Until It Hurts to Stop Read Online Free Page B

lust-worthy than one of the thousands of trees we’ve hiked past?
I shouldn’t even be using up brain cells on this, since the mountain will give me enough to worry about. The contour lines on the map are closely drawn, dense, signaling steepness. It’ll be a long hard haul upward, tougher than anything we’ve hiked before. Phrases from the guidebook haunt me: knife-edge ridges, dizzying ledges.
    Before I go to bed on the foldout couch beneath the Yellowstone map, I slip out to the hall and study the photo of Perry on top of Eagle Mountain. He was slimmer then, with more hair and a blissful grin. The camera is focused on him, and I can’t see much of the view. It’s mostly sky. I’m trying to get a sense of how high Eagle is—well, I know that, I know its surveyed measurement, but I’m trying to get a sense of how high it feels .
    I want to stand up there. Whenever Nick and I finish a day of hiking, especially when we do something I wasn’t sure I was capable of, I get a surge of power. It’s like the feeling of mastering a piece on the piano, but it’s a feeling of physical strength, too. Sometimes I think that if I’d started hiking before junior high, Raleigh wouldn’t have been able to push me around the way she did. I would’ve been too strong.
    The thought of summiting Eagle thrills me as much as it scares me. I felt the pull of the Porte Range all the way from Silver Creek, when it was just a series of peaks on a distant horizon. It’ll be harder than anything we’ve ever done, so the power will be greater. And with Raleigh back in town, I need that power.
    But whatever answers I’m looking for, they’re not in this photo. I return to the living room and line up all my hiking gear: boots, water bottles, rain suit, knife, flashlight, first-aid kit, trail guide, mushroom guide. My boots smell of leather. They’ve been rubbed satiny from previous hikes, but when I brush them with my fingertips, chocolate-colored dirt dusts my skin.
    I stow most of the items in my pack, leaving the bottles out to fill in the morning. Then I sit staring at my gear. It’s so much more organized than my brain, where more problems than I can tackle at once are wheeling and fighting for space: the challenge of the mountain, the threat of Raleigh, the strange new undercurrent between Nick and me. All of it will come to Eagle Mountain with us, carried in the pit of my stomach.

six
     
     
    I dream of Raleigh Barringer. She’s on the mountain with us. While jeering at me, she twists her ankle. She needs us to help her down. While she sits on the ground, crying and clutching her ankle, I say, in the exact tone of voice she used on me in junior high: “Oh, shut up. Don’t be such a baby.” I tower over her; she shrinks beneath my eyes.
I wake up sweating. It’s not quite six o’clock.
    I sit for a minute watching the ghostly blue light of the predawn sky, listening to the whirring of the last crickets of the season, letting the dream—with its strange mix of fear and power—melt away. Fat chance I’d ever have the upper hand over Raleigh.
    I love this time of day, when nobody else is around, when everything is clean and fresh, when there’s more space to breathe. Once I’ve filled my lungs with the morning, I tiptoe upstairs, careful not to wake Nick’s mom and stepdad. Naturally, Nick’s door is still shut.
    I tap lightly and push open the door to his room. He’s a blanket-covered bundle, slug-like. I plop down on the end of the bed, drawing an “oof ” from him.
    “Ready for Eagle?” I say.
“Mm.”
“You don’t sound ready.”
“Jesus, Maggie.” His voice rasps and rumbles, like a car with
    a bad starter. I smile to myself at that thought: Nick has a bad starter . That must be why he has such trouble getting up in the morning.
    “This is your wake-up call.” I jounce the bed, and he rolls over. “More like my wake-up pain in the ass.” Yawning, he frees his head from the sheets and glares at me.