Chapter Seven
He came, was all I could think for the first few seconds. He came!
“How’d you catch up so fast?” I asked.
“Great minds think alike.”
I scrunched an eyebrow in confusion.
“I was getting ready to come find you when you sent that Circ.” He looked west, where the sky was already lavender with the approaching sunset. “It’s going to be an amazing one.”
Joy lifted my spirits like helium. Luke and I were back on the same page, back to how it used to be when things were easy and spontaneous and we acted in tandem without even thinking about it.
“Yes, it’s going to be an amazing sunset. And it will be even more amazing for whoever gets to the top first,” I challenged.
Without waiting for a response, I took off upward. Laughter poured from me as my feet sank into gravel while I pushed to get ahead. It was freeing to extend myself to full exertion in the race against the setting sun and the perception of Luke closing in behind me.
After we’d been at it for a half hour, the switchbacks straightened out, and I got the sense that Luke wasn’t close on my heels anymore. I took a quick peek back and found him about fifty feet behind. He wasn’t as acclimated as me, so I slowed enough to keep the gap between us from widening.
The summit of Everest, which wasn’t visible from Base Camp, was now in front of us as we reached the final section of Kala Pattar. It was just a bitty, asymmetrical triangle dwarfed by the breathtaking side-angled slope of Nuptse across the gorge. With each step gained upward, Everest grew taller. By the time I scrambled through the jagged, crushed boulders at the top of Kala Pattar and reached the stone stupa with its spokes of prayer flags, Everest was nearly peak-to-peak with Nuptse. The incredible full moon floated between them, as large and as white as a dinner plate. Despite my lungs straining for more oxygen, the beauty of it all entranced me.
Luke reached the top about a minute later, immediately doubling over to catch his breath.
“Nice job, ol’ boy,” I said. “I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
All he could manage was a good-natured head shake.
I put on my hat and jacket and sat on the leeward side of the stupa, watching the hard line of the black shadows rise up the glowing, yellow-pink surfaces of the monster peaks around us. My hair, loose as it almost never is on a summit, whipped in time with the prayer flags and snapped against my wind-burned cheeks.
Luke sat next to me, pulling a thermos out of his backpack. “Hot chocolate?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just the powdered kind.”
“Like I care.”
He poured some into the lid and handed it to me. It was nice and warm, moistening my throat, which was dry from the cold, thin air. Silently, we looked across the gorge to Everest’s oh-so-familiar, blocky summit pyramid. A plume of snow flowed from it like a pennant, announcing the presence of the 140-mile-per-hour jet stream winds that blow directly across its top every day of the year except for a handful of summit-able days in May, and sometimes a few in September.
My shoulders sagged under the knowledge that I would not be among the people who would stand atop it this year.
I felt Luke’s eyes on me, so I glanced over.
“Something’s up,” he said.
It was tempting to let some of my troubles spill out. Luke was good at listening. But to tell him any part of the mess would be to reveal how badly my world was upended and how little I had going for me at the moment.
“I’m just tired,” I replied.
“What are you tired from? Napping all day?”
“Don’t you know? Sleep begets sleep.”
I looked across the distance to Everest and its neighbor, Lhotse, all but the tiniest sliver of Lhotse’s west ridge hidden behind the majestic Nuptse in the foreground. My mind kept spinning around the question of why Dad had hidden his money troubles from me. I could have handled it. I could have helped.
I had given up a college education for the mountains and to stay with Dad, yet I would still be losing them both. What would Dad and I do from now on? Email back and forth like pen pals? Meet up at a hostel somewhere in the world once a year? He had no money for plane tickets, and whatever I ended up doing, I probably wouldn’t, either.
What had happened today was identical to what had happened with Amy. When she was my mother, I was satellite to her planet, and then I’d been cut loose. Now, I orbited Dad, and he was doing the same thing: cutting me loose. It wasn’t fair to compare Dad to Amy in this way, but the end result was the same.
Luke cleared his throat. “I know it’s been a long time since we’ve hung out, but you can talk to me.”
I tested him with my eyes, searching for a hint that he was asking because he felt obligated, but his face was pure, and the concern on it lined up accurately with the tone in his voice. It was tempting but, still, I resisted. “It’s nothing. Just a lot going on at Winslowe Expeditions right now.”
What he said about it having been a long time since we’d hung out was exactly what made it not okay to spill my thoughts. Our game on Circ had been a buoy of sorts with that subtle yet constant excitement of planning what I’d send him next, or the zing that went through my body when a new #YCCM arrived. It had amplified everything that happened in my life that was good, while giving a buffer to everything that wasn’t. But there’d been absolutely nothing in two years other than that.
I’d given him my email address when he left for Washington, and in the months between that and when my email account was hacked, he hadn’t written. After this season, he’d be going back to UW, and I’d go on to who knows what, which would likely be nowhere near Washington. I didn’t have any reason to go back there and a lot of reasons not to.
I pulled the protein bars from my backpack, automatically handing Luke the peanut butter chocolate chip one and unwrapping the oatmeal raisin one for myself.
We ate, looking out at the huge white moon. Only the tips of the very tallest peaks were illuminated now, and down to our right, deep in the blackness of the valley, Everest Base Camp was a beautiful array of tents glowing like yellow, green, blue, and orange paper lanterns.
“The wind’s picking up,” Luke said after we finished our bars. “We should probably head down.”
With the sky clear and moon so big, we didn’t need our headlamps until after we’d picked our way down the rocks into the shadowy side of Kala Pattar. After the gravelly switchbacks, the slope tapered off, leaving us at the trail junction back to Base Camp.
As soon as we started walking the wide and well-traveled Base Camp trail, I began dreading my arrival. Once Dad knew I was back, he would want assurance that I wasn’t mad and that we could call Townsend College in the morning and get this all figured out. My whole body bristled with the thought.
I wanted to remain in this bubble of now with my old friend. Just being near him was like having a layer of protection between me and all that I didn’t want to face about the new reality looming in front of me.
Luke stopped when we were downslope from the Winslowe Expeditions camp. He looked back at me, blinding me with his headlamp.
“Jeez!”
“Sorry.”
We both clicked off our headlamps, neither of us making a move to go. We stood there, listening to the great quiet of the Himalayas, where, for the moment, the Khumbu Glacier wasn’t groaning and there were none of the typical booms of avalanches letting loose on distant peaks.
Luke shifted. “I have the new season of Pound Rescue on my tablet.”
Yes to that and yes to not saying good-bye to him just yet. And yes to avoiding Dad for a little longer. If I stayed long enough, I wouldn’t have to talk to him until the morning.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Let’s go.”