moments were rare, especially after Benny started to slip.
The path up to the top hadn’t changed since I had last been there, years before. The way was still marked with splintered wooden signs, mile markers in fading yellow paint. But the pines had crept in closer, and the boulders seemed smaller, as if in the intervening years I’d come to take up more space in the world. With Michael and Ashley there, I felt larger than life; I felt alive.
But next to me, Ashley’s breath was growing ragged, her steps less sure. (Maybe I should have noticed and suspected at that point, but I was still so determined to be her friend.) When we got to a clearing near the summit, she stopped, and braced a hand against a tree.
I turned to wait. Michael had vanished far behind us. “Everything OK?”
She ran the hand up and down the bark of the tree, gazed up into the branches. Her placid smile suddenly looked an awful lot like a grimace. “Just taking it all in. I think I might stop for a minute and meditate.”
She closed her eyes, shutting me out. I waited, looking out at the view. Storm clouds were gathering. A particularly ominous cloud had impaled itself on the peak of the mountain directly across the lake. The wind had whipped up whitecaps across the surface of the water, blowing south toward the casinos on the Nevada shore.
How long was she going to stand there? Did she expect me to be meditating, too? The stillness made me twitchy; I instinctively reached for my phone and lifted the camera to frame Ashley where she stood silhouetted against the lake. Her cheeks were flushed pink with exertion, her lashes trembled against her skin. So pretty. I snapped a photo, applied a few filters. I was typing the caption: My new friend Ashley when the phone suddenly flew out of my hand.
“No!”
Ashley stood before me, her face purple as she jabbed at the buttons on my phone. (My phone!) “Sorry to be such a stickler but…I’m a very private person. I know social media is your thing, but I’d really rather not have you post photos of me online.” She handed the phone back to me. She’d deleted the photo entirely.
I blinked away the tears that had sprung to my eyes. It had been ages since I’d spent time with anyone who didn’t want their photo taken: An appearance in someone else’s feed was the best sort of validation, a flag staking your place in a world that you hadn’t curated yourself. But not for Ashley, apparently. “I’m sorry,” I murmured.
“No, it’s really my fault, I should have said something earlier. Don’t worry about it, OK?” She smiled, but her lower lip was pulled tight against her teeth. I’d clearly made a terrible faux pas.
She turned away from me and looked down the hill. “Let’s head back down and find Michael. I’m starting to think we may have lost him forever.”
I nodded, but I was thinking of the photo that I had already uploaded, days before, of Ashley doing yoga on the lawn. I need to delete it before she sees it and gets upset. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’m going to take one more minute. I’ll catch up.”
As soon as she was out of sight I turned my phone back on, and opened up Instagram, where the photo of Ashley was still at the top of my stream: 18,032 likes, 72 comments. It really was a good portrait—one of the best, artistically, that I’d taken since getting to Tahoe—and I hesitated, a little torn. How identifiable was she, really? I scrolled quickly through the comments, just to see what my followers had to say about it. So idyllic / Whose the yoga hottie?! / Looks fun but R U ever going to start posting fashion again??? / Tired of nature shots, unfollow.
And that’s how, right at the bottom of the page, I came across a comment from my longtime follower BennyBananas. BennyBananas, haha, a joke that I had never found funny at all. The Orson Institute had clearly given Benny cellphone access again, a privilege they only conferred when he was