Lessons In Gravity

by Megan Westfield

  “Let me remind you: you live in a truck. You don’t have a job. We’re giving you a stipend to be in this film and you better start earning your keep. Now, let’s try that again. Tell me about the first time you went climbing.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. What would happen if she actually talked to Josh like that? Perhaps he would shape up and obey. But it could also go the other way, with him storming off and demanding a different cameraperson. She smiled again. Either way, it would be an improvement.

  The guys went to bed, but she stayed up alone, planning to wait long enough so she could pee off the beer before getting in her tent. She poked at the embers with a heavy stick, then swirled the flaming tip through the black air in psychedelic patterns.

  She thought about what Madigan had said about Josh not being the type to pour his heart out to someone he just met, but it seemed more than that. It was possible that he was exceptionally camera shy. One of her documentary-track classes at UCLA had a whole week of lectures about the psychology of camera shyness. Camera shyness could be overcome, just like a fear of public speaking.

  She scooted her camp chair closer to the fire pit for warmth as the flames died down. What if she just leveled with him and tried to find out why he didn’t like the camera? Maybe no one had ever taken the time to give him camera training before. She could show him some clips of what good interviews looked like and they could role-play. It would be a huge risk, but imagine if it worked! If she somehow managed to pull a good interview out of Josh, Danny would be so impressed that she’d be more than set for a recommendation. Maybe even a job offer.

  After the fire went cold, she grabbed her toiletry bag and walked to the bathroom. For once—thanks to the beer—she wasn’t paranoid about running into a bear.

  While she was in the bathroom, a wave of joyous laughter floated past the windows. Ah, to be up late, surrounded by friends, laughing and having fun. It had been so long since she’d done that. After the crash, she’d stuck close to her roommates, and with all of them being film majors, hanging out usually meant watching movies.

  She stepped outside the bathroom, keeping her headlamp off as she walked carefully through the darkness toward the laughter. Ahead, there was a campfire with flames twice as tall as Walkabout’s fires, with so many people gathered around it that they fully encircled the campfire, with a full second row of people in front, sitting on camp chairs. Music from a guitar danced quietly beneath the rise and fall of the group’s laughter and the crackle of the fire.

  Even though she didn’t know any of these people, it somehow stung that she had been left out. How had everyone known to rally for a campfire tonight? Had there been a posting at the registration kiosk? Or were they a private group, like a church youth group or something?

  Trusting that the brightness of the flames would enable her to remain out of sight in the darkness, she crept closer to the fire. She slid behind a pine tree to observe, slowing her breathing so she could hear them better.

  The group’s profuse swearing ruled out a church group, and the addition of words like “quick draw,” “whipper,” “knobs,” and “rappel” revealed they were climbers. That, and the smell of weed mixed in with the campfire smoke.

  April rested her head on the tree trunk and closed her eyes. The night was cold, but the sounds of the campfire made her feel warm. In a way, it reminded her of winter nights at home in Arizona, when her parents would turn on the gas fireplace and play jazz on the old CD player.

  There weren’t many women in the group, but she recognized a girl with long dreadlocks she’d seen around camp. April studied her, wondering if she was a climber, and if so, how good she was. She leaned down to say something to the guy sitting in front of her. The guy turned toward her, and firelight shone on his profile. Josh.

  The dreadlocked girl said something else. Josh’s subsequent laugh was sincere and hearty, ringing out above all the other voices.

  Josh, laughing? She squinted to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. It was him. He was even wearing his gray hooded sweatshirt, with the hood up.

  She studied him as he turned back to his original conversation. He doubled over at something a guy near him said, and then started telling a story of his own. From the distance, she could only hear snippets.

  “…and then this kid…”

  “…I didn’t know what to do, so I…”

  By the end of his story, Josh had entranced everyone on his side of the campfire ring and they were laughing along with him.

  This was Josh Knox? Mr. Awful? The same guy who had completely humiliated her during the interview?

  Aha! This was absolute proof that his stubborn, abrasive on-camera persona was not camera shyness at all but a complete act. Willful film sabotaging. Think of all the projects he had ruined—and Walkabout’s would be next! Josh Knox was just a selfish athlete who wanted sponsorships but none of the spotlight or responsibility that came along with them.

  April squeezed the tree trunk so hard that a chunk of bark broke loose. It disintegrated into flakes, sliding out of her fist like sand. She was furious, yet she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She just kept seeing that look on his face from the cafeteria, and how it contrasted so much to his laughter now. Who was this guy?

  Unable to see his face from this angle because of the shadows from his hood, she closed her eyes and listened for his voice. There it was, clear and joyful. He was relaxed. Natural. Likable. Relatable. Attractive. Interesting.

  “Dude, you don’t even understand. It was sick!”

  “…gnarliest climb…absolutely never getting back on that thing.”

  She opened her eyes. As much as she was angry at him, she couldn’t help wishing that someday he might laugh that way around her.

  Chapter Seven

  Was this what Madigan meant by “climber’s trail”? The path cut up a slope so treacherous and steep it might as well have been vertical. If this was some sort of elaborate hazing scheme the guys had set up, someone was going to pay.

  April pressed her fingers into her temples, trying to find relief from her throbbing hangover headache. She checked Madigan’s map against the terrain in front of her. Yep, this was it. The guys would soon be on their way to the base of the climb, and she had to get moving.

  She adjusted the gargantuan backpack that held her gear and started up. Three steps later, the trail spit her back to the bottom in an avalanche of pebbles and pine needles. She grabbed a sapling and yanked herself back on to the trail. The sapling snapped under her weight and sent her sliding.

  She threw the tree to the side, gritted her teeth, and then sprinted the first hundred yards to the place where the slope was a little less steep. She was drenched in sweat in no time and used a few of her precious minutes to strip to her bottom layer: a dry-fit running top with a tight, low neckline and a barely there halter back. After seeing the dreadlocked girl with Josh at the campfire last night, she’d decided to take Madigan’s advice about skimpy clothing.

  The trail steepened again, and she found herself caught on a seventy-degree treadmill of loose gravel. Her feet jetted out, and she slid down the hill on her hip, straight into a brittle, thorny holly bush.

  She cursed Madigan for knowing how bad this trail was and still letting her come on it. She cursed Theo for not giving her better warning: surely he must have known that a girl he’d nicknamed Hollywood would not do well on this trail. She cursed Danny for subjecting his staff to such miserable working conditions. She cursed herself for not doing an internship in nice, clean, urban, familiar L.A.

  Most of all, she cursed Josh. They were doing all this for him, yet he was secretly sabotaging everything. It was worse than any A-list prima donna story she’d ever heard.

  The more she thought about him, the angrier she got. That anger fueled her up the gravel treadmill and another half mile of equally heinous slope and onto a zigzag of faint trail that rose straight to the sky.

  She crossed the last switchback, gasping for air
and furious. Her hands were caked in pitch and gravel, and rivulets of sweat ran down her body, turning dust into mud.

  The slope eased a little after the switchbacks, but the top was still impossibly far away. Through the gaps between the trees on the ridge, she could tell the morning’s overcast sky had already cleared. It was probably going to get hot, and fast.

  She gulped down some water and continued her ascent past three cairn-marked turns. The next section of trail didn’t require as much effort to remain upright, so her attention turned to the discomfort of her running shoes and socks, which were filled with twigs and pebbles. She longed to empty them, but she didn’t dare take a break that long. She absolutely could not miss Mr. Awful’s top out.

  She climbed across a wide field of boulders, then reached the crest, where the trail was a tidy rut of hard-packed dirt through short green grass. The path kept her close to an apron of white-gray rock that swept up to a high band of cliffs.

  Rounding the corner of the apron, she was met by a jaw-dropping unobstructed bird’s-eye view of Yosemite Valley. A gentle stairway of granite slabs took her to an expansive plateau that was the top of Flying Sheep Buttress. There, a tiny alpine lake was nestled among pine trees and a carpet of new green grass that looked as soft as silk. In the cliffs above, a waterfall streamed thick with snowmelt. She breathed deeply, the pristine air refreshing her lungs after kicking up all that dust on the trail.

  She looked at her watch. Despite it all, she’d made good time. She slid her pack off and dug for her radio. “Madigan, this is April. I’m at the top.”

  She rubbed the backpack indents out of her bare shoulders as she waited.

  Unlike the valley’s crowded landmarks, there was not a soul in sight up here. It was no wonder, seeing as the climber’s trail and the cliff face were the only ways up. She carried the pack over to a log and set her equipment up exactly like she and Madigan had rehearsed in the campground yesterday.

  “Madigan, this is April, I’m all set up,” she said into the radio. “I’ll start rolling as soon as you give me the sign.”

  She didn’t receive a response from him, Danny, or Theo. She flipped through the other channels to make sure the radio was working. A Park Service conversation about an aggressive chipmunk at the visitor center was her confirmation.

  What if coming all the way up here really was some sort of Walkabout hazing?

  She walked over to the place where Josh would be coming over the edge of the cliff. When she was as close as she dared, she lowered on her butt to scoot closer and then rolled onto her stomach to peer over the edge.

  The valley floor fell away from her like a sweep in an IMAX film. Her stomach dropped, and she pulled back. Good thing she wasn’t afraid of heights, otherwise she might have fallen over the edge just from the shock of the sight.

  She peeked over again, this time gripping the sharp edge of the cliff. She couldn’t see the guys, but, then, from her perspective so close to the plane of the face, she couldn’t see much at all of the cliff itself.

  She could tell how high she was by the size of the cars on the road below: bumblebees. Her father used to have her fly at this height when he was teaching her low-level aileron rolls. In the Decathlon, it always felt too low, and she would chicken out until he let her do it a thousand feet higher. Sweat beaded on her forehead from the memory. Without the metal sides of the airplane around her and the powerful lift of the engine, the altitude felt plenty high.

  Flying together had been their special thing, but it had never been her thing. Of course, he’d never known that. His assumption was that she’d come back home after college and he’d give her a “real education” in aerobatics and they would fly the two-plane, father-daughter sequences he’d been choreographing since she could walk. His entire business was already hers, technically. The planes, the hangar, the flight school. Someday—and soon—she would have to sell it all off. She would be selling her father’s dreams, and with all the deferred maintenance and debt from the lawsuit, it wouldn’t even bring in enough to save the family house.

  A lump built in her throat and, suddenly, the height was too much.

  With her head spinning, she carefully inched back from the edge and returned to the log where she’d stashed her stuff. She picked the dead leaves out of her hair to distract herself.

  Where were the guys? Just looking over the side was enough to terrify most people, but her crew was dangling from that side. And it had become her nature to assume the worst.

  A glance at her watch reminded her that Josh wasn’t due for a while. It made perfect sense why the guys wouldn’t be answering her radio call: they would be trying to minimize distractions while Josh was climbing. She’d communicated what she needed to—that she was ready—which was all they needed to know.

  She sat down and shook out her shoes, and then picked the seeds and thorns out of her socks while her sweaty, blistered feet dried in the sunlight. Relaxing against the log, she gazed out across the lake.

  How was it possible for something so beautiful, so untouched to exist? The surface of the lake was perfectly still, giving an unblemished reflection of the upper rim of cliffs, including the waterfall with its thundering muted by the distance. The impossibly bright, bluebird sky was also reflected in the lake, the color shining back on itself like a sapphire.

  It was like being in a storybook. An enchanted, fairy-tale storybook. The pure, fresh air and the sun warm like a blanket put her into a trance. She leaned her head back on the log and waited for the radio call that would signal Josh’s approach.

  Chapter Eight

  The airstrip was sizzling hot as her father lifted her into the booster chair on the copilot seat. Her body quivered with happy anticipation. She waited while Dad did the prechecks, then she mouthed along with all the radio calls. Finally, they were at the start of the runway and it was her turn.

  “Go ahead,” Dad said.

  She clicked on the microphone. “Rose Tower, Mooney echo-alpha-alpha ready for takeoff.”

  “Echo-alpha-alpha, cleared takeoff, runway one left,” replied Uncle Hal, who usually ran the tower.

  “Cleared for takeoff runway one left, echo-alpha-alpha.”

  “Good job, April,” Dad said. The Mooney Rocket roared and shook as he increased the throttle. He looked over for her thumbs-up, then released the brakes. The plane rumbled ahead faster and faster until they were racing into the nothingness at the end of the runway. Dad increased back pressure on the yoke, and they were floating in the air. Her stomach dropped as they climbed higher and higher, the noise and the vibration of takeoff a tangible force inside the cabin.

  She waited for the slight change in speed and altitude that signaled the end of the climb and the landing gear being stowed. “Bumpies!” she cried.

  Dad nosed the plane up and down in quick succession, making her stomach drop just like on the mini roller coaster at the fair. She grinned. He made a silly face and played along like the plane was a bucking bronco. She giggled.

  “Upside down!”

  “The Mooney Rocket doesn’t go upside down, honey.”

  He dipped a wing to the left, then quickly rolled the other to the right as consolation, before banking back to the left. They were going out toward Rose River, which was her favorite route. He lowered as they approached the river, flying over the top of a palm oasis in a shallow canyon. A herd of mustangs burst from the trees, flowing up the sides of the canyon and fanning out across the plateau below them.

  She laughed and spread her arms wide like a bird.

  Dad nosed the plane higher and then steadied the Mooney Rocket on a course away from the mountains.

  “Do you want to drive?” he asked.

  She popped out of her seat belt to crawl onto his lap like she did when he let her steer the truck down their driveway, but he shook his head and buckled her back in. He helped her adjust her seat so she was closer to the copilot controls.

  “Now, don’t make any sudden movements,”
he said. “Just keep her steady. Like on your bike. Remember what happened when you turned too fast on your bike?”

  She fingered the princess bandage on her knee from her crash a few days before.

  “You ready?” he asked. She grabbed the leather controls and nodded eagerly.

  For the first time in her life, she felt the full power of the Mooney Rocket’s 305-horsepower engine responding to even the slightest of hesitation in her hands. The power vibrated through the controls like she was holding the reins of a terrible, mechanized monster. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all.

  She dropped her hands from the controls. “You do it, Dad.”

  “Don’t you want to fly the plane?”

  She noted his disappointment and reluctantly put her hands back on the controls.

  “See, isn’t this fun?” He looked over at her.

  She nodded vigorously. She was old enough to know that this was a lie, but his approving smile made her heart swell.

  …

  A shadow crossed April’s face, and she had the distinct feeling someone was watching her. Strange. It was probably the dream.

  Wait.

  Was she asleep?

  Her eyes flew open, and there was Josh standing at her feet. Her grimy, bare, blistered feet. She fumbled for her radio.

  The power light was green. The volume was still on max. She looked at the edge of the cliff and then back at Josh.

  “Oh my god.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Maybe this was the dream. She hadn’t just slept through the top out. She couldn’t have.

  She opened her eyes again. Josh was still there.

  “Do you want me to crawl back over so you can get that on film?” he asked.

  Oh, shit. A chilly wave of dread swept over her. She had missed the shot.

  Her heart raced. Danny was going to kill her. If he didn’t fire her outright, Josh would make sure she was taken off the crew.

  “Just kidding,” Josh said. “Your crew lost power midway up. They all went back down.”