I must have fallen asleep on the rocks, because next thing I know Kate is standing over me, breathless, dripping water all over my legs. “You know Elgin, right?” I squint into the sun bursting behind their heads. The guy is standing beside her, rubbing water out of his ears. “He goes to our school.” He half waves, but looks past me which means he’s only interested in Kate. “Come on,” she says, taking my hand and pulling me up off the towel. “He knows a better place to go swimming.”
WE WALK STRAIGHT DOWN the canyon, back toward the suspension bridge. In this part of the park the creek bed narrows and it’s hard to hear over the roar of fast-moving water. Kate and Elgin are ahead, climbing over the rocks quick as mountain goats. Kate doesn’t even bother to look back for me. Under the bridge are the falls where jumpers have died. Signs at the park entrance warn about the dangers with a diagram of a stick man twirling in a vortex. Jumpers have been sucked into whirlpools, trapped where no one can rescue them, their broken bodies drifting out eventually.
Elgin’s standing at the edge of a natural waterslide carved into the rock. He sits in the bubbling stream before gliding down, dropping into the pool below. Kate follows him, descending less gracefully. “Let’s go,” Elgin yells at me over the rush of the creek. The water takes me quickly, the smooth rock like the porcelain of a bathtub, and then the rock is gone and the water hits me again, this time like a cold tile floor. My head goes under and I swallow a gulp of creek, my limbs scrambling around me. I break through the surface, gasping, “It’s cold.” Kate grabs my feet and pulls them into the air, sending my head under again. I spit water in her face and laugh so hard my ribs hurt. “That wasn’t what I wanted to show you,” Elgin says.
We hike further down the canyon, my skin tingling after the cold shock, shivers running down my limbs, everything heightened — glints of silver in the creek rapids, green-gold needles in the trees, prisms of light radiating through the branches. Around a bend I can see the tourists crossing the suspension bridge and Elgin stops, holding up his hand. “Wait a sec,” he says. He peers over the edge of the glistening rocks before grinning, reaching an arm out to Kate. “You think you can handle this?” I don’t like his grin or the way Kate’s smiling at him. She takes his hand and looks down. “No way,” she says, pulling back from him. Elgin’s smile gets bigger. I walk right to the edge, standing beside them, and look over. The creek spills over the rocks, twisting into a huge waterfall, billows of mist swallowed into the dark water. “Yeah, right,” I say, crossing my arms, waiting for Elgin’s reaction. Kate puts her hand to her mouth, catching a burst of giggles which means she’s nervous. He’ll bluff until we beg him to stop, until we grab his hands and pull him away from the cliff, believing he’s the bravest guy we know. “Go for it,” I say, calling his game.
Elgin doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look at me. He smiles at Kate again, then backs away from us quickly, breaking into a run. In one leap he’s gone off the cliff. Not like a bird. Not like a slip of paper. He falls like a rock, like a cannonball. He falls so fast he’s gone like a magic trick.
“Shit,” Kate says, getting down on her knees to peer over the side. “Where is he?” When she turns back her eyes are huge. “He did it. Holy crap! Look,” she says, pointing, “there he is.” I kneel down beside her. Elgin is in the water, swimming away from the falls. “What an idiot,” I say. I feel like shouting the words so they echo around the canyon.
“I’m gonna do it,” Kate says, standing. She paces the cliff.
“What, now you’re an idiot too?” I step away from the edge, shaking my head. “No, you’re not jumping.”
“He did it.” Kate takes deep breaths, rotating her arms the way swimmers do before they launch from the block. She tightens her ponytail. “Look! He’s fine.” She points again like I didn’t believe her the first time. She’s shaking out her hands. Far below, Elgin’s sitting on a ledge swinging his feet. He sees us and waves. Kate waves back and grabs my hand. “We’ll do it together. At the same time.”
“Forget it.” I shake her off and start walking away. “You want to go, go ahead. Go smash your brains on some rocks,” I call over my shoulder, climbing up the large boulders leading up to the path. When I turn around I expect to see Kate following me, but she’s still standing by the edge of the waterfall. “It’s like our cliff game,” Kate yells after me, “but there’s something to catch you.”
“We don’t jump!” I shout down at her. “That’s a pretty significant difference.” I cross my arms and eyeball her while she looks up at me, chewing on her bottom lip. “Brad what’s-his-name died here,” I say.
“He didn’t jump here.” Kate keeps peering over the edge to check if Elgin is still there. She looks small and breakable from up here on the boulders.
“He did! He died right there.” I’m practically shrieking now, pointing at the cliff. As I climb further up the embankment, Kate yells, “Hey!”
I turn back and we stare at each other. “He’s just a guy,” I shout down at her. “What do you need to prove?”
Kate puts her hands on her hips without saying anything, her mouth twisted in an amused smile. She thinks it’s funny when I get angry.
“Do what you want,” I say, sucking in my cheeks, and by the time I reach the path and look again, Kate is gone.
BAREFOOT, IT TAKES A while to get back to the suspension bridge—my flip-flops are still on the rocks by our towels. I push through the cluster of people in the middle of the bridge and scan the pool below for Kate. Just when I start to consider notifying the authorities, I spot her and Elgin swimming together around the waterfall. “Bitch,” I mutter under my breath. People on the bridge are staring at me. My legs and arms start trembling from the cold, so I trudge to the other side to sit on a rock in the sun and scowl.
Almost an hour’s gone before Kate comes running onto the bridge, yelling chicken. People grip the rails, giving her dirty looks as they’re bounced left and right, but Kate’s oblivious, glowing; Elgin trails behind her, grinning like a goon.
“You guys took forever,” I yell over the glaring faces. The shivers start again. Kate strolls up to me and makes chicken noises in my ear. “Bock, bock, bock.”
“I went down the waterslide,” I say, jabbing her in the leg with my big toe.
“That was nothing, right?” Kate laughs, looking to Elgin.
“You missed out,” Elgin says, throwing his arm around Kate’s shoulder. “It was awesome.” She hands me my flip-flops and my towel, which I wrap tightly around my shoulders, sulking into the terry cloth. There’s a moment of silence as we all stare at each other. Kate gives Elgin a rough peck on the cheek. “See you tonight,” she says, wrapping an arm around my waist and leading us with purpose out of the forest. When I turn to glare at Elgin, he’s standing there with the stupidest smile I’ve ever seen frozen on his face.
When we’re far enough away I ask, “What’s tonight?”
“Party at the creek,” Kate sings.
“Did you kiss him?”
“Of course!”
I MET KATE AT Outdoor School when we were ten years old. Outdoor School is a school where you learn about the outdoors. Once a year, they pile kids from elementary schools all over the North Shore into big yellow school buses and take them up past Squamish for a week to learn about animals and archery and canoeing and plants. It’s all kind of confusing; one day you’re sitting at your desk trying to figure out algebra and the next you’re plopped in the middle of the forest, learning which berries you can eat if you’re stranded in the wilderness. Max was my assigned learning partner. I was stuck beside him on the bus, a couple kids behind us made kissy noises on the backs of their hands, and he was never far from my side the rest of the week at camp. We had to share field notes, build a dam, and collect water skaters from a canoe. He called them Jesus bugs. He was strange and I was mortified, the way girls are most of the time when they’re ten years old. Wherever I turned, he was there, lurking nearby. Kate was my salvation from that week forward. We were placed in the same cabin group, and I noticed her because she wore electric-blue nail polish, and also because on the first night, one of the girls in our cabin peed in the top bunk and Kate laughed at her behind her back. I thought it was cruel, but it also made everyone want to be close to her, including me.