Screwed (25 page)

Kat, Danni, and Beth clapped and whistled. “Awesome story. You rule.”

“Make fun. I get it. You’re too cool for this place. I only hope you figure it out before it’s too late.” Just as she’d been when she was their age, these girls, except for Tara, were all bluster and big hair. After a few days without hot water and mascara, they would start to lose their swagger. Adolescent ego was no match for a big mountain.

After everyone was asleep, Grace sat alone in front of the dying fire, thinking about Charlie. As much as she tried to put him out of her mind, she wondered what he was doing, whether he had gone to the senior prom, where he was going to college, and most of all, if he would still want to be her other best friend when she got back.

“Hi.” Tara had appeared out of nowhere. Grace hadn’t even seen the tent flap open.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I can’t turn off my brain. When I close my eyes, I see every stupid thing I’ve ever done,” Tara said, grinding her fists into her eyes.

“I know how that is.” Grace’s nighttime brain was like an autobiographical movie theater showing nightly documentaries of all the low points in her life. Even after an exhausting day on the trail, the movies played on.

“Did Truth tell you why I’m here?”

“No, she never said a word.” The other three girls were here at the behest of the court system, but Tara had probably never even jaywalked. “I figured you were like the others, some post-rehab program.” She hadn’t believed that for a second, but since Grace had her own secrets, she wasn’t going to pry.

“I asked her not to say anything, but now I want to tell you. My parents sent me here. A couple of weeks ago, I got accused of cheating at my boarding school. I didn’t do it, but this girl lied about it, and the headmaster believed her instead of me.”

“Why would she lie?”

Tara fiddled with her braid and stared at the glowing embers. “A boy she liked asked me to a school dance last month. I tried to explain, but nobody cared about the truth. The other girl, Brooke, comes from a really wealthy family that donates a ton of money to my school, so of course they believed
her
story.”

“Didn’t your parents stand up for you?” Although Grace’s parents had not stood up for her, she was still surprised when it happened to someone else.

“No, they didn’t even ask me what really happened. All they cared about was how bad it looked. I was so upset when I got sent home that I did something stupid — I ran away.” Grace was all too familiar with parents who thought more about how things looked than how they really were. “Half my family went to that school. My parents said that I’d humiliated them and that I needed to see how good I had it before, so here I am. I think it was more because they were about to leave for Europe for three weeks, and they didn’t want to leave me home alone. My brothers are both away at college.”

Tara’s honesty made Grace want to divulge her own sad tale. “Do you want to know why I’m here?”

“Aren’t you doing this for college credit or something? That’s what the brochure says about junior counselors.” Truth still wore the scars of her old addiction, but Grace looked like the self-assured girl Tara wished she could be.

Grace shook her head. “I decided to come here because last year I got pregnant.”

Tara gasped but quickly recovered. “I’m sorry. You just don’t look like ….”

“My parents kicked me out of the house because I wouldn’t have an abortion.”

“That’s horrible.” Tara started to cry quietly. Getting sent to boot camp was bad enough, but being disowned — she couldn’t imagine it. “Where did you go? Where’s your baby?”

“It worked out,” Grace said, trying to sound upbeat. “I stayed with my wonderful neighbor, and my baby was adopted by a really nice couple.”

“But what about your parents?”

Grace said, “I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to work things out, but I’m not going to let that pain make me stupid, which, as you found out, only makes everything worse.”

When she was standing in Penn Station in New York City, trying to decide whether to take the train to Washington or Chicago, Tara knew that running away was beyond brainless; it would only make her look like she really was a cheater. But she’d been so hurt and angry that she’d wanted to lash out at her parents. If they worried that she might be gone forever, maybe they would regret how unfair they’d been. “I kind of screwed it up with the running away, didn’t I?”

Grace nodded. “But you don’t have to do stuff like that anymore. You know better now. Like Truth says: respect … for others and for yourself.”

Reaching over and squeezing Grace’s hand, Tara said, “Thank you. I won’t tell anybody about your baby.”

“It’s okay. You can tell. It’s part of who I am. If I’m ashamed of it for the rest of my life, I’ll never get anywhere.”

“You shouldn’t be ashamed. You’re amazing,” Tara said.

“And so are you. We’re not afraid of heights anymore, and we’re not going to let anyone, including ourselves, tell us that we’re no good.” Grace wondered if junior counselors were supposed to be dispensing advice and giving pep talks.

“Thank you, Grace. I think I can go to sleep now.”

The two girls stood up and hugged each other tightly, both feeling a little lighter for having shared their secrets.

The Truth squad had broken up and all the girls had gone home, hopefully in a better state than they had been in when they came. After the fireside chat, Tara found her voice, no longer letting the other girls walk all over her. She actually told Kat to fuck off when Kat made fun of the way she talked. And just as Truth had predicted, the other girls had their epiphanies, or at least pretended to. The mountain had worked its magic on the girls, and if they remembered half of what they learned at No Boundaries, they would be well on their way. Right before Kat stepped onto the van, Truth handed her the penis pipe, although she had filled the cavity with some kind of glue so Kat couldn’t smoke through it anymore. It was the perfect souvenir.

Now it was Grace’s turn. To complete the program, she was required to spend three days alone on the mountain, reflecting on all that she had gone through and demonstrating mastery of her survival skills. Looking down at her sinewy arms and legs — definitely no baby weight hanging around — Grace hardly recognized herself. She’d always been thin, but she’d never been strong. Her skin had turned bronze, not just from the sun, but also from a thin layer of grime that seemed to be embedded in the top layer. After more than seven weeks without a proper shower or a decent meal, Grace was nearly wiped out. It was time to go home. At night she dreamt about taking long, hot baths in Helen’s clawfoot tub and eating an entire chocolate cake.

As she waved goodbye to Truth, Dirk, and the others, Grace had to marvel at how far she’d come. Marching off into the wilderness alone, and her heart wasn’t even racing. In fact, she was looking forward to it, mostly because the sooner she finished her individual reflection time, the sooner she could take a shower and put on clean clothes. Her whole body itched, and she’d been wearing the same underwear for nearly a week. Grace took one last look at the No Boundaries crew, and set off on her three days of solitude.

That first night, sitting in front of the campfire she had built, next to the tent she had pitched herself, Grace gnawed on a piece of beef jerky and stared out into the darkness. She was supposed to catch and cook her dinner — jerky was only for emergencies — but even though she had seen half a dozen rabbits that afternoon, Grace had read too many Beatrix Potter books to make a meal out of Flopsy Bunny.

To her dismay, Grace discovered that time slowed down when you were all alone in the middle of nowhere. Three days threatened to feel like three weeks. The worst thing about reflection time was the silence. The crickets and the birds were plenty loud, but the absence of human sounds made Grace lonesome. So she sang. She sang all the Beatles songs she knew from the
White Album
and
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. And she talked to herself. Long rambling conversations with the trees about the last eleven months — all her feelings about Nick and Charlie and her parents — and what she was going to do when she got home.

When Grace woke up the next morning, it had started to snow. She shivered and burrowed down inside her sleeping bag, thinking she should probably just stay there until it was time to go back. No one would know if she’d really climbed all the way to the top, and besides, no one was expecting a snowstorm in June, so she couldn’t be faulted for not sticking to the original plan. Grace zipped the bag over her head and went back to sleep.

Dreaming there were mountain lions howling outside her tent, licking their chops while they waited to devour her, Grace woke up in a cold sweat. But it was just the wind. Peeking out through the tent flap, Grace saw that there was nearly a foot of snow outside and it was still coming down. Not equipped for winter hiking, she tried to remember what she’d been taught about avoiding hypothermia and frostbite. She dug in her bag and put on every piece of clothing she had with her. There was nothing else to do but wait for it to stop snowing, so she could hike back down the mountain. But what if it didn’t stop? What if she froze to death in the middle of June halfway up a stupid mountain two thousand miles from home? After talking herself out of a full-on panic attack, Grace decided that it wasn’t so much the dying part that she feared, but the thought that she would leave so much unfinished business behind, so many things that she had wanted to tell people but had been too much of a coward to say. Taking a pad of paper and a pen from her backpack, Grace decided to finish her business.

Although her letter to Helen was way too short, Grace really felt there was nothing she could say to adequately thank her rescuer and protector. Better to keep it simple. Besides, Helen already knew how much Grace loved her.

Hopefully Charlie would never have to read it, and she could tell him everything in person.

Now Grace needed to write to her parents. Even if she survived the snowstorm in one piece, she knew she wouldn’t be able to face them head on when she got home and say all the things that needed to be said. Smelling her mother’s perfume, watching her father inspect her for some lasting remnant of her public shame — she would be sobbing within seconds and nothing would be resolved. But what to say? Jennifer’s speech the night before Grace had left for Colorado had given Grace much food for thought. It was no different from her speech the previous summer when she so accurately predicted how Betsy and Brad would react to the baby news, but since Grace had become a mother herself, albeit for barely a nanosecond, she was privy to an emotion she had never before understood, and she now knew that Jennifer had been right all along. The love of a parent for a child was, or was supposed to be, fundamental. It was irrefutable, like gravity and breathing, and the fact that shit happens and nothing ever stays the same shouldn’t destroy a love that powerful.

Rereading what she’d written, Grace wondered if she would ever have the courage to send this letter to her parents if she actually survived the snowstorm. She had become a totally new person in the last year — the old Grace would never have been able to say those things. In fact, the old Grace would never even have thought those things. But it was all true, and if she and her parents were ever going to salvage some sort of a relationship, they were going to have to hear it.