I’m standing outside the San Antonio airport, waiting for the shuttle to the Hyatt. The air is fresh, and though San Antonio sits at the same latitude as Houston, directly west, it’s distinctly warmer here than it was outside the Houston airport. As I take off my sweatshirt, a girl with long, curly hair walks up from behind and stands next to me. It’s unclear to me whether her curls are natural or whether she had them done for the interview, but regardless, she was stunning. I had shoved my sweatshirt into my backpack as soon as I got off the plane, but this girl’s still wearing a hoodie so massive that it covers her hands entirely.
“That’s alotta bags you got there,” she says, gesturing towards the two suitcases on which I’m leaning, each with a backpack slung across their handles.
“Oh!” I stutter, a little taken aback, “my friend’s just in the bathroom.”
“Makes sense,” she nods, “I think we were on the same flight, from Houston. You here for the interview too?”
“Nah, but my buddy is. I’m taking an extra gap year, but I’m also gonna be a dentist, so I’m tagging along to see what the interviews are like,” I answer. She probably wants to talk about the interview with someone else, but given that I’m not even close to that step of the application process yet, I didn’t really know what to say. “I’m unemployed as shit right now.”
The girl chuckles and quickly covers her mouth. Although one of her front teeth is crooked, barely perceptible really, her smile is bright and radiant and makes the place even warmer than it already is. Her eyes are tall and round, with dark pupils that almost erase the whites of her eyes. Around them are long, curly eyelashes, and from what I can tell, she isn’t wearing a lot of makeup.
“Naw,” I continue, “Right now I’m just studying for the DAT.” I pause for a second and wait for her to ask me something. When she doesn’t, I think about turning away, back towards where the shuttle might eventually show up, until my friend Justin comes back from his lengthy trip to the bathroom. Those two will be able to find something to talk about. “You feeling ready for the interview?” I find myself asking anyway.
“Yeah, I mean, I didn’t really prepare that much,” she glances to the side, still smiling gently, “but you know fuck it we ball right.”
“Haha. What can you do.”
“Fuck it we ball” wasn’t something I heard a girl say before, and while it was a little jarring to, it was also, in some way, endearing. She really is kind of cute. I reach into my pocket for my phone, trying to come up with some excuse to grab her number, but I stop. I gained twenty pounds in my last relationship, and while Lyla claimed that she “lost feelings from all the fights we had”, those twenty pounds, I suspect, are the real culprit. It’s been more than a year since I’ve been with Lyla, or since I’ve even spoken to her, but for some reason that I can’t pinpoint, I haven’t gotten myself back into shape yet. Every once in a while, I’d start being mindful of my diet and watch the pounds drop on the scale week after week; then, I’d binge eat for two weeks straight and gain it all back. I found it hard to talk to introduce myself to anyone ever since my weight had gone up.
I don’t work out like I used to either. I love rock climbing, but I find that hard to believe now. Rock climbing, it feels like, has turned into just another activity, something to hold onto as I felt my identity slipping away. When I eventually force myself off of one of my binging sprees, typically because the shame of looking in the mirror had grown unbearable, I’d drag myself to the climbing gym, try some boulders, realize I can’t climb nearly as hard as I used to, and become frustrated. The cycle never ends, as they say. All I need to do, I’d remind myself, is get my weight back down.
“You got Instagram?” I try again, leaving my phone in my pocket, “You gotta put me on when you get into your dental schools.”
She chuckles again, “Yeah, I got ya.”
She fumbles through her purse to grab her phone. As she opens Instagram, I see that her suggested reel is a clip from Valorant—an online shooter game that I’ve played on-and-off for a few years now. Recently, since I’ve been climbing less, I’ve had more time and energy to put into Valorant. It’s also been a great way to reconnect with some of my old friends. Seeing the Valorant clip on the girl’s phone makes my heart jump a little.
“You play Val?”
“Yeaahh,” she responds, handing me her phone.
”You any good?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’d like to think so,” she says, confidently, “I play Jett, after all. I’m not a baiter.”
“Ha,” I let out a small laugh, puffing the air from my nostrils. Not very much air comes out—I think I’ve been holding my breath. “We gotta play sometime.”
“Bet,” she takes her phone back, glancing down at the page I pulled up, “your name’s George?”
“That’s me.”
“Cool. I’m Jackie.”
“Nice to meet you, Jackie.”
I hear someone approaching from behind us. My friend Justin grabs his bag and throws it onto his back. He turns to Jackie. “You here for the interview too?”
***
Jackie and I, bananabreadpudding and uncrustables, are playing Valorant and calling on Discord, in the comfort of our own homes. It’s round 6, and our team is down. There’s a common superstition, one that I’ve always believed, that no situation is inherently awkward; someone makes it awkward. Unfortunately, I’ve also always believed that someone is bound to make a situation awkward, subconsciously, simply by anticipating that it will be awkward. And I’m a pretty awkward person. There are long silences between the rounds. I try to fill those silences with small talk about the game.
I unmute my microphone. “Who do you main?”
“I like Jett, but sometimes I play Reyna too,” Jackie says.
I’m not completely sure why I asked her that. I already knew that she played Jett, and it’s not like her answer would’ve changed between now and when she told me at the airport. In fact, why didn’t I ask her about the interview? Or about dental school? God, I’m folding so hard right now.
“What about you?” she asks.
“I usually wait and just play whatever character the team needs,” I respond.
“Ah,” she goes, “You see, people like you are why I can get away with playing what I want.”
“You’re welcome for that,” I joke, before muting myself again.
“Why do you keep muting and unmuting yourself?”
“Oh, there’s construction outside, so I’m just unmuting when I need to talk, so you don’t hear all the noise.”
“Aw, that’s very considerate of you.”
“I just thought it was the normal thing to do,” I say. I do a silent little fist pump.
Jackie and I are about the same rank, but her play-style is a little more fast-paced, to put it lightly. She engages in combat at the start of almost every round, putting our team at the mercy of her actions. She does this so often that the enemy team almost certainly knows when and where she will appear on the map. Any other player would lose the fight every single time. Fortunately for us, Jackie is able to win more of her fights than I expect, and those are the rounds we win.
We lose the game ten-to-thirteen. “You wanna play another?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’m down.”
While we are in queue, I open my phone and send Jackie a Game Pigeon—8 Ball, played over iMessage. I used to play games over iMessage with Lyla. Lyla and I played 8 Ball on our first date too. We always had a lot of fun together, but she was an awful listener, really only giving much attention to herself. Sometimes, she would pout and unironically chant the words “attention, attention” when she had something to say. Sometimes, I’d be in the middle of a story, telling Lyla about, say, a climbing trip I had just come back from, and she’d interrupt me and start telling me about her own day. If I ever had to hang up, to study or to sleep or to do my own thing, I was hurting her feelings. I have to wake up early tomorrow to go climbing outdoors, I’d explain. You don’t love me, she’d return. She always took things too seriously.
I forget to mute while we are playing.
“That’s a loud jackhammer,” Jackie says, “must suck.”
“For real,” I respond, “It starts every day as soon as eight-thirty. And they’re just tryna get their job done, so I can’t even complain about it. Still, I just want an extra hour of sleep, ya feel.”
She doesn’t respond for a couple of seconds. Uh oh. I’ve complained too much—she thinks I’m a little bitch.
“Yeah,” she goes, breaking the silence at last, “even if it’s just an hour, it can really mess up your rhythm and routine and stuff. I understand.”
I picture the gentle smile on her face. “Thanks for the thoughtful response. That means a lot to me.”
We get into the second game.
“Do you think you’re gonna go to UT San Antonio if you get in?” I ask.
“Probably,” she says, “I kinda wanna stay in Texas. Plus, it’s the best school that I got an interview for, so I feel like I kind of have to go if I get in. If I didn’t, I’d probably think about what it would’ve been like if I did for the rest of my life.”
“Yeah,” I take a moment to think, “the worst feeling is knowing that you’re not being the best you that you can be. Or even trying to.”
“Huh,” she scoffs, “I didn’t know men were capable of deep thoughts like that.”
“Ha,” I say, “I’ve been struggling with being the best version of myself, so that’s why I’ve been thinking about that.”
“That’s cool that you—“
“You think it’s cool that I’m struggling?”
“No nothing like that. Just that you can open up about it.”
“I’m just joshin’ ya,” I say.
“Yeah yeah,” she laughs.
It’s round twelve of the second game. Jackie is in a one-versus-three. She kills the first enemy: two remaining. If we were to win this round, the enemy team’s economy would be ruined for the rest of the game. She moves quickly and almost recklessly, without seeming to realize that doing so would reveal her position to the opposing team. If she did realize it, she didn’t care. Suddenly, two enemies emerge simultaneously on opposite sides of the screen, guns drawn. She strafes to the right, calmly moves her crosshair to the first target’s head and clicks. She strafes the other direction and flicks her mouse perfectly onto the second target’s head. And there it is—victory. They didn’t stand a chance.
“Wow,” I blurt out, nearly speechless, “that was sick.”
As we are in queue for a third game, I realize I cannot take the construction noise anymore and decide I have to get out of the house.
“What are you gonna go do?” she asks.
“I’m probably gonna go climb.”
“Oh, like rock climbing? At like, uh, Momentum, or whatever? That’s so cool.”
I smile. “Thanks! I’d be happy to take you sometime.”
“I’d love that.”
We’ve got a second date. “I didn’t mean to leave so early,” I add.
“No, it’s okay,” she reassures, “I had a great time.”
***
Jackie and I are at Momentum, one of the climbing gyms in Houston. Jackie, as it turns out, is really good at rock climbing, a lot stronger and certainly a lot more confident than I was when I started. She moves gracefully and controlled and does not ask for any advice. I do not offer her any. I watch her top a boulder, effortlessly, before releasing her hands and letting herself drop to the mat below, landing on her feet while breaking the fall perfectly with a squat.
She’s wearing grey sweatpants again, paired this time with a ribbed, baby-blue crop top. I’ve chosen to wear a white, oversized tee and extra-loose-fitting blue jeans. I try to keep my eyes on her eyes.
“Well done,” I say, walking to the wall with chalk on my hands, preparing to start a boulder of my own.
Halfway up the wall, I place my right foot onto a foothold that’s a little too small for comfort. Afraid to hesitate, I put my weight on it anyway, reaching for the next handhold. Huh, that hold is further away than I thought. Shit. My heart sinks, and I find myself on the mat below, lying on my side. Embarrassed, I sprawl my limbs out and lie there for a few seconds before slowly rolling my way back to Jackie.
“That was funny,” she giggles.
“Shut up.”
“You wanna go do some toproping instead?” she jokes, “the falls might be easier on you.”
“You know how to belay?”
“Yeah, my brother climbs.”
I stare at her, blankly, “And you didn’t say anything?”
She shrugs.
“So you come here often then?” I press.
“Nah, my brother is, like, really good, so I don’t bother trying to keep up with him.”
“He goes outdoors and stuff?”
“Nah, he does, like, competitions and stuff,” she pauses, “You go outdoors?”
“Yeah, in college, I tried to go every weekend when the weather was good.”
“You should take me sometime,” she smiles.
“I will,” I smile back, trying not to smile a little too hard. It’s hard to believe that Jackie is a real person.
“Yeah, my brother is super into climbing. I can’t take him seriously. One time, I was sharing a hotel room with him, and I woke up in the middle of the night, and he was all scrunched up, making some dumb climbing pose,” she mimics the pose and makes a goofy facial expression—tongue out and eyes rolled in different directions—“must’ve been some weird dream.”
I burst into laughter. I try to think of the last time I laughed so hard.
“Let’s go toprope,” she says.
Jackie does climber things while she is on the wall. She inhales and exhales rhythmically and audibly enough for me to hear from the ground, as if she were pacing herself, acting as her own metronome. When she finds a good handhold, one large enough to rest on and regain some strength, she chalks up repeatedly, taking turns digging either hand into the chalk-bag strapped onto her harness. I’ve never been one to shy from chalking my hands, but Jackie chalks up so frequently that the holds might become slippery again. She would blow on her hands to get rid of any excess chalk, and when that wasn’t enough, she’d slap her hands against her sweats, leaving dusty, white handprints all across the sides.
She shakes out her arm every chance she gets, trying to recover some strength. It’s true that there’s a good reason for doing this—it flushes out the lactic acid—but Jackie seemed to do it out of habit alone. There was no way she needed to be shaking her arm as often as she did. She’d relax her wrist, allowing them to wiggle freely, and jolt her arm repeatedly, as if doing so would will the strength back into her arms and fingers. Even though Jackie claimed that she didn’t climb often, she seems completely comfortable acting like one. She had tied her own figure-eight knot, had started climbing before I could check it (as one does with any climbing partner), and did not appear, even for a moment, to fear that it would come loose, or that she would even fall at all.
“I think I’m in love,” I say under my breath.
“What’d ya say?” she calls from above.
“I said you’re doing great!”
When she finishes the route, I lower her back to the ground. I raise an open hand, offering a high-five. She meets it with a smack, but instead of bringing her hand back, she closes her fingers around mine. Oh God.
“I-I think you’re really pretty,” I sputter out.
“Thank you,” she smiles and doesn’t cover up her teeth this time.
“You wanna grab dinner after this?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
***
Jackie and I are calling and playing Valorant again. My friend Justin had asked to join, but since he had just started playing the game a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be best not to have him and Jackie play together. Jackie isn’t always the most pleasant person to game with. Sometimes, when we play on our own, with randomly assigned teammates, she would mute anyone that spoke too much. For the ones that were the most annoying, she would go out of her way to make the game miserable for them, even if it meant losing the game intentionally. Sometimes, all it took for someone to be “annoying” was for them to be bad at the game. If they called to go to site B, she would run to site A. Then she would blame the loss on the “annoying” person, who was just trying to get everyone to work together. I didn’t want to picture what a game with Jackie and Justin would look like.
It’s been four hours since we started playing.
“How’s your diet going, by the way?” she asks.
I remember the twenty Chicken McNuggets I ate the night before at two-in-the-morning. On the drive to the McDonald’s, during the wait in the drive-through, and on the drive back, I had told myself that I shouldn’t eat the nuggets, and that I would regret it, but I ate them anyway and had been able to fall asleep easily enough. Now, I wish I hadn’t eaten those nuggets. “I’m just, you know, following my plan,” I respond, quietly because those McNuggets were, in fact, not part of my plan.
“That’s great,” she responds, “I’m proud of you.”
I don’t want to picture her smile.
It’s round twenty, game-point, and Jackie and I are the last two standing on our team. There are two enemies remaining. We hold a cross fire; I make first contact. I die, taking an enemy down with me. It’s just Jackie left. The last enemy peeks and one-shots her.
“Dammit!” she exclaims, “I could’ve won that.”
“You suck, man,” I say, backing her up.
“You have a big forehead,” she retorts.
“No food for you tonight, I guess.”
“I don’t want your stank-ass food anyway.”
“Good. Less work for me,” I start queue again, for the both of us, “What time you coming over again?”
“Nine.”
“Okay, Rick and Morty?”
“Duh.”
“Bet.”
***
Jackie and I are in her car, a gold Toyota Highlander, and we are on the way to go outdoor climbing in Austin. On this trip, I plan to have her rappel, one of the more intimidating things you can do while climbing: you have to attach yourself directly to the rock, disconnect the rope, and set up an entirely new system to which you can reconnect and use to lower yourself. Each of these steps involves a series of checks and redundancies to ensure that the climber remains safe throughout the process. Even if you’re certain that you did everything correctly, and in the correct order, you never feel fully secure. I had taught Jackie all of these checks and redundancies earlier in the week, and as she practiced, she waved off my concern nonchalantly, as she usually did. So, while we are in the car, I have her explain them to me several times, in order and without mistakes, to make sure that she was really ready for the task at hand.
We get to the base of the route: a two-pitch, easier line that runs about forty meters tall. I climb first, and Jackie follows right after. The both of us make it to the top without issue. When we connect to the anchor, I motion for Jackie to start setting up the rappel. I watch carefully, ensuring that she is safe without offering any additional instruction. She hesitates a few times throughout the setup but eventually places all the components exactly where they need to be, just as I had taught her.
“Looks good,” I say, signaling that she can start lowering.
I watch Jackie slide down the strands of rope; she starts choppily but quickly finds the rhythm and glides down smoothly. When I see that she’s safe on the ground and disconnected from the system, I shout, “Alright, I’m gonna come down now!”
Jackie gives me a thumbs up.
I start moving the carabiners around, still attached to the system, and I hear a snap.
The rope has failed at the knot, and I feel myself falling backwards. I reach for the carabiners, the bolts, anything that I can grab onto, but I’m already leaning too far back. My eyes dart across the rock, three-hundred-sixty degrees in that single instance, scanning, searching desperately for something to grab onto. I find a small crimp, a hold no more than three-quarters of a centimeter deep, and cling onto it. It’s not good enough: it’s slanted, and there’s no way to wrap my fingers around it.
Soon, my feet are off the wall too. I jerk my body in the air so that I’m facing Jackie. She’s yelling, screaming something at the top of her lungs, but I can’t make out the words.
I fall into my bed. I’m jolted upright and look around frantically. My heartrate is through the roof. It’s dark, except for the sliver of light that shines through the top of the blinds. I toss my bedsheets and pillows around aggressively, looking for my phone. It reads 4:03am.
What the fuck was that…
I run through the sequence of events again, everything that just happened in my head, trying to piece the story together before it escapes me.
I haven’t even gone outdoor climbing with Jackie yet.
I open iMessage and send Jackie a Game Pigeon, while I figure out how to put the incident into words. I type hastily; then, I slow down, finding the sentences that wouldn’t alarm her.
“I just had the wildest dream…”
***
Jackie has started dental school, and a new life, in San Antonio, and I’m still in Houston, awaiting my admission results. A couple weeks before she moved, we had talked about what would happen to our relationship, only briefly. We both agreed that long distance wasn’t worth it, given that I have no intention to move to San Antonio, and that was it. I had hoped that she would bring it up again before she left town, but I knew that she never would. Whether I wanted to believe it or not, Jackie had already made up her mind.
Eventually, I start taking my health seriously. Over five months, I lose twenty-five pounds and put on a mean ten pounds of muscle to replace it. I get a great score on the DAT, higher than I had expected, and my interviews all go well enough. I start climbing seriously again, and I’m climbing better than ever before. I haven’t opened Valorant in weeks. I don’t have as much free time, but I still hop on Discord and call my friends as often as I can. I make the most out of what I have.
I often go to Austin alone these days, setting up fixed lines for myself. When I’m out there, tying my knots, double-checking them and double-checking them again, I think of Jackie.
I picture her smile, cleaving through the cold, late-autumn breeze. I imagine her standing next to me—dressed in her chalky sweats, some crop top that’s way too thin for the weather, and one of my old high school hoodies—looking up at the route with me from below. We had been, say, working on this particular route for a couple of weeks now, trying to make it to the top without falling. We’d both know every handhold, every foothold, and we’d know them painfully well. She would have just completed the route, a few hours earlier, on her second try of the day. I’d start my, say, fourth attempt and get stuck right under the hardest part again, my fingers aching and my calves trembling; maybe I don’t need to get this one today. She’d watch me from the ground, belaying and yelling to “hurry and get your ass up there already so I can stretch my neck.” Then I would finally get it. She almost drops me on the way down because we’d be celebrating—so glad, so relieved that all those drives to Austin had finally paid off, for the both of us. Later that night, when we get back to our apartment, we’d each sit behind our desks back-to-back, calling our friends and playing Valorant together, laughing. We’d tell everyone about the day-trip and the difficult route we both topped. We’d joke about how she absolutely killed it, how I almost quit on my last try, how she pushed me through it without even knowing, and how the most important people come into our lives when we least expect them to.