Hot RA is now calling for our attention. He’s standing by an observation tower. He’s telling us that there are drinks here, by his feet, and that we will begin our descent in five minutes. As I’m thirsty, I work my way around the periphery, the lichen-covered rocks I traverse gray and dry, and strangely slippery even though moisture is nowhere. As the wind whips my hair around and my cheeks burn from the cool air, I can’t imagine what it’s like up here in the winter.
I’m grateful there’s only one Mountain Day a year and the next one isn’t scheduled for February.
I wait in line at the three Igloo coolers by the observation tower. When it’s my turn, I plunge my hand into melted ice and come up with a bottle of water. I am quick to sidestep for the person behind me, and I retreat to the exact same place I was standing before. The twist top makes a crackle as I free it from its rim, and then I am drinking, my hot and dry throat like the roots of the twiglike plants that struggle to grow up here, catching and holding the cool and the wet. My stomach is a basin at my body’s room temperature, and as I guzzle, a ball of refrigeration coalesces there. I stop myself at the halfway mark. I don’t want to have to pee in the woods on the descent.
Can you imagine what Greta would do with the likes of that?
The view once again commands my attention, yet I remain aware of the other girls, and soon their presence prevails over Mother Nature, my stare going to them even though I can watch their like all day, every day at school, and this mountain’s offerings will only be available to me for a few minutes longer. Still, my peers are fascinating to me, alien life forms that look and sound like me, but whose inner composition is nothing like my own. Up here, in the wind and the sunshine, my contemporaries are taking group shots with cameras, cozying close and holding each other in arm links of three and four, everyone smiling at the photographer who then trades places with somebody in the lineup so they all are Kodak-accounted for. These are the pictures that will be reproduced in the yearbook and on the brochures for the school. They’ll be made into posters that will hang in the Admissions Office.
“Okay, time to go!” Hot RA hollers over the gusts. “Let’s do this!”
With his turquoise sweatshirt tied around his waist, he gets the descent going by standing at the trailhead and motioning for girls to drain off the summit into the mountain’s pipe system of cleared pathways. The voices of my peers are loud, their energy still good because they are young, and even if they don’t like climbing this mountain or going down it, it’s still better than being cooped up in a classroom.
As more of them depart, the chatter dwindles. I hear the wind even more clearly now, and I am reminded that we are brief up here, and the weather, like the mountain, is permanent and unimpressed by our split-second tenure.
I take one last look at the view of the unspoiled valley. It’s so beautiful, the acreage of trees nearly incalculable, the clear blue sky overhead completely incalculable. Standing alone, I am captured and held in the palms of the earth, the moment neither a curated photograph nor an imperfect, edited memory, but a pristine testament to the true power of now, of the present, of the imperial instant.
I give myself up completely to this, releasing my grasping, desperate hold on sanity for once, knowing that for this brief slice of time, I do not have to worry about traveling where I do not wish to go. I float, and yet stay where I am, because I am seamlessly connected with all that is around me, even the girls who, being so different from me, have already begun their jangling descent back to level ground, the mountaintop already forgotten.
When I turn around to go, I realize I was wrong.
I am not alone.
Off in the trees, in the shadows, two people are standing close together. A man and a woman.
Make that a man… and a teenage girl.
Hot RA and Greta are by themselves.
If not for her rainbow bright clothes, I wouldn’t have seen them at all.
chapter TEN
My descent, unlike my trip up, is a blur. I remember nothing of the trail. My mind is consumed with what I saw. And yet what did I see? Two people standing together in and among the fluffy boughs of pine trees. That was it. They weren’t kissing. They weren’t touching. Maybe Greta was asking him a question about lunch, like where it was or what was being served. Maybe she had a blister. Maybe she saw Strots sneak a cigarette somewhere and was telling on my roommate.
I remind myself, quite sternly, that as prejudicial as it is for people to judge me for being unattractive, it is just as bad to assume that because Hot RA is good-looking, anytime he is alone with someone of the opposite sex, there is something sexual going on. Or anytime he happens to leave the dorm at night, at the same time a girl appears in the doorway to her room, it is something nefarious. He’s a married man, for godsakes. And Greta is a child compared to him.
No matter how she fills out her clothes.
I am being too suspicious. I am looking for shadows in the darkness where there are no monsters, my brain forging chain links where there are none to be had.
I am following in the jealous footsteps of my mother, whose relationships almost always end because she thinks the man is cheating on her.
And yet as Greta gets on my bus, forcing me to choose another, I find myself checking to see if she’s behaving differently. She isn’t.
Hot RA and I happen to board the same bus. He is immediately swarmed with girls, the bench seats around him and across the aisle promptly three deep with nubile bodies—until he reminds them that for safety’s sake, there are only two passengers allowed per row. The fact that he not only follows this rule but makes others do the same seems like a testament to his character.
His virtue matters to me, although not for a virtuous reason. I want Greta to want him and never have him.
Okay, I also might want him to find no students attractive at all, ever, because it makes my crush easier to bear.
I sit up in front again, and because no one volunteers to sit with me, I stretch out my legs across the bench seat and put my back to the window.
This is not so I can keep watching our residential advisor.
Maybe it is.
As we trundle forth to whatever destination is next, he is chatting with the girls, and I notice Francesca is right behind him. She talks over the other students. He doesn’t pay her any greater attention than he does anyone else, and I become more convinced that what I saw in those woods at the top of the mountain was nothing bad, just like it was a mere coincidence that night with he and Greta appearing at the same time. After all, I do tend to see things that are not there, and not only in a hallucination kind of way. Sometimes, the connections I find among people and things have nothing going for them except the clarity with which I see the interrelationships. Which can be disorienting. There is no confusion in this case, however, and when we disembark, I tell myself to forget all about it.
Besides, I need to use the restroom, and become focused on how I can’t really hold things any longer. Fortunately, we are at a county park that has a concrete kiosk of bathrooms. The line forms quickly, and when I finally get into one of the stainless steel stalls, I can smell cigarette smoke next to me. It has to be Strots, I decide, and I’m tempted to say her name. I don’t. Instead, I check the dispenser to my right and am relieved to find that there is a big fat roll of toilet paper locked into the car-wheel-sized holder. There’s plenty for me, and plenty to last us through the afternoon.