Page 76 of Valley Girls
“Just throw anything in,” Caroline said. “It’ll help you feel better.”
Rilla gritted her teeth and forced herself to reach for a nut, slide it into the crack, wiggle it down, clip in the draw, and drop in the rope. Only after she did it did she realize she’d automatically done something she’d basically just learned. “Got it,” she said, feeling a slight thread of relief.
“You were climbing hard,” Caroline said from below. “You didn’t even anticipate that you were falling. You blew a piece and kept your cool. You are the motherfucking shit right now, Rilla.”
Rilla closed her eyes and shook her head. “I want to get down.”
“When you place a piece, pulloutwhen you’re checking it. Not just down. Finish this pitch and then we’re done.” Caroline’s tone was that of a much older girl. Thea the way Rilla kept wanting her to be. Someone in complete control. “Take a minute to regroup.”
Rilla’s stomach twisted and tightened, but she lifted her chin and focused above—not on the fact that she hung in a couple straps of nylon and tiny bits of raccoon fodder stuffed into thin cracks six hundred feet off the ground. She had to get control of herself. She couldn’t lose it. There was no escaping this—this is where giving up meant she would lose all the work she’d put in, not only on the wall today, but in all the days she’d shown up to climb.
Drawing a deep breath in, she held it in her lungs for a half second longer and then eased it out in a long, controlled breath, imagining all that knotted her body easing out with it. “Help me,” she called.
“Shake out your hands,” Caroline replied immediately.
Rilla took one hand off and shook out the arm, then the other. She took another extra-long breath and swung back around to look at the wall.
“Try putting your hands into the crack on the side and pull that way,” Caroline continued.
Rilla followed her instructions, angling herself out of the corner. “Like this?”
Caroline nodded. “And your feet up on the opposite wall.”
Rilla put her foot up. “Oh.” She almost laughed. It still felt awkward and horrible, but the forces twisting and pulling at her eased. Making her body into a right angle that in some way mirrored the right angle of the dihedral, she got back into the position and looked up.
“Shuffle your hands up. Don’t try to go hand over hand like you were. Stem if you can, though. So much easier. And don’t use your muscle here, hang on your bones.”
Rilla frowned.What?
“Straighten your arms.”
Rilla had thought they were straight, but she obeyed and locked out her elbows. “Oh!” She laughed. Now the bones of her arms did the work of holding her into the crack, not all her muscles, like when her elbow was bent and her arm was flexed. It was still hard—but not impossible.
She could do this.
Twenty minutes of shuffling later, she pulled over the ledge, past the tree, and clipped the anchors.
Caroline followed, and they hauled up the bag and spread out on a wide ledge under the shady boughs of an eighty-foot ponderosa pine, four hundred feet off the ground.
Rilla leaned against the wall, still clipped into the anchor and her eyes lifted with relief to the granite above her she didnothave to climb.
“Have a treat.” Caroline handed her an apple.
“Thanks.” Rilla bit into it, tasting both the sweetness of the apple and the salt and grit on her lips. It was terrible. And intoxicating. “Goddamn, I’m going to do this again, aren’t I?”
Caroline laughed. “Why wouldn’t you? You were great.”
“It was horrible.”
“But wonderful,” Caroline said with a dreamy grin.
Rilla closed her eyes and groaned. It was true.
“Want to know something?” Caroline said, wiping at the sweat on her face and leaving a smudge of dirt.
“Absolutely,” Rilla said, perhaps a bit too hastily.
“My first big wall climb was up here, on a route just over there.” Caroline gestured down the wall. “And I was so nervous and it was so hot that like ten pitches into it I got diarrhea.”
