And that was that. Every time we could have let circumstances pull us apart, Stellar simply refused. After her medical training, she packed her car and drove the two hours north to Grey Tusk—to be near her mom, yes, but also because I couldn’t be anywhere else but the mountains. Getting my degree in Vancouver was necessary, but the coast and the city weren’t for me; like a grizzly bear, I needed my own terrain.
I needed the bite of winter wind on top of the mountain and the perfume of awakening trees in spring. I was cold unless I could lie on a sun-warmed rock in a mountain stream in July. I needed to show people my beloved places so they would love them, too, because people don’t fight for what they don’t love, and people don’t love what they don’t know. The vulnerable wilderness needs friends as badly as I do.
Stellar fits in perfectly here. We bitch about how hard it is for younger women to get recognized in adventure tourism (me) and medicine (her). Or we did, until she left Grey Tusk General to take a three-month posting at a bare-bones clinic in the far North, and I got left behind.
“A pitch competition winner would arrive early to snag the best seat. Right?” I already told her about Monday morning in Craig’s office.
I sneak a peek at the Elements of the Novel classroom. People have practically moved in, with laptops and notebooks arranged just so. Most of them look ludicrously young, photographing their artful setups, all the better to hashtag them later.
Something that’s not quite FOMO zings uncomfortably over my skin. Look at these people, doing the thing. Getting it together in their twenties.
Thirty tolls like a bell at the beginning of every fact about me. Thirty and figuring it out. Thirty and getting wild at the community center on a Friday night.
Thirty, with a failed marriage.
I can’t shake the fear that nothing will un-fuck my life. I’m not even splitting with my husband correctly. I should be cracking champagne and celebrating the dawn of my Era of Liz, where nobody says, “Oh, aren’t you Tobin’s wife?”
Instead, I’m remembering the backcountry ski trip we took to celebrate our engagement. Tobin led us to a 1920s mountain lodge, now a historic site and museum inside a national park. A favorite place of mine to visit in the summer, it was closed for the winter season, the red roofs poking out of the deep snow. The site was perfect, tucked into a cradle of peaks surrounding a cobalt-blue Rocky Mountain lake.
We fried our eggs before they froze, pitched our tent, and had sex winter camping style—going slow, to keep cold air out and compensate for the altitude, and ending up gently dying from the tenderness of it all. I died, anyway, when it was Tobin and me.
In the morning, cold air sparking off my skin, pink sky washing us in promise, he waved his bag of granola at the polished log walls peeking from the snowdrifts. “We could do something likethis. Not a lodge; those days are gone. But we could run tours together. Have our own company.”
“You and me?” In that moment, my past, present, and future felt seamlessly layered and blended, yellow into orange into fuchsia, like the sunrise. I didn’t need to worry about West by North and how my two promotions hadn’t come. Not even one promotion. Everything felt so simple.
“You and me, Diz,” Tobin said, picking me up and twirling me in a hug, and I heard “forever,” just like he meant me to.
“Trust your feelings,” Stellar says, breaking me out of my rose-colored memories. “You have a bad feeling about this. Me too.”
“There’s nothing wrong with improv.”
“Hmph,” she mutters, Yoda-like. “Beyond being an agonizing activity that people inexplicably do on purpose, no, there’s nothing wrong with improv. And there’s nothing wrong withyou.”
“Maybe not. But I could be moreright.”
“Don’t let those assholes at Waste by North tell you you’re not good enough.”
“It’s not just the assholes at my job,” I point out. “It’s also the assholes at six other companies whose interviews I bombed. I have to find a way to get seen, and this is it.”
My own research shows that Craig was, unfortunately, correct to send me here. People have written entire books describing how improv crushed their social anxiety and forged them into invincible public speakers. Naheed’s class will lay the foundation for networking, positivity, and not spontaneously combusting during corporate “fun” events.
And pitch competitions. Improv is where I’ll steal Naheed’s secrets for C-suite appeal.
“It sounds excruciating.”
“That’s how it works, Stellar. No social pain can touch me after I’ve survived this level of nuclear humiliation.”
I inch past Adult Tap, where a handful of unlikely dancers are inventing reasons to click around the classroom. It’s as if putting on the shoes has transformed them into the performers they’ve always wanted to be.
Like magic.
“Fine,” Stellar groans. “But let the record show this is not my favorite of all your ideas.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Have you, though?” Background rustling makes me imagine Stellar adjusting her signature tank top where it’s bunched against her blankets.
“How about when I was drunk and hungry and decided to make hot shortbread with jujube sauce?”
