The Distance from Me to You (12 page)

“Doesn't everybody?” His voice sounded flat. Maybe even sarcastic.

“No,” McKenna said, trying to make peace, to show him she didn't care one way or the other. “Not everybody. Plenty of successful people—”

“And even more unsuccessful people.” His voice sounded almost snarly now. She was digging a deeper hole with every word.

“Well,” McKenna said, trying to keep her voice light and airy, “what's success anyway? Like Thoreau said, ‘The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind.'”

Sam put his slice down. His eyes were narrow and challenging. Warning her to change the subject.

“Did you play football in high school?” McKenna asked, taking another sip of soda. She hoped her voice sounded normal. She wanted to give him a compliment, say something that would remove the foot she'd somehow wedged into her mouth. “You have that look, like you play football.”

“Want to know what look you have?”

There was a subtle change in Sam's face. A shift in the geometry of his smile. Up until this moment McKenna had been
confident that he liked her, at least as a friend. And now, suddenly, she felt like he didn't. All that food turned cold in her stomach.

“I'm sorry if I—”

“You have the look of someone who always does what she's supposed to do.”

Anger bubbled up, canceling out her dismay. “If that were true,” McKenna bit in sharply, “I'd be hanging posters in my dorm room right now.”

“So instead of your college orientation checklist, you've got your AT hiker's checklist. Fancy frame pack, check. Below-zero sleeping bag, check. Water purifier, check. Compass that you probably don't know how to use, check.”

“Check. Please,” McKenna said to the waitress as she walked by.

The waitress slapped the bill down on the table, her eyes stuck on Sam. Sam didn't smile back. Despite their argument, despite their being just friends, if even that, he was still too much of a gentleman to flirt with another girl while he was eating with McKenna.

But not enough of a gentleman to let their conversation go. “You have the look,” he continued, “of someone who's going to get off the trail when it gets cold. You'll get off the trail, go home, and everybody will tell you what an achievement it was to hike as far as you did. Let's say, to Virginia. Even though you didn't make it the whole way like you said you were going to.”

McKenna just stared at him. What the hell had she done to deserve
that
?

His jaw was set, almost trembling, like he was the one who was pissed off. She hesitated for a second, then grabbed the bill and headed up to the cash register. She paid with her parents' debit card, adding a generous tip to the receipt, and then headed for the door without looking back.

In the Laundromat, she grabbed her clothes from the dryer and left Sam's, abandoning the idea of a second load and of restocking provisions. She had a couple days' worth of food in her dry bag. If she covered decent miles this afternoon and tomorrow, she could make another stop in Cornwall Bridge. Right now she felt unsettled and angry. She needed to walk.

• • •

She spent the rest of the day on the trail waiting for Sam to catch up with her. In the evening, she set up her tent and with every move she expected him to come ambling up, throw off his crummy frame pack, and sit down. Explain himself. Apologize. It was, McKenna realized as she hung her food bag up away from the bears, the way you'd feel after a fight with your boyfriend. Not wanting to go to sleep angry.

Still full from the big lunch, she didn't eat anything but a couple nibbles of turkey jerky that night before crawling into her sleeping bag. She turned her headlamp on, planning to start reading the novel she'd traded for one of her own in the last free box. Instead, she lay in the dark, headlamp pointing dormant at the roof of her tent.

She'd felt a kind of kinship with Sam since they first met, a guy her age, hiking in the same direction. But what did she
really know about him? Not where he came from. Not how old he was, except for her guess. Maybe his name wasn't even Sam. Why was he so hostile about sharing normal information? Maybe he was running from the law. Maybe he was dangerous.

She stuffed her headlamp into the mesh pocket of her tent. Listening to the crickets outside, she had to admit she was still also listening for approaching footsteps.

She squeezed her eyes shut. No, she thought, with deep and urgent conviction. Sam wasn't dangerous. She knew that as well as she knew anything in the world. But the way she was thinking about him, the way she was feeling.

That could definitely be dangerous.

• • •

Trail rhythm.
Maybe it was her unease over Sam, the rattling and increasing anger she felt as two days went by with no sign of him. But for the first time, she began to think she was achieving it. She liked the phrase.
Trail rhythm.
It fit the way she'd imagined this trip would go, how she would feel, back at the very beginning. Before Courtney had bowed out, before that hellacious climb up Katahdin, before blackflies had bitten off half her flesh. Before this long, hard, and she had to admit, sometimes lonely summer had started, McKenna had had a very clear image in her mind of the girl she'd be—the
woman
she'd be. She thought she'd take down two thousand miles without so much as a stumble. The woman McKenna had
planned
on being would not let a tough uphill stretch, or a few measly insects, or a bunch of day-hiking naysayers, not
to mention a too-handsome-for-his-own-good loner, get her down. That woman would scoff and then laugh, hold her head up high, and move forward with grace and determination.

She'd have
trail rhythm
.

And funnily enough, since that fight with Sam, for the first time since Brendan gave her that dry good-bye kiss in Baxter State Park, McKenna felt like the person she'd envisioned. She took in a deep breath, full of pine and damp earth. So what if the dew that hovered in the air felt a tiny bit too cold for August? The straps of her pack weren't cutting into her shoulders. If that was partly because her supplies needed replenishing, who cared? According to her guidebook, there was a killer deli in Kent, and at the clip she was walking, she'd get there by lunchtime. Despite those slices of pizza two days ago, the waistband of her shorts felt loose. She'd order a Reuben and a bag of chips and a Coke. Maybe they'd have huge chocolate chip cookies like at Joe's Corner Store back home. She would buy one and eat the whole thing. Nothing left to share, no matter who she might run into.

• • •

The market was every bit as awesome as her guidebook had promised, its shelves stacked high with top-drawer items like rice crackers, Nutella, and organic cereal bars. There was a refrigerated section with different flavors of hummus, and McKenna grabbed the one with a pool of olive oil and slices of pickled red pepper. It would stay cool enough until dinnertime. The girl behind the deli counter looked about McKenna's age.
While she made her sandwich, McKenna loaded up on everything she wanted, consciously not looking at the prices, refusing to let herself worry about how Sam would pay for anything if he happened to come into this store.

When the girl handed over the sandwich—Russian dressing staining the butcher paper, along with the chips and the exact cellophane-wrapped cookie she'd imagined—McKenna found herself asking, as if her voice had a will of its own: “Have any other hikers stopped in today? I mean, have you seen a guy about our age, kind of tall, with longish blond hair?”

“Blue eyes?” the girl asked. “The kind that look right through you?”

McKenna's heart did an uncomfortable skitter. If Sam had been here already, that meant at some point he'd passed her. Without stopping. Maybe he'd keep on walking, or even get off the trail. Maybe she'd never see him again.

What was he doing, looking right through this girl, anyway? McKenna remembered the pointed way he'd avoided the waitress's eyes. The way he'd avoided staying in Ashley's tent. She was just about to ask what he'd bought when the sandwich girl laughed, a short and decidedly unmerry bark.

“I wish,” she said, wiping off the counter with an expert swish of her white cotton dish towel.

• • •

After she ate, McKenna locked herself in the store's bathroom to do some rudimentary washing up. Once she crossed into New York she could spend a night in a hotel, take a real
shower, and do more laundry. For now, she stripped down to her waist in front of the sink, soaped and rinsed her face, and stared into the mirror as she brushed her teeth. It was easy to see small changes: her face was at least two shades darker, despite the loyal application of sunscreen. Without plucking, her brows were growing in a way that made her look severe but also younger. There were streaks of blond in her hair, making it lighter than it had been since she was ten or eleven, though nowhere near as fair as that of anyone else in her family. Or Sam, she thought involuntarily.

She tried to remember the last time she'd seen herself in a full-length mirror. The real changes, McKenna knew, weren't in her face. She reached behind her back and snapped off her bra. Just to see if she could, she slithered out of her shorts without undoing the button. This was no unattended truck stop bathroom; here in Connecticut they weren't messing around with hygiene. Everything shone, smelling like lemon-scented bleach. McKenna scrambled on top of the toilet to give herself something like a full view in the small square mirror over the sink.

If she expected to see a totally different body from the one she'd shown Brendan before heading off on the trail, she felt a slight stab of disappointment. Plus, the tan was not exactly photo-shoot-ready—more like Photo
shop
-ready, the white outline of her shorts and T-shirt standing out against her brown arms, legs, and neck. Her stomach had a slight bulge from devouring that Reuben and the chips (the cookie, saved for later,
was zipped into the front pocket of her pack), but the skin it strained against was taut. Her thighs didn't look skinny, exactly, but tighter than they'd been, and stronger. Reluctantly, McKenna thought about Brendan and that last night with him, the careful questions he'd asked before each move.
Is this okay?
Hands moving, trembling a little.

Blue eyes? The kind that look right through you?

McKenna remembered Sam's hands at the restaurant. Back on the trail, the day he'd come between her and the hunters, the insides of his palms were calloused when he put his arm around her, his fingers closing around her upper arm. She felt sure that those hands wouldn't tremble. And she also felt sure that Sam would only ask permission once.

A sharp rap on the bathroom door made her jump. “Hey,” an irritated voice called. “Someone's waiting out here.”

McKenna gathered up her things fast as possible. Impatient suburbanites aside, if she wanted to get to the top of Schaghticoke Mountain today and into New York tomorrow, she needed to get back on the trail as soon as possible.

• • •

The hike up Schaghticoke was steep in places, but nothing compared to Katahdin or even Bear Mountain, and now she was in much better shape. Even so, it was still way later than she'd planned when she reached the summit. It was funny to be on a trail in her home state, standing at the very top. Almost as if her whole childhood, her whole life, lay spread out at the bottom of the mountain she'd just climbed. Her parents and
Lucy had no idea that right at this moment she was about to cross over into New York. She could see the Housatonic River, where her dad had taken her fishing a thousand years ago. Lucy, she realized with a pang of sadness, had never known the dad that McKenna had—the one who loved sharing the outdoors with his daughter. She wished she'd thought to send Lucy postcards along the way and vowed to start when she got to New York. Then she thought about the trouble it might cause if the postmarks on the cards didn't match Courtney's update texts.

So instead McKenna vowed to take Lucy on a hike next summer, maybe even an extended camping trip. Lucy shouldn't miss out just because their parents had become too obsessed with their careers to take time to teach her about the outdoors.

“Pretty nice view,” came a voice from behind her.

Of course she knew before whipping her head around who the voice belonged to.

Sam, finally, sneaking up as usual. How could someone so big manage to move so quietly? He had his arms crossed, and his head held high, chin jutted toward her. His shave had worn off and there was duct tape patching up his flimsy sneakers. How had he hiked so far, so long, in just those sneakers? McKenna crossed her arms, too.

“Didn't anyone ever tell you it's not polite to sneak up on people?” she said, trying to hide her relief at the sight of him.

“Who's sneaking? I've been waiting up here for over an hour. I was worried you wouldn't summit before dark.”

“You don't need to worry about me. I can take care of myself just fine. See?” She opened up her arms, gestured toward the panoramic vista below. “Made it to the top. Without any help from you, or anyone.”

“Just barely,” Sam said. Which would have been infuriating if he hadn't been grinning that almost-perfect smile, just one tooth crooked on the bottom.

McKenna's own perfect teeth, accomplished by thousands of dollars of orthodontia, felt leaden and inferior.

She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and knelt to pick up the first thing she saw, a fat hedgehog-shaped pinecone lying at her feet. How much damage could a person do with a pinecone? She whipped it directly at his head, aiming for that smirk. Sam ducked—almost, but not quite in time. The pinecone grazed his eyebrow hard enough for him to bring his hands up over his face.

“Whoa!” he said. “What the hell?”

Instantly, McKenna felt bad. Apparently she'd thrown it a bit harder than she'd meant to. She closed the distance between them in three quick strides.