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“Yeah, you were,” he tells me.
“Holden, I’m serious. If you think it’s not safe for me to climb, do you really think I want—”
He starts climbing, a loud rattle echoing through the night air as more space stretches between him and the ground.
“Holden!”
His chuckle is the only response.
It only takes him a couple of minutes to reach the top.
My heart races for every single second of them.
“You were right,” he calls down. “The view’s great from up here.”
I exhale. He still has to make it down, but that seems much more likely now that he made it up there unscathed.
“You coming?”
I eye the rusty ladder. Yeah, this was my idea. And it now seems like a bad one.
“Get your ass up here, Nolan!”
I trust Holden completely. If he says it’s safe, I believe him.
I slip his coat on. The smell of cinnamon surrounds me as I walk toward the ladder and take a deep breath. Glance up, at what looks like a very long climb.
There’s nothing wrong with being cautious. But I’ve felt a little more reckless lately.
Maybe it’s being a senior, knowing next year my life will drastically change.
Maybe it’s the way my family is fracturing and I can’t do anything about it.
Whatever the reason, I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing. Comfort zones can be as constricting as they are reassuring.
It takes me longer to climb than it took Holden, but I make it.
And the view from the topisamazing. It reminds me a little of our hike on the camping trip, seeing so much land stretching around. Dark forest stretches in one direction, the twinkling lights of the town and the university in the other.
I offer Holden his coat back but he tells me to keep it, his eyes darkening to navy the way they often do whenever he sees me wearing something of his.
We stand and stare at the view for a while before Holden’s phone begins buzzing.
“Finn is wondering where we are,” he tells me. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah,” I agree.
Holden heads down and I’m right behind him. I’m not sure he couldactuallycatch me if I lost my grip or a rung suddenly crumbled, but that’s what I tell myself the whole trip down.
We retrace the dirt path that led from downtown here, the path hard to see now that the sun is almost gone.
I can see the lights of the town through the trees. That’s what I’m focused on, when three guys suddenly appear on the path in front of us. There’s an opening to the left that leads to a clearing—almost a park, but not really—that they must have come from.
They’re high, by the smell of it, and a couple are also holding beer bottles.
Holden immediately tenses, so I do too.
“Wassup?” one asks, grinning at us.
