Chapter 1 Everybody’s Favorite Guy #6
“Take your own gondola,” I said.
The one we were on lurched into motion. “Too late,” Walker said.
There aren’t that many open-air gondolas in the world.
Most are closed with glass windows. This one was like riding in a big bucket with a roof.
I could list multiple ways to accidentally tumble out to your death.
There was no way these things weren’t defying half the safety codes known to man.
But I guess this one—built in the ’70s by a local gondola enthusiast with a dream—got a pass.
All to say, it was legitimately terrifying.
As we swung out into the open air, I felt grateful that Walker was there—if only because my newly rekindled hatred was the only distraction I had.
A little round bench circled the inside of the bucket, and I made myself sit down on it.
Walker watched me. “You look very pale.”
“I have a fear of gondolas.”
“I know that about you.”
I gave him a look like, Don’t act like you know me. “Why are you here?” I asked.
“Because you have a fear of gondolas.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t pretend you’re gallant. You’re just escaping the moms’ wrath.”
“That, too.”
Walker was still standing, like he wasn’t sure where to sit.
“You’re shaking,” Walker said next.
“Correct.”
“Are you cold or scared?”
“Both.”
“Can I come sit next to you?”
He took a step in my direction, but the center of gravity shifted and the bucket tilted.
“Stop!” I said.
Walker read the situation and took a step back. Then he sat down—carefully—directly across from me. “Now we’re balanced,” he said, like he was doing me a favor.
“Did you follow me here?” I asked next.
“I just happened to be going to the same place.”
“Are you hoping to keep fighting? Because I’m done.”
Walker shook his head. “Don’t forget that I, too, have a father in a sandwich bag.”
Fair enough.
It was a fifteen-minute ride to the top. Then five minutes to say goodbye to the two best dads in history. Then a fifteen-minute ride back down. We could be done in an hour. Maybe I’d reserve a hotel room in Denver and drive back tonight, if the rental car still worked.
I could do this.
I kept my eyes on my sneaker laces.
“I do need to tell you something, though,” Walker said.
I shook my head. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
But he kept talking. “This might be the last time I ever see you. And there’s something I have to say.”
I sighed.
“That night,” Walker went on. “The night on that garage roof . . .”
He really didn’t need to clarify which night.
He went on. “I was in love with you that night.”
My head popped up and I met his eyes.
Fear of gondolas? Forgotten.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Walker said. “The whole time. I was thinking, ‘This is love. That’s what this is.’”
All I could do was stare at him. The wind fluttered his collar against his neck.
Walker kept going. “I think it had been love for a while—maybe a long while, but I hadn’t figured out the word for it yet.”
I tried out the words in my mouth. “You . . . loved me?”
Walker looked so sad as he nodded.
I shook my head. “So . . .” I shook my head again. “How did you get from love to . . . study hall?”
Walker took a breath. “Ryan.”
“Ryan?” I frowned.
Walker nodded. “I don’t know if you remember, but only a couple of weeks before that, Ryan was diagnosed with bone cancer.”
“I remember,” I said.
“We used to walk to school together every day, but after he got sick, I started driving him in the mornings instead.”
“I remember,” I said.
“The very next morning, after you and I kissed, I picked Ryan up, and he looked different. He looked—brighter. More alert. It was the first time since his diagnosis that he didn’t seem completely shell-shocked.
I asked him what was up, and he told me three things.
One: They’d just given him a twenty percent chance for survival.
Two: He’d been secretly in love with you since that day we all spent at the beach.
And three: He was going to ask you to junior prom. ”
I let all those pieces click together in my head.
“And then,” Walker said, “Ryan said to me, ‘I think she’s gonna be the thing I have to live for.’”
The rest of the gondola ride went by pretty fast after that.
“You . . .” I tried to put it all together. “You pushed me away so that I would date Ryan?”
“I took myself out of the running.”
“But—like that?”
“I thought you could never like Ryan if you already liked me. So I decided I had to make you hate me.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head.
“At first I was just going to reject you loudly in study hall. But I could tell—even as it was happening—that wasn’t going to be enough. So I improvised.”
“You improvised?”
Walker looked really sorry, but he nodded. “I regretted the words even as I was saying them, if that means anything.”
“You improvised by reminding everybody about my eye—which was so much better at that point that nobody even noticed—and reigniting the nickname Patchy?”
“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
“But it did.”
Walker nodded again. “I did routinely beat up anybody I heard saying it, if that’s of interest.”
I wasn’t sure if it was.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Walker went on. “I know I gave up the chance to be forgiven the minute I did what I did. I didn’t want you to forgive me. That’s why I never even tried. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I’m not looking for that. I just . . . wanted you to know.”
“Know what?”
“That I was sixteen, and my best friend who was like a brother to me had an eighty percent chance of dying. And he wanted you—and I wasn’t going to fight him for you. And I honestly thought that maybe . . . maybe you really could become the thing he had to live for.”
I took that in. Then I said, “So he walked in right after you pulverized my heart, and he asked me to junior prom. And I said yes for revenge. And then he kept asking me out. And we wound up dating for the rest of high school.”
“Yes,” Walker said, confirming the facts.
“And how did you feel about that?”
“I was in agony,” Walker said. “The entire time.”
“But you stayed friends with him,” I said.
“Of course.”
“And we both looked after him,” I said, “and we ignored each other.”
“And then they tried that experimental treatment . . . and he defied all the odds and lived.”
“He defied all the odds and lived,” I agreed. “And then he broke up with me before we went off to college. Which was fine.”
Walker nodded. “And he’s well now.”
“He’s well now,” I agreed. “And I’m so glad about that.”
“Me, too.”
“But I’ll tell you something,” I said. If we were stating the facts, there was one more that needed to go on the record.
“What?” Walker asked.
I held his gaze for a second and let the mountain air swirl all around us. Then I said, “I never loved him back.”
Walker held still. “You didn’t?”
“I liked him,” I said. “I looked after him. I wished him well.”
“You did do all those things. Thank you.”
“But the person I wanted,” I confessed at last, “was you.”
Turnaround Pass was technically big enough for the both of us, but barely.
I made Walker scatter his ashes on the other side of the peak.
I wasn’t still angry at him, exactly. I just needed a moment to myself.
It was a lot to take in. I’d known what Walker had done for so long that I barely remembered not knowing. But I hadn’t known why.
And now it felt like the why might change everything.
Instead, I found a flat rock, and I sat down with my dad, staring at the bag of ashes in my hand.
I hadn’t taken a good look at it until now.
I guess I’d expected something like fireplace ashes—whispery and light.
That’s not what human ashes are like. They’re heavy and grainy and sandy.
They have fragments of bone. When you scatter them, they don’t float up toward the heavens like wishing lanterns.
They succumb to gravity and splatter to the ground—leaving your hand weirdly sticky in the process.
But I put all that off as long as I could.
It was impossible that this bag of ash was my dad—or part of him, anyway. It made no sense.
But this mountain pass? This spring day? This timeless sky? If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel him here.
I’d never been to this pass without my dad.
I’d never been to the cabin without him, either, or these mountains.
The Rockies felt like they were just holding my childhood in their hands.
Memories of my dad floated back to me: Fly-fishing with his bucket hat on.
Hiking in those nubby green socks he loved.
Having the brilliant idea to put pancakes in the waffle maker to make pan-ffles.
He was a great dad. He was good at love.
I used to wonder if maybe he’d loved us too well. If we’d been spoiled by all his warmth and goofiness.
But I’m not sure you can be spoiled by love.
I once read that grief is biological. That each person you love has a set of neurons in your brain tasked with keeping track of that person.
When that person dies, and that person is gone, those neurons don’t know what to do.
They keep searching and searching for their person—even after there’s no one to find.
Eventually, the neurons themselves die out.
That’s what grieving is: letting go of the people we lost, and the parts of ourselves that try to hold on.
And our only consolation is love: Diving back in.
Finding more people. Growing new neurons.
Fearlessly, stubbornly, insistently choosing love over and over—damn the consequences.
There on the rock, as I ignored the love of my life on another rock a hundred feet away, I felt so grateful to my dad. He hadn’t spoiled us, I suddenly knew for certain.
He’d just loved us so well it made losing him worth it.
That night, at bedtime, I went to find Walker down in the bunk room.
He was reclining on his bottom bunk, reading a book about bear attacks.
I perched on the side of the bed, facing him. “Are you reading right now?”