And you all duck down, paddling with your backs hunched, trying to get under the smoke for a bit of air. Fortunately, the wind shifts again and clears out some of the smoke. You all take in huge lungfuls of air and fight with everything you have to move forward in the shifting gales. It sounds like a freight train is following you, and when you finally get close enough to see the beginning of the rapids, your body goes into a state of panicked shock. It’s not just a strong current.
It’s a waterfall.
Not the size of Niagara Falls or anything, but it’s not nothing. Ten, maybe fifteen feet in the air. It seems to appear out of nowhere, cutting between two enormous black rocks and landing in more frothing rapids below. And the current is moving fast beneath your boat. These are not the relatively short rapids fromthe beginning of the trip. These rapids are wild. They’re white and foaming, and any stick that gets drawn into their path is immediately sucked under.
Ahead of you, Fran is screaming. But the sound of the fire nearly drowns her out. There’s not much time to think. If you keep going forward, you’re going to be pulled into the path of the falls. If you jump out of your boat and swim to shore, it won’t be long before the fire is likely to catch you. You can’t really call what you’re feeling a panicattack, because instead of going into alarm mode, your body seems to have shut down entirely. Diana’s too. She’s just looking forward, completely still.
What you expect to see from the boat in front of you is Troy scrambling to get out. What you see instead is Troy grabbing on to Will’s shoulders. He’s already decided: He’s going to brave the falls. Your mind jumps to the quarry only for a moment, watching Sean dive off that cliff. He did it so effortlessly, flinging his body out into the summer air, completely ready for the plunge to come. You could barely make yourself walk to the edge to look down. How are you supposed to go over a waterfall?
There is still time for you to bail. You could try to outrun the fire on land. Maybe if you stay on the rocky surface, it won’t catch you. Fire can’t burn rock, right? You think about it, and your anxiety brain seems to already have made the choice to jump out, when an ache starts to build in your chest. You’re not entirely sure if it’s a pang—because you’re not entirely sure what a pang is—but that’s the best way you can think to describe it. It hurts, and soon enough you know why.
If you jump, you’ll be sending Diana over alone.
And this time, you don’t think you can do that. You already abandoned her once, and you know in that moment that you are not prepared to do it again. So you reach up and tap her on the shoulder. She looks back at you, completely horror-struck. But even in her bloodshot eyes and sunburnt skin, you see a flash of that person who climbed up a garage roof just to wish you happy birthday in what seems like another lifetime ago. She is the same person. Your only real friend. And whatever happens next, you have to face it together.
“HEY!” you scream over the din of fire and churning water.
“WHAT?!” she asks, her face tight with terror.
“HOLD MY HAND!”
She doesn’t hesitate. She reaches out and grabs your cold fingers and interlaces them with her own. Then there are only a few seconds to brace yourselves for what’s coming before the current grabs you. Behind you, you feel a wall of heat, like someone’s chasing you with a flamethrower. The air goes dark as night. Then the raging water seizes you and the two of you go over the edge.
FORTY-THREE
It takes two seconds to drop. Maybe three.
But in anxiety-time, that’s at least a couple of lifetimes. At first you’re still in the boat, and you hold tight to the slick gunwale with one hand and to Diana’s hand with the other. The sense of weightlessness sends a surge of adrenaline through your body and a sickening pit to your stomach. And then, at some point, your bodies separate from the boat and your hand unclasps from Diana’s. Every muscle you have tenses for impact, and all you can see when you’re airborne is water cascading around you. It sends up a mist that blinds you from what’s below, so it’s hard to tell just how far you’re going to fall.
Diana hits the water first. You hit next and find yourself fully submerged in liquid ice too deep to see bottom. You flail around in the turbulent water, and when you open your eyes, you see the bright yellow of the canoe a few feet away. It’s scraped and dented, but still mostly intact. You reach out a desperate hand and manage a grip on the side again. Then you clamp both hands on it and use the weight of the boat to pull your head out of the water.
You pop up, your ears ringing from the cold.
“DIANA!” you scream.
You wonder if you’re going to have to go under to save her when you hear her voice from the other side of the boat, shaky but there.
“I’M HERE!” she says.
That’s all you hear before you’re moving again, shooting the next leg of the rapids while clutching your canoe, which jerks you through the water like an angry pet on a leash.
“Just hang on!” you say.
But you don’t know if she can hear you, or even if that’s the right thing to do. You look around frantically for the others, but you don’t see any sign of them. A gust of wind kicks up behind you, and when you turn around, everything is on fire. The wind is hurling the flames forward, and you can see them burning through everything on the shore in real time. The rapids keep you just ahead of the fire, but the heat on all sides of you is growing unbearable. You duck your head underwater to cool off. You blow air out of your nose and mouth, clearing out the smoke and ash.
The current pulls you around a sharp corner, and your legs brush against some big rocks beneath the hull. You lift your legs up as high as you can. Although you can’t see her face, you can see Diana’s hand still holding tight to the gunwale on the other side of the boat. You just hope she’s able to breathe. Between the wind and the rapids, it’s getting harder to stay above water, and you find yourself holding your breath for longer and longer stretches of time.
Your feet slam into another rock, and this time it spins you and the whole canoe around so that you’re going through the Loop backward. This is the moment when you’re sure that you’re not going to make it. You have no sense of where your body is in space, and the surging water has taken away most of your visibility. You plunge under the water again, and the glacial rapids engulf you. You stay under until your lungs feel like they’re going to burst, andthen suddenly you’re not moving as fast. The current seems to have slowed, and before you can do it yourself, a familiar hand grabs you hard by the hair and pulls your head out of the water.
You sputter and wipe your eyes. Diana is looking at you with hair matted in front of her face. She pushes it back, and then screams:
“LOOK OUT!”
Hot coals and embers are blowing across the surface of the water. You’ve been spit out into a small lake, and there is fire burning all around you on the shore.
“The canoe!” you gasp. “Flip it over!”
You both grab on to the same side and pull, dumping any remaining gear into the churning lake. It’s hard to tip it, but the burning refuse from the fire is good motivation. An ember lands on your neck and bites until you splash it with water. And when you finally get the boat over, you both swim underneath and come up under its domed roof. Your whole world is tiny and dark. You can hear the percussion of coals and debris hitting the hull, and the scream of the fire eating through everything around you. It heats the bottom of the canoe like a stove, too hot to the touch.
