I duck inside, my heart pounding. Those aren’t dudes who live on the mountain all season, those are kids from our trip. Wistfulness overwhelms me. If I could see like everyone else, Imight be there with them right now, trying weed for the first time with my more mature boyfriend, feeling like I belong to that group through mutual mischief. I shake my head. No. A change in my medical status wouldn’t change the fact that Richard is a self-absorbed waste of an Oxford shirt. Mason was so right. Richard is a massive dick.
Inside the lodge, I think about finding one of our chaperones and telling them I need to get to a doctor and find out what is happening with my eyes. But I’m so unbearably tired that the thought of all the explaining, all the words I would have to come up with to communicate my situation, makes me start to tear up again in frustration. Plus, what is a doctor going to say to me if they do examine me? “Oh my gosh, you’re right, you do have an emergency, it appears that you are going blind?!” I already fucking know that. And I don’t want to hear it again.
Luckily, my room is empty. I strip off my jacket and snow pants and leave them in a drippy pile on the thin carpeting that looks like it’s been through decades of drippy piles. I burrow underneath the covers of my bed, arranging the pillows to make my little nest. There aren’t enough pillows, so I borrow some from Amanda’s bed, just for a few minutes. I stretch my legs out and wiggle my toes through the pinprick sensation of my feet thawing out. There’s a strange looseness in my jaw, and the skin across my forehead becomes smooth. Holy crap—I’m calm. This is the first moment in the last twelve hours when I haven’t been performing, trying to do the right thing, trying to say the right thing, trying on top of trying. Now everything has crashed andburned. There is nothing left to prove. This afternoon, Richard said my legs got sore because I was fighting the mountain. But it seems like there are mountains in every aspect of my life. And I don’t want to fight them anymore.
I’m starting to drift off when I hear the sound of someone punching in the door code. Amanda bursts in and flips on the lights. She jumps, surprised to see me.
“What are you doing in here? Everyone’s hanging out,” she says.
I feel self-conscious, hoping she doesn’t notice that I’ve stolen her pillows and tucked them under each knee pit.
“I’m toast. My bed has ordered me to hang in.”
She frowns. “Are you sure? You’re going to waste a night away from parents by going to sleep early?”
It does sound pretty weak when she puts it that way. My instinct is to think that she’s trying to make me feel like a loser, but her tone says otherwise. She’s just pointing out the obvious.
I shrug. “This is literally the first time I’ve felt warm all day.” This is true, but what’s truer is that this is the only place I can think of where the fact that everything appears slightly smudged won’t put me in danger of embarrassment or injury.
She puts her hand on her hip, looking like she’s trying to decide whether to reach under the blankets and pull me out of bed by my ankles. One thing I’m realizing about Amanda is that she is stubborn.
“Hold on a sec,” she says, and disappears back into the hallway.
A minute later, I hear the beeps of the keypad again and Amanda is there holding the necks of two bottles of beer in her left hand. She puts them on the nightstand and starts screwing off the caps.
“Oh, no thanks,” I say before she can open the second bottle. “I don’t really like beer.”
She pauses for a second, then unscrews the second cap anyway. “That’s okay. Neither do I. But my therapist says it’s important to mark special occasions, you know? So let’s toast. To freedom,” she says, holding her bottle aloft.
I hold mine up, too, since that appears to be the only option. “To freedom,” I say. But I’m not free, I’m trapped. Trapped on a trip with someone who is now my ex, trapped in unfamiliar surroundings while my eyes shut down on me, trapped inside my head with all my secrets. I feel more closed in than when my parents make me stay home playing Trivial Pursuit with them on Christmas Eve.
I still haven’t put the bottle to my lips, so Amanda clunks the bottom of her bottle down onto the mouth of mine, making it fizz and overflow. I rush to suck it down before it soaks the bed. She nods and takes a long drink.
“Yep, still gross, but in a good way, you know? Like coffee ice cream.”
I want to say,No, Amanda, I don’t freaking know.But I don’t. Instead, I say, “What made you start seeing a therapist?” Probably too private, but she brought it up.
The bubbles from the beer seem to travel all the way downthe length of my body and are now bouncing and tingling in my feet. It’s sort of nice.
“Nothing revolutionary,” she says. She puts her beer on the table, then kicks off her boots and unzips her fleece. “Just your typical ‘parents hate each other, parents get divorce, parents need to feel better about messing up their kids so they put them in therapy’ sort of situation.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I like it. The therapy. And the fact that there’s no more fighting. I like that, too.”
I’ve never thought of Amanda at home before, with her own life and her own problems. “I’m sort of hiding out tonight,” I confess.
“Ooh, from who? What’s going on?” Amanda uses the heels of her hands to hoist her butt up onto the dresser, then sits cross-legged next to the beer bottle.
My eyes start swimming even thinking about saying his name out loud. I can’t cry about something so stupid when Amanda has just told me her parents got divorced. I wave my hand dismissively as I blink back the tears. “Oh, you know. Richard.”
She’s silent for a moment, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s inwardly thrilled. “Wow. You guys seemed so cozy on the bus.”
So shedidabsorb more of our canoodling than she let on. Was that really just this morning that I was trying to rub it in Amanda’s face how hot and heavy Richard and I were? I gulp a few swallows of beer and try to pretend I’m already in the phasewhere my fiery wreck of a love life is just a memory, material for a funny story. “Things change,” I say.
I can’t make out her exact expression. Is she confused? Inwardly laughing at me? Already thinking about sinking her hungry teeth into him? Whatever. I shouldn’t care anyway, right? I’m so done with him.
“You can have him,” I say before I even realize the words are coming out of my mouth. “I mean, if you want to get with him, it’s fine with me. I know you guys are close.”
