On his first day back at Winslow College’s climbing wall after the long winter break, Nolan checks the belay sign-up sheet and sees that someone named Heidi Lane has written her name in the seven-o’clock slot every weeknight for the entire month of January.
Sure enough, at seven exactly, a short, narrow-nosed girl with a shiny brown bob hustles in through the gym’s double doors. She’s wearing bluejeans and duck boots and fuzzy white earmuffs around her neck like headphones.
“I made a New Year’s resolution,” she says. “This is going to be my new thing.”
“Some people find it hard to climb in jeans,” Nolan says.
“I do everything in jeans.”
“What else do you do?”
“Like, besides school? Nothing. That’s why I made this resolution.”
In the gear room, there’s a harness and a pair of climbing shoes meant for older children. They fit Heidi perfectly. While he tightens her waist strap, she lifts her elbows and stares right at him, unlike most new climbers, who tend to look up or off to the side.
“All right,” she says, waddling toward the wall. “How does this work?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re saying I just go. I just get on up there.”
“Some people try to stay on certain routes. That’s what those colored strips of tape are for, next to the holds. But, for now, maybe just use any holds you want. That’s called the all-you-can-eat buffet.”
She starts fast, faster than he would have advised, and with a kind of right-left rhythm. There’s something Spider-Mannish about it, and he wonders if maybe that’s what she’s thinking of.
She’s about twenty feet above him when her left hand slips from a crimp and she falls back. Distracted by his thoughts, he’s less ready for it than he should be. There’s some slack in the rope.
Her scream is surprisingly low-pitched, almost gruff. He clenches his bottom hand and braces himself. She drops about two feet before the rope goes taut and her shoulder smacks against the wall.
A hot shame flushes through him as he watches her kick around for a foothold. It was a small error on his part, but he knows that first climbs are important and there’s a good chance she’ll be looking for a new New Year’s resolution.
“How do I get down?” she asks.
“I’m really sorry about that,” he says.
“How do I get down?”
“You don’t have to come down if you don’t want. You can keep going up.”
“I want to come down.”
“All right. Just lean back and I’ll lower you.”
“No fucking way I’m leaning back.”
He pulls the rope tighter with one hand and draws the slack through with the other.
“Feel that? I’m holding you.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“I’m Nolan,” he says. “I’m a freshman. I’m from around here.”
“Like, Winslow the town?”
“China. One town over.”
“I’ve seen signs for that,” she says.
Finally, she sits back in her harness and removes her small, bony hands from the holds. He lowers her as steadily as he can.
Once her feet touch the ground, she stands completely still, facing the wall. She stays like that for a while.
When she turns to him she has a strange look on her face.
“That was my bad,” he says.
“No, this is good,” she says. “This is great. This is why I came. This is what it’s about.”
“That’s called a whipper. When you slam into the wall like that.”
She looks up at the little bell hanging from the ceiling. He looks up at it, too, because he doesn’t know where else to look.
“I have lived a very horizontal life,” she says.
He thinks about this for a moment. “I guess we all do.”
She walks toward him, dragging the rope behind her, and raises her arms. “Now take this shit off me,” she says.
He carries the equipment back into the gear room and takes his time spraying the shoes with deodorizer. He assumes she’ll be gone by the time he’s done.
Instead, she’s standing a few feet from the doorway, waiting for him.
“Do you know who’s belaying tomorrow night?” she asks.
“Me,” he says.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“Sounds good,” he says.
•
An hour later, Joe Rollo, whom everyone calls Trainer Joe, comes around to lock up. In the summers, Trainer Joe runs Winslow’s youth-sports camp, where Nolan has worked as a counsellor for the past three seasons. Before Nolan’s senior year in high school, Trainer Joe told him that if he got a scholarship to Winslow he’d approve him for the maximum number of work-study hours at the rec center, and he kept his word.
“Closing time,” Trainer Joe says. “I hereby order you to vacate the premises. Fail to comply and I’ll have to report you to the rec-center supervisor.”
Trainer Joe played defensive end at Orono. When they first met, Nolan was intimidated by the way Joe’s muscles bulged beneath his golf shirts. Then, one day, Nolan saw him put a Band-Aid on a little girl’s elbow. She had fallen on grass; there was no wound. Still, Trainer Joe deftly peeled the Band-Aid from its wrapper and smoothed it against her skin.
“Tell the supervisor to drive safe,” Nolan says. “That rain’s probably frozen by now.”
“I’ll be sure to let him know,” Trainer Joe says.
Soon it’s completely dark and the rec center is lit only by the murky green haze of the emergency lights. Nolan boulders around for a little while. When he feels himself getting tired, he drags the big blue bouldering mat into the gear room and closes the door behind him.
Instantly, he is plunged into total darkness. He fumbles around for the battery-powered lantern hanging from the nearest hook and turns it on. The room sways in the tinny, blanched light.
He drags the mat to the far corner of the room. Then he pulls the bungeed-up sleeping bag from its cubby and unrolls it and lays it out on the mat.
He has a bed in his dorm room, but it’s all the way across campus and his two roommates, who are both from Vermont, have turned the place into a kind of all-night weed-smoking den with an open-door policy. He knows he could drive home, too, if he wanted. His house, his childhood bedroom, is ten minutes down China Road. His parents and two younger sisters would be happy to see him.
But he likes it there, in the gear room. He has always felt a little uncomfortable out in the regular world. In the back of his mind, he is always waiting for the time of day when he can be completely alone, reading or doing his homework or something. Every winter, his family pulls a small wooden ice-fishing hut onto Togus Pond; he’ll get up early just to be in there. The one window is usually covered with a thick blanket to keep the heat in. He likes to sit in front of the stove, drinking coffee from a thermos and watching the algae-green glow come up from the holes in the ice. Knowing that for the next however many hours he’ll be alone, setting the hooks and dropping the lines and generally doing everything exactly the way he wants to, exactly the way he was taught.
