Page 7 of Valley Girls
“Just send me home,” Rilla said quickly. The end of Thea’s rope was much shorter than she’d even expected, but there was relief in not having to wait all summer for this moment.
Thea threw her hands up in exasperation. “Why would you even want to go back?” Without waiting for Rilla’s reply, she stormed ahead.
Rilla glared at Thea’s back. Well,therewas the sister she once knew. The one who got angry and left. Rilla needed to go back to West Virginia, before she did any damage to her sister’s pristine new life. Before Thea started regressing to smashing fake blood bags over her head while screaming about futility.
They walked in silence between the shadowed cliffs, and Rilla forced herself to look up.
She’d seen pictures of Yosemite, of course. After Mom had bought her bus ticket and California turned out to be real and not just a threat, she’d sobbed under her pillow and then googledYosemite National Park. A mile wide and roughly eight miles long, the Merced River wound through a grassy meadow and woodland floor. The Internet was full of photos of tall waterfalls lit in sunlight, the Valley spread through wide-angle lenses, with the famous cliffs keeping watch on each end: El Capitan and Half Dome.
What she hadn’t seen—hadn’t understood—in all those pictures was thescale.
How it kept going, on and on. Beyond the limits she didn’t even know her mind had placed on trees and rocks and sky. It was as if she’d walked into what she thought was the world, and suddenly it grew up around her, lurching from the depths of the earth to push tall and proud toward the stars. The whole world was bigger than she had imagined it could be, and she much smaller in it.
“Drugs?” Thea asked, falling back in step beside her. “Weed? Something else?”
It took a second to realize Thea was asking if she’d done them. Rilla’s throat tightened and she kept her face even. “No.” No more. Not after last night.
“Have you talked to someone about what happened? At home?”
Rilla didn’t respond. She was sure if she opened her mouth, she’d cry. Her face flushed hot and horrified. A flash of tightness crossed her collarbone, a blur of heat and anger pressing into her skin, and she had to look down. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over. No one listened in the first place.”
“I’ll listen,” Thea said.
Rilla rolled her eyes. “Yeah,okay. It wasn’t like you think. It wasn’t this huge thing Mom is making it into.”
“You’re saying Mom ...our mom... overreacted?”
Rilla tightened her jaw and glared at her. This was exactly what she feared from Thea. From anyone. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Thea sighed as they crossed into the open meadow. “Fine. But what good does it do anyone if you come all the way out here and just keep doing the same things?”
Rilla swallowed. Her throat ached. “I’m trying.”
Thea snorted. “If this is trying ...” She shook her head. “Girl, I can’t keep you if I don’t have ajob. This is a seasonal position. I just got here two months ago. There’s one opening for a permanent park ranger. At the end of the season they’re going to decide between me and Miller.”
Rilla blanched. “Ranger Dick Face?”
Thea made a face. “Gross.” She shook her head, and the porch steps creaked under her boots. “Why do you think he did all that with you and seeing the judge? He knows it’s good for his career for me to seem unstable. If he can get me in trouble, he can keep me out of a job. If he can getyouin trouble, he can keep me out of a job.”
“Is that what y’all do all summer? Just bust people having a good time?” Rilla asked.
Thea shook her head. “They do these once or twice in the early summer, to weed out the employees who are going to be a problem all summer.”
“What’s going to happen to them?” Rilla asked.
“The ones who were arrested? They’re going home.”
“I want to go home,” Rilla said. She didn’t really, but she did at the same time. It was both things at once. She didn’t want to feel this small. She didn’t want to wait for her sister to get fed up and send her home. She wanted time to belong in this vast landscape. But she only said, “I don’t like it here.”
“You don’t even know where here is,” Thea said, rolling her eyes. “Baby girl, you’re so West Virginia it’s ridiculous. Look at you.” Thea swept her hand up and down.
Rilla frowned and looked down at her boots and cut-offs, the gauze top, thin and drab from a long night. “What?”
Thea snorted. “Nothing. Just ... and your accent. God, sometimes it’s hard to believe I ever talked like that. Ever looked like that.”
“You didn’t look like this. I’m prettier,” Rilla shot back. What did everyone see that Rilla couldn’t? What was she supposed to be ashamed of?
Thea laughed.
