Page 56 of Every Step She Takes
I swallow around a golf ball that seems lodged in my throat. “I’m not that complex, Freckles.”
“I think you are,” she says, before she starts coughing from trying to talk and climb these hell stairs simultaneously. I pass her my Hydro Flask. “But you seem hell-bent on making me think you’re just a pretty face.”
I swivel fully around. “You think my face is pretty?”
Even in the dark I can see the shadowed hint of her blush. Sadie takes a long drink of water, and several deep breaths before regaining control of her respiratory system. “Tell meonetrue thing about yourself.”
“Fine. I think your face is pretty too.”
She shoves my water bottle aggressively back into my hands. The stainless-steel rim tastes like her spearmint ChapStick. “You know, these stairs are the fucking worst,” she barks.
“Don’t hate me, but I don’t even think we’re halfway there.”
“I might hate you,” she says, and we drag ourselves up another two dozen steps in silence. “How about this?” She punctuates each word with a gasp for air. “I get to ask you one personal question.”
A spike of fear shoots through me, but I try to sound flippant when I say, “Deal.”
Sadie considers her one question as we climb. I expect her to ask why I’m angry at the ocean or why this place makes me so fucking sad, and I don’t know how I’ll answer her with the honesty she deserves.
“What do you do for a living?” she finally asks, and the banality of the question catches me entirely off guard.
“What do I do for a living?” It’s such a commonplace question, and it should be easy to answer. But for me, it never is. “Uh, well… I don’t actually do…anything. At least at the moment.”
She quiets for a few more steps before she asks. “You mean, you’re unemployed?”
A logical assumption and far preferable to the truth. “Not unemployed so much as… not employed.”
Between puffs of breath, I can practically hear Sadie thinking about this. “You don’t work? Like, at all?”
“I’ve had a lot of jobs,” I rush to tell her, thinking about what Ruth said. That I’m a directionless, purposeless lump.
“I worked for Smith College in the housing department while I got my master’s there. I worked at a queer youth center in Amsterdam, and for Planned Parenthood in Dallas, and for an NGO in Bangladesh, and for a DV shelter in Wyoming, and—” I cut off, because I realize my résumé doesn’t make me sound any less directionless or purposeless. “In Seattle, I volunteered for a few different organizations, but I couldn’t seem to settle into any of them. I’ve done a lot of different things in different places, but nothing that could be considered a career, I guess.”
Sadie’s judgmental thoughts feel so loud on this hill. “What do you do for money, then?”
I focus on the dark in front of me so I don’t have to think about the expression on Sadie’s face as I say. “My grandfather started a business, like your Nan. Only, it ended up being quite successful.”
Quite. What an absurd understatement.
“It was very successful,” I amend. “And he left me a small fortune when he died. At twenty-five, I came into my trust, and I’ve been living off that for the past thirteen years.”
Another excruciating pause. “Wait, so you actually are wealthy?”
“Uh, considerably.”
“I guess Vera was right.”
I wheel around and blind her with the headlamp again. “What did Vera say about me?”
Sadie throws a hand up over her eyes. “Nothing. Just that you clearly come from money, even though you dress like someone who finds their clothes in a dumpster.”
She’s insulting me, quite cruelly, but I don’t think I’ve ever liked Sadie more than I do in this moment. Because every time someone learns I have money—learns I’m Maëlys Costa, of the Quinta Costa fortune—there’s a shift in how they treat me. I can feel it in my bones like a change in barometric pressure.
But Sadie, bless her, after being awoken at an ungodly hour and forced to climb Satan’s staircase, is still cranky as hell with me, millionaire or not. The horizon is turning pale purple behind the hills to our east, and I can make out those eponymous freckles in the predawn light. “Come on. I want to make it to the top before sunrise.”
“I will go at whatever speed I want, thank you very much.”
I adopt an exaggerated Italian accent. “Climb on my back. I will carry you up the hill. I carry sandbags up Mont Blanc for fun.”
