I am dazed, exhausted and hollow by the time the designer reaches me. She scrutinizes the fabric on my body, the way the dress hangs and hugs in unison.

“No,” she suddenly says.

“What?” My shoulders drop, my stomach gurgling—the sound incredibly audible. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything!” the designer shouts at me. I flinch. “You gained weight since last I saw you.”

“I didn’t,” I say. My pulse kicks up another notch. I didn’t. I know I didn’t.

“We can measure her,” the stylist suggests.

“This is wrong,” the designer touches the sleeve. “This is not on you right.” She tries to adjust the gown, but it looks right to me. I don’t see how my head is supposed to go where she’s pointing. That’s not how I wore it in the fitting.

“No, no, no.” The designer pinches my slender waistline and then her hands fall to my ass. She stretches the fabric down and then squeezes my butt. “This is too tight. Her thighs, too fat.”

I try to grin and bear it, the designer’s hands going wherever she pleases, in places that I would prefer her not to touch.

I haven’t eaten real food in days. I don’t see how I could have gained anything other than hunger. The designer just dislikes me. I must have offended her somehow.

“I want another model,” she declares. “Get her ready, the hair, the makeup. Now.”

My eyes grow big. “Wait, please, let me fix this. Don’t pull me out of the show.” I’ve walked more than one runway this week, but being fired from even a single job will displease my mom.

“The dress looks hideous on you,” she says. The models in the line watch the designer berate me with more insults. “You’re overweight. I don’t even know why others are booking you.”

Christina’s mouth has permanently fallen open.

I take each word with a blank face, but my eyes begin to burn as I hold back more emotion. “So there’s nothing I can—”

And then the designer physically pries the dress from my body. It’s all I can do to not teeter off my heels. She strips me bare. No bra. Just a nude thong. In two quick moments, I stand naked in a room of now fully-clothed people. The cold nips my arms and legs, but the embarrassment is hot on my neck.

The designer focuses on a new model. Blonde. Tall. Wiry.

The exact same size as me.

The nice stylist combs the new model’s hair. I’m alone, and no one’s going to tell me what to do, where to go, or even give me a robe to cover myself with.

When I turn, I meet the intense gaze of the camera. Click, flash. Click, flash.

It’s in this moment—eighteen, being photographed bare and nude without consent—that I feel violated by my own career. I could be fifteen right now, okay with this, told that this is what’s supposed to happen. I could be fourteen. But what difference does it make now that I’m eighteen? I’m just more aware. I see the wrongness, and the blow strikes harder and hurts greater.

I spend the next ten minutes trying to find my clothes, passing people with my arms over my chest. Trying not to cry. But tears build, and the hurt of the whole situation weighs on my chest like a brick drifting to the bottom of the ocean.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

I just want to go home.

< 18 >

RYKE MEADOWS

I take off my helmet in the parking lot, switching off the ignition on my bike, and I notice Sully’s forest-green Jeep parked by the Information Center. I dial his number, quickly putting on my climbing shoes and tying my chalk bag around my waist.

The wind blows hard today, the trees rustling together in Bellefonte Quarry. It’s not so fucking bad that I can’t climb. The sky is clear, and that’s more important.

An incoming storm can fucking kill me.

The moment the line clicks I say, “You flirting with the receptionist again, Sul?” Last week, I had to drag him out of the Information Center before dark clouds rolled through. He was leaning over the desk with his mop of wavy red hair, throwing out the cheesiest fucking pickup lines to Heidi, a blonde twenty-something girl at a community college nearby.

“Now look who’s slow,” he says. “Mission accepted and completed an hour ago, man. Late, late, late should be your first, middle and last name.”

“Did she reject you again?” I ask, heading towards the sheer side of the cliff.

“Not this time. I have a date on Saturday, so every naysayer can suck my balls.”

I smile as I pick up my pace into a run. I don’t want to be that fucking late. He’s going to solo climb beside me, placing gear up the rock face as he ascends, and then he’ll have to repel back down to clear all of it. Free-soloing doesn’t have any of those luxuries. I have powder chalk and my fucking shoes.

That’s it.

A gust of wind ripples the brown water that runs through the quarry. I’ve climbed most of the traditional routes you can in Bellefonte. But before I leave for California, Sully wants me to climb the first route I’ve ever free-soloed before. As some sort of last fucking hoorah in case I die.

So I rode three hours out here. It’s not far away considering the places I’ll travel to for this sport. If I’m not hanging out with my brother or with Daisy, I’m climbing. Finding really good rock faces is hard in Pennsylvania. There aren’t many routes higher than 200 feet.

And one of the three I plan to climb in Yosemite is 2,900 feet. I’ve been flying out to California the past year to train with Sully, using trad gear—with him always as the lead.

I’ve trusted him with my life too many times to count.

We had to path out my course, and even though it’s all planned out—climbing all three rock faces with a harness and my childhood friend—it’s still fucking terrifying to do it without both. No amount of confidence can extinguish that lingering fear. It’ll always be in the back of my head.

I reach the bottom of the flat rock face within another minute, my breath even. I look around, and I don’t see Sully’s ratted blue shirt he wears with his khaki shorts. His pasty white skin is almost always burnt from the sun. “Where the fuck are you?” I ask him, pressing the phone back to my ear.

“Vanished with magic. I’m a descendant of the Weasley clan. I got powers.”

He was never proud to be a redhead as a fucking kid until Harry Potter. I remember meeting him at six-years-old at Rock Base Summer Camp and he was scrawny and quiet. That fucking changed fast. “You’re fucking cute today,” I tell him.

“Because this is a special moment,” he reminds me. “Look up.”

I crane my neck, my eyes grazing the flat limestone, and then I spot Sully waving at the top of 120 feet of ascension. “You climbed without me?” I frown. “I thought you wanted to do this together?”

“That was the plan until I got here.” His legs hang off the cliff. “I was just going to scope out the face, but I saw weeds and dirt in the cracks. I cleaned the route for you on my way up.” I can almost see him shrug. “I didn’t want you to die in Pennsylvania on a hundred and twenty foot ascent. If Ryke Meadows is gonna go out, he’s gotta go out big.”

“Thanks, man,” I say with as much appreciation as my voice will allow. If I climbed and found loose rocks in the cracks and handholds, it would’ve been a bad time. I’m thankful for a friend like Adam Sully, especially after all my college ones were shit when I became famous.

Sully never really cared. He doesn’t even mention it that much. We met at summer camp, climbed together, and we’ve done it ever since. Some months I don’t see him since he backpacks a lot, skipping college. For cash, he’s a climbing instructor at a gym. When we meet up, it’s like no time has passed. It’s like we’re at summer camp again, picking up right where we left off.

He’s the kind of friend I’ll have for life. Not because we share deep fucking secrets or our heartbreak—we don’t do either—but because we have a passion for the same thing. And even though I know I may die alone while I climb, I’ve been lucky enough to share each accomplishment and triumph with someone else who understands what it means to reach the top.

“I’m timing you,” Sully tells me. “What’s your first record?”

“You fucking know all of my times.” He always told them to kids at camps, gloating about my speed climbs each year. And then when we were instructors, he’d fucking tell the pros. And then when we were considered pros, he’d tell anyone who’d listen.

“Remind me,” he says.

I dip my hand in the chalk and then begin scanning my path upwards, a grid that I see laid out with each crack and divot and precipice in the fucking rock. “The first time I climbed this, it took one brutal fucking hour,” I tell him.

“And what’s your latest time?”

I smack my hands together, the chalk pluming. “Six minutes, thirty-eight seconds.”

I know he’s smiling. I don’t even have to see him. “I’ll see you at the top.”

My lips rise.

And I climb.

* * *

I didn’t set my stopwatch since Sully’s timing me, but the ascent feels different from the last time I did it, which was over a year ago. I feel lighter, freer. Stronger.

I’m near the top, clinging to the rock, my hand slipping between the smallest crack in the mountain, a fissure just deep enough for my fingertips to rest. I support my body with this single grip until I reach for the next handhold, a space where two rocks meet.

I move fast and precisely, not stopping to catch my breath or to consider an alternate path. This is where I’m fucking going, and I just go.