Page 88 of Valley Girls
He snorted. “Is she your bird carrying messages down here, then?”
“Well, it’s the best I got. What you been climbing?”
“Nothing special.” Walker sighed and sank into a chair. “I’m stuck.” He poked at the fire, gaze flickering over to Olivia. “We haven’t met? Have we?”
Olivia’s eye widened. “No. But I think I’ve met your sister. She beat me at a youth worlds in Germany when I was sixteen. I didn’t realize she had a brother.” Olivia visibly blushed, even in the light of the fire.
Rilla snapped her chin to study Walker, grateful for her dark corner to hide the flush of jealousy. The skin of her wrist burned. “He’s everyone’s vacation fuck boy,” Rilla said before she thought all the way through the sentence.
He didn’t look at her, but his mouth visibly tightened. “Yep,” he said lazily.
That terrible sense of just having made a mistake sank in her stomach. What had she just said? Despite what Thea and Petra had said about him, she’d never really seen any evidence of him being like that. Appalled, she buried her nose back into the outline and tried to ignore everyone as they kept talking.
“Caroline!” Petra said as Caroline slumped in and dropped her pack in the dirt.
“Move,” she ordered her brother.
Rilla kept her nose in her notebook.
“Ugh.” He moaned, but rolled out of the chair and sat on the box next to Rilla.
She swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He didn’t reply. But his arm touched hers. Warm and reassuring in the dark.
“How is freeing The Nose going?” Petra asked Caroline, almost teasingly.
Caroline huffed into the chair and didn’t answer.
Rilla’s stomach clenched. She couldn’t tell if Caroline regretted taking her climbing, or was just focused on her own climbing, or just exhausted and hadn’t noticed Rilla was there.
Probably just tired.
Or all of it.
“Hey, that climb you did the other day. I heard there was a loose block on the fifth pitch,” Petra said.
Caroline leaned over and poked around at the snacks Hico had brought. “Are these Oreos?”
“They’re Hico’s.”
“Huh?” He was on his knees at the edge of a spread-out tarp, busy packing for the next day’s climb, paying no attention.
Caroline held them up. “Mind?”
“Help yourself.”
Caroline sat down and opened the package, finally turning to Petra. “The block is loose right below the fifth set of bolts. Even touching it seemed like a bad idea. I stayed far away. It’s definitely coming off soon.”
“Soonmeaning, anytime between now and a hundred years from now,” Petra said.
“Speaking of which,” Hico said. “Did anyone get updated beta for the huge chunk of Half Dome that came off?”
“I have an update. I’ll copy the page for you,” Walker said.
“Everything changes. Even Yosemite,” Petra said with a sigh.
Rilla looked up at the ridge—blue and shadowy in the moonlight above the warm glow of camp. At home, the mountains changed in theory, but not really in practice. The flood had changed things, but not really the mountains. Here, the ridges changed at a rate you could see. Young gods versus the old. Rilla balanced her pencil on her finger—the old gods had seen fit to kick her out, but it felt as if the new ones had yet to see her.
