In the Same Boat

by Holly Green

  I grab the pen dangling from the sign-in sheet and hold it out for Gonzo. “Please?”

  “Cully’s like my brother. I’m not going to let you get him killed.”

  I clamp my teeth down on my tongue to keep from shouting that I’m not going to get anyone killed.

  Gonzo waits a moment for me to answer, and when I don’t, he walks back to where the others are sleeping.

  There’s more thunder.

  I go lie back down, but I can’t keep my eyes closed for more than ten seconds because my stomach feels like a sinkhole. I watch for lightning. I listen for thunder. I don’t trust them to wake me when the storm passes because I’m the only one who understands how important this is.

  Anyway, eyes closed or not, I can see the boats downriver getting farther and farther away. My brother, becoming unreachable.

  It’s just like that camping trip we took in New Mexico. I was six and Tanner was eight.

  We were eating cereal in our camp chairs for breakfast, and Dad and Tanner were talking about that day’s hike. Tanner was going on and on about climbing his first mountain.

  “How tall did you say it was again, Dad?” Tanner asked.

  “How long will it take us?” I added.

  Dad’s face fell. He didn’t answer. I turned to Mom, thinking she might answer, but her eyes were round and soft in that way that said something was wrong.

  “The two of us are doing something different today,” Mom began.

  My heart sank. “I want to climb the mountain with Dad!”

  “We’re going on a really special hike,” Mom explained. “It’s through a meadow full of wildflowers.”

  But I didn’t want Mom’s wildflower consolation hike. “No!” I shouted. “I want to climb my first mountain!”

  Dad’s eyes fell to the ground. Mom shook her head.

  “I want to climb my first mountain,” I said again, this time through tears.

  Dad stood from his chair and rustled my hair with his big hand. “Sorry, kiddo. I thought you understood you and your mom were going on a different hike.”

  Mom tried to pull me into a hug, but I pushed her away.

  “Just give her a minute,” Dad said. He and Mom went to the truck to refill our water bottles for the hikes.

  My brother rose out of his full-sized camp chair and bent down eye-to-eye with me in my kid-sized chair.

  “Face it, Sadie,” he said. “You can’t come because you can’t keep up.”

  Eleven years later and nothing has changed.

  2:15 A.M. SUNDAY

  A lifetime passes. A cold, shivering lifetime. I’m never getting out from under this bridge. Rain comes in sheets and fat drops and torrents. Cars come and go, loading and unloading, resupplying their boats. Two stop and rest. Two more pass us by. John Cullen snores. Erica snores. Everybody snores.

  I can’t unclench my fists. I would pummel John Cullen for getting steamrolled by Gonzo and Erica if I didn’t know I’d get disqualified.

  But the rain finally slows. The storm stops.

  I shake Erica awake. She rubs her eyes and yawns wider than a hippo.

  “It’s over. Sign us in.”

  She rubs her eyes again and looks around, then shakes Gonzo. She stretches and slowly gets to her feet, then confers with the race officials.

  “Fine. It looks like the storm’s over. We’ll sign you in.” She says it like she’s making some huge concession.

  It’s too much work to bend down, so I kick at John Cullen’s foot until he wakes up.

  “What?”

  I shine my headlamp on him. His eyes squeeze tight.

  “Move. It’s time to go.”

  “Just give me a minute.” He yawns and stretches and yawns and stretches, and I give up and pull the canoe into the water.

  Another team that’s been resting under the bridge is stirring. If we get on the water before they do, that’s one boat we don’t have to pass later.

  John Cullen shoves another empanada into his face and hands one to me before he gets in the canoe, and then we’re off, with Erica and Gonzo waving goodbye to us from shore.

  An hour passes. An hour with nothing but constant paddling and that grating pain in my shoulder and now another blister on my palm and one on my right thumb. I almost want to ask something about his college, just so it won’t be so freaking quiet between us. This is the longest leg of the race. Thirty-eight miles between checkpoints, just him and me. Not a single spot with public access.

  At least the moon is out again, casting a glow on the thin clouds in the sky and a soft blue hue on everything below.

  “You should take a snack break,” I say, because neither of us has eaten since the empanadas onshore. He puts down his paddle and bends forward in his seat.

  I should eat, too, but my stomach’s gone sour like I might throw up.

  “Why’s there so much trash in here?” he asks.

  “Didn’t you give your trash to— Oh no.” I tug the handle of my water jug and it pops out of the holder. Too light. Water sloshes around the empty space. “Damnit.”

  “What?”

  “We didn’t resupply,” I say.

  “Damn,” he echoes. “How long until we see them again?”

  “Six hours,” I answer. “If we’re fast.”

  “Damn.”

  I have two GUs left. I don’t know how many snacks. Maybe four. But the water … I would have taken two full jugs and I barely have half of one.

  “Log jam!” John Cullen calls. “Every turn there’s another effing log jam.”

  “They don’t call it The Hardest Miles You’ll Ever Paddle for nothing,” I say. It’s an old phrase. One you pull out for whiners.

  “I hate you,” he grumbles.

  “Hate you, too,” I say.

  There’s a steep bank to the left, so I steer us to the right and we pull over onto a muddy mess of a bank. He’s right. There really are a stupid number of log jams in this race.

  “I’m too tired to try to figure this one out,” he says. “Let’s just portage.”

  “Fine.” When I don’t know if I’m going to have enough food and water to last this leg of the race, the last thing I want is to get stuck in some gross, snaky, stagnant water.

  I step out first.

  “Should we go back?” he asks, just as my feet sink into mud up to my ankles. Now that the rain has stopped and the air is still and we’re not moving, the mosquitoes are out. I feel a bite and slap at my neck.

  “What do you mean, should we go back?”

  “I mean we don’t have enough food and water to last till the next checkpoint. So do we paddle one hour back upriver and get resupplied, or do we paddle for six more hours and get dehydrated?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. We never turn back. Constant forward motion.”

  He steps out of the canoe, and he’s close, but he’s up a slope. It’s like I’m standing in a hole. My eyes are barely to his shoulders. His headlamp shines above me, but when I raise my chin to look at him, mine shines in his face. He puts his hand on it and clicks it off. Everything turns black.

  “Don’t call me an idiot,” he says. “This is on you. You’re the one who couldn’t wait to get back on the water. You’re the one who woke everyone else up. If you’d given us enough time to think things through, we’d have remembered to resupply.”

  “Don’t blame me!” I yell. “We would have just resupplied and left if you’d backed me up in the first place.”

  My eyes have adjusted to the moonlight enough to see his hands fly up in the air. “That’s right. Everything’s my fault. This whole fucking thing is my fault!” He steps closer. The mud squelches at his feet. “Well, I’m done, Sadie. I’m out.”

  “What do you mean you’re out?” I yell. He can’t be—he’s not quitting. Is he? He can’t quit. “What about your tuition?”

  “Do you really think that’s the only reason I’m out here?” His hands grab at his hair. “You’ve been an asshole all day and I’m freak
ing over it. I don’t have to do this with you!” His head shakes and my ears ring from the yelling.

  I’ve poked a hornet’s nest, and I don’t even care. He can’t quit. And it’s not just about quitting. It’s not about the food and the water. It’s egging my house and the cricket rumor. It’s being eleven years old and him shouting at me that my dad almost got his dad killed. It’s my brother’s nose. It’s him destroying my tree house. And the fact that he never tried to make it right. His chest is right there like an invitation and I shove my hands into him and push.

  He lands in the mud, and I teeter forward. My feet are stuck. I can’t catch myself. My hands and knees plunge into the mud. It splatters my face, gritty in my mouth. And he’s standing back up, towering over me, angry.

  How do you think he’s going to handle it when things go wrong?

  I’m pulling my hands out of the mud, trying to get up, when he scoops up a handful of mud and flings it into the night.

  And then his hand is open, covered in mud, reaching down to me.

  I look up and even in the moonlight I can see there are no hard lines on his face anymore. No more muscles popping out of his neck.

  I put my own muddy hand in his, and my fingers slip out, but then I hold on tighter and he pulls me to my feet. I wait for him to walk away, to get his phone and call Gonzo. But he doesn’t.

  Our breaths come loud and hard, but as our standoff lengthens, they slow down.

  “Are you leaving?” I ask.

  His mouth tightens and I think he’s going to say yes, but then it relaxes, almost into a smile. “Are you gonna try to goulash me?” Something inside me loosens, like the lock breaking on a box that’s been clamped tight. Like now there’s enough room for some of the good memories to seep out. I shake my head.

  “Call me Cully again,” he says, and there’s a soft plea in his voice. “Every time you say John Cullen, it’s a kick to the gut.”

  John Cullen is what his dad calls him.

  The word is already in my mouth.

  Soft.

  Round.

  Familiar.

  Waiting to come out.

  “Okay, Cully.”

  My parents always said my first word was Cully, before Mama and Dada. That I coined the nickname because when I was learning to talk, I couldn’t say John Cullen. That as soon as I learned to crawl, they would put me on the rug when we got together with the Hinks and I would crawl straight to Cully.

  The whole thing is an exaggeration. I know that. But there’s some deep-down truth at the bottom of it all, because Cully was my person as far back as I can remember.

  I had a roller-skating party for my seventh birthday, and Mom and Dad made me wait until after, when we got home, to open my presents. I tore the paper off a present from a girl in my class, revealing an adorable plastic dollhouse that came with a family of little bunny figures who walked on two legs and wore clothes, and another family of cat figures. My heart practically exploded from the cuteness.

  “Whoever picked that doesn’t know Sadie very well,” Dad said.

  Tanner picked up the box and laughed. “When has she ever played with little bunnies?” he said, before dropping it on the table.

  Their words were a dirty boot stomping down all that excitement.

  Scofields don’t do cute and adorable.

  I took the box upstairs and tucked it into a corner of my closet.

  I pulled it out the next day, when Dad and Tanner weren’t at home, and I studied each velvety little animal. The girls wore fancy dresses, and the boys wore old-fashioned suits. The dad bunny even had a tiny pair of plastic glasses.

  I set up the house in my closet, complete with plastic bunk beds and a dining room table, and even a little steamer trunk up in the attic. I moved the animals around, having them at the table and putting the kids on the little couch. I switched their outfits around. I put the glasses on the little girl bunny and made the little boy cat wear the dad’s bow tie. But beyond that, I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Only that I wanted to keep playing.

  The knock on my bedroom door made me jump.

  “Cully’s here!” Mom’s voice was muffled behind the closed door to my bedroom. I made sure to shut the closet before I opened the door to my room.

  There he was, in a striped shirt, his red hair all mussed, his big smile revealing a missing front tooth.

  After Mom was gone, my stomach turned over as I opened the door to my closet to show Cully what I’d been doing. I held my breath as he bent down in front of them.

  He picked up the grandpa bunny and studied his sailor coat. “They’re so cute!”

  In an instant, he’d devised a whole scenario where the bunnies had to save the kitties from a ghost living in the attic of the dollhouse.

  Within a year, the fuzz on those dolls was worn and dingy from being played with by dirty fingers. They’d been pirates and librarians and explorers hacking through the jungle.

  I never understood how Cully did that. How he saw those stories so clearly. How when he looked at me, he saw me more clearly than my own family did.

  4:21 A.M. SUNDAY

  The hoots of owls and croaks of frogs and the dips of our paddles in the water fill the dark night. Our cone of light reflects off the water and the branches of the trees lining the river. It stinks of old fish. But all I can think about is the water sloshing around in my jug in all that empty space. We’re two hours into this leg. A little more than five hours till Hochheim. And that’s if we keep a good pace.

  John Cu—

  Cully.

  Cully and I took stock after we fought. About half a jug of water each and enough food for both of us to eat twice. Not a great way to paddle thirty-eight miles. Not even close. At this point in the race we should be trying to eat every hour and drinking even more. But it’s enough because it has to be.

  “What if it’s not? What if we need to call Gonzo and Erica?” he asked. “Are you going to rip my phone out of my hand and throw it in the river?”

  My eyes flicked to the back of the boat, where my phone was vacuum sealed, there only for an emergency. Use it and you’re out. Any call for help and you’re out. Even if you change your mind and want to keep going.

  Dad had a teammate who was losing his shit on the bay one time. Dad grabbed the emergency flare from his hand and threw it in the water.

  “We’ll make it,” I said. We both needed this finish.

  Now we’re on a long, straightish stretch of river, taking stroke after stroke after stroke. My stomach churns, but I don’t get to have a snack for another hour. And the last sip of water I took didn’t seem to make my mouth any wetter. Add that to the cheese-grater pain in my shoulder and my sore butt and my sore hands, my sore everything. Eyelids that don’t want to stay open. I’d almost like another log jam just to break the monotony.

  “Hut.”

  We finish the stroke and switch sides, keeping the same cadence. No. Not the same. I’m putting in for the catch as he’s moving his paddle through the air for his catch.

  “Let’s pick the pace up,” I say.

  But he doesn’t change a thing.

  “You’re slowing us down.”

  A moment passes, and he takes a big breath. The faster pace must be coming. But he exhales that huge breath, and nothing changes.

  I’d rather he just say, We’re doing this my way and I’m not taking orders from you anymore. But he decides to be passive-aggressive instead.

  At this pace, we’ll be lucky to make it to Hochheim by nine thirty.

  Slowing our pace doesn’t just mean we’re giving up any chance at top five. It means it’s going to be longer before we resupply. Longer before we get more water.

  When my grandfather did the race back in ’64, racers didn’t even have support crews. They were on their own. Grandpa and his friends had to take everything with them. Dad says they filled ketchup bottles with honey for energy and brought gross nutrition bars that tasted like cardboard. And they drank river
water, purified with chlorine tablets and flavored with Tang. Getting restocked with water and ice socks came later. Having your bank crew give you food is even more recent. It’s because they know people will keep going even if they run out.

  The water here is milky brown, full of silt and all kinds of runoff, and a good amount of pee from the racers upstream. We’re downriver of gas wells and cow fields and crops sprayed with god knows what. I don’t know what it was like back then, but now, even if we had chlorine tablets, I still wouldn’t drink this.

  How would Dad handle it? Never call for help—that’s certain. If he didn’t have purification tablets, he’d probably drink his own urine.

  Some racers keep going no matter what.

  It’s the draw of the Odyssey. Digging deep down and seeing what you’re made of. What you’re willing to do to succeed. And what, if anything, can make you quit.

  * * *

  “You’re here!” Cully bounced when he opened the door. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been to his house a million times before, but this was the first time I’d been invited to sleep over. Who knows how long Cully had been asking before his parents finally agreed.

  The whole thing was oddly formal. I was only eight, but I could tell. Mom stood at the front door behind me, even though she never walked me over to Cully’s. Even though I’d been running through the open garage into the back door of Cully’s house for as long as I could remember.

  Leslie Hink came from around the corner to greet us at the door. Her face was tight. “Sadie. We’re so glad you could be here. Cully’s been talking about this all week.”

  Mom patted me on the back to get me through the door. “Thanks so much for having her over,” she said.

  “Come on!” Cully said, waving me farther into the house, and I followed him, with my backpack and my sleeping bag, into his room. “It’s going to be so fun!” he said. “Mom said we could watch a movie, and I got some new LEGOs.”