“Nothing else mattered. It was just us.”

- The Best of Me, coming to theaters October 17

Chapter 3

The four of us spent the night at a motel outside Williams, Arizona, about twenty miles from the Grand Canyon. It was a couple minutes past one o’clock in the morning when we pulled into the parking lot outside La Piedra Inn—a quality establishment, if I’d ever seen one—and hauled at least a thousand pounds of water bottles and tents and sleeping bags and canned food and spare clothes up to our rooms, because we couldn’t leave them in Matt’s van in case any of the local criminals were interested in going for a hike sometime soon.

Lindsey and I shared a room.

Our window overlooked two oversized dumpsters and the brown stucco wall of the neighboring building, and the sink in our bathroom only spouted out ice cold water. I just barely managed to brush my teeth before I collapsed onto one of the two twin beds in the room, so exhausted I couldn’t stay upright any longer.

When I woke up the next morning, the button of my jean shorts was digging into my stomach and the underwire of my bra felt like it was trying to burrow its way into my ribcage.

I sat up, blinking furiously as I tried to orient myself. Brilliant Arizona sunshine filtered in through the stained curtains over the window, illuminating the empty bed on the other side of the room. The bathroom door was shut, but I could just barely make out the sound of Lindsey’s muted humming. I rubbed the palms of my hands into my eye sockets, wondering how on earth she could sound so chipper.

I wasn’t a morning person.

By the time I’d managed to get my act together long enough to tug on some clean shorts and a tank top, Lindsey was out of the bathroom, whistling a tune I didn’t know.

“G’morning,” I grumbled, still half-asleep.

Lindsey laughed musically.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” she teased, “You look like you need coffee.”

I grunted.

“You excited for today?” she continued as she folded her pajamas into a neat stack and tucked them away at the bottom of her hiking pack.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice still thick with lethargy, “I am.”

It was true, at least.

There was a certain kind of buzz in my veins that morning, the kind I only ever felt before a climb. It felt a lot like the eager jitters I’d gotten as a kid when the sun set on Christmas Eve, or when I looked out the car window after a six-hour road trip with my parents and saw the road signs telling us to take the next exit for Disneyland.

“Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon before?” Lindsey asked.

I shook my head.

“No way!” she said, her jaw dropping open. Lindsey propped her tanned, slender hands on her hips. “You’ve never climbed the Grand Canyon? Oh my God, Camille! It’s, like, the mecca of the western rock climbing world. How’ve you never been?”

My face grew warm.

I rubbed my palms against my shorts, shrugging.

“I just never got around to it,” I admitted quietly, deciding to leave out that part about my mother bookmarking every news article she could find online about climber deaths in the Grand Canyon over the past fifty years in order to tell me that no, I could not go. “Have you?”

“Of course!” Lindsey cried, plopping down on the edge of her bed. She pulled her legs up onto the duvet and folded them, Indian style. “I’ve been three times, actually. I went on a climbing tour this March with some of the other counselors from camp. We went to, um, let’s see—” she held up a hand and started counting off on her fingers, “—Peru, Venezuela, Colorado, Arizona—obviously, then Wyoming. It was so incredible. Phineas is a great guide.”

Phineas Jones, the head instructor at our rock climbing camp, was the kind of guy that could win one of those reality television shows where they drop people, naked as the day they were born and carrying only a dull machete, into the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. I’d heard about his climbing expeditions—all the counselors said you hadn’t really lived until you’d seen him start a fire with his teeth while clinging to a slanted rock face twenty feet above the ground.

I tried not to be jealous, but it was hard.

“You went with Phineas?” I asked, my eyes widening.

Lindsey grinned and nodded. “It was ah-mazing. The guy’s crazy, to be honest, but I also think he’s sort of a genius. I’m going on his expedition to Tibet next summer and—”

“Tibet?” I croaked.

I had a map on my bedroom wall back home; it was a detailed chart of all the hiking trails that ran through the Himalayas. So I knew that Tibet was wedged up right against Nepal, and I knew that Mount Everest straddled the boarder between the two countries.

“Yeah,” Lindsey said, shrugging casually, “Phineas apparently spent a couple years at this Tibetan monastery, and they said they could host some climbers for three weeks if he wanted to come visit.”

“Are you climbing Everest?” I asked.

I could feel my pulse thumping in my wrists.

No, no, no. It wasn’t fair.

Lindsey threw back her head and laughed, her caramel curls bouncing around her shoulders.

“It’s not that serious of a trip,” she told me, which managed to calm my racing heart a little. “We’ll probably do some hiking around the base of the summit, but I don’t think Phineas has the kind of funding to get us all oxygen tanks and that crap.”

It took me another three minutes for my heart rate to decelerate.

Lindsey finished packing up and turned to face me, her eyes so bright she was practically a walking testament to the existence of beauty sleep. She asked me if I was ready to head on out, and I slung my overstuffed backpack over my shoulders and grabbed a box of dehydrated food, climbing rope, and a spare tarp that Tucker had packed in case Arizona, one of the driest states in the US, was suddenly bombarded by a freak rainstorm in the dead of August.

Tucker and Matt were waiting by the van.

When Matt saw us coming, he shot me a smile so brilliant that I almost tripped over my own shoes, which I couldn’t see because of the giant cardboard box I had cradled in my arms. Luckily, I managed to steady myself before I could faceplant in the middle of the La Piedra Inn parking lot. Matt Everest’s smile really should’ve been illegal—his teeth were too white, too straight; his lips too full and chiseled, like some sort of obscenely attractive Roman statue.

“Morning, ladies,” Matt greeted.

Tucker turned around to watch Lindsey and me approach. My gaze immediately zeroed in on the bold white letters printed across the front of his navy t-shirt—NYU.

It was like he was trying to cause me mental anguish.

“Good morning,” Lindsey chirped.

I brushed past her as she stopped to talk to Matt, intent on setting the cardboard box in the trunk of the van before my knees buckled under the weight of the thing.

Tucker followed me around the back of the Volkswagen, his hands tucked into the front pockets of his athletic shorts. I was about to snap at him—because he really needed to give me, like, at least a couple feet of personal space—when he reached around to the rear doors of Matt’s van and popped them open for me.

I frowned at the unexpected act of chivalry.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“No problem,” Tucker said, shooting me his lopsided grin.

As I stepped past him to dump the box in the tiny square of open space amidst the camping supplies shoved haphazardly into the trunk, I caught a whiff of spearmint.

Before I could point out that chewing gum all the time was a pretty gross habit to have, Lindsey’s voice broke through the air.

“Shotgun!” she hollered.

I groaned. Audibly.

Five minutes later, with all four of us packed into Matt’s van, we headed off into the sunrise. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet, but the dry Arizona heat had started to make itself present. The thermometer on the dashboard read seventy-three, but it felt hotter than that. If I squinted down the stretch of road ahead of us, I could just make out the beginnings of a mirage on the asphalt.

I dug my water bottle out of my backpack.

The last thing I needed was to pass out on the trails from dehydration. Although, when I started to think about it, maybe Matt would end up carrying me back to the van, all heroic-looking and sweat-drenched. Before I could enjoy the idea too much, Tucker popped into my fantasy and started lecturing me on how many liters of water the average human being needed to consume to stay hydrated.

I grumbled and resigned to chugging water.

Williams was no more than a speck of dirt on the greater map of Arizona. Most of the buildings on the main road in town were a single story tall and boasted flat façades that looked as if they hadn’t been refurbished since the early twentieth century. We pulled over at an old-school dinner, like something out of a sixties movie, and ate our way through several plates of scrambled eggs and flapjacks before we hit the road once more. I lost track of the number of billboards we saw advertising all the local tourist attractions—railways, a drive-through wildlife park, and, of course, the Grand Canyon.

Excitement buzzed in my veins. There were only fifty-nine miles of road separating us from one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

I leaned back in my seat, trying to ignore the way Tucker’s boney shoulder occasionally bumped against my jaw when Matt drove over a rough patch in the road, and let my eyes slip shut.

When they opened again, almost an hour later, it was to the sound of a single loud, whooping cheer.

“Wuh happened?” I mumbled, sitting upright and pressing my palms against my eyes in an attempt to rub the sleep from my eyes.

“We’re here!” Lindsey chirped.

It took me a moment to register what she meant.

And then I saw it.

Out through the window, on the other side of Tucker, the Grand Canyon carved through the landscape, a million bands of coral and red and orange that sunk into the earth like inverted mountains. I’d never seen anything so massive in my entire life.

It’s sort of funny. I’d always laughed when people tried to tell me how breathtaking the Grand Canyon was. I thought that, given the number of gorgeous Californian landscapes I’d seen over the past eighteen years, there was no way I could ever be rendered speechless by any single collection of dirt and shrubs. I’d seen the Half Dome and scaled parts of El Capitan at Yosemite, I’d white-water rafted down the American River, and I’d stood with my toes hanging off the edge of a cliff at Big Sur. I thought I’d become numb to natural wonders.

I was so, so wrong.

Matt navigated the Volkswagen down a road that ran parallel to the canyon, and I leaned as far as I could over Tucker’s lap—I didn’t care that I could smell his nauseating spearmint gum at that point—in order to press my hands against the window of the van and stare out at the plunging walls of layered rock.

By the time Matt pulled into the parking lot outside the Grand Canyon Visitor Center, I was bouncing in my seat.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” I urged Tucker, shoving his arm in an attempt to get him out of the van so I could see what we’d come for.

“Can you at least wait until the car stops?”

Matt turned into a parking space and the van stuttered to a halt. Tucker took his sweet time unbuckling his seatbelt—just to spite me, I’m sure—before finally reaching for the door.

I scrambled out behind him.

“Where’s the canyon? I can’t see it from here,” I frowned, rolling up onto my tip-toes in a useless attempt to see over the roof of the Visitor Center.

“Patience,” Tucker told me, patting the top of my head as he started around towards the trunk of the Volkswagen. I squirmed out from beneath his touch, wiping my hand furiously over my hair in case his palms were as sweaty as I imagined. “We’ll hit the trail soon.”

Soon wasn’t soon enough.

“What all do we need?” Matt asked from the other side of the van, his wide hands resting against his hips as he frowned at the mountain of camping supplies in the back. The little crease between his perfectly shaped eyebrows was kind of adorable.

“Our backpacks,” Lindsey replied, tugging hers onto her shoulders, “Plenty of water. A map, at least one cell phone—just in case. I think today we’ll just scout out some places to climb tomorrow. It’s still the weekend, so the park’s probably pretty crowded. Tuck,” she jabbed a finger at her little brother’s chest, “you’re in charge of not getting us lost. Run into the Visitor Center and grab us a couple of maps, okay?”

Tucker snorted.

“Okay, mom.”

Lindsey shot him a look that could’ve killed.

Then, with all the finesse of an older sister, she licked three of her fingers and rolled up onto her toes, combing her hand over Tucker’s unruly mess of dirt-colored hair. He squirmed out of her reach, groaning in defeat as he started towards the Visitor Center.

“Love you!” Lindsey called after him.

“Sure, sure,” Tucker waved her off.

I watched him run his fingers through his hair again, trying to return it to its usual state of disarray, before he slipped through the sliding glass doors and into the immense building.

Tucker reemerged five minutes later, a stack of maps tucked under one arm. By that point, Matt, Lindsey and I had all strapped our backpacks over our shoulders and thrown a tarp over the supplies in the back of the Volkswagen, just so nobody who walked by Matt’s van would be tempted to break a window to steal some dried fruit.

“Got the maps?” Matt asked.

Tucker nodded.

“And a free pen,” he announced, holding up a bright blue ballpoint with a line of words printed across the side—The Grand Canyon: It’s Just Gorges. “They were handing them out. Kinda cool, huh?”

Lindsey and I rolled our eyes in sync.

The four of us each took a map—although Tuck had two extras, which he said he wanted to bring along just in case we ran into anyone who was lost—and together we started onto the trail. We only had to walk for about five minutes before the canyon rolled into view, stretching out before us like some great deity had made the world its sandbox and shoveled out one long, giant scoop of earth.

I fell into step beside Matt.

“You’ve been here before, right?” I asked him, slipping my thumbs beneath my backpack straps. “Didn’t you and your parents used to visit the Grand Canyon, like, once a month?”

Matt barked out a laugh, the sound as crisp as a breeze.

“Not that often, but it was a lot,” he nodded. “After dad tore his ACL it kinda put a damper on the family camping trips, though.”

Matt’s parents had both studied at UC Berkeley back in the late seventies—Charlene was in the marine biology department, Paul was a geology major. They’d always been very bohemian; back before Matt had a license and got his van, his mom came to pick up him from climbing camp on a tandem bicycle. It was healthier for the environment to avoid anything that emitted greenhouse gases, he’d told me the next day, not even a little embarrassed that his parents grew their own food and wandered around barefoot whenever they could.

Charlene and Paul were really into nature. They’d named their son after the world’s tallest summit, for crying out loud. And as if Matt’s pun of a name wasn’t enough, they’d dragged their only son around on camping trips and month-long excursions to exotic locations—the Galapagos, Ethiopia, Madagascar.

The Everests were a worldly people.

“I’m sorry about that,” I told him.

Matt shot me another earth-stopping smile.

“S’not your fault,” he shrugged. “Life happens.”

That’s so profound, I thought.

“Still,” I said, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear, “It sucks you don’t get to come here as often anymore. I think I could live here for the rest of my life. This place is incredible. And huge.”

Matt turned his head towards the canyon.

“Biggest in the world,” he nodded.

“It’s only the third largest canyon in the world, actually,” Tucker’s voice interjected from several feet behind us.

I turned over my shoulder.

“Who cares?” I snapped, “It’s still gigantic.”

I spun back around, but Matt was gone—ten feet ahead of me on the trail, now, laughing at something Lindsey had said. Anger bubbled up in my stomach as Tucker’s long strides propelled him to my side. His shadow hovered over me, the real-life version of one of those storm cloud that hangs over the head of cartoon characters.

“Five thousand feet deep,” he agreed, “And that’s just an average.”

“Did you know there’ve been over six hundred deaths in the Grand Canyon since the late eighteen hundreds?” I asked, rattling off the information my mom had used to argue against my ever going there.

“Six hundred and eighty-five,” Tucker nodded.

It’s going to be six hundred and eighty-six if you don’t shut up.

Luckily, Tucker seemed to notice that I wasn’t in the mood for any more small talk. He kept quiet and let me alternate between gazing out at the canyon and narrowing my eyes at Lindsey and Matt’s backs, wondering what on earth could be so funny that the two of them felt the need to laugh like hyenas every few minutes.

We followed the trail around the rim of the canyon for nearly a mile before the path forked. Lindsey checked her phone, calling out the time and temperature for Tucker to scribble on one of the maps with his newly acquired pen, and then we began our descent.

The path was smoothed from years of wear, but the further into the canyon we hiked, the more uneven the ground became.

I was so preoccupied with studying the rock formations around us—the soaring walls and the plunging cliffs—that I almost forgot Tucker O’Hara was right beside me. But I didn’t, because his elbow kept knocking against mine when the trail narrowed and I could hear the contents of his water bottle, tucked away in his backpack, sloshing with every step he took.

As we started through a stretch of the path lined on either side by twenty-foot walls of granite, Lindsey and Matt stopped walking and bent over with laughter at something Matt had said.

Tucker and I, who were as far from laughing as two people could get, caught up with them quickly.

“I am a great climber, thank you very much!” Lindsey was telling Matt, feigning offense. Her laughter echoed off the rock walls on either side of the trail, ringing in my ears like the incessant screaming of a crowd of preteens at a boy band concert.

“Really?” Matt teased, “I bet you can’t climb that solo.”

He pointed to the wall on our left.

It was smooth and solid, at least three times as tall as Lindsey was.

“I could,” Lindsey stated, folding her arms across her chest and tilting up her chin—a move I’d seen Tucker do at least a million times when Matt dared him to do stunts. “I just haven’t stretched yet, and I don’t want to slip up and chip a nail or something.”

Matt rolled his eyes.

“Girls,” he sighed.

I’m not sure why I did what I did next. Maybe I felt the sudden need to defend my gender, or maybe I just saw an opportunity to snatch Matt’s attention back. In any event, I opened my mouth and the words came tumbling out.

“I’ll do it.”

Three heads snapped in my direction.

Lindsey beamed at me. Matt’s eyebrows shot up. Tucker’s face twisted into an incredulous frown.

“I didn’t know you could boulder!” Lindsey chirped.

Bouldering was one of the more challenging forms of rock climbing. I didn’t like leaving the ground without a harness buckled around my waist and a rope promising to catch me, even when I climbed indoors and there were foam pads to break my fall. Some people loved climbing without any equipment; they said it was freeing.

I wasn’t one of those people.

“I’ve done it a couple times,” I said, trying to sound casual.

Twice. I’d attempted bouldering twice.

The first time, I’d slipped halfway up a fifteen-foot wall and scrapped off a swatch of skin on my left forearm. The second, I’d land so hard on my rear that I couldn’t walk right for almost two weeks. I’d spent the majority of that time on the oversized black leather couch in my living room, an ice pack tucked beneath me, marathoning Real Housewives with my mom.

But technically, I’d gone bouldering before.

“Shows us whatcha got, Settlemeyer,” Matt told me, nodding towards the rock wall he’d indicated.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Tucker chimed in, his face still scrunched up and his eyebrows furrowed. “We didn’t bring any crash pads, and Camille’s not even wearing—”

I started towards the wall, ignoring Tucker.

“Go Camille!” Lindsey whooped.

I shrugged off my backpack, letting it drop onto the dry dirt, and rolled my shoulders back, stretching out my muscles. Then I whipped my palms across the front of my jean shorts, trying to get my hands dry so I’d have better grip.

“Camille,” Tucker warned.

I surged forward and laced my fingers around a protruding chunk of red stone, testing my weight on it.

I wouldn’t have any problem getting to the top of the wall. I knew that already. Climbing was second nature for me; I could’ve scaled the thing with my eyes closed.

It was the descent that was going to be tough.

Matt and Lindsey called out instructions to me, pointing out what looked like good holds, as I made my way up the uneven wall. The darker stone was solid and firm, but the lighter rocks crumbled to dust in my fingers.

I couldn’t let myself think about the ground. That was what always got me in trouble—I’d start calculating how many feet of air were between me and a couple of bruised or broken bones, and then I’d slip up. Instead of focusing on the fact that I was ten feet in the air and the ground below me was solid, I imagined Tucker O’Hara sprawled out on the trail, a makeshift crash pad.

A moment later, there was nowhere left to climb.

I laughed, exhilarated.

“See?” I called over my shoulder, “I told you I could.”

“That was crazy, Camille!” Lindsey shouted up at me. “I had no idea you were so fast! Tucker, why didn’t you tell me she was so damn fast? Did you see that? She’s half monkey.”

“Hold your applause,” Tucker’s voice was a tight monotone. “She’s still gotta get back down.”

Buzzkill. I scowled.

My descent was clumsy, at best. I tried to keep a slow and steady pace so I wouldn’t end up slipping, but all that did was put more strain on my arms. By the time I reached the ground, I was unharmed but drenched in sweat. I realized, belatedly, that my face was going to be bright red for the next couple of hours.

“Way to go, Camille,” Lindsey cheered for me.

I turned to face her, my legs shaking like Jell-O beneath me, and smiled triumphantly.

Matt and Lindsey offered me a small round of applause, which Tucker didn’t bother participating in. I ignored him—an act that was becoming increasingly easy with all the practice I’d been getting—and spun around to pluck up my backpack from the ground, grunting under the weight of it. When I turned back again, Matt and Lindsey were standing beside each other, less than a foot of space between their bodies, giggling like they were best friends in preschool.

My backpack suddenly felt a million pounds heavier.

When Lindsey and Matt noticed I was ready to go, they started off down the trail again, the warm Arizona sunshine bouncing off their hair and casting halos of light around their heads.

I huffed, exhausted, and reached around the side of my backpack for my water bottle, only to remember that I’d chugged most of the thing during the ride from Williams.

Sure enough, I only had two tiny sips of water left.

“That was really stupid,” Tucker said, walking up to my side as I tilted my water bottle back and tapped the base of it, trying to shake out every last drop of moisture.

“You’re just mad I didn’t fall,” I muttered.

Tucker glared at me long and hard, his uneven eyebrows drawn together and his mouth twisted to one side. I slapped my hand against the side of my water bottle and a drop of water smacked against my chin. A muscle beneath Tucker’s left eye twitched.

“Here,” he huffed impatiently.

Tucker reached around to the side pocket of his backpack and slipped out his own water bottle, a purple aluminum canister with NYU’s logo printed across the side of it. He shoved it into my hands, still scowling. I scowled back as I accepted the bottle and unscrewed the cap, because I wasn’t about to turn down the water but I wanted him to know that I was really unhappy about it.

“Thanks,” I said, a little breathless, when I was certain I’d chugged about half the contents of Tucker’s water bottle. I slapped the cap back on and shoved the canister at his chest, but Tucker shook his head.

“Keep it,” he grumbled. “You’ll need some more. Just don’t drink it all, alright? I’d really rather not faint from dehydration today.”

“Fine,” I snapped.

Tucked huffed and shot a glance at Matt and Lindsey, who’d stopped twenty yards down the trail to admire a lone hawk that was circling in the sky overhead.

“You know,” he said, turning back to me, “being reckless isn’t going to make him like you more.”

My spine went rigid.

Tucker spun on his heels and started after Matt and Lindsey, leaving me to stand there marinating in my own anger. How dare he? The whole reason Matt and I weren’t staring into each other’s eyes and holding hands at that very moment was because Tucker and his stupid sister—who was actually really cool, which made her presence all the more infuriating at the moment—had tagged along.

“Camille!”

Lindsey’s chipper voice snapped me out of my thoughts. She was jogging towards me, shuffling uncomfortably under the bouncing weight of her hiking backpack, with a giant grin on her face.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m coming.”

“Oh, hey,” Lindsey said, falling into step alongside me. “You and Tucker have the same water bottle!”

She reached out and tapped the purple aluminum canister in my hands with her fingernail.

“It’s his,” I told her.

Lindsey let out a burst of laughter.

“You stole Tucker’s water bottle?” she asked, grinning at me from behind her hand as if we were sharing secrets. “That’s such a good one! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first. Tuck’s such a germaphobe. He’s totally gonna freak out. Here, I’ll rub some of my lip balm around the rim so it looks like we—”

“He gave it to me, actually,” I interrupted, my voice small. “He said I could have some, but just not the whole thing.”

Lindsey’s eyebrows shot up clear to her hairline.

“He did?” she asked, incredulous.

I nodded.

Lindsey squinted into the distance, her eyes tracking Tucker and Matt as they marched side by side about thirty yards down the trail. She watched them for a long minute, then glanced back at me. A slow, knowing smile curling up the corners of her lips.

Whatever epiphany she was having, she didn’t bother sharing.