The Overlook

Emory had found a stick somewhere between the parking area and the guardrail and was using it to point at things.

“That’s the Springs,” he announced, gesturing at a smudge of grid on the horizon. “Probably. Or Pueblo. One of them.” Another gesture at something that could have been clouds. “And that -”

“Emory,” Stetson said, “if you point that stick at me one more time I’m throwing it off the overlook.”

“The stick is educational.”

“The stick is a hazard.”

I was sitting on the hood of Chandler’s Jeep with my legs stretched out in front of me and a jacket that was doing about sixty percent of the work required of it. The overlook was a flat pull-off on the south side of the ridge, twenty minutes outside town, the kind of place that existed in every Colorado zip code: a patch of gravel, a guardrail, and a view that made the guardrail feel almost insulting. You could see the whole valley from up here. On a clear day you could see the mountains stacked behind each other like something staged for a photograph.

Today was clear enough.

Maekynzie and Tinsley were at the guardrail, Maekynzie with her phone out and Tinsley standing slightly behind her with the expression of someone who had opinions about the framing but was choosing her battles. Noelle was a few feet down, leaning on the rail with her elbows, looking at something in the middle distance that wasn’t any particular thing.

Chandler was beside the Jeep. Close enough that I was aware of it, not close enough to mean anything.

The fatigue had been there all morning, low and steady, the kind that didn’t announce itself loudly but was still there when I reached for things, still there when I laughed too hard or moved too fast. Cycle one had finished nine days ago. Cycle two started in five. This was the window, the part where my body was supposedly recovering, and technically it was. I just wasn’t recovered.

I hadn’t told them how tired I was. There was a version of today where I stayed home on the sofa with Bernard and the heating pad and let the window close around me, and I had actively chosen not to do that, which meant I was also choosing not to ruin it by announcing that my legs felt like something assembled incorrectly.

“Okay but which one is Pikes Peak,” Maekynzie said, still holding her phone up.

“The tall one,” Emory said.

“They’re all tall, Emory.”

“The tallest tall one.”

Stetson pointed. Maekynzie adjusted her phone. Tinsley said, “More left,” and Maekynzie moved left and Tinsley said, “Too far,” and this went on for a while.

I watched them from the hood of the Jeep and thought: this. This is the thing. Not any single piece of it, not the view or the weather or the fact that I was upright and outside. Just all of them, exactly like this, Emory with the stick and Stetson threatening to throw it and Noelle quietly watching something none of the rest of us were watching. The particular temperature of this group. I had been cold and in a recliner in an infusion room five days ago and now I was here, and both of those things were true, and the second one was winning.

Chandler pushed off the Jeep and walked up next to me, not on the hood, just standing with his forearms resting on the side panel.

“You’re quiet,” he said. Not an accusation.

“I’m always quiet.”

“Not like this.”

I looked at the valley instead of at him. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t push it.

Emory and Stetson had migrated toward the guardrail and were now apparently arguing about whether you could throw Emory’s stick far enough to clear the ridge, which was the kind of project that required full attention and both of them had given it. Noelle had drifted down the rail toward where Maekynzie and Tinsley were still debating the photo. The group had scattered in that natural way it did, everyone pulled toward whatever they were pulled toward, and it left just the two of us in this small pocket of quiet by the Jeep.

Chandler didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

The wind came up for a second, and I could smell his jacket, something familiar that I didn’t have a name for, and I looked at the mountains and pressed my thumb into my palm and thought about nothing very carefully.

“Sloane.”

“I know,” I said.

He hadn’t finished saying whatever he was going to say. We both let that sit.

“Good view,” he said finally.

“Yeah.”

Emory’s stick sailed off the overlook in a long arc and disappeared into the tree line below, and there was a brief cheer from the guardrail, and the moment ended, and everyone started drifting back toward the cars.

The diner was twenty minutes back toward town, a low building with a neon sign that had been half-burned out for as long as any of us could remember, and a menu that hadn’t changed since before we were born. We took the big booth in the back. Emory immediately started reading from the laminated specials card in the voice of someone giving a TED talk.

“Today,” he intoned, “we offer a journey. A culinary odyssey. The pot roast.”

“Stop,” Maekynzie said, already opening her menu.

“The pot roast has been slow-cooked,” Emory continued, “with love. And also with gravy. The gravy is included. It is always included.”

“I’m getting the pot roast now just to spite you,” Stetson said.

Noelle ordered first because she always knew what she wanted before she sat down. Tinsley studied the pie case at the front of the diner with the focused energy she usually saved for things that actually mattered, and when the server came around she asked three specific questions about the cherry pie before committing to a slice.

“The crust,” she explained to no one in particular, “is the whole thing. A bad crust ruins it.”

“Tinsley has strong opinions about pie,” Maekynzie said to me, in the tone of someone stating something we both already knew and found equally funny.

“I’m right here,” Tinsley said.

Chandler was across the table from me, which was where he usually ended up, and he was looking at the menu even though he always ordered the same thing, which was either a tell or a habit and I had stopped trying to figure out which. I ordered a grilled cheese because it was the thing my stomach could reliably tolerate right now and also because it was what I always ordered here, and if I changed it someone would ask why, and I didn’t want to talk about it.

Maekynzie turned ordering into something closer to a negotiation, asking the server about substitutions with the confidence of someone who had never once been told no and didn’t plan to start. The server, a woman named Winnie who had been working here since our parents were in high school, handled it with the patience of someone who had seen everything.

“Winnie is incredible,” Emory said, watching her go.

“Winnie has seen things,” Noelle agreed.

The food came. The booth got loud in the specific way it did when everyone was comfortable and fed and not trying, which was the best version of loud. Emory had moved on from the specials card to doing voices for the couple two booths over, a low murmur that only our table could hear, some invented conversation about whether to get dessert that was so accurate in its domestic specificity that Maekynzie inhaled a mouthful of milkshake and spent forty-five seconds trying to recover.

I laughed. A real one, the kind that came from somewhere involuntary, and it cost me something, a pull in my chest and a wave of exhaustion that rolled through me so fast I almost missed it. I didn’t miss it. I pressed my hand flat on the table and let it pass and kept my face exactly where it was.

Nobody noticed. That was the goal.

My phone buzzed.

Across the table Chandler was ordering something, not looking up from the menu. His coffee cup was in his hand. It went still for just a moment.

Evan.

hey. you doing anything this weekend?

I read it once. The couple two booths over was apparently deciding against dessert, if Emory was to be believed, and Maekynzie was still recovering from the milkshake, and Tinsley was eating her cherry pie with an expression that suggested the crust had passed inspection.

maybe. what did you have in mind?

I put the phone face down on the table.

Noelle was watching me. Not full-on watching, the side-eye version, the one she deployed when she was gathering information before deciding whether to ask about it.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” She took a sip of her water. “Who is it?”

“Evan.”

The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile exactly, more like the suppressed version of one. “Oh.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

She wasn’t. That was the thing. She was doing absolutely nothing and it was somehow louder than if she’d said something.

Emory’s Winnie impression was extremely accurate and Stetson was crying a little and Maekynzie had given up on the milkshake entirely and the booth was loud and warm and exactly what it always was when these specific people were together, and I wanted to hold it still for a minute, just freeze it, just this, just here.

The cherry pie turned out to be, according to Tinsley, above average. She said it the way someone says something has been confirmed rather than the way someone says something is good, and somehow that made it feel like higher praise.

Chandler drove me home.

The others had dispersed in the parking lot, Stetson leaving with Noelle, Emory taking Maekynzie in his mom’s Subaru, Tinsley with her mom who had been texting from around the corner for ten minutes. It left just the two of us in the Jeep, which was not unusual, and the drive was quiet in the way our drives were sometimes quiet, not uncomfortable, just not requiring anything.

I watched the diner disappear in the side mirror and then the road curved and there was nothing but the ridge ahead of us, lit gold where the sun was going sideways across it.

The fatigue was heavier now. The kind of heavy that showed up when you stopped moving and your body caught up to where you’d been keeping it. I leaned my head back against the seat and let my eyes go soft on the window and didn’t try to be anything in particular.

The overlook was visible for a second as we came around the bend, just the guardrail and the edge of the flat where we’d been standing, and then it was gone.

I thought: I want to come back here.

Not with all of them. Just the two of us, the Jeep, that view, no one requiring anything from either of us.

I didn’t say it. I filed it next to all the other things I was not saying yet, in the place where I kept things that weren’t ready to be words.

Chandler had his eyes on the road. His hands were easy on the wheel, the same way he was easy with most things, and the Jeep smelled like it always did, and outside the mountains were doing what they always did.

I closed my eyes for the last five minutes of the drive.

He didn’t say anything about it.