The Girls of No Return (44 page)

“That's great.”

“What about you? Off to college? Some East Coast breeding ground for I-bankers?” She puffs on her cigarette once more before dropping it on the ground and grinding it down. Then she bends and picks up the butt, slips it in the front pocket of her shirt. “Margaret's influence,” she says when she catches me watching.

“Not the East Coast,” I say, pausing to put my own cigarette out on the sole of my shoe. “Not any coast. I'm taking a year off.” I drop the butt in my back pocket. “Actually, I'm going to spend a couple of months up at a fire lookout in the Sawtooth Mountains. It's kind of a volunteer internship.” I watch the side of her face for a response, but I don't see one. If she thinks about the lookout on Buckhorn Peak or anything else, she's not letting me know.

“Sounds nice,” she says instead. Her voice is flat, painfully civil.

If we were still at school, I'd let Boone take the lead, as I always did. That way, I wouldn't be responsible if the conversation turned a corner and disappeared. But we're not at school anymore, and I know I have to do this.

“Boone,” I say, and my voice sounds different.

She turns to me.

I've been thinking about what I'll say all week, but suddenly, each of my well-practiced lines sounds childish in my head.
I'm sorry. Forgive me. You can't know how terrible I feel.
Worse than childish — they sound courteous.

It's not going to be perfect
, I say to myself, and then I say this to Boone. “It's not going to be perfect.”

“What's not?”

“What I need to say. I need to tell you how sorry I am —” My voice catches, but I continue. “But I don't need you to forgive me. I just need you to listen.” I don't look away from her the whole time I'm talking, so I see her nod slightly. “I've had time to think about this — believe me. So I know there's nothing I can do to —” I run my hand through my hair. “I can't change anything that happened.”

“Tell me something I don't know.” Boone turns her gaze to the road.

“I'm trying,” I say, breathing through my nose as I attempt to quell the anxiety that rises in my chest. “I'm trying to tell you what it's been like. I didn't want to believe it then, but I get it now. I know that Gia —” Boone shakes her head at the mention of Gia's name, but I keep going, afraid that, if I pause, I'll lose my nerve. “That she could only have ever hurt me. She wasn't like you.”

“No shit.”

She needs to hear this. “Boone. Your friendship was the most honest thing I'd ever had.” I'm speaking more quickly now, and I remind myself to slow down. “And Gia . . . Sometimes it felt like, for all the good I found at Alice Marshall, there was still the bad, you know? Like, no matter how hard I tried, there was still this piece of me that wanted to hurt.” I pause, swallowing. “To be hurt. You can't know how much I wish I'd been stronger for you. To at least have been able to see Gia for who she was.”

We're standing in the middle of the road, the heat heavy on our shoulders. I reach up and dash my arm across my forehead, trying to wipe away the tears that are threatening to spill.

Boone turns on her heel and starts back toward the diner. I think she's ignoring me, and my breath jerks in my throat. But then she raises her hand over her shoulder. She curls her fingers together, calling me. I catch up with her, and we walk slowly, neither of us in a hurry to get back to my folks and Margaret. I'm waiting for her to say something. Anything. She does.

“Get over yourself,” she says.

“What?”

“Get over yourself,” she repeats. “I had to.” She kicks at the ground. “I hated you for a long time,” she says. “A long time.”

“Oh.” I feel it all collapsing, and I steel myself for what she'll say next.

“But it turned out that hating you was almost worse than learning to live with this.” Boone points up to the right side of her face, and the pink fault line extending from either side of the patch. “I mean, it was toxic, spending all that time thinking about what I would say to you, what I would do . . .” Her voice trails off, and then she adds, “Like something poisonous was just festering inside of me. I had to deal with it.” She gestures toward the diner. “Margaret helped.”

“Margaret? How?”

“She visited me every few months. Said it was part of the job. What bullshit. But she came anyway. We did some heavy lifting, let me tell you.” There's almost a smile. “I mean, God! The talking! Sometimes I wished it would stop, that she'd just go away.” This time, she laughs, though it sounds a little forced. “And I will say this: I got to a place where I could understand where you were coming from, how you might have felt about Gia — no matter what she did, no matter how thoughtless she —”

Her voice catches and she looks away, starts again. “If Ben had apologized, called me back, asked me to . . . I would have done anything for him. I mean, it's so stupid.” She's kicking up so much dust with the toe of her shoe that a small cloud has formed around our feet. “But, yeah,” she says, “pretty much anything. I guess when I think about it that way, I can see how, in that moment . . . Sometimes the line between love and desperation is damn thin.” Boone shakes her head. “You just have to hope you don't have a knife in your hand when you figure that out.” She throws a smile my way that almost cuts me with its sadness. But there's understanding there too.

We've stopped walking, and are near enough to the diner that I can hear the clattering sounds of lunchtime. The sun is so bright that I can't see past the windows' glare to where my parents are probably still standing with Margaret. I wonder if they can see us.

Boone continues. “I guess what I'm trying to say is, after all that, after the months and months of ridiculous soul-searching, I at least got to a place where I no longer wanted to kill you.”

“I'm so sorry,” I say now. “I —”

Boone holds up her hand. “Don't want to kill you,” she says. “Doesn't mean I forgive you.”

I nod, blushing at the tear that makes its way down my cheek. I'd hoped, hoped, hoped. But, I remind myself, I didn't expect.

She reaches out a hand and grabs my shoulder, squeezing tightly, in anger or compassion, I can't tell which. “Margaret's got this thing, this mantra,” Boone says. She makes her voice low and throaty, a good approximation. “
Forgiveness is a work-in-progress.
And you know Margaret. Full of shit half the time, karmic genius the other half.”

“I'll take those odds,” I say.

“I thought you might.” This time, the smile is real.

“So did you and Margaret cook this up, then?” I wipe at my face with the hem of my T-shirt as I fight the briefest blaze of envy. Margaret never visited me. Maybe that was my punishment: to struggle with this alone. Maybe she knew that was the only way I'd work through it all, anyway.

“This trip back to school? No. I mean, it was all Margaret's idea. But I knew about it before you did. I doubt she'd put us in a room together unless she was sure I wouldn't gut you or something.” Boone lifts her palms up. “See? Nothing, not even a pair of scissors.”

There's something about the way she's looking at me. Now, I think. It's time. I swing my backpack around and unzip it. “I have something to show you,” I say. “I made it.”

“Oh, Jesus. Tell me it's not a macaroni necklace or another lanyard.” Boone exhales and laughs drily, clearly ready to lighten the mood, but she stops when she sees the thick manuscript, bound by an industrial clip. “What's this?”

“It's my Thing,” I say.

Boone looks down at it for a long time. When she looks up again, her cheeks are flushed. “You wrote about it?”

“It's all in there,” I say. “Everything. Gia, and Ben, and . . . you.” Maybe she'll laugh, but I don't care. “I want you to have it.”

Boone looks at the first page. Reads the epilogue as I stand there, staring at the diner's weathered door. “Damn,” she says. “You really did write it all down.” She swallows, and I can see that she's trying not to cry. “Okay, then. Okay.” She exhales and looks up at me. “Thanks.”

We both laugh, awkward and relieved. We were never good with moments, and now it has passed.

“Maybe we should just read excerpts to the girls at the school,” I suggest, trying to keep things light. “Take on different voices. Give them some theater.”

“Hmmm,” she says. “Somehow I think it might be more beneficial coming straight from us.” She points to the patch over her eye. “You know — more ‘in your face.' ” Her laugh is soft.

“Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”

Boone nods toward the door, and I grab the knob, but before I've had a chance to turn it, she says, “Hey. Wait.” She holds out the manuscript, points to the first page. “Looks like you took some creative liberties, Townie,” she says, frowning. “It's missing a prologue.”

Behind her, a gust of hot wind sends a holdover from last year's leaves skittering down the road. I inhale deeply. There it is: the distant, familiar scent of the mountains. We're almost there.

“I'll write it,” I say. “I'm writing it now.”

 

 

When I think about an acknowledgments page, the list of people to thank begins to spiral backward, my relationship with each person dependent on an introduction by another, or a conversation, or a situation in which others were involved. So, with that in mind:

My parents and my sister have always supported and encouraged my desire to write, even when I was penning stories with titles like “Sally Needs a Friend.” Thanks, Mom and Dad, for settling in Idaho and forcing me to go to Girl Scout camp with Morgan Cole, whose father, Steve, took me on my first backpacking trip in the Frank Church Wilderness eight years later — an experience without which this book would never have been written. Ruffneck Peak was always in the back of my mind as I wrote. Thanks to Jennifer Purvine, who knows Ruffneck well, and who, as a wildlife biologist for the Salmon-Challis National Forest, answered all of my questions about flora and fauna. Any mistakes or liberties I've made or taken are in no way indicative of her limitless knowledge of the Frank.

There are so many people with whom I've shared experiences in the woods and who've taught me different ways of appreciating wildness: Carrie, Emma, Catherine, Marcus, Mike, Kim, and a Girl Scout camp counselor who went by the nickname Twizzler — you're all in here somewhere. Bradley and Frank Boyden, fearless stewards of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, provided the priceless gift of getting off the grid. I finished the novel at their secluded cabin and encountered a mountain lion, not exactly in that order.

A big thank you to Denise Shannon, my wonderful agent, and to the other first readers of this novel: Morgan, Alexa, MJ, Polly, and Sierra — and to the readers before them, when this novel was just a story in a graduate school workshop: Chris, Drew, Will, Matt, Elaine, and Todd. And speaking of readers and writers, I extend heartfelt gratitude to my college professors Susan Jaret McKinstry and Gregory Blake Smith. I got to know Cheryl Klein in their classes, and long after we'd graduated, she wrote to me in Africa and suggested that I write a book for young adults. Now she's my fantastically insightful editor. Thank you, Cheryl, for sparking the fire of this book over a decade ago, and for tending it with such care and wisdom.

First and finally, my deepest thanks go to Rob, with whom I'll enter any wilderness.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Erin Saldin
grew up in Boise, Idaho, and went on her first backpacking trip in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area at age fourteen. She spent two years with the Peace Corps in West Africa before completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She now lives in Missoula, Montana. Please visit her website at
www.erinsaldin.com
.

 

Text copyright © 2012 by Erin Saldin

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Saldin, Erin.
The girls of No Return / Erin Saldin. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A troubled sixteen-year-old girl attending a wilderness school in the Idaho mountains must finally face the consequences of her complicated friendships with two of the other girls at the school.
ISBN 978-0-545-31026-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-545-31027-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-545-39253-2 (e-book) [1. Emotional problems — Fiction. 2. Schools — Fiction. 3. Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness (Idaho) — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S1494Gi 2012
[Fic] — dc23
2011024214