Chapter 19 #2
“I’ll show you to the pool,” Caleb tells them, and I feel a pang of jealousy.
Of course he doesn’t want to come with me.
I totally rejected him last night after he borderline risked his job to sneak me out to the lagoon.
I’ll be lucky if he says another word to me this whole trip. Which is exactly what I wanted.
Right?
“Looks like it’s just the four of us!” Arthur declares proudly. Beneath his hiking shorts, his spindly, pale legs are already wobbling. How he’s going to manage this hill without a jet propeller, I have no idea.
The trailhead for the hike is well-marked, including placards to mark each of the edible fruits and herbs along the way.
We see yam and taro plants as we climb: even the promised guava tree Caleb was looking for in the forest. I turn around to make some moderately clever joke about it before remembering that he’s not there, and my stomach sinks.
But why do I care? I was the one who pushed Caleb away.
I’m the one who told him I didn’t feel a thing for him.
“It’s invasive,” I tell Jules as she plucks a fruit from the tree. She looks at me sideways as she bites into the sweet, pink flesh.
“Since when are you an expert on Fijian flora?”
“I… read it in on a plaque.”
Jules ignores my half-hearted answer, but I’m not convinced.
Why do I care that Caleb’s not here? When I’m around Caleb, I’m easily triggered.
I’m insolent. Gutsy. Unfiltered. It’s like a faucet’s been turned on in my brain that I can’t seem to switch off—something I thought I locked up after Dad died.
The switch that tells me to keep my head down.
To focus on nothing but accomplishment. To avoid conflict at all costs.
But when I’m with Caleb, I don’t want to filter myself.
It’s like the person I was once, before I threw myself into creating the life I thought would keep me safe, is starting to come back.
If Caleb won’t talk to me anymore, will I lose that too?
By the time we reach the final switchback, we’re all a little out of breath. The only one who isn’t is Arthur, who motors to the top of the hill like a man half his age.
“C’mon, slowpokes!” he calls to us from fifty feet ahead as we stop to check out an orchid the size of my fist hanging from one of the trees. “Cats to kill, contracts to fill!”
“Ugh, Dad. I hate that expression,” Harry mutters as we step back onto the trail. But in a few moments, we see why Arthur was so anxious to get going.
The lookout point at the top of the trail stretches out over the ocean, offering a sweeping view of Mamanuca’s crescent-shaped beach and the islands that surround it.
In the distance, sailboats skirt across the water, hugging the wind as they fly towards new anchorages.
Behind us, a small wooden pavilion decorated with shells of all sizes presides over the picturesque scene below.
I stare, awestruck, wishing I could bottle up this view and take it home with me.
“Well,” Arthur rubs his hands together beside me. He’s finished this task, and it’s time to check the next thing off the list. “Shall we?”
“Dad, don’t you want to enjoy the view?” Harry asks.
Arthur pulls out his iPhone with shaking hands and snaps a lopsided picture of the viewpoint.
“There. Consider it enjoyed. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a daiquiri down at the pool with my name on it.”
Arthur extends his walking poles and turns back towards the trail with no further discussion.
“Guess that’s that!” Jules says, linking her arm in Harry’s. “Ready for some pool time, Stelly?”
“You guys go,” I tell them. “I’m going to wait up here a while.”
I can’t bear to leave this lookout just yet—not when I only have five more days before my view reverts to the graffitied dumpsters out back of Mickey’s Pub.
“You sure? You heard what Tracy said about the rain.”
I look up. Still not a cloud in sight.
“I’m fine, Jules. Thirty minutes max, then I’ll come back and join you.”
This seems to satisfy them, because after a few cute couple pics, they all head back down the hill and leave me to my hermiting.
As soon as they’re safely out of sight, I survey the cliffside for a good place to sit and settle on a landing a few yards ahead that looks down into the bowl of the island.
The rock face I scramble up to get there is slick and mossy: wet with the trickle of some hidden spring that’s leaking down through the stones.
Strange birds call out from the trees down below me.
One of them, a teal-feathered finch with a head the color of Patricia’s ruby tennis bracelet, flits over from the trees and comes to rest on one of the bushes just below my feet.
I reach for my phone, hoping to capture it before it disappears.
But it flits away just as I have the phone in my hand.
An email notification dings on my screen. I guess all I had to do to get service was elevate myself by a few hundred feet. I’m about to stick it back in my pocket when I realize the email is from Dr. Rivera.
My heart flies into my chest. When I last spoke to her a month ago, she told me I wouldn’t be hearing from her until spring. Is she just checking in, or—I try to temper my excitement—does the department want me back?
I open the email.
Dear Stella,
I trust this email finds you well and rested!
I’m reaching out because I just finished reviewing this new chapter of your dissertation.
While I had high hopes for this next phase of your work, I’m sorry to say that I was a little disappointed in the material.
I know this isn’t the feedback you were hoping for, but I wanted to catch you before you continued to put more effort into this new direction.
My heart sinks like a week-old jack-o-lantern.
I’d almost forgotten about the new chapter I sent her before I left.
I scan the rest of the email, my eyes catching on words like “derivative” and “uninspired.” The moral of the story?
The two-hundred page behemoth I’ve been working on for the last two years is still total garbage.
Just. Like. Me.
I keep reading in a half daze, my chest constricting as if by python.
Not only am I suspended until May, but even if I do get my job back, I might have to scrap pretty much everything I’ve been working on for the last year.
More long nights. More endless hours of research under the library’s fluorescent lights.
More precious moments of my life spent building something I haven’t been excited about in years.
A pitiful, strangled yelp escapes my throat as I start to cry.
Not cute crying, but full-on sobs: the kind that rack your body so hard your abs hurt when you’re done.
But the tears that spill over my cheekbones aren’t tears of grief or even self-pity.
They’re tears of hopelessness. Tears of overwhelming frustration.
Of realizing I’ve wasted the last three years of my life on a dream so old I’m not even sure where it came from.
I’m slowly losing everything I’ve worked so hard for.
Everything I promised my dad I would do.
Anger swells in my body, and before I have time to think it through, I lift my phone and hurl it over the cliff edge with as much force as humanly possible.
I watch in horror and fascination as it catches a shrub about ten feet down, depriving me of the satisfying crunch of ruptured technology.
I stare at it. I feel better for a grand total of ten seconds before I’m hit with the realization that A.
Its replacement costs a thousand dollars I don’t have and B.
I’m now responsible for releasing a toxic phone battery into an ecologically flawless environment.
Shit.
I drop a foot off the cliff’s edge, lowering myself with my hands to see if I can reach the ledge below.
The good news is I’m tall enough to reach it.
The bad news is it’s not stone, but dirt.
As soon as I set my weight on it, the ledge crumbles beneath my foot, catapulting me into the bush below.
I scramble at the rock face to try and grab for something, but all that accomplishes is scraping my palm before I drop into the foliage.
It almost breaks my fall, but I feel something crunch below me as I hit.
I reach under my butt to make sure it isn’t my tailbone.
It’s not. Unfortunately, it is the shattered and now completely non-functional corpse of my phone.
A huge tear I didn’t realize I’d shed splats onto my phone’s surface, obscuring the cracks spidering along its surface.
Another hits me in the shoulder. Rain. I have just enough time to tilt my head back to see the newly formed clouds before water begins pouring from the sky without a hint of subtlety.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Worse, I don’t see any way to climb back to the top of the cliff, especially now that the stone is slicked with rain.
I’m going to die here. RIP Stella Olsen. Jobless, chronically single, and vaguely reminiscent of a drowned rat.
Could this day get any worse?
“Stella!”
Apparently the answer is yes.
I don’t need to see him to know who the voice is coming from, but Caleb pops his stupidly cute face over the ledge just to make sure. If my track record for self-control wasn’t already iffy, I’d punch the rock.
“Are you alright?” he calls down, and I brace myself for whatever lecture on safety or stupidity he’s about to hit me with.
“Peachy,” I growl.
“Just showing off, then?”
He swings his leg over the ledge, lowering himself down towards me. What is he doing here?
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” he calls down, clearly exasperated.
“I’m fine,” I practically shout. “Just let me do this.”