Page 68 of That Summer Feeling

“I’m great. You?”

“Great.”

We didn’t have time to say more. We had to run.

She leaped down from the last wall and charged off toward the tunnels, moving at a pace I wanted to match. She needed to know that no matter how fast she sprinted, I’d do my damn best to catch her. We were headed toward the same destination. At the tunnels, we dropped into a crawl. Each of us slithered down parallel paths, emerging on the other end with barely a second between our times.

Behind us, Aja had stopped at the end of the wall climbs to motivate Sky and Laurie to keep it moving. She’d really developed into a captain in the truest sense—a no-soldier-left-behind leader who knew that not all of us needed her to stick by us and cheer, but Sky and Laurie did. In order for our teamto work best, she had to be there for them to ensure the success ofallof us.

We reached the spinning logs. With quick, tiny steps, Stevie sailed across them, holding her arms out for balance like a gymnast on a beam. I did the same, right behind her. Forever in sync. Tommy started the log walk right as Stevie and I finished. I looked back to see him spry and focused, light on his feet as he took careful steps forward.

I thought again of Ethan’s favorite question.Why do you care so much?

He wasn’t ever asking it for an answer. He was asking it to be judgmental. Subtly, because everything he did was subtle. But judgmental all the same. In that moment it occurred to me that it was the wrong question, anyway. It wasn’t about the why. It was about the how.Howdo you care? That’s what mattered.

I cared through my words. My generosity. I cared through the way I supported people’s plans and dreams. I cared through the challenges I pushed through.

Everyone at this camp had opened their arms to me since the moment I’d fainted at Mason’s feet. No one had ever once judged me for being who I was. Except maybe Julianne, but to her credit, she was right to judge me for being distracting. The other people here had no way of really knowing how much they’d all changed me over the course of the week. Completing this obstacle course was one way I could show them at least a small piece of it.

We made it through the monkey bars and the weightedsleds. Stevie and I ended up as the first two to reach the rock climbing wall. There were safety supervisors there to get us into harnesses before we began climbing.

My stomach lurched. All my exhilarated pride and excitement began to drain out of me—an unseen puncture in my boat of courage. My adrenaline no longer had a pleasant, buzzy tremble. It turned into a shake in my legs, and an air-gulping desperation to catch a breath that wasn’t available. I’d managed to trick myself into thinking my fear of heights was some abstract, conceptual thing. In some ways, it was. But it was also literal. Very, very literal. A terror that, when confronted, did not retreat.

“Oww,” Stevie said softly. “Fuck.” She shook her wrist. Her harness was nearly secure, and she was due to take off in seconds.

Tommy slammed into the wall from the full-throttle force of his run. “What’s wrong?”

“I hurt my hand pushing the weighted sleds,” Stevie told him.

I’d been right beside her, and she’d not so much as skipped a beat as she moved. We’d been standing getting harnessed for close to a minute. How had the pain just appeared?

Stevie didn’t look Tommy in the eye and hold his gaze in her Stevie way, all resolution and pride. Instead she focused all her attention on her unswollen wrist—though a beautiful one, as far as wrists were concerned—and pretended to nurse it. It looked so unnatural that in any other scenario, I’d have laughed. Because I did not have to know Stevie long to understand she was the type of person to run a marathon on abroken ankle. Not that sheshould, but she would. She did more than necessary when it came to competing, and here she was trying to get out of the biggest competition of the week.

She was lying.

And she was doing it for me.

She saw me panicking, and she was trying to save me, as she had so many times before. She knew my shaking was coming from fear, and she wouldn’t be able to carry me up the rock wall like she’d wanted to do across the ropes course. So she was going to throw the competition instead.

The resolution that only seemed to find me when I was around her—that spine-straightening assuredness I’d never known before—came charging forth. “I’ll carry you up,” I said to her.

“You’re not carrying an entire human up a fifty-foot wall.” She looked at one of the safety supervisors. “Will you let me out of the harness? I won’t be able to compete.”

“Don’t take her out yet,” I told the supervisor.

“Please do,” Stevie said.

The man lingered with his hand over Stevie’s harness, utterly confused.

“I’d do anything for you,” I said to Stevie.

“I don’t need you to do anything for me. I can do it for myself. Just not right now.” She moved the supervisor’s hand and started unclipping the harness herself.

I put my hand atop her wrist—herinjuredwrist—and pressed down. “You don’t need to do it for yourself anymore. This isn’t all or nothing. I’m here.”

Tommy, to our left, had already started up the rock wall.Aja, Sky, and Laurie arrived together, getting harnessed on the right side of us.

I saw it then. What Stevie tried so hard to hide.Herfear. She did everything to avoid showing it because it had depths that terrified her, so she made herself scary to intimidate everyone out of acknowledging it. She was afraid I’d leave her behind. That when we went down the mountain, I would give her up because I didn’t know how we’d fit our real lives together.