Don’t Look Now

GOOD MORNING, COCKROACHES!”

“Hurhhh?” I said.

When I woke up, I was all twisted around in my smelly old sleeping bag. It was like waking up inside a cotton ball soaked in sweat.

“What time is it?” I said, trying to untangle myself.

“Time to mow down another challenge,” Fish said. “Let’s go! Move, move, move, move, moooooove!”

Oh… man. I either needed to figure out how to stop dreaming, or just stop sleeping. I couldn’t take too many more nightmares like that one.

Not to mention the day-mare that hadn’t quite started yet.

I barely even remember the next part. I guess we had breakfast and hiked up to the base of Devil’s Highway, then put on some harnesses and sat through climbing school. All I know is that it seemed like five minutes later when Pittman was saying, “Okay, who’s first?”

And then Carmen’s hand was clamping down on my shoulder.

“We got this,” she said.

It was another buddy challenge. We were doing something called top-roping, where they had ropes already set on the cliff—two of them, side by side. Sergeant Fish and Sergeant Pittman were the belayers, which meant they held the rope at the bottom and kept an eye out for you. There was even a thing on the line they could use like brakes, anytime you slipped up. So supposedly, there was no risk at all.

I mean, unless your climbing rope broke.

Or your harness broke.

Or one of those little thin carabiner clippy things broke.

Or a big chunk of rock came loose and crushed your head on the way down.

Or if your belayer stopped paying attention, even for a second, maybe because they were distracted by one of the other seven kids they were supposed to be keeping track of.

But hey, other than that I felt perfectly safe.

“All right, here we go,” Pittman said. She was Carmen’s belayer and Fish was mine. “Look for a handhold, pull yourself up, and start climbing.”

That part wasn’t the problem. I mean, I know how to climb stuff. For me, it wasn’t about getting up that cliff. It was all about being up there.

So as soon as I was about an inch off the ground, I just started thinking the same three words over and over.

Don’t. Look. Down.

It was my strategy for this obstacle. That was exactly when everything went all screwy on the climbing tower. The second I looked down from that thing, my brain started to melt and I felt like I was going to explode into a million pieces.

So now I didn’t care what it took. If I didn’t look down, I couldn’t know how high I was. And if I didn’t know how high I was, I couldn’t be afraid of heights. Right? That was the idea, anyway.

It really helped too. I mean, until it didn’t.

After that, everything went really, really bad, really, really fast.