Page 81 of Valley Girls
Thea smiled. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Rilla nodded. “Me too.” It was worth the fear and the agony. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out. Caroline had texted—three pictures. The first was their selfie, smiling wide and messy hair in their helmets. An up-the-nose shot for Rilla, lovely.
The others were Rilla on the edge ... the massive Valley framed behind her. She smiled. She barely recognized herself. Saving them to her phone, she flicked over to Instagram and got halfway through uploading a shot of her looking down, when she canceled it.
The only reason she’d wanted that picture was to prove something. But who was she trying to prove something to? Everyone at home had only wanted a spectacle. When she stopped being a spectacle, they stopped caring.
She looked at the photo again.That is me,she told herself over and over. Staring at the girl’s thick, hardened arms. Her curious look hundreds of feet below. Her strong legs and messy braid.That is me.No one in West Virginia needed to believe this. No one needed to see it. It was all she’d hoped she could be, and all they’d never believed. She was the one who needed to see it. She was the one who needed to believe it.
Going back to Instagram, she uploaded the one of her and Caroline, #ValleyGirls. Upstairs, she combed through the slopped over pile of homework, pulled out her algebra, and folded her legs under the bare lightbulb. Pencil in one hand and chin tucked into the other, she began.
And didn’t stop.
All night. Under the wind gusting through the open window, whispering all the things she could want, because a tree and a frog grew four hundred feet above the Valley floor.
Twenty Five
The Nose became a secret. She kept it tight inside her chest, a note she’d hidden inside her ribcage, that only she could read. A desire so laughably out of her ability, she couldn’t afford to let it escape, even as she alternated between working for more gear and climbing with anyone who would have her as a partner. She unfolded it and read it in her soul while scrubbing the floor of the public bathrooms in Half Dome Village for twenty dollars from Bethany and Amarie. She checked to make sure it was still there when newcomers, Olivia and her partner Avery, showed her the short, painfully big moves on the Camp 4 boulders. She picked it out of the dirt and tucked it back away after she landed on her ass on their bouldering mat over and over.
Olivia caught her staring at the white lightning bolt smeared onto the granite boulder in chalk.
“It’s famous,” Olivia said. “Midnight Lightning. It took Ron Kauk and John Bachar two months to do it the first time. Anyone who gets it goes back over the lightning bolt with their chalk. To share in it.”
Rilla tried the problem and could barely get on. Avery tried and got halfway before landing on their ass. Olivia didn’t get any farther.
But after they moved on, Rilla often found herself looking at the lightning bolt as she walked back through the Camp, and reaching for that secret note tucked into her ribs. To share in an experience bigger than herself, a history she became a part of—it was what she’d wanted even before climbing came into her life.
“Do you aid climb?” she asked Petra, too intimidated to ask her to teach her outright.
“Ugh. Aiding is a slog,” Petra said. “Let’s just find something you can actually climb.”
Rilla shrugged and kept packing.
•
“Why don’t you just fucking ask her?” Jonah asked as they jogged side by side one morning through the Valley.
Rilla growled. “I don’t want to have to ask her. I want her to know, like, duh, Rilla is amazing. Rilla needs to aid to do anything bigger.”
“Does she even know how?” Jonah said, slowing as they came to the open spring near the start of the Valley circle.
“Yeah, she knows how.” Rilla came to a stop, sides heaving. She was a better runner than when she started, but Jonah had this unfair ability to run and never seem winded. “She climbs with Adeena all the time. Big routes.”
“And they don’t invite you?”
“They’re partners. I don’t know. I get it ... if you have a good rapport with someone, and they climb at the same level, you don’t really want someone new to come in and change the dynamics.” She bent and filled her Nalgene with water from the spring. A cool breeze stirred the wisps of hair at her neck and brought a wet, earthy smell that made her feel at home. “You know, I never realized how much the humidity unlocks the smell of things.”
“Does it smell differently on the East Coast?”
Rilla blinked. “Yes! Totally! Haven’t you ever been?”
“I’ve never been farther east than Kansas.”
“Oh. No, it’s so humid and disgusting. It’s like the air is a heavy, hot wet blanket. In West Virginia, I mean. I haven’t actually been to the coast.”
Jonah shuddered.
“But it carries all the smell and soul. The flowers and the earth and the trees. You can smell the breath of everything. You can get drunk on the smell of honeysuckle.”
