Читать книгу Frat Girl - Kiley Roache - Страница 15

Chapter Seven

“I don’t think I can do it.” I stare up at the rock wall, arching toward the ceiling.

The sun is just beginning to set beyond the windows that make up the opposite wall, and it’s casting a pink-orange glow on the stone surface.

People scramble up and down, hopping between footholds that seem way too far apart.

“Nonsense,” Jackie says. She looks different without her glasses and hipster clothes, wearing athletic shorts and a tank instead. “You’re gonna be a natural. I can tell by looking at you.”

I look at her and the biceps that seem almost comical on her petite frame. I turn back to the other climbers. Some are her teammates, using the same blue-and-gold gear she’s strapping herself into. Others, like me, have rented gear from the gym, but they’re all lean men with beards and women with remarkable arms—your classic granola-eating climber types.

People who are actually naturals at this.

“Have you seen me?” I turn and flex my nonexistent muscles.

She laughs. “I’m serious, you think it’d be all about upper-body strength, like the big bodybuilder types would be the best. But petite girls are actually the most suited, because of their low center of gravity. You’ve got to have the right balance of flexibility and core strength, and traditional athletes don’t always have that.”

“Hmm, a sport I actually have the possibility of being good at.”

She smiles. “Exactly.”

She explains the basics as she straps me into my harness. “Okay.” She pats me on the shoulder. “You are good to go.”

By the time I’ve managed to get both feet off the ground, albeit only about a foot up, she’s strapped herself in and started scrambling up the wall like some sort of small forest creature.

“C’mon, you can do it,” she yells down to me.

I stumble my way toward the top. Jackie scales the entire thing and rappels back down before I make it halfway.

She starts up for a second time and catches up to me at about the three-quarter point.

“I’m stuck.” I readjust my feet by a few centimeters; they feel like they might go numb. My fingertips scream, sick of supporting so much of my body weight.

“See that red one, at about your knee?” she says.

I nod but don’t turn toward her, my eyes on the rocks.

“That’s your next step. It’s kind of small, so you’re only going to be able to fit one foot, and you’re going to want to move on quickly.”

My eyes dart from the red rock to my feet, then to the ground far below. “Shit. Maybe I should just rappel down.”

“Nah, you’ve made it this far—no way this one will be hard for you.”

Grunting, I lift my right foot to the tiny red rock. All my weight on my right toes, I push myself up and then grab higher rocks with my left hand, then my right. I scramble to get my feet onto two bigger rocks a bit above the rest.

“Nice!” Jackie climbs up to my level.

“You sound so excited. I thought you said that part was nothing.”

“Are you kidding? That’s the hardest part of this course! Took me three tries to get past it.”

I roll my eyes and keep moving.

We both tap the ceiling before rappelling back down.

“This is actually pretty fun, once you get past the part where you think you’re gonna die,” I say once my feet are back on the ground.

“I know, right? It’s a pretty cool workout. A great place to think, you know? I like how metaphorical it is. Making progress, reaching higher.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” I hadn’t really thought about it as something so...deep. It was just a sport, after all. “But you don’t actually go anywhere.”

“That’s true. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.” She reaches down to adjust her harness. “Like, there are these Tibetan monks who make these amazing sand paintings, spend weeks with their backs bent over them, working in excruciating detail. And when they’re done, they wash them all away. That’s climbing—you have all this progress, you reach higher just long enough to take a breath, and then you come back down.”

I took up at the wall, at the almost-gone sun, then back to her.

“But that’s also life.” She places one foot on the wall, ready to go again. “You try so hard to live as much as you can, to grow and change and develop, and maybe inspire the same thing in the people around you, but you know that either way, you and everything you do and everyone you meet will be dust in the end.”

She starts climbing again. I stand there for a minute, dumbfounded, before I follow her.

I hate how snobby it makes me feel to say it, but I would never have had a conversation like that with the kids at my old school. They were plenty smart, but not in a daring way, in a get-good-grades-to-get-a-good-job way.

Sure, they knew more when they left school than when they started, about the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, and the green light representing Gatsby’s desire, but they had the same opinions on politics and religion and life as they did freshman year and, for God’s sake, as their parents had before them.

It’s not a lack of intelligence; it’s a lack of curiosity. There was none of the thirst for knowledge like you can see radiating from people like Alex, like Jackie.

I wanted to be like that. That’s why I left. I needed to look for more than what the kids talked about at home—who was dating who and where the next my-parents-are-out-of-town party would be—I just knew if I stayed much longer, I’d suffocate. But I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be smart enough to have anything real to say.

We make it to the top again, and I take a deep breath.

“You’re right—this is pretty amazing.”

“Again?” she asks when we reach the ground. She smiles, and it lights up her whole face.

“I have to go soon,” I say. “I have dinner with a family friend at eight,” I lie.

She nods and picks up her water bottle, the official one all the athletes are given, a status symbol. She raises it to her lips for a second, then scrunches her nose. “Empty.”

We leave the climbing area and head to the general gym.

“Ugh,” she says as the glass door closes behind us.

“What?”

“I forgot the athletic gyms are closed today because of training limits. Which means all the meatheads are at the Muggle gym.”

I look around the room, and sure enough, the whole place is littered with giant men lifting weights. Not exactly your typical Warren student.

We push past all the scrawny freshmen loitering at the edge of the room and wait in line at the watercooler.

Jackie is reaching for the faucet when a brick wall of a guy steps in front of her.

“Hey, dude, there is a line!”

He doesn’t turn around.

She reaches up to tap him on his shoulder. He swats behind him, like Jackie’s hand is a fly, before looking over his shoulder. I recognize Duncan, the football player from down the hall. “What?” He takes out one earbud.

“There’s a line.”

He laughs and continues to fill his bottle. “I’m in the middle of varsity conditioning. I think I need it a little more than you and whatever elliptical crap you’re doing.”

My jaw drops. I turn back to Jackie.

“For your information, I’m an athlete, too,” she says, then stands taller and shows him her water bottle.

“Okay.” He laughs. He screws the cap back on his bottle and then pulls out his phone, taking his time to select a new song while he continues to block our way to the water, his chest in a sweat-stained shirt like a wall.

Finally he steps away, shoving his phone back toward his pocket but missing and slipping it into a fold in the fabric instead. It clatters to the floor, ripped from his headphones, and slides across the linoleum to my feet.

Duncan turns around, panicking.

“Don’t worry—the screen didn’t crack.” I step forward to hand it to him. I glance at the screen for only a second, but long enough to see that the song he had chosen was by One Direction.

“Nice taste in music.” I press the phone into his hand.

He turns white as a ghost. “You can’t—Oh my God.” He grabs my arm and pulls me farther away from the watercooler. “You can’t tell anyone.” His voice is earnest.

“What? That you were super-rude to us? You didn’t seem bothered by that a minute ago.”

“About, you know, that playlist. My sister bought the songs, and, I don’t know, I just kind of like them, but my teammates can’t know, okay? So don’t say anything.”

He seems genuinely freaked, so I resist the urge to laugh.

“Yes, sure, calm down. I’m not gonna tell anyone. I really don’t care.”

“Okay, thank you.” His shoulders drop half an inch as he relaxes.

“Whatever.” I walk back to Jackie.

God, masculinity is fragile.