolted to the rock—shiny and well-kept—clearly waiting for their ropes. They pulled the ropes, put on their harnesses, and began dropping down into the canyon on rappel, one by one. When it was Rilla’s turn, she started off and then paused to drink in the full sight of the still stunning waterfall. She’d listened to this fall every night. She’d seen it when she didn’t know what she was looking at. And now she stood right beneath it.
Walker stepped in front of her, grinning. “Yo, Rilla.” He snapped his fingers. “Focus.”
“I was admiring the view,” she said.
“See ya in a bit.” He waved.
Over the edge, the main falls slipped out of view and she followed the short, bulging wall to the bottom, joining the others in a shrunken pool walled in on all sides by the rock. The far side of the walls were water-polished and Rilla shuddered to think of standing here in the spring, when the falls were rushing at peak, and this pool would be covered in fathoms of tumultuous water, thrashing at itself to get over the next edge. Warm fingers gently touched her spine, and the shiver looped around itself and spun into a warm, aching hook that dropped to her toes as Walker gripped her shoulders.
“You cold?” he asked.
She smiled and spoke over her shoulder as they trudged through the pool, their packs floating alongside them. “No. I was thinking about the water being high.” And how fast and powerful it would be churning through this arm-width channel.
“Oh. Yeah. That is a scary thought. Wait for me, I need to get the rope.” He turned and pulled long stretches of the rope down over the drop, and coiled it back up to carry over his muscled shoulder through the waist-high water.
