Until It Hurts To Stop

Until It Hurts To Stop - Chapter 1

One

My friend Nick reaches across the cafeteria table and drops a knife into my hand. “Happy birthday, Maggie.”

I turn the knife over in my hand. I have always wanted one of these. I’ve borrowed Nick’s often enough, out on the trails.

I know I should hide it. It’s a Swiss army knife, not a weapon, but our school gets hysterical over nail clippers. They’d probably confiscate it and put me on some list of budding terrorists.

Even so, I can’t resist stroking the smooth metal and snapping open the different tools: the nail file, the screwdriver, the tiny scissors. Best of all, I love the tiny scissors. Nobody else is near enough to see me handling this supposed instrument of danger, anyway. Nick’s legs sprawl into the space next to him, discouraging anyone from sitting too close.

“Thank you.” I give the knife a last squeeze and slip it into my pocket. “It’ll be perfect for our next hike.” Nick’s stepfather, Perry, first brought us onto the trails when we were fourteen. Now that Perry’s knees are shot and Nick has a driver’s license, Nick and I hike alone.

“About that,” Nick says, winding spaghetti around his fork. “I thought we could try your suggestion.”

“What suggestion?”

“To climb a mountain.”

“What? When did I say that?”

“When we were at Silver Creek.”

“Oh, right.” We’d hiked in Silver Creek State Park a couple weeks ago, just before school started. After a hard slog through the park, with about a dozen stream crossings (balancing on stones, teetering on slippery logs), we’d finally reached a hilltop with a view of the Porte Range to our south. Glowing with success—or endorphins—I’d said, waving at the mountains, “I bet the view’s even better from up there.”

“Now there’s an idea,” Nick had said.

And I, who was normally afraid of—well, pretty much everything—had laughed with excitement. Nick and I have hiked some hills, but never any real mountains. Yet in that moment, I believed I could climb anything. As if, after years on the fringes of the world, I’d found the place I belonged.

The mountains looked like home—some long-forgotten home—and they looked tough. Sharp-toothed, with a dangerous beauty. Gray and lilac and blue. They loomed on the horizon, silent and immense. Nick and I stared at them, their quiet power sinking into our bones, until mosquitoes and a race with the setting sun drove us back onto the Silver Creek trail. And I put mountains out of my mind.

Until now.

“I can’t believe you’re bringing that up,” I say. “I wasn’t serious.” Except maybe for a moment.

“We could get serious about it,” Nick says. “How about Eagle Mountain?”

“The one Perry climbed?”

“Yeah.”

Nick says it like he’s offering me my own private island and a vault full of gold. A picture of Perry grinning on Eagle’s summit hangs in the downstairs hall of their house. I tell myself it can’t have been too bad a climb if he was able to smile like that. Still— “I’m not sure I can make it up a mountain.”

“I’m not sure I can either,” Nick says, “but let’s find out.”

I rub a smear of mustard off the crust of my sandwich, turning over the idea in my mind. “This isn’t going to be like Mount Everest, is it? Where if you can’t make it, they leave you in the snow to die?”

Nick laughs. “Eagle’s not even a mile high. But if it helps, Maggie—I promise I won’t leave you in the snow to die.”

“How do you know I won’t leave you in the snow?”

“Because I’ll have the car keys. Besides, there is no snow around here in September.”

The plan makes my mouth water, despite the prickling in my nerves. Sometimes the best hikes were when Perry, Nick, and I tested ourselves, like when we hiked farther than I thought I could, or faced extreme weather. I remember the sparkle of crusted snow on a subzero day, and the ice formations we saw at Hemlock Brook—pillars and palaces seen by nobody else, as the printless snow around us proved. Even though the air stung my throat, I managed to keep myself from freezing; I pushed myself out into a day when most people stayed home.

Remembering the surge of power, the sense of belonging, that I felt at Hemlock Brook and at Silver Creek, I want to feel it again.

“Okay,” I say. I wish I could flick open my knife to accept the challenge. “To the mountains!” I could cry, but you need to be brandishing a sword to carry that off—and possibly sitting on a horse. An Excalibur-type flourish might be too dramatic for my little blade, but I like the symbolism, and it would get a laugh out of Nick. I would do it if I didn’t have to worry about the teachers patrolling the lunchroom.

“Saturday?”

“Sure. But remember, nobody leaves anyone in the snow,” I say as my friend Sylvie takes the seat next to me.

“Snow? What snow?” she asks, biting into a pear.

“Never mind.” I touch the chain around my neck. “Listen, thank you for the necklace.”

Sylvie slipped me her present in the hall after third period, since we don’t have any classes together. I’ve been wearing it ever since. It’s a necklace with a stone the same emerald color as peacock feathers.

“Oh, do you like it? It’s malachite. I thought the color would be perfect for you.”

“I love it.” While she returns to her pear, I say, “Why are you here? I thought you had a yearbook committee meeting. Or something.” I can never keep Sylvie’s committees, clubs, and teams straight. Her calendar is a blur of plans and appointments. We can barely get through a conversation without some reminder or incoming message beeping at her.

“I did. And it went on forever. I wouldn’t even be getting this much to eat if this girl, Raleigh, hadn’t taken over.” Sylvie laughs. “It was her first meeting, but she practically ran the whole thing. Not that I’m complaining. Because otherwise, we’d still be there, debating whether to put the sports-team pictures before or after the student council pictures.”

“Raleigh?” I repeat, my stomach beginning to burn. I know only one person with that name. “Raleigh Barringer? She’s back?”

“‘Back’? Oh, right . . . She did say she used to live here. Before I moved in.”

“She went to West End Junior High,” I say through numb lips. “With me.”

Nick looks up from his spaghetti.

“Well, she said her family’s been living in Italy for two years.” Sylvie scrolls through one of her endless to-do lists. “Nick, did you do the math homework yet?”

While Sylvie eats and chats with Nick, my ears buzz. I swear I can taste stomach acid.

Raleigh Barringer.

I thought I would never see her again. I’d celebrated her move to Italy the way people cheer the toppling of maniacal dictators.

And before I can recover from hearing her name again, I hear her voice, screeching somewhere behind me. Her laugh is a cold fingernail ripping my skin open, right down the back of my neck.

It paralyzes me. For a minute all I can do is watch Nick slide bread over his sauce-covered plate. He keeps glancing at me, but I won’t meet his eyes. I have to be in mental lockdown, all my energy focused inward. Because otherwise the panic flashing through me might burst out, right in the middle of the cafeteria, for everyone to see.