by Holly Green
I can’t do this. I’m not going to make it to the finish.
But I stuff that fear deep down inside.
“Of course we have something to fix it.” I dig in the back of the canoe for our patch kit and start mending the crack. After fifteen minutes, after Leo has portaged the log past us, the wound in our boat is mended. I can’t say the same for the one inside me.
12:05 A.M. MONDAY
“Sadie!”
“What?” I pull my eyes off Cully’s back and see him, see the river, see everything with fresh eyes. I don’t think that was the first time he’d called my name.
“Log jam,” he says.
“Log jam,” I repeat, and suddenly I see the huge tangle of debris blocking the narrow river before us.
It rained here earlier today. I can smell it.
“I think we could make it through that hole over there,” Cully says, pointing ahead.
Right next to the black space Cully points to, I see a rabbit with an umbrella. It’s got a stern look painted on its face, like I should know better than to try to squeeze through the hole. It says that I should be at home in bed, and why did I ever get back in a boat after last year?
“What do you think?” Cully asks.
I put down my paddle and press the heels of my hands into my eyes, and when I look again, the disapproving rabbit is still there, but when I squint, I can just make out the hole.
“Too narrow. If we can’t find something better, I think we should portage.” I see the light of another boat portaging river right, so someone else already came to this conclusion.
“Trust me. We can make that. I can see it better than you,” Cully says, switching to a forward stroke. The boat starts moving and I’m too exhausted to fight it, so I press the rudder pedal and help Cully line us up for the hole. If we can avoid the portage, we’ll save time and energy.
The nose goes through fine. Cully lies back in the boat to keep from getting beheaded by a branch. The boat shudders, and the sickening scrape of wood on the hull fills my ears before we come to a halt. Cully only made it through a little past his seat, which isn’t the widest part of the boat. There’s no way we’re getting through here. We may have already cracked the hull, and I want to scream at him for being so stupidly stubborn. I told him it was no good.
I freaking told him.
Cully reaches up and tugs on a branch, trying to lurch the boat forward, but it doesn’t move. He lifts his butt up to do it again.
“Stop!” I say, and his hand slips off the branch.
“Damnit!” someone calls from the bank. It’s the other boat, the one portaging. “God-damn-stupid-fucking-mud!”
So we caught up to Mike Lewis.
He should be happy. At least he’s not caught in the log jam.
“We’re going to have to back up,” I say.
“I still think we’ve got this,” Cully says.
“You’ll make it worse.” I backpaddle a couple of times, trying to ease us out, but it’s no good. At least there’s no current pushing the boat.
Cully pushes off the log with his foot, but we’re too stuck to move. He pushes again and again, but it’s no use. The boat is good and stuck, and our weight isn’t helping.
“We could climb over the logs. Maybe tilt the boat,” he says.
“Not worth the effort. Let’s climb out and swim it to shore,” I say.
“Shit!” Mike yells from the other shore.
“Shit,” Cully echoes.
“I’ll get out first, and then when you get out, you push off the log jam.”
“You-stupid-ass-useless-fucking-boat!” Mike shouts.
“Let’s portage on the other side from him,” Cully says.
I flip on my headlamp and check out the left bank. It’s steep and covered in trees. I shine my light on the right side and see Mike struggling to get his boat up a steep bank with no trees, and apparently nothing to grab on to. “We’ll portage left,” I agree.
I slide out of the boat into the water. I kick and kick, away from the log jam, not moving anywhere, until the boat rocks and then lifts. Cully is out. I keep kicking, and suddenly there’s a push, and we start moving upriver. I kick as hard as I can, pulling with my free hand, swimming the canoe toward the left bank.
There’s a little bit of muddy bank before the trees begin and the earth takes a sharp turn up. My legs are like rubber when I try to stand. I wobble, slip, and fall, splashing to my knees and elbows. Dirty, fishy river water fills my mouth. I spit and spit before I stumble back to the boat and rinse my mouth out. Thank Gonzo and Erica for giving me some plain water. I could not handle any sort of mixed berry grapefruit shit right now.
I am so damn tired. Getting that boat up the bank already feels like an impossible task.
“Just one minute,” Cully mumbles, crawling to the bank. He lies on his stomach in the water, folds his arms on the mud, and lays his head down.
My knees soften. Maybe one minute wouldn’t hurt. Maybe one minute would make us faster.
“Damnit!”
Mike Lewis’s shout from the opposite bank brings me back to my senses.
“Let’s move,” I say, nudging Cully with my foot.
“Two minutes.”
Cully snuggles down into the mud, but a moment after I grab the stern handle, he’s on his feet, taking the bow.
“How’re we going to do this?” Cully asks, his voice laced with sleep.
I shine my headlamp up the bank, into the trees.
“We’ll have to try to slide it up. I’ll go first and pull. You push.”
I flip up the rudder so it doesn’t drag on the ground, and start up the hill, holding on to the stern handle. It’s all a tangle of mud and tree roots, and every step is made worse by the weight of the boat and the effort not to fall and the fact that my legs are gummy worms.
We both slip in the muck more than once. My body’s caked in it. A good ten minutes pass, and we’ve moved about ten feet. Maybe Mike had the right idea portaging the other side, except that he’s still cursing over there.
Cully’s end of the boat is probably only a few feet past the bank when we get stuck. There are just too many trees too close together, and the boat is just too damn long and unwieldy. I end up facing him as he tries to back through the space between trees.
“Try swinging your end to the left,” I tell Cully, hoping we can thread the boat through a hole to the side.
Cully takes a few steps to the right, banging the hull against a tree.
“Your left, not mine,” I shout.
“Why didn’t you just tell me that?” Cully’s voice is raised, too.
“Because it was obvious.”
Cully steps to the left, until he runs into another tree.
We move forward a few steps, readjust the angle, move back a bit, readjust again, and I’m just so sick of it all, I want to scream.
“Push!” I yell at Cully.
“I did push. It’s just stuck. See!” Cully lifts up his hands and steps away from the boat. It doesn’t move. “I didn’t sign up for this so you could spend sixty hours insulting me.”
“No, you signed up for this because you needed your daddy to pay your tuition, when I’m going to spend the rest of my life paying back loans so I can go to school.”
I hope it stings.
“I’m not here for my tuition,” he grumbles.
I set down my end of the boat and move around a tree so I can see him better.
“What are you talking about? You already told me that’s why you’re here.” I walk toward him. My body vibrates with anger.
He puts a hand up, shielding his eyes from my headlamp, and I click it off. Everything goes black.
I poke him in the muddy chest with my finger. “You told me you’re here for your tuition,” I repeat.
What a stupid-ass thing to try to lie about.
“He took it away,” he yells. “Are you happy now?”
But I’m not happy. Cully was always an artist.
From the time we were kids. He should go to art school.
“At the starting line,” he says, “as soon as he found out I was getting in a boat with you, he called it off.”
Johnny and Cully at the starting line. Cully red like a volcano. Cully saying fuck him.
But then I’m so confused. He didn’t need to do this.
My eyes adjust to the darkness and Cully’s face emerges in the moonlight filtering through the clouds. We’re just a foot apart.
“Then why are you here?”
He turns his head away. Looks back. Rubs a hand over his forehead.
“Why would you get in the boat?” I’m raising my voice again, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m still angry or because I’m confused. “You don’t care about this race. You never cared about it.”
He opens his mouth, closes it, and then he takes a deep breath. He still won’t look at me.
“Why aren’t you answering me?” I shout.
His eyes turn back to me.
“Because I’ve missed you! Okay?” He’s still half shouting. He steps back, tugs at his hair with both hands, and then takes a step closer. “I’ve missed you every day for the last six years. And I knew how much you wanted this. I knew you couldn’t do it without a partner.”
My heart is a freight train.
“You hate me!” I’m still yelling. Why are we both yelling? “You tore down the tree house.”
“I took down the tree house because I was hurt and I was mad. People do stupid things when they’re mad.”
“I didn’t do anything!” I shout, because every bad thing I did to Cully came after the tree house. “I didn’t do anything to you!”
He huffs out a breath, and then he winds back up.
“You let go!” Cully shouts. He moves forward, his face a few inches from mine. His breath warm on my face. And then he’s not yelling. “We didn’t have to stop being friends. I held on, and you … you let go.”
And there we are, at the finish all those years ago, when our dads were looking at each other with venom in their eyes. Cully’s hand was warm wrapped around mine. He knew what was coming, too. He squeezed tighter.
I let go.
And I know it now, for the first time, that this is the root of everything that went wrong between Cully and me. I was the one person in his life who took him just as he was. Not his parents. Not his sister. And when it came down to it, when it was obvious that the Hinks and Scofields were over, he chose me, but I didn’t choose him.
That day at the tree house, maybe he’d been waiting for me. That could have been our place, neutral territory. But instead, I pushed him away. I told him it was mine. I told him he had to leave. No wonder he ripped it apart.
I ruined things.
I ruined things, and I’ve spent the last day and a half being an asshole to him. And he kept going, just because he wanted to be friends with me again.
If he didn’t hate me before, he should now.
Everything goes blurry. I start to wipe my eyes, but my hands are covered in mud. My chest heaves. So does his. I stare back at his moonlit face. I feel like I’m falling forward. Like that string that connects us is pulling me closer.
He takes a half step toward me and his eyes meet mine.
“I’m still holding on,” he whispers.
I reach out and pull him to me.
My mouth is on his and his lips are dry and chapped. I press in harder, like all at once I’m telling him how sorry I am and trying to make up for six years of missing him. His hands find my waist, his fingers cool and damp from the mud. But the rest of him is so warm and the insides of his lips are so soft. I wrap a hand around his neck and—
“Could you two just get on with it?” Mike yells from across the river. “I’m gonna fucking vomit over here.”
We both freeze. Cully steps away. His head turns toward the sound of Mike’s voice. I turn away, too.
Oh my god. I kissed Cully.
It was never like that between us before. I don’t even know if I want it to be like that now.
I kissed Cully, and—I didn’t even ask. You’re supposed to ask someone before you mash your face into theirs.
“I’m sorry,” I say, without turning back to look. “I don’t know why I did that.” If he’s completely disgusted, I don’t want to see the look on his face. I take a breath. And another.
When I turn back, Cully is staring at the canoe. My stomach sinks a little. It’s not like I was hoping he’d sweep me into his arms, but that was good. Like, really good. And it doesn’t seem to have had any impact on him.
It’s a relief that it’s dark, because my cheeks burn with embarrassment and I don’t know why. I don’t like Cully like that. I could barely even tolerate him a day ago.
I guess it’s good, at least, that he’s not acting mad at me. And if we’re not going to talk about it, I’m glad we have the boat and the race to focus on.
“Let’s turn it upright,” he says. “It’ll be easier.”
It’s so freaking simple. I couldn’t even see it.
We secure all the loose parts. He holds the bottom of the canoe and I take one of the cross braces, and we turn the boat vertical. We’re so close together, I’m grateful for the canoe between us. Grateful that he can’t see my face. Grateful I don’t have to look at his. The boat towers over us, unwieldy, and we take tiny steps, weaving through the trees. We twist it and turn it and adjust the angle. It wears on our already exhausted bodies, but eventually, the ground levels and the trees thin, and we’ve made it up the hill. We take turns dragging the boat across the soft ground, and somewhere in that time, the moon comes out from behind the clouds.
A cheer erupts from the opposite bank, and I guess that means Mike finally got his boat out of the mud. Slowly we weave our way back down to the shore, past the log jam, and see his bow light moving downriver as he paddles away.
By the water, there’s a little sandy bit of shore that we set the canoe on. I stand in the shallows stretching, shining my headlamp downstream, where the river winds its way to Seadrift.
“Well, that was a mess.” Cully’s voice is soft.
I’m slow in turning to face him.
Mess is an understatement.
And it’s not just the kissing.
We have so far to go, and I’m making a mess of the whole thing. Dad would have known what to do. That was one of the things I was supposed to be able to offer here. I’m supposed to know how to do this stuff. But I don’t. And I’ve got Cully here, thinking I’m some sort of expert. And on top of the fact that I destroyed our friendship, I’ve made our partnership super weird, and I’m not even sure I can get us the rest of the way down the river. I’m not my dad.
I let my legs crumple beneath me.
Cully sits down, too, and I feel every inch of the foot he’s left between us. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“I’m making this up as I go, and I’m lousy at it.” My voice cracks. “At this point last year, I’d already asked my dad if we could quit.”
“You wanted to quit?” he asks, like he doesn’t quite believe it. “I thought you didn’t finish because you got hurt.”
“Yeah, I got hurt. But I also wanted to quit. I was tired and scared, and I said it. I said it out loud, and Dad didn’t even answer, and then we wrecked. And the thing is, I’m not sure if we wrecked because I made a mistake, or if we wrecked because some sick part of my subconscious knew it was the only way to get home.”
And now the damn tears are rolling down my cheeks.
Cully inches closer, but not close enough.
I remember one night, hiding in my closet with our sides smashed together and warm, reading A Wrinkle in Time. He could read faster than me, so he would wait until I tapped his leg before he turned the page. Even now, I can still feel the soft flannel of his pajama pants under my finger. I remember thinking in that moment that my heart might just explode with love for my best friend, Cully Hink.
Everything in me want
s to lean against him like I did that night in the closet. To rest my head on his shoulder. For everything to be good and comfortable and warm between us. And maybe I could do that right now, if I hadn’t just kissed him.
“I don’t think you did it on purpose,” he says quietly, and it takes me a moment to realize that he’s talking about the wreck, not the kiss, and I’m a little disappointed, because maybe we should talk about the kiss. “Even subconsciously,” he continues.
“How can you say that?” I ask. “You don’t even know me anymore.”
He lets out a little half snort. “You haven’t changed that much.”
There’s that tug in my chest again. The string that’s connected us our whole lives.
“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I got that bag of Sadie Bears covered in eggshells,” he says. “I really wanted those cookies.”
I’m hit by a good bit of regret. “Sorry about that.”
“Nah,” he says. “I heard they called you Sadie Bear. We’re even.”
The way he smiles at me makes every moment of missing him bubble up inside me. Now I’m the one who doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I stuff the feelings deep down in my belly. “We should get moving.” We shouldn’t be sitting here like this, wasting time. Constant forward motion. It’s the only way I know how to race. It’s how Scofields do it.
He falls back on the gravel. “Five minutes,” he whispers.
My partner is hurting. And so am I.
This is how I become one of those people who lie down to rest on the side of the river.
12:44 A.M. MONDAY
I listen to the rhythmic rise and fall of Cully’s breath beside me and fight the urge to shake him awake. It’s good he can sleep. I hope it helps him. It’s just hard to understand how he can be there, so peaceful, when I’m trying not to jump out of my skin.
My feet are in the water and my back is on the gravel. My ant bites itch like mad, even though I put more cream on, and I have to keep my eyes closed, because there’s a freaky clown face in the trees eating one of those giant turkey legs. Eyes closed isn’t much better, though. Horrible little movies play on the backs of my eyelids. A few of them are about the race. Boat after boat pulling up to the finish, each one with a Tanner in it who gets out and accepts a trophy and a bar of gold and a puppy that will never grow old. But mostly it’s me, trying to kiss Cully, and a look of disgust spreading across his face, over and over like a bad GIF.
