Page 68 of Valley Girls
She chuckled, warmed to have a companion in sister misery. “Yeah.”
“You can do this,” he said, nodding toward the cliff. “I mean, not right this second. But you’re here; and if you want to work and find your people, you can. By the end of the summer even, you could climb The Nose if you wanted.”
Rilla laughed. “You’re joking.”
“I’m totally serious,” Walker said.
She looked down. “It feels like all I can really do is fuck up. Did you hear I dropped the rope yesterday?”
He laughed. “Yeah. I heard.”
“Don’t laugh! Your sister had to rescue me.”
“Listen. Is that what’s getting you down?” He straightened off the tree. “I mean, fucking up is an integral part of climbing.”
She frowned and side-eyed him. “Stop bullshitting me.”
“It is!” he insisted. “If you aren’t falling, you aren’t climbing hard enough. If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t progressing. If you aren’t getting in over your head, you aren’t exploring. You try and not fuck up in a way that will kill yourself or someone else, but everything else ...” He smiled. “Climbing makes failure a friend, not a foe.”
Never had she wanted to kiss a boy more in her life. But beyond that she wanted other things more than she’d ever wanted them. She wanted to climb, to say she was sorry, to not have failure mean such big things in her life. She didn’t want to be afraid of messing up—even if she didn’t have much more to lose. Abruptly she tightened her fists and turned down the path.
“Wait. Where are you going?” he said with surprise.
Rilla shouted over her shoulder. “Tell her I went home to do my homework.”
Walker’s reply echoed off the cliff. “Copy that.”
She was going to climb El Capitan.
She was going to stay in Yosemite. She was going to outrun that ranger every time, and she was going to push herself until she was scraped, and she was going to get back up when she fell, and she was going to keep her eyes open to look for where the thin path swung away from the wide asphalt, and in doing all those things—in pursuing this thing that was so much bigger than herself ...
She was going to transform.
Twenty One
For two days, the Valley was quiet except for the rain drumming the roof as Rilla worked. Her eighteenth birthday came, and just when she was ready to throw all her books out the window and post something passive-aggressive about being forgotten on Instagram, Lauren came home with two chocolate cupcakes and a piece of dry spaghetti stuck in the middle of one and lit on fire as a makeshift candle.
“Don’t tell Thea, I forgot to get her one,” Lauren said, licking icing off the top after Rilla had blown out the spaghetti.
“Thea probably forgot anyway,” Rilla said.
Lauren snorted. “Sure, and how do you think I knew it was your birthday?”
Oh yeah. Rilla made a face.
“Well, how does eighteen feel?”
“Like seventeen,” Rilla said over a mouthful of cupcake.
Thea came home later with more cupcakes, and a new fleece Patagonia jacket.
Rilla clutched the jacket, her smile real.
She finished all of her trigonometry before the rain stopped, the waters receded, and tourists flowed back into the Valley.
Morning dawned—bright and simmering heat in the thick shafts of golden sunshine slotted through the pines. The river ran high, but within a week a fire had lit in the high Sierras and the wind shifted, bringing the smell of smoke with it. Rilla would have imagined Thea surely had something to do with forest fires in the park, but Thea just layered on more sunscreen and listened with a morose look on her face to the fire reports and the radio chatter.
“You hate your job, don’t you?” Rilla asked one morning. They hadn’t talked about the conversation during the flood. But resumed tentatively, as if it had never happened.
