Page 9 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

But it didn’t have to. This was one of the maddening beauties of sisterhood, knowing each other so well there was room even for contradictions.

“Have you laid eyes on your lotion goddess yet?” Liv asked. “Did she spritz you with magic hiking toner?”

Mandy stuck out her tongue. “PK told me she’s arriving later today.”

“How? Is there a service elevator you didn’t tell me about?”

“You mean you didn’t read appendix B in the itinerary regarding alternative modes of transportation?”

“I read the entire—” Liv said. “Oh. You’re joking.”

“Want a piggyback ride?”

“I’ll survive.”

“Of course you will,” Mandy said. “Come on. Soon we’ll be at the river. Then all you have to do is float.”

Liv hefted her day pack, and they started moving again. The heat fell heavy in the last five miles down to the Colorado, the straps of her pack grating against her shoulders as they marched down the winding trail in silence. Or rather, Liv was silent. Every few minutes, Mandy would burst out singing, or whistle, or say something like “did you know lizards smell with their tongues?” It was like hiking with a possessed CB radio that kept turning itself on.

But Mandy said no more about how she won this trip or about the amazing Babette Sauvage. Liv kept thinking about the dog-eared book in Mandy’s pack, her sister’s rapacious appetite for reinvention and transformation. The big adventure. The quick fix. Maybe that was the draw to Babette, the idea that you could rub a cream into your skin and become someone else. Liv had been trained to separate surface from depth, lies from reality. She looked down the trail to the other guests tromping to the river. Did they all have a connection to Babette Sauvage? What shiny stories had they smeared across their faces, and what blemishes—what scars—might be hiding underneath?

Chapter Six

They reached the river before Mandy decided how much of the real story to tell her sister. She’d always wanted to meet Babette, and the chance to spend a whole week with her was too good to pass up. But she hadn’t thought it all the way through. Liv wouldn’t understand what she’d done, and she’d be even angrier when she found out how long Mandy had been hiding it from her.

Mandy looked out across the Colorado, searching for an answer in the fast-flowing water. The river was more motion than object, thick and viscous, roiling with sediment, a muddy orange fist hooking through the canyon walls. Mandy removed her shoes and slipped her feet into a pocket of quiet water by the bank, letting its chill prick her awake after the tiring hike down. She took a step deeper, flirting with the lip of the current, testing its fearsome shove.

“Not too far,” Liv whispered.

Mandy took another step.

The truth was, Mandy liked her sister’s protectiveness. So different from her friends back in Austin, the ones who pushed her over the edge to justify their own free falls. They loved concocting cocktails and costumes, making out with strangers at black-light-and-hay-speckled music festivals. Most nights, Mandy loved that too. But sister trips were a time to reset. To strip back the paint and partying and come back to her old self. Even preparing for this trip, waking up early to jog along Lake Austin, she’d felt better.

And now here they were, and Liv’s love felt as claustrophobic as ever. Mandy never could tell if Liv worried because she cared or because she didn’t trust Mandy to take care of herself. Probably some of both. And so secrets piled up, covering the rough patches where trust ran ragged between them.

She’d tell Liv everything. But not until Babette gave her official welcome. Mandy was a decent storyteller, but Babette had built an empire with her words. Babette could explain everything.

The rest of the guests filtered in slowly, gazing at the river, dunking their feet, tossing off their packs, and tucking into low-lying pockets of shade offered by scraggly bushes along the shore. Every few minutes, PK took a lap around the beach, looking from his watch to the water to the sky, like a dog who had lost his owner. But if he was hoping for a sign of Babette, none was forthcoming.

Finally, there was a whoop from the river, and up came a flotilla: a thirty-five-foot-long barge, with two smaller rafts linked by rope trailing behind. The parade was both rugged and majestic, and it was suddenly obvious that this had been Babette’s plan all along: to float in on an inflatable throne, held aloft in a litter by a crew of shirtless, gleaming boatmen, the freshly anointed empress of the river.

Mandy rushed to the bank to watch. There was only one person on the barge, a weathered man in a faded orange life jacket, wielding a pair of oars atop a mountain of bulging tarps. He was towing two rafts, one of which was empty. The other held a young woman with a long braid down her back, using a paddle as a rudder. Babette was nowhere to be seen.

The rafts were bright as sunflowers, blazing above the thick brown river.

“Yellow,” Imogen groused. “Kill me now.”

The braided woman leapt from her raft, flaked out a rope, and tossed one end to Thor on the bank. Within minutes, the guides had all three boats anchored to stakes pounded into the sand. The oarsman on the barge stood, took a running leap over the bulging tarps, and flew not toward the beach but into the heart of the river. He hit the water with a big splash and a bigger yell. A few sharp strokes later, he scrambled up on shore and shook himself like a satisfied mutt.

“Wild Adventures?” He unclipped his life jacket and took off his sunglasses, revealing a crinkled smile, scraggly beard, and a blue bandana peeking out the collar of his soaked long-sleeved shirt.

“Howdy. I’m Big Pete. Your trip leader. Welcome to the Colorado.” Everyone nodded, or waved, or made the absolute minimum effort to demonstrate that they’d survived the hike down. “We’ll do introductions tonight at camp. For now, there’s me, head boatman. Our other guides are Katy, intrepid boatgirl”—the young woman with the braid rolled her eyes—“and you’ve already met Thor and Marc. Marc will head back to the rim with the mules today and meet us with the van at the end of the trip. Thor will be on the river with us.” The long-haired guide looked positively itching to get on the water, his fingers spidering up the clasps of his life jacket to clip on a knife and a mesh bag stuffed with rope.

“Katy’ll talk your ear off about the plants and geology around here,” Big Pete continued, “and Thor’s our trip medic. If you need anything, holler for any of us.”

“Holler?” Liv asked. “Are we piloting the rafts ourselves?”

“Not a chance.” Big Pete grinned. “There will be a guide in each raft telling you what to do. Plus one on the supply boat—the big boy we call the chub—with all the gear. Mostly we’ll just float along. But we’re starting with a bang. These next rapids, a couple miles downriver from here, they’re two of the biggest whippers we’ll see on the trip. Get ready to hold on.”