At first Sam thinks it’s only temporary. Her dad is staying a short time before he leaves again. Her dad says no, but she does not believe him. Probably, he is practicing a new act.
“Nope,” he says. He sold his unicycle in Montreal, along with his accordion. He gave up his magician clothes.
“Even your hat?” Sam is hanging from the metal bar in the basement of the Y.
“Hold on, monkey!” Her dad keeps talking to distract her from the pain. “No more hat. No wand. No rabbit.”
Her dad doesn’t miss the travel. He misses drinking, but he is committed. In the spring he does not disappear.
Sam almost thinks he will start traveling now that the weather is warmer, but no. He stays. In May, when Courtney says, Let Dad come and watch you compete, Sam says okay.
As soon as she walks in, she sees him standing with the other parents, and he looks brand-new. Courtney cut his hair, and it’s still long, but it’s not shaggy. He is thin but he’s not pale. His eyes are dark but smart and happy. He looks like a rock star, compared to Halle’s dad. Courtney is a mermaid next to him.
Halle says she’s nervous, but Sam can’t even talk. What would it be like to win and watch her parents jump for joy? They would hug each other. They would say, Wow, that’s our kid.
“Good luck! You can do it. Just believe!” says Halle.
Courtney always says Halle has a good heart, and it’s true. You feel safe when you’re around her, because Halle is not afraid of anything. She has no natural predators. At competitions, Halle climbs to win, but she is a good loser too.
Toby tells the team to just get up there and have fun, but Sam can’t. She is too fierce and scared.
Sitting in her chair, she shuts her eyes and pretends no one is watching. She tells herself, Nothing matters. No one is looking at you. And then they call her number and her heart drops. She glances at the wall and she is so dizzy she can hardly stand. She feels faint, except she hears a long high whistle. Her dad is whistling with two fingers as she jumps.
Now. Now she will shake off all her sickness and her fear. She grabs the first hold and starts talking to herself again. Nobody is watching. Nobody is looking. Nobody is chasing you. Don’t rush. But halfway up, she slips and falls.
“Sam,” Toby tells her, “if you would just relax.”
Other kids do great. A few are incredible. The best is a girl named Ayla from Vermont. She is only eight, but smart and tiny as a spider monkey.
Sam’s arms are longer like she wanted. She is ten and a half now, and she is stronger, but she weighs more too. She feels her weight up on the wall.
Before her final round of bouldering, Sam sits in her folding chair, and she can’t see the other girls climbing, but she knows how they are doing from their parents’ faces. She looks at Jim and she can tell that Halle makes it almost to the top. Sam sees it in Jim’s face. Oh…oh…almost! And then his smile. Oh well.
When Sam looks at the crowd, she can tell that Ayla is putting on a show. Everyone is smiling. Wow! Amazing! Even Sam’s dad is standing there admiring Ayla, because she is so fast and graceful—and then, suddenly, everybody groans. Noooo! Even with her back to the wall, Sam knows that Ayla fell. Ayla messed up—and that means Sam has a chance. Sam realizes this, even though she is climbing badly. She could be the first to solve this problem—but there must be something weird about it, some trick question on the wall.
What is it? She can only turn and look up for one second when the judges call her. Then she has to start. She must climb upward with her clumsy arms and her big feet.
She wedges her right toe into a hold and reaches up above her head. What next? She dips her left hand into her chalk pouch, so her fingers are all white and dusty.
Where can she go?
She misses being eight. And seven! She didn’t even understand that climbing hurt.
The wall juts out and what can you do? How do you leverage your whole body up there? This is the trick question, and Sam doesn’t have an answer.
She isn’t smart enough to figure it out, so she does something dumb. She lunges and grabs the ledge with her right hand, and now she’s dangling. For just a second, she kicks and reaches with her left and now she’s hanging by two hands, but her feet can find no landing place. She knows right away that this is where Ayla fell.
Sam will fall too. Her arms are straining. Her hands are claws. She can’t hold on a second more, but she does hold as she berates herself. Stupid. Idiot. Hanging from the ledge, she hates her weight, but she starts pulling herself up, her body ripping. It hurts so much she can’t hear anything except her dad whistling. Then she can’t hear anything at all.
The wall seems to her the only person left. She is fighting the wall with all her strength and all her pain, her fingers gripping to the bone, her body curling under her and up. It’s like a pull-up, but so much slower, so much harder. It’s life and death. It’s nothing she has done before. When she heaves herself over the top, she is a castaway collapsing on dry land. Battered, broken, saved.