Until It Hurts to Stop (10 page)

Luis leads a line of dancers into the already-packed kitchen. He moves as smoothly here as he does on the basketball court. He beckons to me, but I shake my head. Years of piano lessons taught me to find a beat, so I’m not worried about the rhythm, just about trying to move freely in front of everyone.

The dancers make a circuit around the kitchen, and this time when Luis passes me, he grabs my hand and pulls me off the counter. I’m swept into the tide, adjusting my dancing to match the motion of the others.

For a few minutes, it’s beautiful, the way we all move together. I belong; I’m in tune with everyone around me. We lock into the beat as if it’s keeping us alive.

Luis abandons himself to the music, pumping his hips with no shame or self-consciousness, and I wish I could let myself go like that. But underneath, my internal alarm system’s on alert. Some part of me stands back and watches the people around me for danger signs: smirks, superior glances, whispers. I don’t see any, but I shrink back toward the counter, anyway.

When he sees me slipping away, Luis stretches a hand toward me. It’s an invitation, and I take it, dancing there for as long as he holds me, trying to remember the last time I felt so welcome in a crowd. The heat in the room is suffocating, moisture running down the steamed windows, but somehow it urges us on, fuels us all.

I read Luis’s moves—I seem to read them even before he makes them—and he reads mine, and we’re never out of step with each other. It’s like a conversation, only easier.

But other girls surround him. They approach him from all sides, and I can see how badly they’d like me to leave the floor. I edge away, and the group swallows up Luis. I return to my perch on the countertop while the dancers flow back toward the living room.

Nick enters the kitchen and leans against the counter next to me. “Is this party everything you dreamed it would be?” I ask him.

He shrugs and tilts up his cup of beer.

“How many drinks is that for you?” I wouldn’t care, except he’s driving.
“First one.”
Vanessa, whose back is to us, looks over her shoulder. Her eyes meet Nick’s, and they hold that gaze so long I want to wave my hand in front of his face to make sure he’s still conscious. I try to read the look that passes between them: heat, or challenge, or a question . . . all of that, but mostly a question.
What question? What is with them?
Nick looks away first, and Vanessa turns back to her circle of friends. Nick takes another swallow of beer.
“Why don’t we get going?” I say.
“I want to show you something first.”
“Aw, Nick, I bet you say that to all the girls.” The line is out of my mouth before I can check myself. It’s the kind of joke I would’ve made without thinking just a few weeks ago. But with what has happened between us, it takes on a new bite that instantly makes me wish I could take it back.
He doesn’t react, though, still intent on whatever he wants to show me. “Seriously. Come on.”
He leaves his beer on the counter, takes my hand, and leads me through clumps of people. The heat of the room laps against our skin. Nick leads me down an empty hall and pushes open a door. I’m about to ask him what we’re doing when an eerie, luminous glow from inside the room dries up all the words on my tongue.
We’re surrounded by bluely glowing aquariums. Soft motors chuff, and the aquariums bubble, but otherwise it’s silent. The reflected ripples on the bare walls make me feel that I’m underwater, too, while the fish glide past me. They flick their fins, shimmer, and probe the glass with tiny mouths.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“Vanessa’s brother likes fish.”
“‘Likes’ may be an understatement.” I walk past the tanks, fighting the urge to make swimming motions, expecting the air in here to be as heavy as water. The blue light tranquilizes me.
Nick stands behind me while I study one tank, its mossy plants and jewel-bright fish creating a tiny secret kingdom. He’s so close that his breath warms my neck, and that warmth travels through me, tickling my nerves. The party has faded to a background murmur. We are alone.
We’ve been alone before, but there’s a stirring between us now, something charged. If I turn, we’ll be face-to-face.
I stay right where I am, relishing how near he is, pretending I’m going to turn around any minute. Pretending he’ll lean into me, that our mouths will meet. Knowing all the time that I can’t risk it. Reminding myself that just last night, he recoiled when we got too close. I wish I could stop thinking about kissing him, stop imagining it every time we’re alone.
Been there, failed at that
. I wish the daydreaming part of my brain would get the message.
I keep facing the glowing aquariums. This room is its own world. The silence builds and builds until I have to break it. “I love this place.”
He laughs softly. “I knew you would.”
“How did you even find it?”
“Vanessa showed me.”
His words bump against me like a finger tapping the wall of a fish tank. Something that I can’t fully see ripples around me.
“Vanessa showed you?”
“Yeah.”
“Since when are you such great friends?”
He doesn’t answer.
“What’s going on with you, Nick?” I turn my back on the aquariums, to see his expression, but his face in here is mostly dark. Silvery-blue light touches his nose and lips and chin. The electricity in the room has turned dangerous, the kind of spark that snaps and stings. “I saw the look you two gave each other out there.”
“What look?” he says.
“When we were in the kitchen.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come on. You were practically slurping each other up with your eyes.”
He stretches a finger toward the glass of one tank. He doesn’t tap it, but runs his finger along the outside to see if the fish will follow it. “Nothing’s going on with me and Vanessa.”
“Yet.”
I’m guessing here, but his pause confirms it.
“I don’t know,” he says.
I don’t know
. Not, “Nothing’s going to happen.” Not, “You’re imagining things, Maggie.” My world slides sideways, flips me over, and all the blood rushes to my head.
The door bangs open, and two people stumble into the room, laughing. It’s Darci and Phil. “Ooh, someone’s already here,” Darci giggles. I worry that they might lurch into the tanks and break them. But they fall onto a futon that must belong to Vanessa’s brother.
“We were just leaving,” Nick says.
“Don’t let us push you out,” Darci says, but Phil’s already kissing her with the loud, wet, stomach-turning smacks of a Saint Bernard.
In the dark hall, I tell Nick, “I want to get out of here.” And this time he doesn’t argue with me.

We’re in the car before Nick speaks again. As we take the curves of Ridgway, he says, “What’s your problem with Vanessa?”

“I don’t have a problem with Vanessa.”
“It sure seems like it.” Nick’s eyes stay fixed on the road, his hands at perfect nine-and-three on the wheel, as if I’m a DMV examiner giving him a road test.

“It just takes some getting used to. You haven’t had a girlfriend before, and—”
“Did you think I was never going to?” he cuts in, his voice defensive. I swear I don’t understand what’s happening between us tonight.
“It’s not that.” But I realize he’s right, sort of. Not the way he means it—I never thought he
couldn’t
find a girlfriend—but somehow I thought he wouldn’t want to. I guess I’ve imagined the two of us going along like this forever, always being closer to each other than we are to anyone else. Even when he didn’t want to take our kiss any further, I never imagined him putting another girl in my place.
I twist the ends of my hair. “You’re my best friend.” I clear my throat, still winding hair around my fingers. “I don’t want that to change. I want us to keep hiking and—”
“Don’t worry,” he says, his voice rough, almost impatient. “We’re still friends.”
Friends with a mountain to climb tomorrow
, I remind myself. But I’m not sure how I’m going to climb it with this new Nick, with the shadow of Vanessa between us.

fifteen

We’re halfway up Crystal Mountain. The day has turned unseasonably hot, a last blazing gasp of summer. Sun bakes the rocks. Moisture collects on my scalp, under the straps of my backpack, and at the bottom edges of my bra. A hot wind swirls around the boulder where Nick and I sit munching fistfuls of trail mix. We’ve climbed high enough that the valley below us has shrunk to toy size, with miniature trees and matchstick light poles and a steely ribbon of river. But there’s still plenty of mountain above us.

“I should’ve brought my own trail mix. Without
raisins
,” I say.
“Yeah, can you leave something for me besides raisins? I’m going to take all the ones you’re picking out and stick them in your backpack when you’re not looking.”
We squabble, laughing, the way we have on a dozen other hikes. On the outside, it’s as if we’re back to normal.
But all morning, the party has loomed between us. I went there worrying about Raleigh, but came out worrying about Vanessa. The fact that Nick’s been smiling to himself all morning hasn’t helped. Everything I say feels like I’m pushing words against a barrier between us. But I keep trying.
“I need fuel,” I say. “Look at those ledges ahead of us.”
“Up there? We can do that.”
I gulp water and hop off our boulder, whose surface is starting to burn me even through my shorts. “Well, let’s go. Crystal isn’t going to climb itself.”
“If it did, that would sure save
us
a lot of trouble.” Nick stuffs the bag of trail mix into his pack. I stretch and shake out my legs, waiting for him to buckle his pack straps.
We pick our way over ridges of burning rock. Skinny, twisted trees grip the mountain with their roots, but none of them casts enough shade to shield us. I can almost feel my skin reddening, and we stop at the bottom of the next steep section to slather on sunscreen.
We can’t see our own faces, so we usually smooth off the excess gobs of sunscreen for each other. Sliding my finger down the side of his cheek, closing my eyes as he wipes my forehead, I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything. I rub my hand on the bottom of my T-shirt, wishing I could rub off my discomfort as well. It’s so much easier to keep Nick in the friend category when we’re not stroking each other’s faces. . . .
I need to concentrate.
For the first time, looking up at the narrow ledges where we’ll be climbing on the very rim of the mountain, I shiver. I’m not exactly afraid of heights, but I’ll be putting my feet inches from a thousand-foot drop. That could make anyone gulp.
The blazes, paint blotches marking the rock, lead up into the sky. They wind around the left side of the mountain, where there’s a rim just wide enough to walk on. We’ll have rock rising on our right, a steep drop-off to our left, and then we’ll reach a point where we go up the face of Crystal. From here it looks blank and sheer and impossible, but I know that when we get there, we’ll find bumps and imperfections in the rock that will allow us to move up. Still—
“I forgot to bring my wings,” I tell Nick. When in doubt, make a joke.
“Didn’t I tell you you’d need them today?”
He leads, and I ignore the quivering in my legs.
Be strong
, I tell myself, moving one step at a time, drawing comfort from the solid rock on my right as the edge of the world creeps ever closer on my left. The empty air over there sings with the strange magnetic pull that heights have, an invisible downward pressure.
Gusts of wind smash into my face. They batter the wall beside me, ricochet and try to sweep me over the side. My stomach tightens. But I reach the base of the next section, where Nick waits. He pulls out his phone and snaps a picture of the trail upward, then turns to take a couple of the view below.
“How come you’re doing that?” I ask. Both of us usually prefer to keep hikes inside ourselves, rather than taking pictures we’ll never look at again. We’ve always said that pictures don’t begin to tell the story of what trails are really like. And when I think of myself scrutinizing the picture of Perry on the summit of Eagle, unable to get any real answers from it, I know it’s true.
“Vanessa asked me to, so she could see what it’s like out here. She actually wanted to come with us, but I thought this would be too rough for a beginner’s hike.”
“When did she ask you that?”
“She called me last night, after we got back from the party.”
Vanessa called him after the party? I wait for more details, but he doesn’t give any, and it makes me queasy to ask. Not only would it feel like I’m prying, chiseling at the barrier between us that has just gotten thicker . . . but I’m not entirely sure I
want
to hear the details.
Instead, I turn to look up at the section ahead of us. Now we can see that Crystal’s smooth wall isn’t smooth after all, just as I suspected. The steep, slick sections are interspersed with narrow ledges.
“Ready?” Nick says, grinning as if he’s earned a spot on the NBA All-Star team. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed how
high
we are.
“Sure,” I say, to convince myself that I am. I try to find our old bond, to tap into our mutual belief that we can handle any trail, but I still feel cut off from him. Almost as if I’m alone up here.
Nick moves up the rock, finding ripples and notches, sometimes using his hands at the steeper spots. Behind us the void yawns; the wind howls out of it. I take an extra minute to gather myself before I follow Nick.
Every step takes me higher into uncertainty, higher into the unknown. My legs and fingers tremble. I’ve never felt this scared on a trail before—not even in the rain last week. I search inside myself for the inner steel I’ll need to make this climb, for the joy I’ve felt on trails before. I think of those T-shirts from my dad’s company. And how, at the moment, I’m not feeling my Mid-Regional POWER.
A hawk shrieks, its voice bouncing off the walls of rock, its screech like a cold talon slicing down the back of my neck.
Don’t slip
, I tell myself, my mouth dry.
And now I can’t stop thinking about slipping, tumbling down the trail. Flying off the mountain, crashing all the way to the valley floor.
All the mistakes I could make, all the missteps I must not take, fight for attention in my head—so many of them that I have no brain cells left for climbing.
I stop and hold on to the rock, my stomach feeling like I’ve swallowed live frogs. And for all the air up here, I can’t get any into my lungs.
I’m stuck.