by Jenn Bennett
He turns toward me, and I’m pulling him closer, and he buries his head against my neck, sobbing quietly. I feel hot tears on my skin, and my arms are circling him. The scent of him fills my nostrils, shampoo and sunniness and wood smoke, the tang of sweat and fragrant pine needles. He’s harder, stronger, and far more masculine than he was the last time I hugged him. It’s like holding a brick wall.
Gradually, the quiet crying stops, and he goes completely limp in my arms.
We’re in a strange cave, slightly lost. Off plan and definitely off trail.
But for the first time since we left home, I am not anxious.
19
* * *
We’ve been walking for several hours now, and we’ve only just made it past the valley below our cave. My back and legs hurt, despite the ibuprofen Lennon gave me at breakfast. He had it laid out for me on a bear canister when I woke up, along with one of the blue coffee cups. I’m not sure how he got out of the tent without me knowing. All I know is that every time I woke during the night, his arm was still wrapped around me. And then sometime around dawn, I was vaguely aware of being a lot colder. By the time I fully emerged from sleep, he’d already started a fire and was readying everything for our breakfast, last night’s roller-coaster emotions exchanged for the promise of hot coffee and a new day.
Not a bad way to wake up. Except that my body feels as if I’ve been hit by a truck that’s backed over me several times out of spite.
Hiking hurts.
It hurts even more when we crest over a steep hill. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m eager to see where we’re going. Lennon made another map. He drew it inside his journal this morning and recalculated our route while I tried not to stare at the dark stubble growing over his jaw, because it gives me inappropriate feelings about him. After taking that wrong turn yesterday inside the cave, he said we’re going to stick to a more established trail that I’ll like better: It’s marked on the official King’s Forest map and leads to not only a ranger station but something scenic along the way—only, he insists on that scenic thing being a surprise.
He knows I hate surprises but talks me into accepting it. I tell myself that I’m relenting because of what he revealed last night, but it’s probably the stubble. It’s really good stubble.
We are at a crossroads where two trails diverge. A signpost tells us that the larger path in front of us is Emperor Trail. And through a break in the cedar trees, we are now staring at white-capped mountains that glitter in the bright sun.
“Oh, wow,” I murmur.
“Right?” Lennon says. “The brown peak on the left is Mount Topaz and the gray jagged one on the right is Thunderbolt Mountain. So many climbers die up there.”
It doesn’t look deadly. In fact, it looks beautiful. Majestic. Yes, I definitely see why people say that about mountains. I stretch out my arms and fill my lungs with clean air. Something stings. I slap my arm.
“Oh, we’re entering mosquito territory,” Lennon says, turning around and pointing at his pack. “Dig around in the second pocket. There’s a small bottle of insect repellent.”
I unzip the pocket and slip my fingers inside, finding the bottle in question. We take turns anointing ourselves in citronella-scented oil that makes my eyes water. Once we’re slathered up and mosquito-proof, we set out on the trail that cuts through a cedar grove. It doesn’t take long for two things to happen: (1) we see other hikers ahead of us, and (2) we see them walking up a towering set of granite stairs that’s been carved into the mountain.
“What the hell is that?” I say.
“Emperor’s Staircase,” Lennon says, waggling his brows. He’s wearing a slouchy, black knit cap with a skull on it, and the spiky ends of his hair stick out from beneath it. I wish I had a hat to cover up the disaster that is my mass of frizzy curls. Nature is unforgiving.
“We’re going up those rock stairs?” I ask.
“Not just rock stairs, Zorie. It’s nature’s noble staircase,” he says in a grand voice. “More than eight hundred steps carved into the granite cliffs in the late eighteen hundreds. Three men died building them, and nearly every year since then, someone’s died on these stairs. Fifteen in the last decade. This is the currently the deadliest trail in all the US national parks.”
“What?” I say, alarmed.
He grins. “Don’t worry. The people who die are generally just idiots who fall over the side trying to do stupid things. You’ll understand why when we get farther up. If Brett were here, I’d give him a fifty–fifty chance of surviving, because he wouldn’t be able to resist the call of death. Which almost makes me wish he were still with us.”
“That’s not nice,” I complain, though I can’t help but smile a little.
“But,” he insists, “you and I will not be following in any daredevil footsteps.”
“Um, I would hope not?”
“It’s fine. Thousands of people with basic common sense hike these stairs every year and live to tell the tale. It’s one of the park’s most popular features. You are going to love it, I promise. There’s a huge treat at the top.”
“A hot tub and a pizza?”
He chuckles. “Not quite, but you’re going to like it. We’ll break for lunch halfway up. Let’s do this, Everhart!” he says enthusiastically, an infectious smile splitting his face.
And so we begin the ascent.
We have to climb a normal uphill path for about a half hour before we hit the stairs. They’re rough and wide, and pretty wildflowers and lacy grasses grow alongside them. They casually snake up the mountainside, and the top steps are hidden from view, around the back of the peak. The steps are steep in parts, and a little wonky, but apart from the strain on my calves, I can’t really understand why they’d be dangerous. I hear water that gets louder as we ascend, so I assume there’s a nearby river, just out of sight.
Climbing, I realize that I’m feeling better physically. Not exactly 100 percent, but Lennon says it takes time for the body to get used to hiking. It’s a slow and steady endurance, not a race. And the pristine scenery definitely helps to motivate me.
The problem with hiking is that it strips away everything. There’s no distraction of checking your online feeds. No TV. No schedule to keep. It’s just you and your thoughts and the steady pace of your feet moving over rocky ground. And even when I try to keep my head clear, it’s busy working in the background, quietly trying to solve things that I don’t want solved.
Like Lennon.
And me.
Us.
We haven’t talked about last night. Not about sleeping in the same tent, and definitely not about his dad dying. I have questions upon questions, but I’m waiting for him to give me some sort of indication that he’s ready to answer them.
Or maybe I’m not ready to hear those answers.
I hate quandaries.
After we’ve been hiking up the steps for twenty minutes or so, both my head and legs feel close to exploding. No amount of internal reflection or pretty scenery can distract me from the pain. “I can’t go any farther,” I tell him, breathless. “Worst StairMaster workout ever. I hate these dumb steps. I hate them, I hate them, I—”
“Take it easy. We’re almost to the halfway point. Right up there,” he tells me, and I spot a place where the steps break. There have been a few rest areas along the way up the mountain, but this one is a smooth granite plateau with several carved-rock benches. One is occupied by a family of tourists with day packs—two kids and a mom and dad. They’re also loud, shouting to each other over the ever-present roar of that unseen river. This is startling after not hearing or seeing another soul all day yesterday.
Lennon dumps his backpack on a shady bench over near the mountainside of the plateau, and I collapse next to him, sitting for a moment perched on the edge of the bench before I unhook the straps on my pack. We’re in a semiprivate, protected area, so the noise of the river isn’t as bad here.
“I’m sweating,” I tell him. “I don’t remember the last time
I sweated before this trip.”
He opens up his bear canister and retrieves the same lunch we ate yesterday. “It’s good for you.”
“Is hiking how you went from skinny to jacked?”
Squinting eyes fix on mine. “I didn’t realize I was.”
“Oh, you are,” I say as my neck warms. Smooth, Everhart. I’m veering too close to the subject of me spying on him in his room with my telescope and decide to quit while I’m ahead and drop it.
“You never got to look at the stars last night,” he says after a moment.
Ugh. He was thinking about me spying too. Terrific.
“It’s fine,” I tell him.
“I promise that you’ll get some quality stargazing time tonight,” he says, and after some reflection, clears his throat. “I haven’t asked today if you want to keep going all the way to Condor Peak. The ranger station I told you about is on the other side of the mountain. We should get there this afternoon. I mean, I know I just assumed you’d be here tonight to stargaze, but if you want to call a car at the ranger station . . .”
Oh. I actually hadn’t been thinking of that.
“You don’t have to make a decision right now,” he says. “Just think about it and let me know. So I can make contingency plans.”
I nod, and the subject is dropped. We eat in silence, mostly because I’m too tired to do two things at once. Chewing is all I can handle. But by the time we’re packing back up, the tourist family has left, and we’re alone on the cliff. That’s when I start to notice Lennon’s leg bouncing like a jackhammer. He does that when he’s concentrating too hard—when he takes tests—and also when he’s antsy about something.
When he catches me staring at his leg, he immediately stops bouncing it and sighs. “This is stupid. We should just talk about it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Last fall. Look, I told you about my dad. Now I want to know about yours.”
“My dad?”
His eyes narrow and flick to mine. “I’d like to know what he told you about me after homecoming. I assume he told you something. I just want to know how much of it was true.”
“Not following,” I say, shaking my head.
“After homecoming. What he told you.”
I stare at him. “Um, he just had a talk with me and told me I’d be better off staying away from you. That it would be best to make a clean break and move on, because it was causing me . . . stress.”
“That’s it?”
I don’t know what he wants me to say. “Pretty much. I didn’t tell him about . . . you know. The experiment.”
Lennon squints at me. “And he didn’t bring it up?”
“Why would he?”
He starts to answer, but then changes his mind. Twice. After biting his lower lip and another rapid leg bounce, he finally says, “I’m trying to figure out why you cut me out of your life and started seeing Andre.”
“You ditched me at homecoming!”
“I texted you.”
“Once. ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s it. That’s all you said. I texted you back a million times and you didn’t answer.”
“Well, excuse me if I was busy with my father attempting suicide.”
My body stills. “That was . . . on homecoming?”
“It was one of many shitty things that happened that day.”
“Umm . . . Do you want to share these things with the class?”
He stares at the mountains in the distance as if they might grow legs and walk away. “That’s why I was asking about your dad. He didn’t say anything about what happened that day? At the hotel?”
“What hotel?”
He closes his eyes and mumbles something to himself, slumping low on the park bench. “Never mind.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” I say, getting irritated. “Absolutely not. You brought this up. You finish it. What hotel?”
He covers his eyes with one hand and groans.
Which totally cranks up my anxiety several notches. If Lennon thinks it’s bad, it must be far worse than I ever imagined.
“Just tell me,” I plead.
He slaps both hands on his knees, elbows bent, as if he’s about to stand, but instead inhales sharply and blows out a hard breath. “Last fall, things had been, well, changing between us. The Great Experiment was undertaken.”
“I was there,” I remind him.
“I thought it was going well. Well enough that we agreed to tell our parents and go public,” he says, leaning back against the bench and slouching lower, arms crossed over his chest. “And I guess I . . . was overenthusiastic about the importance of homecoming. I thought, well, you know. That we had the friend thing down. We were expert friends. And when we . . . I mean, my God. The things we did on that park bench.”
“Not everything,” I say, feeling my ears grow warm.
“No, but it was good. I mean, really, really good. Right?”
It was amazing. Awkward at times, especially at first. It’s odd to kiss your best friend. But also not odd. Also very nice. So nice that I can’t think about it right now, because it makes me flustered. This entire conversation is making me flustered. I think I’m sweating again.
He relaxes when I hesitantly nod to confirm. “So, yeah. Things were going well. We agreed to go public. It felt right. But then homecoming was approaching, and you were getting a little stressed out about telling your dad—”
My fingers are starting to go a little numb.
“—and I don’t blame you. He’s not friendly or approachable. And, you know, he’s never liked me.”
I don’t correct him, because it’s true. When we were kids, Dad didn’t seem to have an opinion about Lennon—until he found out that Lennon had two mothers and a Muslim father. That’s when he began to say snarky things about the Mackenzies.
Lennon continues. “I’m just saying that at the time, I understood you not wanting to tell him, but I especially understood after what happened the day of homecoming.”
“Which was what, exactly?”
He sighs heavily. “I knew some seniors who were getting hotel rooms for homecoming night.”
That happens every year, both at homecoming and prom. Sometimes the rooms are reserved by groups of kids who want to party, and sometimes it’s just couples.
“I thought I’d get a hotel room for the two of us. Alone,” Lennon says.
I make a strangled noise. This is . . . not what I expected to hear. At all.
“In retrospect,” he says, “I’m aware that this sounds as if I was making some pretty big presumptions about where our relationship was headed. And I guess I was. But to be fair, I thought we were on the same page. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.”
I have no idea what I’m feeling right now. My skin feels like it’s on fire and numb at the same time. “You couldn’t have asked me about this?” Honestly, at the time, I probably would have been thrilled out of my mind, but it’s weird to hear about it now. “Like, consulted me beforehand?”
“I thought I was being romantic by surprising you.”
“By renting a room where we could have sex?”
He squints one eye shut. “Well, when you say it like that, yeah, it sounds pretty skanky. But I never would have pressured you. You know that. Right?”
“But that wasn’t your intention?”
“Like I said, I thought we were simpatico on this subject. At the time.”
Okay, maybe we were, that’s true. There are only so many extreme, heavy-metal, where did my bra go? make-out sessions you can have before you start to lose your mind a little.
“Please do go on and tell me what happened next in your romantic hotel scheme,” I say drily.
He sighs again. That’s not good. When he sighs a lot, it’s because he’s about to say something he doesn’t want to say. “So anyway, you may not remember this, but the day of homecoming, I wasn’t at lunch.”
I nod.
“I had sneaked off school grounds to reserve the hot
el room. Only, I was worried the hotel wouldn’t let me, because I was sixteen, and I knew that other kids getting rooms there were using their parents’ credit cards, so . . . I sort of borrowed Mac’s credit card.”
“You . . .”
“Okay,” he admits. “I guess I stole it.”
“Oh, God.”
“I know. It was stupid. I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought I could charge the room, sneak the card back into Mac’s purse, snag the bill when it came in, and pay for it before Mac noticed. And Ina Kipling’s cousin was working the desk at the Edgemont Hotel—”
“Whoa. That’s—”
“Fancy. I know. Ina told a few of us about it in drama class. She claimed her cousin would bend the hotel’s minimum age policy, so I sneaked out of school and went to the Edgemont Hotel the day of homecoming. I was at the desk, and it was Ina’s cousin, and she asked me what name to put on the reservation, and I didn’t want to use our real names. So I panicked and used my dad’s name. And as I’m spelling out ‘Ahmed’ for Ina’s cousin, she’s asking me if I’m Arabic—which sort of pisses me off, because first, I’m not a language, and second, she’s acting like I’m a terrorist or something.”
I roll my hand to move Lennon along. Get on with it, man!
“And as we’re having this conversation, and I admit that Ahmed is actually my father’s name, she tells me that I have to give real names or she’ll get in trouble. So I give her my name and your name, and then, out of nowhere, your dad shoves me.”
Hold on. What?
“My dad?”
“Your dad,” he repeats in a voice that’s heavy with resentment.
“What in the world was he doing there?”
“He was apparently behind me in line and overheard the whole thing. Because he made a huge scene. We’re in the middle of this luxury hotel, with bellhops and gold luggage carts, and he’s screaming at me that if I so much as look at his daughter again, he will beat the shit out of me.”
I cringe, covering my eyes in horror as Lennon continues.
“Then he threatens Ina, saying that she should be fired for giving a hotel room to a minor, and . . .” Lennon sighs loudly. “It was horrible. I wanted to die. And then your dad snatched Mac’s credit card off the counter and demanded to know if my moms had sanctioned this. He called them ‘dyke heathens.’ ”
