Chapter 10 The Edge of the World
On Saturday, I realized hike had been a very strong word for what Victoria actually wanted to do.
She should have said stroll, because there were no gigantic boulders to climb, no teetering precipices, and no rickety rope bridges.
There was only a trail of hard-packed dirt with bare trees rising up on either side.
Huge relief. Even though our local mountains weren’t humongous, my ears had popped on the drive up, and I could feel the slightly thinner air from the elevation. I was not ready to fight for my life up here.
“So,” Victoria said once we were several yards down the trail, “how has it been?”
My first instinct was to brush off the question, but … she deserved an honest answer for being so supportive.
“It’s been good having a couple days off,” I said at last, “but Wednesday sucked, and Monday is going to suck, too. It’s hard walking into a room and hearing everyone go quiet. Knowing they were talking about me. Knowing I probably deserve it.”
Victoria nodded. “I know your ex-friends are posting mean texts written by other people, not just you, to try to make it look like it’s not them running the scroll. But people will see the truth eventually—that it’s the Four Takes targeting you.”
“Maybe.” I tugged my hat down to my eyebrows. “But does it really matter? I did say all that crap. People are right to be mad at me. And maybe I just have to take it.”
Victoria said nothing.
Eventually, we rounded a bend in the trail. Ahead, the sky was huge and blue, with a red-gold wall of sunlit mountain on one side and a breathtaking view of the valley on the other. Our trail was a dusty ribbon between.
I pulled out my phone and knelt, angling the camera so the trail snaked up the center. Then I snapped several photos—one just as Victoria was stepping into the frame.
She looked back at me. “What are you doing?”
I took another photo before I locked my phone. “Documenting our adventure.”
“Okay, weirdo.” She waited for me to catch up before she started walking again. “So, no one’s actually hassling you, right? If Mom and Dad need to take steps …”
“No, just a couple people texting to tell me how mean I am. I can ignore them. Anyway, the things I said …”
“You said some cruel things. But I know you regret it.”
My heart clenched, but I nodded.
We’d finally gone over all this with Mom and Dad the other night.
They’d been disappointed in me—and they weren’t shy about saying so multiple times—but they’d been much more concerned about the scroll.
Dad had said it was online bullying and the school should put a stop to it.
Mom had reminded him that the school couldn’t regulate students’ social media when it wasn’t for a class.
And Victoria had pointed out that it was really up to Scrollr whether “Deer Hill Dirt” violated community guidelines.
They’d all agreed that we should report the scroll, so Victoria did it. But she got a response that it could take a few weeks for them to look at it.
It was nice she’d tried.
As disappointed as they were, Mom and Dad moved on pretty quickly.
There’d been Thanksgiving to think about (always a small affair at our house, but there was plenty of pie!).
And they had the basement crack to worry about.
A guy was supposed to come over next week to tell them what it would cost to fix it, and now they talked about it even more.
So in a way, I was grateful to the basement crack for taking the heat off me.
“I keep picking up my phone to check Scrollr,” I admitted as our shoes crunched the trail. “I didn’t think quitting would be so hard. I guess I was checking it a lot.”
“Gotta keep that brain drenched in dopamine.” Victoria grinned.
“Do you remember when I was on Scrollr? I looked at it all the time. That’s actually why I quit.
I’d started looking at it while I was talking to other people.
Like, right in front of them, I’d pull out my phone and check Scrollr.
I felt horrible when someone pointed it out. I was prioritizing the wrong thing.”
To be fair to me, I couldn’t remember ever looking at my phone when I was with other people. But wow did I reach for it when I was even the slightest bit bored.
Finally, we came to a steep drop-off. There was only a waist-high wooden barrier between us and the edge of the world.
“Can I take your picture there?” I motioned at the rail. “Gaze over the valley or something.”
She shot me a look, like she was trying to figure out if this was a trick. But she agreed, and I found a spot where I could snap both her and a huge tree nearby.
“Is this good?” She rested one hand on the rail and contemplated the world below.
“Yeah. Move around a bit. Try to look natural. Or something.” I took several photos while she shifted her weight to one hip, looked over her shoulder, and pointed at something nonexistent in the distance. “Okay, that’s good. I’ll look at these later.”
She hurried back to the trail. “Good. Being that close to the edge was making me nervous.”
“Really? You’re scared of heights?”
“Uh, yeah. Go look.”
I went to the barrier and peered over the edge. It was a straight line down. Quickly, I backed up. “They just let people wander here on their own!?”
“I think they expect visitors to understand how gravity works.”
“That is a lot of trust to put in the public.”
“I know. Welcome to the wilderness!” She gestured to a huge gash on a tree. Like claws had taken a swipe at it. Bear claws.
Oh yeah. This park was home to major wild animals, as well as potential gravity accidents. That had been easy to forget while moseying along a nice trail. I snapped a picture of the claw marks and we kept moseying.
“So, what’s with the photos?” Victoria asked.
I bit my lip. After all the trouble photography had gotten me into, I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about my attempts at it with anyone besides Knight.
He’d liked all my photos so far—first the red leaves, then train tracks, and yesterday, a motion-blurred woodpecker flying away from a bird feeder.
The bird had only been a streak of black and white wings, and the rest of the photo was in focus, but after I’d spent time editing it, I’d decided I liked the effect.
It was cool, even though it wasn’t what I’d intended.
But Victoria was my sister. And I wanted to be a kinder person.
“I’m trying it out,” I said after a minute. “Photography, I mean. It seems fun.”
“Can I see your pictures?”
“I guess. When we sit down.” As we entered the woods again, I kept an eye out for something interesting to capture. “Jess always seemed happy taking photos. Hers are magical, like that’s how she sees the world.”
“Are you looking for that, too?”
“Maybe.” I frowned. “I’m trying to figure out if I’m any good at it. It feels kind of like weaving used to feel—a technical challenge, but also kind of … intuitive. Like, yes, there are rules, but you also have to trust your gut about what works.”
“That’s a cool way to think about it.” She kicked a rock off the path and into the brush. “So that’s why you’re taking so many pictures now? Practice?”
“Well, sort of. Don’t freak out, but …”
“I love it when you start stories that way.”
“I texted my text-door neighbor. Like, the meme? Text-door neighbor?”
“Wait.” She tilted her head. “Are you safe? Should I call the police?”
“Yeah. And no. He’s thirteen, like me. We proved it.”
“Virginia …”
I explained about the book and note selfies. “So it’s fine. And since I’m trying out photography, I send Knight a picture every day. He even draws for me. Look!” I pulled up his first piece—the cat in the box.
Victoria’s suspicious glare cracked into a small smile. “That’s really cute, actually.” She quickly put on her stern expression again. “But we’re going to talk to Mom and Dad about this. They need to speak with his parents.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I don’t trust strangers.”
I was about to protest—Knight was my future best friend!—but it was fair to say there were some questions I couldn’t answer. Like his first name.
I texted him.
Me:
I don’t think our friendship is weird
The progress bar crept up and hung. Cell service was not one of the wonders of our national park.
Victoria motioned for me to keep walking. “For now, I want to hear more about your photos. What kind of things are you taking pictures of? Besides me dangling off a cliff.”
I shrugged. “I’m still trying things out. People. Nature. People in nature.” I glanced around, spotting a cool pile of rocks. “Something like that, maybe. The videos I watched told me to look for interesting objects, then find a way to show them off. Like, with light or contrast.”
“So how would you photograph those rocks?”
I circled the pile, looking for a way to frame it. “I don’t know,” I said after a minute. “I mean, I’m sure there’s a good photo there. I just don’t know how to find it.”
“What did you like about it to start with?” Victoria asked. “What made you notice that pile of rocks?”
“It looks like … a cat.” I bent down, one knee on the ground. “If you look at it from this angle, you can see how it’s sitting.”
Victoria came to crouch beside me. “It looks like Zooms when she’s perched by her bowl, waiting for someone to feed her.”
“Exactly!” I looked at the rocks through my phone’s camera. Sure, it looked like a cat there, too, but there wasn’t anything special about it.
But then, a beam of golden light shot through the trees, illuminating the rocks so they glowed. Before I could even think about it, I snapped several times, shifting to slightly different angles as I did. The sunbeam was gone just as quickly as it had appeared.
“Whoa,” Victoria said. “That was amazing.”
I looked at her, grinning. “Yes it was.”
Later, we stopped at a picnic area near the car. While we ate turkey sandwiches and leftover pumpkin pie, I edited the photos I’d taken during our so-called hike.
The one where Victoria had stepped into the frame just as I was shooting had turned out really cool.
Her shadow was a slender wraith against a rock wall.
And there were a few at the overlook that looked so nice, I couldn’t believe I’d taken them.
Maybe it was because I’d followed all the suggestions for using the on-screen grid and finding something to frame her with.
(The pros knew what they were talking about. Wild stuff.)
After lunch, we hiked a different trail, this one with a narrow waterfall and an overlook that, uh, overlooked Deer Hill. In addition to a few more photos, I got a bug bite, a cramp in my left foot, and some burrs in my hair. I wasn’t cut out for the great outdoors.
It was almost dark when we got back to the car.
Victoria fired up the heater and put on a playlist she called “Dance Until Your Brains Fall Out,” and then we were driving down the mountain with the music blasting while we sang along.
I’d never tell Victoria, but it had actually been a really nice day.
Maybe … maybe I hadn’t been giving her enough credit before.
At the base of the mountain, my phone buzzed half a dozen times with incoming texts, which had been delayed in the wildlands of no signal. The first one was from Knight, responding to my earlier text.
Knight Errant:
Yeah I think this situation is very normal
Unfortunately, the rest of the texts were bad news for the cat in the box.