“Oh my god,” said Zoe. “Please tell me what girls don’t understand—because I’ve always wondered.”
Either Dallas didn’t hear the sarcasm, or decided to ignore it.
“What girls don’t understand,” he began earnestly, “is that guys actually do want to hear about their feelings—they just don’t want to hear about all of their feelings. They want to hear about some of them.”
“How much are we talking?” said Zoe. “Do you want to hear, like, thirty percent of our feelings?”
Dallas mulled this over.
“Maybe fifty percent?” he said. “Depending? We just want there to be time left at the end to talk about something else. But with you guys—with you girls—everything is always connected to everything else, so you start talking about one feeling and that leads to another feeling, which leads to another feeling.” He looked at her with his dimpled, wide-open face. He was absolutely sincere. “You know? There’s never any time left.”
They were just outside Polebridge now. Dallas turned onto the road to town. Polebridge was a tiny, pony express sort of place in the middle of nowhere. There were maybe a dozen buildings—a café, a general store, a cluster of cabins, a red outhouse with a crescent moon on the door. Except for the satellite dishes, it might have been 1912. There was a rail for tying up your horse.
Dallas parked in front of the store, shut off the engine, and turned to Zoe, apparently still waiting for the lowdown on her feelings.
What the heck, she thought.
“Okay, here are the highlights,” she said. “My mom’s pissed at me for going caving. Jonah won’t leave the house. He’s like a crazy person in a play. I haven’t seen X—my boyfriend—I haven’t seen him in days. I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear about him. What else? I miss my dad. I’ve never gone caving without him. I don’t even know how to go caving without him.” She made herself stop talking. “So those are my feelings. Which fifty percent do you want to hear more about?”
To Dallas’s credit, he said exactly the right thing: “You need some sugar.”
He disappeared into the general store and returned five minutes later with a bag of pastries, which he dumped onto the seat between them, like a pirate’s treasure. There were chocolate chip cookies, cherry turnovers, and huckleberry bear claws. It was far more food than the two of them could eat. Zoe unwrapped a bear claw and began to devour it, licking the frosting off her fingers. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.
“When we’re finished with Silver Teardrop, I want to go see Black Teardrop, okay?” she said. “I haven’t seen it since…”
She trailed off, and Dallas finished the sentence for her: “Since we looked for your dad?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You really ready to see that place again?” said Dallas.
Zoe laughed. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the sugar.
“Who knows,” she said.
They left Polebridge and drove the last ten miles to Silver Teardrop, the car bucking and rattling over the road. The forest in this part of the mountains had recently burned. The trees were stripped and charcoal black, and rose out of the snow naked as needles. They reminded Zoe of the woods near Bert and Betty’s house, of course—and that reminded her of chasing Jonah and the dogs through the blizzard, of meeting X, of meeting Stan. It was just like Dallas said: everything was connected.
Silver Teardrop lay under a frozen creek bed that ran alongside the road. There was nowhere to park. Dallas drove an extra half mile, and finally the road widened enough for him to pull over. For the next five minutes, he blared Kanye West’s song “Monster” at top volume, which seemed to be a pre-caving ritual of his. Zoe stood outside the truck, watching in amusement as Dallas duplicated every move from the video. Finally, the tune ended. Dallas emerged from the truck, red-faced and beaming.
“Woot!” he shouted, not so much to Zoe as to the universe.
He gestured for Zoe to follow him. He walked to the back of the 4Runner and opened it with a flourish.
“Behold!” he said.
Zoe couldn’t speak for a moment: It was a gearhead’s paradise. There were beautiful coils of rope hanging from hooks. There were drills, bolt kits, harnesses, ascenders and descenders, caving packs with holes in the bottom so water could drain out. There were folding shovels and gleaming ice axes. There were whole unopened boxes of Clif Bars and CamelBaks full of water. Everything was meticulously curated and cared for. Everything was shiny. Zoe’s dad always used as little gear as he could get away with: he liked to improvise, and he was kind of a slob. Dallas had four identical orange helmets. He even had a stack of jumpsuits, which were a lighter shade of orange. They appeared to have been ironed.
“Turns out I have a little OCD,” said Dallas.
Zoe didn’t want him to feel self-conscious.
“No more than, like, a serial killer,” she said.
Dallas took a jumpsuit from the pile, popped it open, and stepped into it. The suit used to have a breast pocket, but Dallas had removed it so it wouldn’t fill with mud when he crawled. The front of the suit had tiny holes in the shape of a U where the pocket used to be.
Next, Dallas inspected the row of helmets. Zoe wondered how he could even tell them apart. Finally, he picked one, rigged it with an LED headlamp, and strapped it on. He was square-jawed and handsome in his orange helmet-and-suit ensemble.