Graphic the Valley Read Online Free Page A

That tooth angled wrong. She said, “So I can stay up here with him?”
    The crew chief shook his water bottle back and forth. “No, no,” he said. “We don’t really do that. The tents are for weeknights or emergencies. Nothing else. You can ride back down with me if you want to.”
    She took off one of her gloves and wiped her forehead. “I can’t go down this weekend. Just can’t.”
    All the other workers had stopped working. We all stood and listened.
    The crew chief said, “What do you mean you can’t?”
    Lucy shook her head. “I just can’t go down this weekend.”
    The chief flipped his water bottle and caught it. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “I mean, I guess you could stay up.”
    I smiled and turned away. Went back to scraping moss. Clearing the boulder wasn’t part of my job but I did this sometimes at the end of the day so I could come back and climb a feature.
    I heard one of the other boys say, “Lucky fucking bastard. And he doesn’t even barely talk.”
    • • •
    We used the group stove to warm up Nalley’s Hot Chili out of cans. Lucy cut slices of cheddar cheese off the block. “Want some?” she said.
    “Thanks.”
    She smiled, and I saw that crooked tooth again, so turned that it caught on her bottom lip.
    I opened a bag of corn chips and held them out to her.
    “Thanks,” she said. The chili was warm, and she flipped off the stove. “Good enough, right?”
    We ate.
    She said, “You don’t want to go down to the Valley on the weekends either?” She pointed her spoon at me.
    “No, not really,” I said.
    She took a huge bite of chili and said, “Me either,” with her mouth full.
    I said, “Why not?”
    She swallowed. “I’ve been there a lot before,” she said.
    “Me too.”
    • • •
    After dinner, we cleaned our bowls with jug water, scrubbing with the pads of our fingers.
    She said, “Want to go for a swim?”
    It was almost dark and I’d gone swimming earlier. I’d planned on climbing after dinner. Venus was blinking in the west and I climbed every night now. But I looked at Lucy, a girl close to my age, prettier than granite. I said, “Yeah, I could swim.”
    At the edge of the lake, she stripped to her bra and underwear. Black and black with a small line of lace along the top. She was facing away, so I stared. Surprised by how strong she was. Big shoulders. She had a curve in her spine like a snake turning over stone, and scar lines across her left shoulder, two straight lines two inches across. Her skin there and down, I examined the space between her bra and underwear, that curve of her low back, then her backside, the half-circles of her butt, the muscles and the shadow between her legs. I held my breath.
    She ran through the shallows and dove in. Swam out. I was still standing. Hadn’t even undressed yet. She bobbed up and wiped her eyes. “Aren’t you coming in?”
    “Yeah, sorry,” I said. I pulled off my shirt, then my jeans. Ran in. The water was cold, tightening my pores. I swam out to Lucy.
    She was shorter than me, barely able to touch where we stood, and she kept kicking off her toes, bobbing like a small animal crossing a river. Her nostrils flared as she bobbed. She said, “Do you like it out here?”
    “In the lake?”
    “No, no,” she laughed, “in the high country. In Tuolumne.”
    “Yeah, I like the Domes,” I said. “That’s why I came back this summer.”
    “The Domes?” she said. She looked up at Pywiack, mounded above the lake. She stared like she hadn’t seen it until then. Then she turned and looked across the road at Polly Dome. “Oh yeah,” she said, “the Domes are cool. I didn’t think about them.”
    I cupped water over my hair. Dove down and grabbed a handful of the gritty silt from the bottom. Rubbed it all the way to the ends of my hair, the way my father had showed me.
    “Did you just put mud in your hair?” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    She laughed at me. “Nature’s soap, huh?”
    “The