“The rappel is kind of like your final exam,” Maureen explained. “It's a big part of your grade. We want to start with some climbing tomorrow to make sure you're all ready for it.”
Ama felt her ears ringing. Her hand was halfway up before she could retrieve it. “What do you mean grade?”
“Your grade for the course,” Maureen said.
“Your grade for the course? You get a grade for the course?” Amas voice was anything but loose.
“If you're taking it for high school credit, as most of you are. We're required to give you a grade. It's not my preference, but that's how it is.”
“So you get a grade from this and it goes on your transcript?” Ama persisted.
“If you are getting credit, yes.”
“Can you take the course for credit but not get a grade, you know, just get a pass, like you get in gym?”
“No, Ama, you can't. You get a grade.”
“And you have to throw yourself off a mountain to get a good one?”
“We call it rappelling,” Maureen said patiently.
Later that night Ama lay in her sleeping bag and worried. The night air -was humid and made the fabric of her sleeping bag feel slightly damp against her skin. Absently she watched the shadows passing over the orange nylon walls of the tent, -wondering if they represented man or beast or teenager.
What if her first grade in high school was an F? How could she live that down? She couldn't. She couldn't even imagine what her parents would say.
In normal circumstances, Ama loved grades. She loved the concreteness of them. She was the kind of person -who felt disappointed when a teacher said “Don't worry, you won't be graded on this.”
She mostly loved grades because all the grades she got were As. She loved As. She loved the way they looked, the straight and pointy aspect of them in contrast with the weak curves of Bs and Cs. But how could she possibly get an A in this? She couldn't. It was wrong for her. She was -wrong for it. What if her first high school grade -was a B or, God forbid, a C? Or -worse! It could easily be -worse! Ama could barely breathe at the thought of it. What -would Esi say?
She thought of the rappel. And how it -was only going to get-worse.
Around midnight, she guessed, Carly snuck into the tent -with a boy. Ama froze in her sleeping bag. She didn't dare lift her head.
“Don't-worry, she's asleep,” Ama heard Carly-whisper.
“Are you sure?” the boy asked.
Ama thought it sounded like Jonathan. Carly -was back to Jonathan.
“Yeah, she always falls asleep early.”
No, I am not asleep! Ama felt like shouting. How can I sleep when my first high school grade is going to be an F? She squeezed her eyes shut as she realized, to her disbelief, that the two of them -were climbing into Carly's sleeping bag together, giggling. She wished she had sat up and said something right away, but now what was she supposed to do? She lay there motionless, barely breathing.
“Did you hear her going nuts over her grade tonight?” the boy, probably Jonathan, said. “Dude, that girl is so freaking uptight. How do you share a tent with her?” He said something else, but softer and mumbled, so Ama couldn't hear it. She felt the pulse of outrage and tingle of humiliation climb all the way up her scalp.
Ama badly wished she was asleep. Or really anywhere else in the universe. She hated this place.
She heard the zip of Carly's sleeping bag and Carly giggled again. Ama heard more giggling and -whispering.
“She's not that bad,” Ama overheard Carly say.
Jo stretched out the time it took to get home from the restaurant that night. When she walked through the front door she felt like she was walking into a different kind of house. She heard her mother vacuuming in the living room and knew that her dad wouldn't be coming home that night or Friday night or any night. She tried to keep those thoughts away but there they were.
Just because her father -was coming for no nights this summer instead of ten or twelve, it made this a different kind of place. It turned this house into her mother's place and turned Jo into an article of custody.
There was so little—ten or twelve nights—that made this anything like a family house. The slightest nudge and it came apart. So then, what was the big deal? What was the big difference? What did it really matter? An idea had changed, maybe. A classification had changed. But nothing that was real had been lost.
“I'm only sorry you're there in the middle of it,” her aunt Robin had said when she'd caught Jo on her cell phone during her break at the restaurant that afternoon.
“You don't need to be sorry,” she'd told her aunt. “I am fine.” There was no being “in the middle of it.” There was no middle. Her dad was in one place, her mom -was in a different place. There was nothing new in that.
She went to her room and picked up her dirty socks and emptied her garbage can. She carefully folded her Surfside T-shirt and left it on the top of her dresser for tomorrow. She stared forlornly at the single handprint she'd made on the window. She was going back to being a tourist here.
After Ama completed this letter she crumpled it up and tossed it into the cooking fire. Even Ama had her limits. Anyway, what was the point? They wouldn't hit another mail drop for five days.
As they began the day's endless, pointless hike, Ama stared suspiciously and unwaveringly at the ground. She had to keep a very close eye on it, because it was always coming up with a new way to make her stumble. For her grade, she was supposed to be looking at tree types, but she didn't dare. She'd have to learn to recognize them by their roots.
She was seeing a lot of bugs. And also slugs. There were a lot more slugs in the world than she had ever guessed. She paid special attention to the bugs and ants, because she was trying to figure out -which kinds could bite or kill her. If she was given her grade on bugs, she might do well.
Jared had given her something called moleskin for her blisters and an extra pair of socks he'd brought along. “Man, Ama. These are some of the worst blisters I've seen. I don't know how you are walking.”
The moleskin had helped for the first five miles, but she could feel from the wetness in her boots that the blisters had started to bleed again.
By the sixth mile she had fallen far behind, and during the seventh she was stunned to actually catch up. As she came upon the group, they were clustered together in a clearing, bathed in late- day light, all of them looking up at something.
“What's going on?” she asked Maureen, lifting off her heavy pack and easing it to the ground.
“We're taking a break before the last part of the hike. We're camping up there tonight.”
“Up there?”
“Up there.”
“On that mountain?”
“Yes. It's only a mile from here, but it's all up.”
Ama felt tears fill her eyes and tried not to blink them out. How could she get up that mountain? She pressed her lips together so they wouldn't tremble. She looked at her pack. She looked down at her feet. How could she do it?
She realized the other kids were putting their packs back on. No! Not already! It was one of the many bad things about being the slowest hiker: the break -was always ending by the time you caught up. If she took the time to drink or eat, she'd be lost. She'd never catch up again.
“Are you okay?”
Noah -was looking at her.
She tried to ease the stricken look from her face. “I'm okay.”
“Do you need some help?”
“No, I'm okay,” she choked out. She was about to cry. All of a sudden she realized this, and that she was going to be unable to stop it.
“Excuse me,” she muttered. She stumbled toward a clump of trees. She kept going until she was out of eyesight and earshot.
She cried only until she could make herself stop. Then she blew her nose on a leaf and straightened up. When she got back to the clearing the group had left. They were already snaking in a line up the mountain. She looked around frantically for her pa
ck, but it wasn't there. Where was it? Hadn't she left it there?
Oh, my God! What would she do without her pack? Her sleeping bag? Her clothes? Her -water? Should she tell the leaders? How many more ways could she find to mess this up?
She squinted at the hikers on the trail. She realized as she studied them that a tall one toward the front of the line, namely Noah, -was carrying not one pack but two.
“Did you see the new waiters?” Bryn asked Jo the next afternoon -when Jo emerged from the kitchen, shiny, pink, and damp -with steam from the dish-washer's drying cycle.
“No. Why?”
“You'll see -when you see them,” Bryn said suggestively.
Each -weekend, as the summer progressed and the restaurant got busier, the management took more waitstaff.
“It'll get as big as it gets by the Fourth of July,” Caroline, a veteran of many summers, had explained to Jo. “In August servers -will start having fights and leaving and getting fired.”
Jo -was doubtful about -what she'd see, and amused by the pure boy- craziness of Bryn, but she took off the kitchen apron anyway.
“Did you see the new -waiter?” -waitress Megan asked her as she sat down at the staff table to eat a crab roll before the dinner shift started.
“No. Why do people keep asking that?”
Megan raised her eyebrows. “Because he's cute. Both are cute, but one is really cute.”
Jo took a bite of her roll and chewed. “I'm retired from cute boys,” she said through a half- full mouth.
Megan looked amused. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“You're pretty young for that, aren't you?”
Jo tried to look serious. “I've had my share.”
Megan laughed. She was big and strong- looking, like she played field hockey or something, but she had a gentle face.
Jo looked up at the clock and realized she had less than a minute until table- setting time. She shoved the remaining half of her crab roll into her mouth and got up from the table. She nearly collided with two large people entering the room, no doubt the famous new waiters. When she looked up at the two faces she discovered, to her astonishment, that only one of them -was a stranger. The other one was indisputably familiar, especially around the mouth.
Jo's cheeks were full of food and her eyes big in their sockets. She backed up a few feet. She stared, trying to chew and swallow.
The familiar one, whose name she did not know, took a moment to process the unexpected familiarity of her as -well. She was hard to place, probably, what with it being so light out and her being more than three inches from his face.
She watched as his confused surprise gave way to happy surprise.
“Goldie?” he said.
She swallowed the last of her crab roll and tried to clear her airway. “It's Jo,” she coughed out.
“You work here?” he asked.
Megan and Bryn materialized at her side. “You two know each other?”
“Sure,” he said with a big smile.
“Sort of,” Jo said, looking at her foot.
Polly didn't have a decent mirror in her room, so she listened at her door for total silence before creeping into the hallway in her bra and underwear. She darted into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The big mirror was high above the sink in the bathroom, so she had to hoist herself up to get a good look at herself in it.
She looked at herself and herself looked back.
Strange, in a way, that that person she saw was this person she was. She didn't necessarily feel like that person. Mostly she went about her life with no concept of what she looked like. Looking at herself now, she didn't quite square up.
Did that mean she was not good model material?
She pretended the mirror -was a camera. She smiled at it. Hmmm.
She could get those teeth- whitening strips. That could help. Not so much -with the overbite, but with the whiteness.
She got up on her knees, balancing on the edge of the sink so she could see more of her body.
Though she had never said it out loud to anyone, her bra size was 34D. Somehow she thought that by not saying it and by standing in a certain -way, she could make the world believe that she wore a 34B like everybody else.
She hoped she was still growing vertically, but she sincerely hoped she was done growing there. If she lost -weight, she would probably get smaller. And also there was a surgery you could get to make them smaller if-worst came to -worst.
She -wondered if her grandmother had -worn a size 34D. Back then, having big ones -was probably more acceptable in models.
Polly's lips -were big. Her eyes -were dark and big. Her nose -was not- small. Her -waist -was small, but her hips stuck out. Sometimes Polly felt jealous of the girls -with tiny features and straight- up- and- down bodies and nothing sticking out anywhere. Polly felt like everything of hers stuck out everywhere.
Her skin -was pale and almost completely clear. That was one thing she had going for her. She leaned in closer and saw two tiny pimples on her chin. Oh, -well. There was makeup for that. Everyone knew models wore tons of makeup.
Her knees were hurting against the porcelain and she still didn't have the whole picture, so she stood up, slowly, teetering to her full height with one foot on either side of the basin. She looked up and saw that the top of her head was only a few inches from the ceiling.
Oh, no. Her underwear -was atrocious. Why -was she still wearing those? They were old cotton briefs with faded purple flowers. Models did not wear Carter's briefs. There was no way she could evaluate the state of herself wearing that underwear.
She scrambled down off the sink so she could throw them away and find another pair. She strode back to her bedroom, pulled open the top drawer of her bureau. She took out a respectable pair of red bikini underwear she'd gotten -with Jo at Victoria's Secret last year. She pulled off the old ones and put on the new.
But with her hand poised to throw the old ones in the wastebasket, she began to slow down and rethink. Now that she was back in her old, dim room and not immediately faced with her glaring face, she started to feel sorry for her old purple- flowered briefs. They were very soft. They had been -washed hundreds of times, and still they had no holes and none of the elastic had sprung out of them. They had been very nice to her the whole time she'd had them. In truth, they were probably her most comfortable pair. Not all underwear -was comfortable. Jo had gotten her to wear a thong once with her leggings, and that was not comfortable, no matter -what anybody said.
Polly couldn't just throw them away for no good reason. What had they ever done wrong? They couldn't help it if they weren't sleek or fashionable. They just were how they were.
Instead of throwing them away, she folded them up into a tiny ball and put them away in the back of her drawer.
Okay, so she wouldn't throw them away just yet. But she would not wear them. Unless there were absolutely no other clean ones. And she would not wear them to modeling camp.
It took Ama hours to thank Noah. She kept trying to think of a way. She hovered close enough to him on several occasions to say the two words, but she couldn't make herself do it.
Later, she went by herself to a stream to peel off her pus-soaked, bloody socks in privacy. It turned out Noah -was there too, washing some clothes.
“Thank you,” she blurted out, before the words could crawl back down her throat and hide.
“No problem,” he said.
She tried to submerge her feet and rinse her socks before he could see, to spare him the gruesomeness, but she didn't quite get them under in time.
He openly -winced at the sight of them, and she didn't blame him. Between her hair and her feet she was a genuine fright. She'd give him nightmares for sure.
Earlier that evening, as she'd walked the last mile feeling as light as a bird without her pack, she'd had an idea. It was so comforting it had carried her up to the top of the mountain. Maybe Noah could be her belayer. If he was her belayer, she had the ho
pe that maybe she wouldn't absolutely die.
It was a good plan -with one major problem: she would have to find a way to ask him to be her partner, and she knew she never -would.
“I heard he has a girlfriend,” Sheba said, her loud voice amplified by the slick tiled walls and metal stalls of the women's bathroom/lounge at the Surfside.
Jo stopped her hand- washing mid- lather.
“Who told you that?” a waitress named Violet Brody asked.
“Uh, I forget. … Did you tell me that, Megan?” Sheba asked.
Megan put down her eyeliner and turned from the mirror. “I didn't say that. I don't think he has a girlfriend. If he did, would he be looking at Goldie”—she pretended to cough—”excuse me, looking at Jo, like he wanted to eat her in one bite?”
Jo stared straight ahead, frozen. It was the end of the night, and the older girls had gathered in customary fashion to brush their hair and put on makeup for their late-night activities. Usually Jo and Bryn hung out in the girls’ room as long as they could, soaking up the atmosphere and the gossip. Once the older girls left, they washed up and walked the boardwalk for a little while and then -went home.
“He does seem to have a thing for Jo, doesn't he?” Violet said, as though Jo wasn't even there.
“You know him from somewhere, right?” Megan asked, turning to the actual Jo instead of just talking about her.
“Well,” Jo began, startled to be the center of attention. Not so much that I know his name. “We met one other time.” Specifically the night before last. She turned off the water and dried her hands.
“I can't believe you know him!” Bryn squealed.
“I guess you made a big impression,” Sheba said.
“He's a little old for her, isn't he?” Violet asked.
Jo had no idea how old he was. Her face burned with embarrassment and also some amount of pride. All eyes -were on her.
“Not more than a couple years. Maybe three,” Megan said.