Robby disappeared around a bend fifty feet in front of her. Will was already well ahead. Allison was just as fit as either of them, if not more so—she ran every day and took Pilates twice a week—but her legs were shorter, and now she was alone with Sitka spruce and sword fern, the sound of the ocean still far off, though she guessed she’d emerge from the woods soon enough to a view of water crashing onto rocks below.
“Come on, A.J.,” Will called. “Keep up.”
She’d known he’d do this to her even before they made it to the trailhead and would have wondered why she’d agreed to come if she didn’t already know, hadn’t since the moment he mentioned Robby. “He’s never hiked out on the coast,” Will had said on the phone, and even before he asked if she wanted to join them, she’d already determined to invite herself. Robby and Will—her older brother by four years—had been roommates at George Washington, where Allison had visited once before her junior year of high school and again for Will’s graduation. She’d just been a kid then, and Robby hadn’t paid much attention to her, but she was instantly taken with his fine sandy hair and long fingers, his boyish face and hairy shins in cutoff cargo pants. Now Will had moved back to Portland, and Robby, originally from Virginia, had come with him. They shared a rented two-story Craftsman she hadn’t yet seen, along with two other boys, in a funky Southeast neighborhood sporting dozens of bars, a pair of indie music venues, and a crumbling second-run movie theater. Robby had scored a job with an ad agency, while Will worked the cheese counter at a food co-op.
Allison wished Will wouldn’t call her A.J., at least not in front of Robby. That’s what Robby called her now, too. The initials were too androgynous, she thought, too childish, and she was no longer a kid. She’d just finished her freshman year at Claremont and had come home for the summer, living back in her old room in her parents’ dull house in Multnomah Village. She needed a job or an internship or something, but first she just needed some time to clear her head, though what filled it now, instead of the various dramas at school, the stress of papers and exams, was Robby and the possibility of a summer romance, or at least a summer diversion. She didn’t want a boyfriend—she’d tried that briefly during spring semester and found it mostly exhausting—just a month or two of thrills to re-energize her for the year to come.
“A.J.!” Will called again. “Quit lagging.”
She puffed up a steep slope where spruce roots made a sort of staircase and caught a quick glimpse of Robby’s back before he disappeared again behind another massive trunk. Will would always treat her like a child, no matter how old she was. That was the privilege of being born first. But she was nineteen now, a woman with a bit of experience—she’d seen three men naked this year and had slept with two of them—and she wanted Robby to recognize it even if Will never would. Their whole lives he’d been running ahead of her on trails, showing off for their father, whose knees were too shot now to walk farther than down the block to their neighborhood park. He’d always made her feel small in front of his friends, but now she had other ways of hooking those friends’ interest. She’d use them as soon as she could.
And that might be sooner than she’d thought, because Robby had paused for breath at the top of the rise, leaning against a tree with one hand and stretching his quads by pulling a foot up with the other. It was mid-May and still cold, but he’d worn shorts, and once more she admired his hairy legs and the hard balls of his calves as she hurried to catch up with him. She wished she, too, had worn something that would show off her assets, but she’d known it would likely rain at some point during the hike so had donned her most unflattering outfit, thick-soled boots and baggy nylon pants, a windbreaker flapping around her chest.
“I don’t know why he doesn’t wait for us,” Robby said. His voice was deeper than she remembered, though also a little whiny, the lift of a question at the end of his statement. She could enjoy the sound of it for the summer, she supposed, though probably not any longer.
“He likes to show off.”
“He might as well just hike on his own.”
“At least we can walk together,” Allison said, trying to inflect the words with a hint of flirtation, or maybe seduction, neither of which came naturally to her. The two boys she’d slept with last year had made all the moves, and she’d just gone along both times, taken by surprise and somewhat bewildered by what was happening. By the time she realized the second one thought of himself as her boyfriend, she was too embarrassed to tell him she wasn’t especially attracted to him. So she stayed with him until he started sleeping with another girl down the hall and, after she found out, told her he was too young to be tied down.
Now she was ready to take charge, make her own choices, and she’d start with Robby, though up close his skin was oilier than she’d pictured, a splash of acne on his neck she was surprised he hadn’t gotten under control at twenty-three. He was also skinnier than she preferred, less athletic, and he was sweating hard though they’d come only two miles so far. Still, he would be good practice if nothing else, and feeling a sudden surge of boldness—perhaps because she didn’t think she had much to lose—she grabbed his arm and pulled him forward.
“We’re almost to the first viewpoint,” she said. “You won’t want to miss it.”
“I hiked a lot as a kid,” he said, still breathing hard though he’d been resting for more than a minute. “In the Blue Ridge. But the trails we went on didn’t climb so much.”
“You’ll get used to the slopes. Just takes a few times out.”
“I should have told him I wanted to start with an easy one.”
“He would have taken you here anyway,” she said. “And then made fun of you for thinking this was hard.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“The really steep part’s at the very end. But you don’t need to go to the top to get the best views. And sometimes you can see a heard of elk on the lower headland.”
He looked skeptical but came along as she nudged him forward. He kept craning his neck to spot Will ahead, hoping, she supposed, that he’d stop and wait. But she knew he’d wait only at the summit and then laugh at them for taking so long. Why anyone would want to hike with him she didn’t know, or be friends with him for that matter. True, he could be charming when he wanted, and he had the easy good looks that drew people to him without much effort. But he hadn’t had a girlfriend—at least one Allison knew about—since high school, and she suspected that was because he was as much an asshole to other women as he was to her.
She tried to distract Robby by talking about her roommate this past year, who didn’t turn out to be friend material as Robby had for Will. She was a conniving bitch, Allison said, who snuck into her desk drawer and read her journal. Next year she was getting a single. “So I can have people stay over whenever I want,” she added, and glanced at him through her bangs.
The sound of the ocean grew louder, and this time when they turned a bend, the tree line abruptly ended, and they came out into a meadow full of tall grass blown flat by the wind. A gust hit them as soon as they stepped from the canopy, and Robby hugged himself, the bare skin of his legs visibly prickling even under all that curly hair. But the view was even more spectacular than she remembered. They were five hundred feet above the waves, and in front of them the headland stretched another half mile into the ocean, bright green slopes ending at sheer black cliffs. The slate gray water met a pale gray sky at a perfect seam in the distance. She hadn’t wanted to admit how much she missed home over the last year, how tired she’d gotten of the Southern California sun and the air that dried out her skin and chapped her lips. She jogged ahead to a narrow point where she could get the best picture and dug her camera—a little Olympus point-and-shoot her parents had bought her for graduation—out of her pack. She took a couple shots of the landscape, then remembered Robby and decided she wanted several with him in the frame, so she could show them to friends when she got back to school and have them ask who the cute boy was, even if he wasn’t quite as cute as she’d wished.
But Robby was still back by the tree line, crouched at the high side of the trail, eyes closed. Spotting him there brought a feeling that was oddly familiar—the sense that she was just catching up to something she hadn’t understood while it was happening, as with all three of the boys who came onto her last year and had most of her clothes off before she’d decided whether or not she wanted them to touch her. When she reached him and put a hand on his shoulder, his eyes snapped open, glanced down the slope, and his whole body jerked backward.
“You’re afraid of heights?” she asked, and immediately felt foolish for asking a question whose answer was obvious.
“Don’t tell him.”
“How are you planning to keep it a secret? I mean, if you can’t even fake it here. The drop-off’s way scarier up ahead.”
“I’ll pretend I twisted an ankle and had to turn back.”
“He’ll make fun of you for that even more.”
“He threatened to break up,” Robby said, the words followed by a horrible sound that took her a moment to recognize as a sob. His eyes were closed again, and tears leaked out of their corners, blown sideways toward his ears by the stiff wind. “Said we don’t have enough in common, things we like to do together. So I agreed to come here.”
She was too surprised to say anything. Once again she hadn’t understood a thing. Life kept happening to her, and she didn’t know when—or if—she’d ever figure out how to make it happen for herself. But so much made sense now, in hindsight: why Will had distanced himself from their father, with whom he’d once been so close; why he deflected every time Allison asked if she could come see his new place. How long was he planning to hide who he was? How many years before he’d stop referring to Robby as just his roommate? And how many times, for that matter, could Robby fake a twisted ankle?
She put an arm around him and led him back to the trees. Once there, she gave him a hug, not seductive or flirtatious, just sympathetic and warming, her ugly windbreaker crinkling against his bony chest. “He does this to everyone he loves,” she said. “His way of feeling in control, I guess.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he leaves me,” Robby said.
She wanted to tell him he’d be better off, that he deserved someone who accepted him as he was. That he could make choices for himself and not wait for better things to come along. That he could ask for what he wanted and not pretend to be happy with whatever people happened to offer. But she also knew that wasn’t what he needed to hear right now. Instead she told him, “I’ll break his ankle if he tries.”
“Thank you, A.J.”
She wouldn’t, she decided right then, ask him to call her anything else.
Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel, Trust Me, winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the story collection, While It Lasts.