by Roxie Noir
I wonder if anyone but us knows about it. Probably not, because why would they? If a hundred trees fall in the forest and there’s no one around to hear them, et cetera.
“Well,” I say, surveying the landscape, the broad expanse of destruction stretched below us. “Shit.”
All day we’ve been walking along the edge of a mountain too steep to climb down comfortably, but it’s starting to look like we’ll have to risk it because we’re closing in on sixteen hours with no water except melted snow.
I sigh, step back, ready to return the way we came but Wilder catches my arm.
He points.
It takes me a minute to figure out what he’s pointing at, squinting hard because I probably need a new prescription on my glasses, but finally I see it: a dark slash down a granite cliff face, a couple hundred feet past the recent avalanche.
Water. A trickle, probably, but more than enough for the two of us.
“It’s not far,” Wilder says. “Five hundred feet? Six?”
“You’re kidding me,” I say.
He just looks over at me, eyes crinkled at the corner.
“I would never,” he says, his voice low and teasing.
I swallow again, mouth and throat sticking together, cross my arms in front of myself.
“Look how recent this is,” I tell him in the most reasonable voice I can muster. “It can’t be more than what, a week old? There’s no snow on it, and I know that you also know that an area that’s recently seen an avalanche is incredibly unstable for a long time afterward, because all the debris could easily be set off again since all the organic matter that was keeping it in place to begin with is gone—”
“There’s water over there,” he says, pointing. “And past that, I think there’s a way down that’s easier than what we’ve been walking over.”
“Sure, or we could end up at the bottom of the mountain the fast way, buried under a pile of trees and rubble,” I point out.
The cold breeze ruffles our hair, sneaks in between the buttons on my coat.
“We could end up there any way,” he points out.
“Trying to get across an area where there’s recently been an avalanche is just stu—”
And he’s gone, hopped down the three-foot embankment we were standing on, already setting off across the wide scar on the landscape.
My heart’s in my mouth, and I honestly feel like I might throw up, though maybe that’s just the hunger since we’re not exactly eating well.
“Wilder!” I shout. “What the hell!?”
He turns, waves, gives me the thumbs up.
As he turns back he stumbles a little over a log, his foot hitting it awkwardly, and it starts to scoot downhill lengthwise, throwing Wilder off-balance in the other direction.
I gasp, both hands at my mouth as the log going downhill builds steam, catching other debris in its path, fluffy little snow flurries rising around it as it jogs and tumbles.
Wilder catches himself on his hand, the other thrown out for balance before hopping to another spot, turning to look at the log he dislodged, still tumbling downhill. Finally, it catches on a rock and stops with a jerk, the other stuff that was tumbling with it coming to a slow stop twenty or so feet below it.
I wait, holding my breath. Wilder adjusts his pack and keeps moving. I’m waiting for something worse to happen, for the whole mountainside to come unstuck and roll away, down into the valley below so I can be really screwed, alone out here.
Doesn’t happen. Wilder gets smaller and smaller, lightly stepping through the snow and mud and logs and rocks like it doesn’t bother him at all. Like it hasn’t even occurred to him that he could die at pretty much any moment, with pretty much no warning.
The sun peeks through the clouds for a moment, bathing everything in sudden golden light. Wilder’s almost across, close to the water and the easy way down, and I know that this means I either have to go or be completely alone in the wilderness.
He was fine, after all. I’ll be fine, too.
And I should go before he gets to the other side and looks back, only to see me wussing out again. I jumped that chasm on the rocks, I can do this too, even if it’s a hundred times worse and probably way more dangerous.
Come on, Squeaks.
I can’t let him see me freak out like that again, so I hop down onto my good ankle and start across.
It’s steeper than it looks. There’s no cover, so I can see all the way down to the end of the scarred area, where it looks like an outcropping of rocks finally stopped the landslide a thousand feet below. On it are freshly-splintered trees, branches askew, and I can almost hear the noise they must have made when they hit those rocks going forty, fifty miles an hour.
I don’t even need an imagination to know what would happen to me down there.
I shake my head, wrench my eyes away from it. I force myself to only look at what’s in front of me, to only work out the path I’m going to take and not think about all the things that could possibly happen.
Right foot on that dirt patch. Left foot on that rock, careful, it’s rounded, right foot there, left foot there…
I make my way across slowly, carefully. I don’t watch Wilder or the way he was practically leaping from spot to spot like a gazelle who didn’t know he could die, and I hold my arms out for balance, my heavy pack making that even harder.
I get a third of the way across, halfway. The adrenaline shooting through my veins slows as long as I don’t look down, and I don’t.
Three-quarters and I’m almost there. I look up for a split second at Wilder, standing on the edge of an embankment that’s only a couple of feet high, grinning while the breeze tosses his hair, looking for all the world like he’s just won the lottery or something.
Asshole. I look down, keep going, until I’m ten feet from the end.
See? It wasn’t so bad, I tell myself.
My left foot lands wrong on a rock and slides downhill, jerking me to the right. I catch myself only to gasp in pain as my right ankle, the bad one, gives way and twists, sending pains shooting all the way to my hip and I fall awkwardly backward, half on my pack and half on my ass.
And I slide. My legs and arms are akimbo, and I start sliding downhill, the dirt and snow around me so unstable I may as well be on a sand dune. I grab out helplessly, but everything I can grab is also moving, sliding along with me, the ground itself giving way.
I don’t even scream. I can’t.
The fuck are you supposed to do when you’re in a landslide?
My mind goes blank except for one single thing: a scene from some James Bond movie where he skis down an avalanche, landing safely at the bottom with some witty quip. It’s completely useless.
I stop. My right foot, the bad one, hits a rock or something that’s sticking out of the ground and even though my vision goes fuzzy with pain and the rest of me jerks sideways, I stop. Snow and dirt and rocks clatter on downhill below me, bouncing and rolling, but I lean backwards against the earth, start breathing again.
I only fell about twenty feet. It’s not even that far, and I turn myself over, crawl back up the steep slope on my hands and knees, get back to where I was.
Wilder’s already there, his pack off, crouching in front of me.
“Can you get up?” he asks, breathless.
I don’t answer, my chest heaving, my whole body shaking.
He doesn’t ask anything else, but he reaches around me and unbuckles my pack from my back, lifts it away, heaves it onto his own back.
“Hey. Come on,” he says, grabbing my shoulder.
I finally sit back on my heels, slightly unsteady, and look at my hands. My thick gloves are torn all over the palms, but they’re still functional. My pants and coat seem like they’ve got some tears too, but I don’t think anything’s broken worse than it was before. My glasses are even still on my face, still patched together where Wilder fixed them.
“You okay?” he murmurs, pulling a glove off.
He pu
ts his hand on my face, thumb stroking across my cheekbone.
I stare up at him in shock, at the way the rough pad against my face sends a shudder through my body, adrenaline ebbing and spiking.
I must have another concussion, I think, even though I didn’t hit my head.
I don’t move. I hardly breathe. All the focus in my entire body is concentrated in this one spot, his hand on my face, his eyes in front of mine and getting closer, the blue-green deepening, his breath puffing out in front of him.
I’m back on that conference table, biology handouts spread in front of me.
Your face is really close to mine.
Wilder kisses me.
Right there on the landslide, rocks and dirt and debris everywhere, both of us kneeling on the snowy ground. My eyelids stutter closed, and the same funny, warm feeling as always floods my stomach as his hand comes around the back of my head, holding me against him.
I open my mouth against his, my body betraying me as his tongue finds mine, his hand warm on my neck now, my whole body alive and tingling with adrenaline and endorphins and jubilation and fear and I don’t even know what, I just know I kiss him desperately. Like we’re teenagers again, like we might be found any second by the adults, so we have to make the most of this five minutes.
Finally, Wilder pulls back, running his hand over my cheekbone again, his eyes lit up, a smile curling around his mouth.
“C’mon, Squeaks, let’s go,” he murmurs, his face inches from mine.
I come to my senses and slap him.
Chapter Nineteen
Wilder
For a moment, total silence.
Then I start laughing. Imogen’s eyes are wide behind her half-broken glasses, like she can’t believe she just did that, her pretty face smudged and dirty.
“That bad, huh?” I ask, still grinning.
It didn’t hurt. She’s got thick gloves on, plus it’s pretty clear that Imogen’s never slapped someone before, so honestly, I hardly even felt it.
“What the hell?” she whispers.
I stand, brushing my knees off, shifting her pack on my back. She does the same, unsteadily, glaring at the hand I offer her. Even though she just slapped me, not that it did any harm.
“What do you mean, what the hell,” I tease her, stepping closer.
My whole body is tingling with danger right now, that combination of adrenaline and endorphins, the constant rush of being alive and right here. We could both plummet to our death on the rocks below, sure, but the fire behind Imogen’s eyes right now is about ten times as potent as that possibility.
“I mean what the hell are you doing,” she hisses.
I grin again, jam my hand back into my glove. I want to reach out again, touch her like I just did, but I’m afraid she’d jerk away and fall down a mountain.
“Only what you’ve been thinking of since you saw me again,” I tell her. “You can play quiet and shy and angry all you like, Squeaks—”
She slaps me again. It hurts exactly as much as the first time she did it, but this time I grab her wrist on the follow-through, afraid she’s going to go off-balance and tumble again.
“Hit me when we’re on firmer ground,” I tell her. “Don’t worry, it’s close.”
I turn without saying anything else, carefully walk the last few feet to the embankment and climb up it, slinging her pack onto the ground next to mine before I turn to watch Imogen jump, trying to hoist herself up onto the other side.
I let her try a few times before I walk over, offer my hand. She doesn’t look me in the eye as she takes it and I pull her up in one quick motion.
“Thanks,” she says softly, not looking me in the eye. A muscle in her cheek twitches, and she look away at the gray smudge against the rocks, the trickle of water that’s the whole reason we came over here.
We walk over, fill our water bottles, guzzle. The water’s cold and clear and tastes wonderful, and even though I know that nasty stuff can still live in it, I know that dying of dehydration would be far worse.
As we put on our pack again, getting ready to keep up the long downward trek, Imogen pauses. She sighs, then comes right up to me, shoving her glasses up her nose, and stares me down like she’s thinks I’m some sort of aggressive predator.
“I don’t want you to kiss me,” she says, her voice clear and firm.
Liar.
“No?”
“No.”
“You kissed me back pretty well for someone who didn’t want to be kissed,” I say.
“I was surprised.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, tilting my head to one side, studying her face. Her jaw’s set, her eyes stubborn, her mouth a flat line across her face. “It didn’t feel like surprise, Squeaks.”
She flinches. Just barely, but I can see it: she blinks, a muscle in her neck twitches. In her pocket, one hand curls into a fist.
“It felt like you’ve been waiting for me to do that since I walked over to you at the airport,” I go on, taking a step forward. “It felt like—”
“At the airport when you were standing next to your girlfriend?” she asks, her voice barely audible.
It stops me in my tracks, the way she says it, not even angry but just sad, like a kid who’s just found out that Santa Claus isn’t real.
“Amy’s not my girlfriend,” I say quickly. “She’s just some girl, we see each other now and again, but it’s nothing.”
“Does Amy think that?” Imogen asks. “Or would Amy get her heart broken if she knew you kissed me?”
She turns, starts walking. It’s mid-afternoon, the clouds coming and going, light slicing through the trees sometimes, the whole forest going dim sometimes. I’ve got the urge to catch up to Imogen, tell her that Amy’s doesn’t matter to me, but that’s a losing argument and I know it.
Ten Years Earlier
“That’s because Coach Jackson’s a fucking dick,” Trevor says, shoving a chicken nugget into his mouth. “The hell does what you do off the field have to do with what you do on it? You can still fuckin’ run, can’t you?”
“Fuckin’ pre-calculus, man,” Jake sighs, poking at some sad, boiled vegetables on his plate with a plastic fork. “I’m never gonna need that shit ever, you know? And Coach is letting it fuck up my whole future and he doesn’t even care. It’s bullshit.”
The fork clatters to his tray and he leans back in his chair, looking around us at the Solaris High School cafeteria. It’s a Friday, the day after my biology test. Two days after I made out with Imogen.
It’s game day, so we’re all wearing our football jerseys and the cheerleaders are parading around the school in groups of two and three, hair in high, curly ponytails and tiny, tiny skirts on.
Trevor watches a group of them go by. Next to him, his girlfriend Nina glares holes through his head.
“Or, like, with English,” Melissa says, sitting next to me. She takes a long drink from a can of diet coke, her half-eaten sandwich in front of her. “I already speak it, why do I have to be able to diagram sentences? Literally no one will ever ask me to that again in my entire life.”
“Literally no one,” Trevor says, his eyes still on cheerleader butts, mimicking Melissa.
She pulls a small, adorable frown, her eyes flicking to me because he’s making fun of her again. Subtly.
Melissa probably doesn’t know the word subtly.
“I’m just saying,” she scoffs. “It’s all just useless stuff. We’re never going to use it, we have calculators and dictionaries and shit, why can’t everyone just chill about this dumb stuff?”
“Why indeed,” Trevor intones, very seriously, looking back at our group.
Melissa pouts. Even though I don’t think she quite understands why Trevor’s making fun of her, she knows he is and that’s enough to piss her off.
“He should definitely let you play,” I say to Jake, trying to change the subject. “If you failed the last test and got a D on this one, that’s improvement, right? Improvement should be rew
arded.”
“You did get the D, right?” Trevor asks.
“Fuck you, man,” Jake says, throwing a french fry as Trevor laughs.
“It’s your favorite letter. Guys, Jake got the D!”
I can’t stop myself from laughing, even though I know it’s impossibly stupid.
But Melissa doesn’t. Her face is still in her pouty frown, and when we finally stop, she pulls on the sleeve of my jersey.
“That weird girl is, like, staring at you,” she says, nodding her head toward the cafeteria food line.
My stomach drops.
That weird girl.
Yeah, it’s Imogen.
She’s standing there with her cafeteria tray, back to the wall, shoulders a little hunched like she’s a bird about to take off. When she sees me looking at her she glances at Melissa, then looks away, takes two steps, stops, backs up one step, looks around, shifts her weight on her hips, shoves her glasses up her face, turns to face the other direction.
Looks back at me, an impossible question in her eyes, looks away like she doesn’t know where to look or who to look at. Her face is slowly going bright red, a deeper shade every time she glances over and sees Melissa and I looking at her.
I feel like there’s a fist closed around my windpipe, just watching her flutter awkwardly like this. Melissa sort of shrugs, flips her red ponytail, and looks up at me through thick lashes as she sips her diet coke.
“Is that the girl who’s tutoring you in biology?” she asks, sounding almost bored.
“Yeah,” I say, glancing over one more time. “Imogen.”
“What a weird name,” Melissa says, looking back at her again.
Imogen’s frozen there like she’s trying to fold into herself. She’s wearing a black shirt, black skirt that falls to her knees, fishnets and cargo boots.
I wonder what her skin feels like through the fishnets, little diamonds of soft flesh crisscrossed by black mesh, and then I instantly hate myself for wondering.
“It’s from Shakespeare,” I tell Melissa, only half paying attention to her. “Imogen’s a character in one of the plays no one ever reads.”
