“Shhh, no. It was an owl. Go to sleep; I’ll keep drawing.” Tate’s fingers brush the skin of my neck for a minute, then they’re gone.
I’m so tired. “Are you sure? I can stay up.” My voice isn’t very convincing.
“Go to sleep. I got this,” Tate says, and I do.
Chapter Two:
Tate
(Five Months Earlier) December 19
Boorman Creek High School, California
7 feet above sea level
It’s entirely possible that the thing that will finally kill me won’t be trying to ollie a stupid-wide gap on my skateboard or cracking my skull falling at El Capitan but will be…Advanced Seminar Literature. I wasn’t going to take the class—I’m not an advanced kind of student, except for electives like Real-World Design Challenge—but my favorite teacher, Mr. Abrams, did that thing where he looked me in the eye and told me he reallyreallyreally thinks I can do it if I put my mind to it. He meant well, I’m sure, but now it’s halfway through first term of senior year and all I hear while he’s talking about persuasive arguments and fallacy of reason is the adult voices in the Charlie Brown specials: Waah-waah WAAH-waah, wah-wah. I have a feeling both Mr. Abrams and I are going to regret this by the time final grades are due.
I slide my sketchbook out from under my notebook and start to doodle. My brain’s in that place where a million thoughts collide and crash into each other: Are we finally heading back to Mount Rainier in a few weeks even though the temps are going to be ball-shrinkingly freezing? Is Rose wearing yet another new necklace, and if so, how many necklaces does one human need? Is there a material lightweight and strong enough to build retractable wings on a small airplane, since realistically I think that’s the only way we’re going to get flying cars in my lifetime? The only thing that shuts off my brain is letting my fingers fly over my sketchbook.
Rose, who sits beside me, slides her foot under my desk and stomps on my toes. “He’s telling us what will be on the midterm,” she whispers. “TAKE. NOTES.”
I sigh. Flip her the finger discreetly behind my sketchbook. Slide it back under my notebook and dutifully try to take notes.
The thing is, school’s easy for Rose. No. That’s not true. She works incredibly hard, unlike our friend Ronan, who does dick-all and still mostly gets As. No, working hard is really easy for Rose. And not just in school. In every part of her life. She has color-coded calendars and bullet journals and list-making apps and whatever else it takes to juggle a million things and make it look effortless.
With climbing, like everything else, Rosie’s a natural. That’s what Dad said the first time he took us to the rock gym when we were ten, and he repeats it—feels like every single time we’re out together. It’s true: she clings to the rock like she grew there, like she has magnets in her hands that move automatically to the strongest hold on the mountain. And unlike at school, I am too. The two of us were phenoms at the rock gym when we were little, and now I’ve got six feet, three inches of reach that make it almost easy to monkey up stuff other people can barely touch. And the gnarlier it is, the better…It sends my mind into hyperfocus so that there’s nothing to do or worry about except the next reach in front of me.
Somehow climbing went from one thing we do for fun—along with surfing (me), skateboarding (me), sketching (me), eating frightening amounts of fish tacos (me and Rose), buying necklaces (Rose), planning world domination via architecture (Rose)—to…everything. Every weekend filled with overnight, extreme-condition climbs in the Sierras or the Rockies. Every summer paycheck put into an account for climbing expenses. Every vacation’s air miles cashed in for tickets to climbing playgrounds in South America, Canada, Europe. Every conversation leading to speculation about how long it will be until the big one: Nepal. Mount Everest. I love it.
Closing my eyes for a second, I imagine me and Rose and Dad and Maya, Rose’s mom, on our way to Everest. Immediately my brain’s overloaded with a million different images, facts, thoughts—like a beehive exploded in there. It’s too much. Jimmy, the shrink I’ve seen since I was seven, would probably tell me to get a hold of my toolbox and figure out which tool was going to help me chill out. I’ve been trying to pull things out of that toolbox for ten years now. Sometimes it works, others not. But I get it now: I’m wired to be hyper.
We’ve been planning this trip for so long—longer than I have ever worked for anything in my life, by far. We were in fourth grade when I asked Rose and Maya and Dad if we could climb Mount Everest someday. I was hanging on an advanced route at Rockface, the gym where we started climbing, literally hanging in midair, because I could. Maya was belaying me, and Rose was on a route nearby, with Dad below. We both loved being roped in. When you’re belaying, you’re suspended by your climbing harness: even if you fall, you don’t go anywhere, at least as long as you trust the person holding the rope. It’s awesome knowing you can’t fuck up if you try.
I asked her the question only because hanging there I could see this huge poster-sized photo of the gym owner on Everest, and it looked incredible. And Rosie said sure, like I was asking if she wanted to go to Mount Tam again this weekend. But Maya looked up at us, then at Dad, and shrugged and said, “Really? Would you?”
And we both said yes, and I don’t know about Rose, but my heart was beating so fast, like someone was really asking me if I wanted to see dragons or travel to the moon. It seemed impossible, something that only climbing rock stars could ever consider, but that night over In-N-Out burgers, Maya pulled up some facts about Mount Everest, and the kind of climbers who did it, and said if we were serious, we could talk about planning for it.
I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life. School sucked, and fighting with my parents about school sucked worse, but when I was training to climb Mount Everest, I wasn’t a school fuckup, I was a climber, someone working toward one of the most elite and extreme adventures on the planet. The more people we told, the more it felt like we were nailing down a promise. It felt impossible but also inevitable, like I had to do it.
With Maya’s help there were bake sales every Thursday, with two hundred individually wrapped chocolate chip cookies and a cute handwritten sign saying Cookies for Climbing: Help Us Reach the Top of the World. And in fifth grade, a car wash every Saturday. And selling bags of popcorn every Friday lunch period in sixth. Maya was doing all the research, following each year’s climbing season the way some people follow their favorite football teams. But I was the one who couldn’t stop talking about it. And of course Dad was all in. He was climbing long before I came along. It was his idea to get me to Rockface in the first place. He said if I was going to climb the walls at home, I might as well learn how to do it right. But he was stoked that I love it so much and brags to all his friends about my climbing. It’s cool to have one thing in common.