“Wait!” He grabs my wrist. His grip is insistent but gentle. “What’s going on? You suddenly can’t look at me anymore?”
And because I usually do what people expect of me, I force myself to look at him. His face is still shiny and wet, droplets of water hanging off his thick eyebrows and eyelashes. Silently, he loosens his grip, and I only see his eyes. He’s the only one who’s touched me in a gentle way lately, and suddenly, I want so much more. I can hardly breathe. I deliriously dig my nails into my palm, and the pain floods my mind, separating me from the feeling of losing myself. I’m sure he’d laugh at me.
I jerk my arm, and River lets go. I race along the path, stumbling over stones and thick grass.
“Kansas! Wait!”
But I can’t. I just want to get away from him and his eyes and the idea that I could be important to him.
After a while, I actually arrive back at our tent. I climb inside, wanting to burrow under the blanket. But that’s childish, so I wrap my arms around my pulled-up legs and remain stock-still. A few seconds later, River opens the flap and looks at me in shock.
“Whatever I did wrong, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you or overwhelm you. I’m just me, unfortunately.”
Unfortunately? I swallow. This person who calls himself River is too good to be true. People like him only exist in films. I’m dreaming, and I’ll soon wake up, and James will shout from downstairs to hurry up.
River points to my fingers. “You’ve hurt yourself. You’re bleeding.”
I quickly hide the disfigured hand behind my back before he sees the ugly scars.Toad hand, Chester hisses in my head. I don’t want to run away again. And I want to look at him. I’m simply too afraid of everything.
River stares at me for a moment, then pulls away. I hear him lighting a cigarette and taking a drink. Probably to wind down. Why does he even want to go to a highline when he constantly needs something to wind down?
At some point, I hear him outside saying, “I owe you some information about me.”
Anxious, I hold my breath. I hear his footsteps outside the tent, and suddenly, his shadow appears against the thin fabric, kneeling in front of the entrance without opening the flap.
“I did something bad once,” he says quietly. “So, at times, I really hate myself. It may not seem like it, but even the sunniest skies can hide the darkest storms.”
Chapter 7
This afternoon, we’re heading to the Badlands, the rugged landscape where Kevin Costner filmedDances with Wolves.
When River parks far from the tourist information center and starts walking, I follow as always, even though I don’t know the destination or the reason for our hike. Before us lie jagged rocks, layered horizontally like layers of a monumental cake—mustard yellow, mocha brown, rust red, curry orange. They jut out of the ground with nothing else nearby. Just heat, sand, and dead grass.
Although it’s late afternoon, the sun beats relentlessly on the top of my head. At some point, River takes off his shirt for the second time today and throws it over my head, laughing.
“Now you look like a Bedouin,” is all he says. I squint through the material, glad I can no longer see the full extent of his perfection.Thanks, I think, but I’m too spent to pull out my phone and type it, so I smile cautiously at him between the sleeves of his shirt. Every muscle in my body still hurts from slacklining, and I know I’ll be terribly sore tomorrow. The fact that River is now hurrying forward with long strides doesn’t make it any better. He also seems nervous because he’s doingsomething with his right hand. It looks like he’s forming some secret symbols, some kind of Morse code, and every now and then, I spot a piece of paper.
After taking forever to climb the hill along the edge of the colorful rocks, I stop, panting softly as sweat runs down my back. I’m not used to this much activity. For a moment, I think about gym class, the only time I was truly active—mostly because I was dodging the heavy medicine balls and hockey sticks that randomly hit me. I think Chester paid Amber and Lilian to do that, just like he paid them to lie.Why is your hair wet again, Kansas? She showers during her lunch break; God knows why. Maybe they turned off the water in their house.
At this moment, I don’t know how I endured it all for so long. It seems so close yet incredibly far away at the same time. I only see the old images through a filter, as if my emotions weren’t stored with them.
“Hey, Texas, are you coming?”
I glance up and see River standing a few steps away. He obviously has the stamina of a decathlete because he doesn’t seem the least bit tired. I nod weakly and start walking again, still clueless as to what we’re doing here.
At some point, when I think I’m about to topple over, he stops. “Better than Old Sheriff, right?” I hear him say from higher up.
Something about his words irritates me, but I don’t know what. I adjust the T-shirt over my head so that I can see more. We’re standing on the highest point in the area. The highway is behind us, and a valley as wide as the Nile Delta opens up before us. Grass carpets on which buffalo graze, steep mountain ridges, shadowy ravines, and rocks that rise eerily from the ground, strangely shaped as if from another world. A lavender-blue veil floats over the mountaintops, almost as if the sky is descending to merge with the land.
“Bizarre, right? Beautiful and bizarre.”
Oh yeah, he loves that. Bizarre.
He walks a few feet further, leaving the red and yellow warning sign behind him until he reaches the break line. He stands there, unshakable and rigid, only his hair fluttering in the wind. He almost looks like one of the earth-colored rocks—that’s how brown his back is. From this distance, the tattoo on his shoulder blade is legible.
Still alive for you, June.
The words are in deep dark blue, not black, and again, the letters remind me of calligraphy—playful yet accurate.
