Die.
20
Hands Down
Henry and I get back to Charlotte at four in the morning, no words exchanged between the two of us on the entire trip back. Five hours and some mediocre sleep later, there’s a knock on my door. After a lengthy debate with myself over answering, I finally give in, and, as I suspected, it’s him.
“What do you want?” I demand. “We aren’t flying out until tomorrow, are we?”
“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” he says. “Get dressed. Bathing suit, something sporty.”
“Is this a setup?” I ask, suspicious. After Priya’s speech yesterday, I don’t know what to expect.
“It’s your day off,” Henry says. “The crew is long gone to another hometown.”
“Did John approve this?” I can’t help but ask.
“Fuck John,” Henry answers. “I’ve done more than enough for him over the years. I already planned this and Charlotte approved it weeks ago. Let’s go.”
I continue to stare at him, every betrayal fresh on my mind. He reads my hesitation.
“This isn’t a trick, Jac,” he finally says. “Do you want to spend the day in your hotel room or do you want to spend it somewhere a little less claustrophobic? This can’t be what it’s come to between us.”
“Well,” I say at last. “It is. Give me fifteen minutes. And don’t fuck with me.”
He nods, and I close the door in his face, getting dressed. I wish I had something sloppy to wear, something to make me feel as separated as I can from the girl I’ve been these past few weeks, but no dice on packing anything even slightly not flattering in the small amount of luggage I was allotted. I opt for no makeup, hair in a boring ponytail with a hat on top, and a pair of sunglasses that came in our sponsor-provided gift bags at the start of the show.
Henry is waiting in the lobby when I walk down, and he doesn’t say anything to me, just gets out his phone and calls a Lyft. I remember him last night, his fingers falling through mine, the promise of something and then nothing. His gaze down in his lap as Priya read him the riot act. I don’t know what I want from him—to not be such a coward? To maintain his icy façade?
It doesn’t matter. This is one day of my life and one day without the 1. I’ll take what I can get.
THE NATIONAL WHITEWATER Center is twenty minutes from our hotel, out hidden away in a copse of trees just off the interstate. Even this early on a weekday, the parking lot is filling up.
Henry buys us tickets with what is presumably a the 1 credit card. As he hands my wristband over, he says, “What do you want to do first?”
I look at this list of options. Zip-lining, whitewater rafting, ropes courses, kayaking. Finally, I point toward a description on the brochure I grabbed at the register.
“Climbing,” I say. “The freefall climb over the pool.”
“Aggressive,” he states neutrally, and I can’t help the small smile that curls at the edge of my mouth.
Henry had briefly mentioned to me on the way over that typically, the contestants got a day to relax before their hometowns, but since mine had come first, I got the day after. Last season, he said, he and Marcus had gone to a Cubs game together.
“That must have been quite a day,” I said.
In the back of the Lyft, Henry shrugged. “Marcus and I did have things in common. I don’t know. It was complicated.”
I leaned my head against the window. “Yeah.”
It’s hard to resist the happiness I feel bubbling inside of me. Me, an anonymous stranger in the crowd, outside, the smell of flowers and chlorine and life in the air. I could be anyone, I could be Jac Matthis, and I remember her, keep her close to my heart.
The climbing wall juts out at an angle over the pool, getting progressively more angled as you climb. I feel weak when I start on the first wall, the third easiest one, my body not quite functioning the way I remember it, arms and legs clumsy.
I make it about two thirds of the way up, and then drop, submerged in the pool below, before swimming back to the ladder to climb out. I get back in line to go again, a glutton for punishment. I focus myself, my whole body, whole purpose on climbing this third easiest wall, push myself.
I make it to the top and progress to the next wall. I conquer that one and on to the next. I end up behind Henry on the seventh wall.
“You want to go first?” he asks me. I shake my head, concentrating on the wall, building a plan out in my mind, in the grip that will get me to the next grip, into where my feet will go, where I will need to swap them out.
Henry takes to the wall, bare feet curled on oddly shaped footfalls, his bare back flexing with the effort of going against the wall. I hardly think about him at all, but rather, his body, the way it moves, the way he plans. Where I had planned to use my body weight to push up to a higher left handhold on the wall, he crosses over and grabs a handhold to his right, and I admire the way he does it, changing my own strategy. He gets stuck at a foot switch, loses his grip, and falls into the water below, his body going as straight as possible as he falls, just like the instructor taught us. He swims to the ladder and pulls himself up.
I climb onto the wall, securing my feet, holding my body as close to the wall as possible. For a few weeks two summers ago, I’d briefly dated a travel writer with a passion for climbing. He’d taken me to the gym with him, showed me how to shift my hips just right to get momentum, to find the top of the wall. I’d started going when I knew he wasn’t there, practicing, so I could impress him the next time I saw him. Not much impressed him, I soon realized, as I quickly graduated from V0 to V1 to V2 routes, but I found it didn’t matter that much to me. I’d tried to grow used to a world in which practicing and succeeding didn’t elicit applause from an eager audience, but with climbing, it was a bit easier. The wall itself congratulated me, each time my two hands landed on the piece of tape telling me I had completed a route. You’re good, Jac, it seemed to say. You did it.
I think of him, just briefly, on that wall as I climb. I stopped going to the gym once we ended things; it was too expensive and too likely I’d run into him. But I remember that satisfaction as I climb. I remember working out the puzzle of a wall, outsmarting it, beating it, and it being happy for me.
Gravity pushes against me as I get farther up the wall, my mind clear, focused only on the task at hand. At the spot where Henry struggled, I move to swap feet just as he had, not fully getting a grip on the first try as he had, but hanging on, both of my arms straining to keep my fingers tightly wrapped around the handholds. Swinging myself for momentum, I get my foot planted against the foothold—just barely—and manage to push myself up enough to get hold of the next highest handhold, hugging my body to the wall and shifting my right foot up, allowing me to finally, easily, push myself up the wall. The rest is fairly simple after that, and I touch the top, a feeling of satisfaction deep inside me. This is who I am. This is who I can be.
I let go and fall into the pool below, cold water replacing sticky sweat as my momentum pushes me deep under the water. I tread water underneath for a moment, feeling every ache in my muscle, every pull against my shoulder, before I have to go up for air. I swim over to the side and climb out, going back around to the fence and exiting. Henry is standing there with a stupid look on his face, a closemouthed smile. I stand there, dripping wet and staring at him.
“What?” I finally say, and the word unlocks something inside of me. I’m smiling, too, unable to stop myself.
I don’t think he’s sure what he’s going to say for a minute, but finally, he looks away from me, shaking his head. “You kicked my ass,” he says.
“You deserved it,” I tell him.
“Sure,” he agrees, looking at me again, nodding.
“That was fun,” I say, and it seems to please him, this change in my demeanor. I don’t want to ignore him anymore. I want to pretend the past few weeks haven’t happened. I want to pretend the 1 hasn’t happened, and we could be any two people out here at the water park. We are that.
