Golden (20 page)

“The Courage to Be New”

—1947

The girl I want to be tries to look casual standing in front of Carl's Jr. at six a.m., wearing a huge backpack and irrationally scanning the parking lot for any sign of my mom brandishing the speech I'd pieced together from a Google search of “inspirational speeches” and left on the kitchen table for her approval. It was a Hail Mary. I'd spent the entire weekend shut away in my room, trying to come up with words I believe in, that the scholarship committee would believe in too, but I kept coming up blank. Instead of writing my speech, I went back to other words—Julianna's, and Robert Frost's, and even my dad's. So when Sunday evening rolled around, I did what I had to do in the hopes that somewhere
on the road ahead of me, I'd find what I really wanted to say.

I check my phone again, hoping for a
We're on our way
text from Kat, but no such luck.

The girl I actually am is a nervous wreck who is totally unsure about the trip, hesitant to really hope we'll find Julianna, all mixed up about what may or may not be going on with Trevor, and petrified of how much trouble I'm guaranteed to be in when I get home. I try not to think about all that, though. I lean my back against the building and look out over the ring of mountains that surrounds our little town, hoping to channel some of the calm of the morning. The air is a touch cooler than is comfortable in the cutoffs and tank top I threw on in a hurry, so I pull a sweatshirt out of my bag and slip it over my head.

Though it's still shadowed where I'm standing, the peaks of the mountains are washed golden by the rising sun, and cloudless blue sky stretches out in every direction. Spring is undeniably here, and with it that feeling of newness and possibility and freedom. A fresh start, which is exactly what I want. I want this day to be my fresh start. I want this to be the day I step out of my comfort zone and go somewhere new. I've got the small amount of cash I've saved up, my MapQuest printouts, the journal, and my dad's signed copy of Robert Frost's collected poems tucked into my bag. Somehow the combination of those things feels right. I have no idea what I will do or even say if we actually find Julianna, but I'm ready. Ready for whatever happens.

As if cued by my last thought, Trevor's Suburban turns into the parking lot and crosses the empty spots to where I'm
standing. Kat waves excitedly from the front seat, and Trevor gives a nod and a half smile before he puts the car in park. For a second it crosses my mind that it's strange they showed up together, but that thought is overshadowed by a second one:
Holy crap, we're really doing this.

They both get out, and Kat crashes into me in a sort of tackle hug. “Holy shit, Parker, we're really doing this! God, I'm so frickin' proud of you! You have the journal? And the map, and everything?” I nod as best I can, my answer muffled by her cleavage and enthusiasm. She releases me. “Good. I'm gonna go grab us some food. I'm starving. You want coffee?”

“Um, sure. You want me to come with you?”

“No. You stay. I'll be right back,” she says with a wink and a glance at the Suburban. She pushes through the red double doors, releasing a waft of grease and coffee from inside, and then she's gone. When I turn back to the car, Trevor gets out casually, his hair still morning messy, which is adorable, and his eyes as blue and bright as ever.

“Morning, Frost,” he says with a grin that seems either a little shy or a little tired, I can't tell which. He holds an arm out. “Let me get that bag for you.”

I slide it off my shoulders and hand it to him. “Thanks.”

“Wow,” he says, hefting it up and down a couple of times. “Kat didn't tell me we were running away forever. You bring all your earthly possessions along?”

That familiar warmth creeps up my neck and threatens to spread out over my cheeks. “No. I just . . . I didn't know what I would need, so I brought it all. You never know what the weather will be like on the coast. Sometimes—”
Oh my God,
just be quiet now. Stop being lame
.
Be someone new today. Brave. Bold.
“Yeah, I guess I probably brought too much.”

“That's okay.” Trevor hefts my bag into the back of his Suburban. “Just giving you a hard time.”

He shuts the trunk and we both slide our hands into our pockets at the same time. He takes his out. I laugh. What happened to who we both were yesterday, in my car?

“So,” Trevor says, after an awkward moment. “Is she always this . . . peppy in the morning?” We both look through the window to where Kat is inside gesturing wildy and the guy behind the counter is laughing.

I turn back to him. “Not usually. I think it's because she's finally getting me to do something crazy, that she would do. That
I
normally wouldn't.”

“Ah,” he nods. “Corrupting the indomitable Parker Frost. It
is
an accomplishment, actually.”

“Indomitable? That's a big word for you, Trevor Collins.” He laughs, and it's enough to encourage me. “It might be an accomplishment,” I say. “But she's been failing at that for years. There's a chance I'm just a lost cause.”

Trevor raises an eyebrow. “I don't know about that, Frost. Maybe you just haven't been tempted with the right transgression yet.”

Brave. Bold. WWKD.

“Or maybe I have,” I say with a smile I'm pretty sure looks like one Kat would give. “Maybe I just haven't made up my mind whether to risk it.”

He smiles slow and leans in close. Close enough to touch. “That's too bad. Because all the fun is in the risking.”

“Then maybe you should try it some time,” I answer back.

Kat comes out then, loaded up with more grease-dotted bags than it would take to feed all of us three times. She sees me looking. “
What?
Road trip food doesn't count.”

“True,” Trevor says. “Let's get on the road. So we can eat some of that food that doesn't count.”

With that we pile into Trevor's car—which he informs us is actually called the Silver Bullet. Kat hops in the back, and I, by Kat's design, I think, sit shotgun. Seat belts click, the familiar chorus of “Should I Stay or Should I Go” rushes out of the speakers, and greasy fast food breakfast is distributed all around.

Kat raises her Diet Coke in between me and Trevor. “To fate, friendship, and adventure. Here we go!” We tap our drinks together. Trevor puts his arm on the back of my seat to twist himself around when he backs up, and when he does, our eyes catch.

“Wait,” I say.

“No backing out now,” he says. “You're committed.”

“No, it's not that. I'm not backing out. There's just one place we have to stop before we really get on our way.”

“Let me guess,” Kat says. “Summit Lake?”

I turn around. “How did you know?”

“You might be the one with the scholarship to Stanford,” she says through a mouthful of breakfast burrito, “but I'm always one step ahead of you.”

“But if I had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.”

—“FIRE AND ICE,” 1920

The road to Summit Lake is off the main highway, fifteen minutes or so out of town, and is definitely out of our way, but there's no other place this trip should begin. If we're searching for a different ending to Julianna's story, we need to start where the original version ended. When Trevor makes the turn off the highway, the road narrows as if that's the only way it can manage to hug the side of the mountain it puts us on. We all kind of go quiet when we round the first turn and
the view unfolds in front of us, grand and dramatic, and in my mind, a bit sinister, too.

The edge of the road may as well be the edge of the earth, the drop is so sheer. When I was little, I'd cower in the back with my hands over my eyes on roads like this, scared that the slightest shift of the steering wheel would send us right off the edge. Today I look out my window, first across to the other side of the gorge, which is thick with the green of aspen trees, and then down, down, down to the bottom, where icy snowmelt flows, fast and unforgiving. The sight of it makes me doubt everything I've come up with about the possibility of Julianna still being alive. It would take more than a miracle to survive the plunge from the road to the bottom of the gorge.

“I wonder what the hell they were doing out here,” Kat says from the back seat. “You know? This road is scary enough in broad daylight, with no snow on it.”

“Maybe it was an accident they ended up here,” Trevor says. “Everyone's always said he was drunk when they left. Maybe they were trying to go out to the Grove or something and got confused. Who knows?” He shrugs, but keeps both hands firm on the steering wheel, his eyes never leaving the road as we wind around another curve. There could be a million different reasons, but there's no one to ask.

We pass a yellow sign that says
SCENIC OVERLOOK
, with a picture of a camera on it, and then the dirt turnout it refers to. “Maybe they were looking for a place to talk . . . or park,” I say. “Like one of these spots.” It's not an uncommon thing for kids in our town to go driving out into the boonies to
“talk.” There are plenty of awe-inspiring spots with views that people go out to under the pretense of looking at them.

Kat leans forward on my seat. “I bet she told him about Orion that night—at the party, and that's why they left. And then maybe they got in a fight, and he drove out here. That could happen if you were drunk and pissed off.”

“Yeah.” I nod. “It probably could.” I shiver a little at the thought of Julianna telling Shane on this road. In a snowstorm, when he'd been drinking. Finding out something like that might make it easy, in a moment of hurt or anger, to turn the steering wheel just enough to do something you could never take back.

We round another curve and pass another
SCENIC OVERLOOK
s
ign, and the view from this one really is worthy of the title. From this vantage point you can see where the icy water of the river tumbles into the lake and then disperses into the stillness of it almost immediately, like it's been swallowed by the depth and the cold. Summit Lake is one of the deepest in the country, breathtakingly beautiful, and the quintessential summer image of our town. Every Summit Lakes postcard or calendar has a shot of this lake, a blue-green gem nestled at the base of glacier-carved granite mountains. It's dramatic, and striking, but to me it's always been a distant, cold, kind of beautiful. It's a place with a history of tragedy. Shane and Julianna are just one chapter.

The road begins its descent as it wraps around to the south shore of the lake. We pull into the empty parking lot, and Trevor parks facing the water, then cuts the engine and is quiet a moment. Kat is too for once, and I think it's
because we're all sitting here looking at the water, half in the shadow, half in the sun, thinking about Julianna Farnetti. I am. I'm wondering whether she's beneath its surface, deep in the blue water so dark it looks black, together forever with Shane Cruz, like she was supposed to be according to everyone else; or whether she somehow escaped that fate, slipped out of the lake, and found her way to a new life, far away from here and from who she was before.

“Shall we?” Trevor asks.

I nod.

We all open our doors to get out, and when we shut them, the sound echoes off the sharp, sheer ridges of granite, like three muted shots. Then silence. Kat hugs her arms to her chest. “God, this place gives me the creeps.”

“Can't imagine why,” Trevor says. “Between those kids that fell through the ice and the guys who tried to save them, and Shane and Julianna, it's got its fair share of ghosts floating around.” He grins. “No pun intended.”

He's right. It's one of those places steeped in stories that go back even past our childhoods. There was a girl, probably around Julianna's age, whose dad drowned in this lake, along with a school bus driver, when they both tried to save four boys who had walked out onto the ice and fallen through. Before that there was a bloody shoot-out between a group of escaped convicts and the sheriffs who'd chased them there—one that ended with the sheriffs being dumped in the lake and supposedly haunting its shores for years after. And long before that there was the legend of a Paiute boy who disrespected the lake's power and was
swallowed by the water, never to be seen again.

“Ha. Ha.” Kat rolls her eyes, then runs them over the surface of the water. “Funny, except nobody floats here. They all sink to the bottom, then slip down the center of the hourglass.” She shivers. “Ugh. You couldn't pay me all the money in the world to go swimming in this lake. For exactly that reason.”