3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows (9 page)

She was seeing a lot of bugs. And also slugs. There were a lot more slugs in the world than she had ever guessed. She paid special attention to the bugs and ants, because she was trying to figure out -which kinds could bite or kill her. If she was given her grade on bugs, she might do well.

Jared had given her something called moleskin for her blisters and an extra pair of socks he’d brought along. “Man, Ama. These are some of the worst blisters I’ve seen. I don’t know how you are walking.”

The moleskin had helped for the first five miles, but she could feel from the wetness in her boots that the blisters had started to bleed again.

By the sixth mile she had fallen far behind, and during the seventh she was stunned to actually catch up. As she came upon the group, they were clustered together in a clearing, bathed in late-day light, all of them looking up at something.

“What’s going on?” she asked Maureen, lifting off her heavy pack and easing it to the ground.

“We’re taking a break before the last part of the hike. We’re camping up there tonight.”

“Up there?”

“Up there.”

“On that mountain?”

“Yes. It’s only a mile from here, but it’s all up.”

Ama felt tears fill her eyes and tried not to blink them out. How could she get up that mountain? She pressed her lips together so they wouldn’t tremble. She looked at her pack. She looked down at her feet. How could she do it?

She realized the other kids were putting their packs back on. No! Not already! It was one of the many bad things about being the slowest hiker: the break -was always ending by the time you caught up. If she took the time to drink or eat, she’d be lost. She’d never catch up again.

“Are you okay?”

Noah -was looking at her.

She tried to ease the stricken look from her face. “I’m okay.”

“Do you need some help?”

“No, I’m okay,” she choked out. She was about to cry. All of a sudden she realized this, and that she was going to be unable to stop it.

“Excuse me,” she muttered. She stumbled toward a clump of trees. She kept going until she was out of eyesight and earshot.

She cried only until she could make herself stop. Then she blew her nose on a leaf and straightened up. When she got back to the clearing the group had left. They were already snaking in a line up the mountain. She looked around frantically for her pack, but it wasn’t there. Where was it? Hadn’t she left it there?

Oh, my God! What would she do without her pack? Her sleeping bag? Her clothes? Her -water? Should she tell the leaders? How many more ways could she find to mess this up?

She squinted at the hikers on the trail. She realized as she studied them that a tall one toward the front of the line, namely Noah, -was carrying not one pack but two.

“Did you see the new waiters?” Bryn asked Jo the next afternoon -when Jo emerged from the kitchen, shiny, pink, and damp -with steam from the dishwasher’s drying cycle.

“No. Why?”

“You’ll see -when you see them,” Bryn said suggestively.

Each -weekend, as the summer progressed and the restaurant got busier, the management took more waitstaff.

“It’ll get as big as it gets by the Fourth of July,” Caroline, a veteran of many summers, had explained to Jo. “In August servers -will start having fights and leaving and getting fired.”

Jo -was doubtful about -what she’d see, and amused by the pure boy-craziness of Bryn, but she took off the kitchen apron anyway.

“Did you see the new -waiter?” -waitress Megan asked her as she sat down at the staff table to eat a crab roll before the dinner shift started.

“No. Why do people keep asking that?”

Megan raised her eyebrows. “Because he’s cute. Both are cute, but one is really cute.”

Jo took a bite of her roll and chewed. “I’m retired from cute boys,” she said through a half-full mouth.

Megan looked amused. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re pretty young for that, aren’t you?”

Jo tried to look serious. “I’ve had my share.”

Megan laughed. She was big and strong-looking, like she played field hockey or something, but she had a gentle face.

Jo looked up at the clock and realized she had less than a minute until table-setting time. She shoved the remaining half of her crab roll into her mouth and got up from the table. She nearly collided with two large people entering the room, no doubt the famous new waiters. When she looked up at the two faces she discovered, to her astonishment, that only one of them -was a stranger. The other one was indisputably familiar, especially around the mouth.

Jo’s cheeks were full of food and her eyes big in their sockets. She backed up a few feet. She stared, trying to chew and swallow.

The familiar one, whose name she did not know, took a moment to process the unexpected familiarity of her as -well. She was hard to place, probably, what with it being so light out and her being more than three inches from his face.

She watched as his confused surprise gave way to happy surprise.

“Goldie?” he said.

She swallowed the last of her crab roll and tried to clear her airway. “It’s Jo,” she coughed out.

“You work here?” he asked.

Megan and Bryn materialized at her side. “You two know each other?”

“Sure,” he said with a big smile.

“Sort of,” Jo said, looking at her foot.

Polly didn’t have a decent mirror in her room, so she listened at her door for total silence before creeping into the hallway in her bra and underwear. She darted into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The big mirror was high above the sink in the bathroom, so she had to hoist herself up to get a good look at herself in it.

She looked at herself and herself looked back.

Strange, in a way, that that person she saw was this person she was. She didn’t necessarily feel like that person. Mostly she went about her life with no concept of what she looked like. Looking at herself now, she didn’t quite square up.

Did that mean she was not good model material?

She pretended the mirror -was a camera. She smiled at it. Hmmm.

She could get those teeth-whitening strips. That could help. Not so much -with the overbite, but with the whiteness.

She got up on her knees, balancing on the edge of the sink so she could see more of her body.

Though she had never said it out loud to anyone, her bra size was 34D. Somehow she thought that by not saying it and by standing in a certain -way, she could make the world believe that she wore a 34B like everybody else.

She hoped she was still growing vertically, but she sincerely hoped she was done growing there. If she lost -weight, she would probably get smaller. And also there was a surgery you could get to make them smaller if-worst came to -worst.

She -wondered if her grandmother had -worn a size 34D. Back then, having big ones -was probably more acceptable in models.

Polly’s lips -were big. Her eyes -were dark and big. Her nose -was not-small. Her -waist -was small, but her hips stuck out. Sometimes Polly felt jealous of the girls -with tiny features and straight-up- and-down bodies and nothing sticking out anywhere. Polly felt like everything of hers stuck out everywhere.

Her skin -was pale and almost completely clear. That was one thing she had going for her. She leaned in closer and saw two tiny pimples on her chin. Oh, -well. There was makeup for that. Everyone knew models wore tons of makeup.

Her knees were hurting against the porcelain and she still didn’t have the whole picture, so she stood up, slowly, teetering to her full height with one foot on either side of the basin. She looked up and saw that the top of her head was only a few inches from the ceiling.

Oh, no. Her underwear -was atrocious. Why -was she still wearing those? They were old cotton briefs with faded purple flowers. Models did not wear Carter’s briefs. There was no way she could evaluate the state of herself wearing that underwear.

She scrambled down off the sink so she could throw them away and find another pair. She strode back to her bedroom, pulled open the top drawer of her bureau. She took out a respectable pair of red bikini underwear she’d gotten -with Jo at Victoria’s Secret last year. She pulled off the old ones and put on the new.

But with her hand poised to throw the old ones in the wastebasket, she began to slow down and rethink. Now that she was back in her old, dim room and not immediately faced with her glaring face, she started to feel sorry for her old purple-flowered briefs. They were very soft. They had been -washed hundreds of times, and still they had no holes and none of the elastic had sprung out of them. They had been very nice to her the whole time she’d had them. In truth, they were probably her most comfortable pair. Not all underwear -was comfortable. Jo had gotten her to wear a thong once with her leggings, and that was not comfortable, no matter -what anybody said.

Polly couldn’t just throw them away for no good reason. What had they ever done wrong? They couldn’t help it if they weren’t sleek or fashionable. They just were how they were.

Instead of throwing them away, she folded them up into a tiny ball and put them away in the back of her drawer.

Okay, so she wouldn’t throw them away just yet. But she would not wear them. Unless there were absolutely no other clean ones. And she would not wear them to modeling camp.

It took Ama hours to thank Noah. She kept trying to think of a way. She hovered close enough to him on several occasions to say the two words, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

Later, she went by herself to a stream to peel off her pus-soaked, bloody socks in privacy. It turned out Noah -was there too, washing some clothes.

“Thank you,” she blurted out, before the words could crawl back down her throat and hide.

“No problem,” he said.

She tried to submerge her feet and rinse her socks before he could see, to spare him the gruesomeness, but she didn’t quite get them under in time.

He openly -winced at the sight of them, and she didn’t blame him. Between her hair and her feet she was a genuine fright. She’d give him nightmares for sure.

Earlier that evening, as she’d walked the last mile feeling as light as a bird without her pack, she’d had an idea. It was so comforting it had carried her up to the top of the mountain. Maybe Noah could be her belayer. If he was her belayer, she had the hope that maybe she wouldn’t absolutely die.

It was a good plan -with one major problem: she would have to find a way to ask him to be her partner, and she knew she never -would.

“I heard he has a girlfriend,” Sheba said, her loud voice amplified by the slick tiled walls and metal stalls of the women’s bathroom/lounge at the Surfside.

Jo stopped her hand-washing mid-lather.

“Who told you that?” a waitress named Violet Brody asked.

“Uh, I forget. … Did you tell me that, Megan?” Sheba asked.

Megan put down her eyeliner and turned from the mirror. “I didn’t say that. I don’t think he has a girlfriend. If he did, would he be looking at Goldie”—she pretended to cough—”excuse me, looking at Jo, like he wanted to eat her in one bite?”

Jo stared straight ahead, frozen. It was the end of the night, and the older girls had gathered in customary fashion to brush their hair and put on makeup for their late-night activities. Usually Jo and Bryn hung out in the girls’ room as long as they could, soaking up the atmosphere and the gossip. Once the older girls left, they washed up and walked the boardwalk for a little while and then -went home.

“He does seem to have a thing for Jo, doesn’t he?” Violet said, as though Jo wasn’t even there.

“You know him from somewhere, right?” Megan asked, turning to the actual Jo instead of just talking about her.

“Well,” Jo began, startled to be the center of attention. Not so much that I know his name. “We met one other time.” Specifically the night before last. She turned off the water and dried her hands.

“I can’t believe you know him!” Bryn squealed.

“I guess you made a big impression,” Sheba said.

“He’s a little old for her, isn’t he?” Violet asked.

Jo had no idea how old he was. Her face burned with embarrassment and also some amount of pride. All eyes -were on her.

“Not more than a couple years. Maybe three,” Megan said.

“It’s not that he’s too old for Jo,” Sheba said to Megan, resuming the version of the conversation -where Jo wasn’t there. “He’s too … cool for Jo.”

Bryn laughed a little too loudly.

“Thanks a lot,” Jo piped up.

“Not too cool. I mean, too slick,” Sheba amended. “He seems like a player, doesn’t he?”

“Possibly,” Megan said.

“Likely,” Violet added.

“He looks like trouble,” another -waitress, named Caroline, agreed.

“But he’s so hot!” Bryn opined, eager to stay in the conversation.

Jo -watched them gather up their things and drift out of the restaurant. Jo and Bryn -were left to themselves. She could still hear the older girls discussing the potential of her and him. It didn’t seem to make any difference that she -was no longer among them.

The terrain got rockier over the next two days. The group did their first technical climb, -which meant they used ropes.

Amas entire body shook for the hour leading up to her turn. She haltingly climbed five feet off the ground, looked over her shoulder, and panicked. Her hands clung so hard to the rope she burned the skin of her palms. Her feet shook so hard she couldn’t make the toes of her boots stick in any of the holds.

Eventually Dan and Jared had to pull her up by the rope, nothing more than dead weight. When she got up to the top she thanked them, -walked a few feet away, and vomited.

Later, after eating lunch and resting in the sun for a while, she looked out over the rock face they’d climbed. She stood a good distance back from the edge, of course, and tried to calculate its height. She figured it was probably similar in altitude to the final rappel. Maybe a little lower, but not much.

Later still she sat on a flat rock as Maureen rubbed salve into her cut-up hands.

“How far -was that climb?” Ama asked casually.

Maureen held up both of Amas wrists to examine her hands in the fading sun. “Yikes, girl,” she murmured. “How did you do this much damage?”