Page 39 of Valley Girls
She fell asleep.
Thirteen
Sixteen miles. Eight pitches of climbing. Rilla turned the numbers over on soundless lips, listening to the ceiling fans hum above her as she stared at her phone’s desperate attempts to snag Internet. Sixteen. Eight. Sixteen. Eight. A blank screen with a winding wheel stared back. Never mind yesterday,thiswas looking into the abyss.
She sighed, sinking deeper into the corner of a worn leather sofa in the Half Dome Village lounge—a sparse rectangular building filled with couches and comfortable chairs arranged around a stone fireplace. Most everyone sat, staring at their own slow-moving phones. A few people read books, or whispered over a guidebook. One or two napped. The air was warm and drowsy, and clear sunlight streamed through the windows.
It’d taken Rilla a half hour of gentle, slow walking on tender feet to cross the Valley, and she didn’t plan on moving—it was the only place she could sit, all day, and be steps away from food, coffee, and a bathroom. She’d even brought a schoolbook.
She was the only high school student in the little Valley school, and when she’d met with the principal to pick up her books, she’d also been given a ten-page, single-spaced letter detailing what she needed to complete in order to be reinstated into her senior year in the fall—whether it was here or in West Virginia. Everything was due by a date in August. So far, all Rilla had done was put the pile of books on the floor by her cot and let it gather dust. But today, she’d brought a book.
Her swollen and bandaged feet were propped up on a battered coffee table, in her softest pair of wool socks, and the only shoes able to adjust for the swelling—sandals. She didn’t even care that the blue wool socks came to her mid-shin, her shorts were men’s boxers patterned with lobsters, and her only clean hoodie was from middle school and basically three-quarter sleeves. She was never repeating yesterday again. Sixteen miles. Eight pitches. Not a single picture. Did it even happen?
Not that Instagram was loading anyway. Switching over to her messages, she stared again at the few and brief text conversations she’d had with friends from home.People, she amended, with an empty feeling in her stomach. Not friends. No one had told her people could break your heart like this. Cutting you out and discarding you. If they could just see Rilla as a climber, they’d want to be friends again.
“Looking like a climber already,” Hico said as her cushion suddenly tilted the wrong way and he smashed into her tender side.
She winced and shifted upright. “Uh, hey guys.”
“Stop manspreading,” Gage said, kicking Hico’s knee with a battered flip-flop.
Hico moved and Gage sat beside him, crunching the three of them onto the two-seater.
Both boys put their feet up on the table. Hico wore rainbow socks, black basketball shorts, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and dug into his strawberry yogurt with a fork. Gage, in a plaid button-down and pants, unwrapped a sandwich on his lap and pulled packets of hot sauce out of his pockets, before painstakingly cutting a packet open with a little pocketknife from his keychain. She remembered him out of the shower and again found herself looking away and blushing.
People snuck glances at their little group, as if her friends’ presences were disrupting the quiet. Rilla shifted and tugged her shorts down.
“Nice lobsters,” Hico said, over another fork of yogurt. It dripped on his chin and he licked it off. “Heard you did Snake Dike yesterday.”
“How’d it go?” Gage asked, dousing his sandwich in hot sauce.
A man to the left in a cloth chair cleared his throat loudly and lifted his eyebrows at his tablet screen.
“How’d it go?” Gage repeated in a whisper almost louder than his original question. He took a big bite of sandwich and waited, chewing.
“I can’t walk,” Rilla whispered back. “I might be dead. I’m not positive.”
Hico snorted. “Well, you made it back on your own two feet, so that’s a win.”
“Is that how you decide a win?”
“More or less,” Gage said. “Sometimes just alive is good enough. Feet are incidental.”
“Incidentally, my feet are busted,” she said.
Hico muffled a laughing at the sight of her wool socks. “We can see, girl. We know. But your cat-eye is looking ...” He winked and clicked his tongue in approval, and Rilla felt her spine involuntary straighten. He was cute. They were all cute, in individual ways. And she was goddamn susceptible.
“What?” Gage asked.
Hico pointed at her eyes. “Her makeup. I got three older sisters. Do you know how hard that shit is?”
Gage narrowed his eyes and studied her face. His eyes were dark and deep.
Rilla’s pulse fluttered. “Why is Hico eating yogurt with a fork?” she asked Gage, feeling strange at the scrutiny of her makeup.
“I’m catching a judgmental undercurrent in your whispers,” Gage said. “Hico, why don’t you enlighten her as to your fork.”
“I could only steal a fork,” he said sulkily. “The spoons were out of reach.”
