The Girls of No Return (14 page)

“No nighty-night bedtime kisses,” said Boone.

“Good,” I said.

“Hey, Lida. Where were you?” asked Karen. “I didn't see you out on the water. Did you escape to the Smokers' Beach?” A copy of
David Copperfield
was resting facedown on her stomach.

“I was out there,” I said gruffly. I pulled myself up onto my bunk and swung my legs onto the mattress.

“I can vouch for her.” Jules spoke cautiously, as if deciding upon each word as she said it. “She was there.”

I knew that now she would tell everyone who I'd been in a canoe with, about the conversation she'd had with me and Gia, and I would have to explain myself. Maybe the other girls wouldn't care, but Boone would. I closed my eyes and waited.

But Jules didn't say anything. She yawned and turned over roughly in her sleeping bag. The rest of the girls took her cue. Gwen stood and turned off the light, and I heard the sounds of books being shut and dropped on the floor, sleeping bags zipping all the way up. I grabbed the flannel pajamas that I kept under my pillow and undressed in the darkness on my bunk. But I couldn't sleep. I felt off-balance, almost seasick. No matter how hard I tried to think of something else, I could hear the laugh that seemed to lie just underneath Gia's tongue as she talked about the Fifteens we'd seen.
Playacting.

 

 

SATURDAYS WERE OUR ONLY FREE DAYS, AND EVEN THEN WE
weren't exactly free. We still had our morning chores, still had Waterfront Hour, still had a campfire at the end of the day. The only things missing were our classes. (Even on Sundays, we had to attend shortened versions of math, science, and English. Thirty-minute sessions instead of an hour. Then, in the afternoons, there was usually a schoolwide workshop on self-esteem or communication skills, for example. Total waste.) Considering that we hardly had any homework as it was, our classes weren't the burden that they could have been.

Still, I felt unshackled on Saturdays. It always surprised me how everyone else knew just what to do with their free time. Some girls would write letters, paint, play horseshoes next to the Mess Hall, strum one of the few guitars that always seemed to be on hand. Sure, there were a few catfights, curses lobbed across the school grounds like footballs, someone arriving at the infirmary with a cigarette burn on her arm that she refused to explain — the natural results of unsupervised time. But for the most part, on Saturdays, Alice Marshall seemed more like a finishing school for debutantes than a place where hard girls went to soften. Gia usually spent Saturdays in her cabin writing letters, or hanging out with her cabinmates on the dock. She told me that she didn't want to alienate herself from the other girls in her cabin, and I said that didn't seem likely, seeing as how they practically struck up a band every time she smiled.

I hated Saturdays. They just highlighted my inability to do very much with myself. I suppose I could have read — Alice Marshall had a tidy little collection of bookshelves in one corner of the Rec Lodge — but that seemed beyond pathetic. I could have hung around the other girls, like Jules (who was usually in the cabin with a notebook or a deck of playing cards), but the idea of making small talk was exhausting.

So I wandered instead. All over the school grounds. In and out of classrooms, around the Waterfront, winding a slow path through the cabin area and over to the Mess Hall. I would sometimes stop there and pick up a cup of coffee to take with me; I drank more coffee on Saturdays than the rest of the week combined. Sometimes I collected sharp rocks as I walked, dropping them into my pockets, only to shake them out later. I might see if I could glimpse the doe and fawn that sometimes napped in the dusty shade of the hall's slightly raised deck. From the Mess Hall I would walk down the subtle incline past the bell and toward the beach. Then I would turn around and go back toward the cabins. I could keep up this wandering for an entire afternoon. I just made sure to never stop moving.

I found myself doing just that a few days after Gia explained Alice Marshall's version of the birds and the bees. It was a bright day — the sun was just grazing the tops of my arms and shoulders. Some of the I-bankers had optimistically put on tank tops in the morning, though by lunchtime their arms were goose-pimpled and red. Margaret said that this had been a bizarrely rainy and cool season for the Frank. Still, the blue sky was promising. It had to start feeling like summer
sometime
, and this was the closest it had gotten so far.

I was doing my regular thing, wearing a nice groove between the Mess Hall and the Bathhouse with my feet, trying to keep my eyes simultaneously on the ground in front of me and on the lookout for Gia, when I ran into Margaret near the Bathhouse.

“Lida,” she said, walking toward me. I always thought Margaret was taller than she actually was, and so was constantly surprised every time she came near enough for me to feel like I was towering over her. She stopped when she was a couple of feet away. “We haven't gotten much of a chance to talk lately. How are things? How're you settling in?” She was wearing a faded T-shirt and baggy jeans, and she scratched absentmindedly at a mosquito bite on her arm as she talked.

“Peachy,” I said. “Lots of personal growth, lots of inner harmony.”

“Sarcasm, sarcasm.” Margaret shook her head, smiling. “Be careful, Lida. You might just find yourself growing harmonically when you're not looking.”

“Pretty sure I'd notice,” I said.

“Hmmm.” Margaret stared at me for a minute, just long enough to make me feel uncomfortable. It was a real skill of hers. “Stranger things, Lida,” she said, before walking away. “They've been known to happen.”

Margaret headed toward the Mess Hall, and I turned to continue my pointless pacing. Boone was watching me from the doorway of the Bathhouse. She looked outfitted for combat: Her long braid was pulled tighter than usual, and she was wearing a pair of hiking shorts that appeared to be made out of canvas. It was the first time she'd worn anything besides her jeans, and I could see now that Boone had long legs as dark and smooth as river rock.

“Hey,” she said, frowning at me. Ever since we'd cleaned the Bathhouse together, Boone had been looking at me like I was an exotic insect that she was about to name and pin to a wall.

“Hey.” I looked again at her outfit. “Uh, going somewhere?”

“Hike.”

“Oh.” Boone was the only girl I knew at Alice Marshall who hiked for fun. She took what I'd been doing every Saturday and made it into something respectable: an outing. I shuffled my feet a little in the dirt.

She stuffed her fists into the pockets of her shorts. “Fine,” she said, as though I'd asked. “Come on. Your scrawny ass could use some exercise.”

I looked down at my legs. I always wore long pants, and that day was no different; I had on a pair of jeans that were almost dirty enough to pass as camouflage. Boone was right. I wasn't muscular. In fact, my legs resembled winter branches. “Um,” I said, “I wasn't planning on —”

“What are you, an idiot? You're coming with me, Townie. Let's go.” She spoke as though I had no choice in the matter, and frankly, I don't think I did.

“Okay,” I said cautiously. “Let me just get . . .”

“Now,” Boone said, jutting her chin toward the curtain of trees beyond the Mess Hall. “We're going.”

She took off, and I took off after her, trying desperately to match my own clunking gait with her graceful one. I wanted to ask where we were going as we practically sprinted through the school grounds and into the trees. Once we hit a well-worn trail that led away from the school and up the side of a mountain, however, I knew exactly where we were headed, and I suddenly regretted having come.

Everyone said that the hike around Buckhorn Mountain, on the eastern side of Bob, was the easiest and most traveled trail in the area around Alice Marshall. The peak had a higher elevation than the mountains around Buckhorn, but the trail itself — if you were in good condition — could be scaled in a quick hour-and-a-half “jaunt.” After all, you were
only
climbing about twelve hundred feet from the lake to the turnaround point. The path wound up and around the side of the mountain until it curved and started back down at the timberline. There were a few breaks in the trees where you could look out and see Bob and the school laid out prettily like some Swiss alpine resort — it's where I guessed most of the photographs for the brochure had been taken.

Personally, I had always thought that if Buckhorn was the easiest trail, then there was no way I would ever try to hike any of the others. I'd been on it a handful of times already in Outdoor Ed. Hikes don't get easier the more you do them: The incline stays just as steep, the rocky part just as forbidding, the footholds as elusive. The only thing that might change is the way your lungs contract and wheeze, and since I started my nightly pilgrimages to the Smokers' Beach, my lungs had definitely changed — just not for the better.

But we didn't take the usual path. Boone and I followed the Buckhorn trail at first, saying little to each other, scrambling in places and walking slowly in others. She seemed to float over the trail as though she didn't even notice what it was doing to her legs and chest. The subalpine fir trees and whitebark pines started to thin the farther we got.

When we reached the curve in the trail that switched back across the timberline and swung down to the school, Boone didn't turn. She marched straight ahead through the trees toward a rocky outcrop.

“Where are you going?” I called after her, but she didn't answer. I craned my neck, still panting from the climb, but I couldn't make out where she had disappeared to in the rocks. I stepped off the path and followed.

The outcrop that I'd seen from the trail was actually a mess of stone slabs and knee-high boulders that wound all the way around to the backside of Buckhorn. Stepping onto one of those rocks and looking out was like walking through a magic portal. The entire perspective changed. I found Boone standing on a boulder, her hands in her pockets like she was waiting for a bus, and I scrambled up to join her. From where we stood, there was no Alice Marshall. No Bob. No tiny specks of girls like little black ants crawling across the dock or beach. All I could see were endless, boundless mountains. Granite ridges; dark, knobby peaks; and almost everywhere, a green so deep and steady that it blurred my vision. Wrapped along the side of a mountain range in the distance was a swath of charcoal and nutmeg, where it seemed as though a painter had once brushed a forest fire across a canvas.

“Damn,” I said quietly. “I didn't even know this was here.”

“Seriously?” Boone laughed. “Where did you think we were living — a movie set?” She stared hard at the mountains in the distance. “There's the rest of the Frank. It's always been here. Always.”

I had a hollow, sweet feeling in the pit of my stomach like I got when I imagined stepping off a plane into another country, another life. Giddy, and a little scared. Such immensity. I swallowed.

“So this is what you do, then, during Waterfront Hour,” I said. “You just come up here and sit?”

“Hell no,” said Boone. “This is only a rest stop. But don't worry,” she added, glancing at me, “we're almost there.”

We picked our way across the side of the mountain, stopping every few steps to look out at the view. It slowly became clear to me that we were following a crude path through the rocks of a talus slope, though it was barely discernible and absolutely confusing: sharp, right-angled turns, figure eights around boulders, and all the time, walking with one hand on the side of a rock in case we lost our footing and slipped.

The path crossed the backside of Buckhorn and turned before climbing steadily upward along the mountain's spine. It had gotten windy, the kind of wind that, when you're scrambling across a ridge with no buffer between you and either edge of the mountain, seems particularly insistent. I was already wondering how long we'd been out and how we were ever going to get back. I was also wondering if this had been a good idea. I mean, Boone could have just reached out and pushed me off any one of those boulders. Wouldn't have taken much. Just a flick of the wrist, really.

“There,” she said, stopping next to a large rock and pointing above us. “The height of civilization.”

And that's when I knew where we were.

I had seen the fire lookout from the school grounds. Everyone had. If I stood on the corner of the docks and craned my neck, Buckhorn Peak held court above the other rocky ridges off to the east, and on top of the peak, perched so precariously that it must have been held there by magnets, was what looked to be a tiny little shack. I never thought that (a) anyone could possibly live there, and (b) I would hike all the way up the peak to find out.

But indeed that's what I had done. We were standing maybe fifty feet below the shack now, and I suddenly understood what science teachers had been trying to tell me all along: Objects appear smaller from a distance. The shack was no paper hut — it was a large, octagonal wooden house with a thin deck attached to each of its sides. It still looked like it might topple over and crash down the mountain with the slightest puff of wind, but it was at least big enough to live in.