Chapter Seven
The last time Valerie had stood on someone’s shoulders it had been at the Florence + The Machine concert at Northerly Island in Chicago a few years back.
Gustav—the captain of the Mariner’s Chest, an eighty-foot Sunseeker Predator Valerie had worked on for less than a month—had hoisted her onto his shoulders so she could see over the crowd.
But after three hit songs Gustav’s hands had started roaming a little too far up her calves.
Just as the chorus of Dog Days Are Over had made its way across the stadium, Valerie had promptly climbed down, feeling terribly icky.
This time, however, it felt deeply satisfying.
“Stand on your toes or something,” Valerie barked.
She bit at her lip to keep herself from smiling.
But who was she kidding? She was literally standing with her feet planted on Adrienne’s shoulders.
In a way, she was above Adrienne for once.
Out here on this island, social class, wealth, and that silly blue checkmark that somehow made you think you were more significant than everyone else, didn’t matter.
“I can’t!” Adrienne shouted beneath her. Valerie didn’t risk looking down at her face, but she assumed it was scrunched in agony. “And why the hell do you have to be so damn short?”
Beside them, Eden practically shoved Isla over the wall.
Her arms were Hercules-strong. Valerie watched their chances at the reward diminish.
Although they could probably still catch up.
Strangely, she wasn’t feeling that devastated about it.
The mere thought of being trapped alone on a luxury reward with Adrienne was mildly horrifying.
Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense considering Valerie had spent many nights imagining exactly that.
She had pictured herself and Adrienne stretched out on a gingham picnic blanket with a view of frolicking waves, drinking chilled mastiha-infused gin fizzes, eating grilled octopus drizzled with oregano, and talking about how to blindside one of the big threats in the game.
But that was before Adrienne had influenced her game with the whole swap thing, when she’d intervened with Outlast Her’s fate.
Tlingit lore, old fisherman warnings, and the unpredictable nature of the Pacific Northwest had taught Valerie to respect the unseen rules of the world.
She, for one, would never bring a banana aboard a boat.
It was a death sentence. And she’d never ever mock the land otters or speak the name of the Kushtaka, or whistle at the northern lights unless she wanted them to swoop down and take her head off.
When Valerie had picked out that orange stone, she’d played along with the universe.
She’d done everything right. Orange was the color of the sun after all and wasn’t the sun the exact meaning of new life?
Wasn’t that the sign of new beginnings; of growth?
Orange had felt like her second chance. A chance Adrienne had taken from her.
“I’m not that short!” Valerie huffed back.
Then she pushed her weight down against Adrienne’s shoulders and launched herself up. Her fingers gripped the side of the ledge, and for one terrifying second, her shoes scraped uselessly against the wall before she managed to swing a knee over the top platform.
“THROW THE ROPE!” Adrienne called impatiently from below.
Valerie was just about to do that. But Adrienne shouting at her was irksome.
Which was why Valerie grabbed the coiled rope lying on the platform, tossed it over the side of the wall, and then, because she was being petty, she jumped off the platform and let Adrienne maneuver up the wall all by herself.
Clearly, that was the opposite of camaraderie.
It was possible that the viewers would think she was being an unsupportive teammate.
Did Valerie care? Yes. But just enough for her to glance back over her shoulder.
And she was glad she had. The way Adrienne scrambled over the wall, well, Valerie couldn’t exactly stop herself from grinning.
The sleek, manicured influencer whose entire Instagram profile was perfectly curated was suddenly reduced to a scrambling, wide-eyed mess.
She looked like a cat trying to escape a bath, and Valerie savored every second of it.
“What the hell?” Adrienne spluttered when she caught up. Her breath was ragged and her honey-blonde hair was dark and matted to her forehead. “You could’ve helped me.”
“Oh,” Valerie said sweetly. “I’m so sorry, I thought I was too short to help.” She was well aware that she was acting like a child. A petty, petulant child for that matter, but she couldn’t help it. Nor could she help the little satisfying spin she did before she raced toward the next station.
The hamster wheel was a monstrous, open-faced cylinder made of thick timber and iron brackets.
It sat suspended inside a long but shallow track filled with ankle-deep water, and as Vivian explained, each pair would have to stand side-by-side and work together to push the wheel to the other side.
Which was a lot harder than Valerie had expected.
At first, nothing happened. The hamster wheel didn’t budge even an inch.
Valerie threw her weight forward, her palms pressing against the rough wood above her head until her shoulder blades burned.
Beside her, Adrienne dug her manicured nails into the slats.
She had her teeth bared. Valerie caught sight of her briefly.
Then Adrienne turned toward her, and Valerie couldn’t snap her head away fast enough.
Instead, she focused on the other contestants.
Sienna and Tamera were already at the rope swing.
Close behind them, finishing off the hamster wheel, were Eden and Isla.
Amy and Niko were the only ones behind them.
But where did that put Carmen and Safiya, or Hallie and Stevie?
Valerie was just about to whip her head around to look when Adrienne shouted, “PUSH!”
Irked, Valerie countered, “I am pushing. You push.”
“If I push any harder, my eyeballs are going to pop out of my head.”
Valerie had to admit that was somewhat funny. She didn’t think Adrienne had it in her to be funny. In fact, she’d assumed the only humor Adrienne possessed was mean and usually targeted at people who didn’t have the latest Fendi Spy.
“EDEN AND ISLA HAVE ONE MORE PUZZLE PIECE TO COLLECT!” Vivian called.
She was standing off to the side of the course, her eyes covered by her tortoiseshell sunglasses to ward off the intense sun.
And the sun was intense. Valerie could feel its heat through the slats.
“HALLIE AND STEVIE ARE PASSING AMY AND NIKO!”
“PUSH!” Adrienne called again. This time Valerie didn’t fight her, she pushed as hard as a woman during childbirth, and then, slowly, reluctantly, the wheel began to move.
And move it did, albeit slowly.
By the time they got to the other side, Adrienne’s face flushed a violent, blotchy red. Valerie imagined she looked just as bad. Her face was hot. Her back was screaming, and when the wheel hit the end of the trench, she couldn’t scramble out of it fast enough.
Immediately Adrienne bent forward. She had her hands on her knees and was breathing hard.
“I’m seeing stars,” she muttered, her head hanging low enough for that blotchy red to turn purple.
“I don’t think I can go any further. It’s not like we’re going to win the reward anyway.
” Then she pushed herself up straight enough for the purple to drain away.
“Eden and Isla are way ahead of us. They’re going to finish that puzzle and—”
“We’re not quitting,” Valerie said. Her breath had evened to a manageable rhythm.
“Why not?” Adrienne snapped back. She shot Valerie a look that Valerie should’ve seen coming.
Wasn’t everything building up to this anyway?
Wasn’t this the actual elephant in the room, so to speak?
Everyone else was probably thinking it, but Adrienne was the only one to have the guts to say it out loud.
“It’s not like you haven’t done it before. ”
But even so, Valerie felt the words like a blow to the face. She drew air into lungs that suddenly felt too small. “I didn’t quit that challenge.”
And it was the truth. Just because she’d stepped down the ledge without crumpling to the ground like everyone else hadn’t meant that she’d stepped off willingly.
But people didn’t seem to believe her when she said her body had moved of its own accord.
That one second she was deep in concentration, and the next her foot was on the sand, and Vivian was shouting that she and her teammate were no longer in the game.
“Then what happened if you didn’t quit?” Adrienne said, looking at her with eyes so dark blue they might as well have been the freezing, bottomless depth of the Gulf of Alaska. “Because we all saw it. We all saw you step down and quit.”
“Fine,” Valerie relented. Because admitting that was easier than admitting that after standing on that beam, balancing those water-logged buckets for what felt like too long, she’d experienced a vision.
She’d seen Harriet in her prime, spinning barefoot around their backyard, a fireweed tucked behind her ear while she laughingly twirled a yellow silk scarf around her head like a ribbon dancer.
Then the vision had changed. Suddenly Valerie was sixteen again, standing in her mother’s hair salon when she witnessed her mother’s knees buckle, watched her fall against a rolling metal cart, plastic hair rollers scattering across the linoleum floor.
Then remission. Then not. Then her mother walking slowly down the grocery aisle, one hand braced against the cart.
Her mother needing to sit halfway up the harbor steps because she was too breathless to continue.
Her mother in that awful chair. That pained smile.
And then the worst part. Valerie had watched Harriet walk toward her across that beach.
But she was younger, her skin sun-warmed, her cheeks rosy, and hair loose and wind-tossed the way it used to be.
Behind her, large ethereal wings had unfurled, and then Harriet wasn’t so much walking as drifting backward, the tide pulling around her ankles.
Valerie had instinctively stepped toward the vision of her mother. Not because she wanted to go with her. Because she wanted to stop her from leaving forever.
How could she possibly explain that to anyone? She couldn’t. Which was why she opened her mouth to say something else. Anything else. But before she could, Vivian’s voice thundered, “EDEN AND ISLA WIN THE FIRST SEASON TEN REWARD CHALLENGE!”