Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement 
7B
Wednesday, March 13, 2019 // The Statement 
7B

Between us and the sun

T

he outer planets don’t have phas-
es. The moon has phases, and 
Venus and Mercury have phases, 
because they sometimes come between 
us and the sun. To us, they are sometimes 
made partially of shadows. But the outer 
planets are too far away. They could care 
less about us, let alone what lies between us 
and their sun. They don’t want our perspec-
tive of them. They’re immune to our label-
ing of phases and our view of shadows. It’s 
worked out for them so far.
That’s the thought that put me to sleep. 
I’d never thought of the planets much, but 
for some reason — maybe it was sleep-
ing outside or the edibles we’d stacked on 
our s’mores — that night the planets were 
my new obsession. I closed my eyes on the 
stars, so many more than I’d ever seen in 
the city, and rolled onto some sharp twigs 
and let myself feel them for all they were 
worth through my sleeping bag. Ezra was 
already snoring, his fingers intertwined 
with Nicola’s, asleep beside him. Her beanie 
had slipped halfway off her bald head. I was 
tempted to pull it back on, but she’d been 
having insomnia lately and it would’ve been 
cruel to wake her. Chemo fatigued most 
people, but it’d just made Nicola nocturnal.
I woke up before the others, those twigs 
finding new spots on me to prod me in dur-
ing my restless sleep until I had to give it 
up. My breath shone like the morning dew 
I had to shake off with my sleeping bag. Fog 
rose from the lake, or maybe it was steam, 
or maybe those two were the same thing, 
but, either way, I was pulling off my quar-
ter zip and fleece pants and walking down 
to the water’s edge, naked but for a pair 
of spandex, the only thing that would dry 
afterward. I felt a twinge of guilt for dis-
turbing the glassy surface of the water, but, 
damn, was it warm. Was it warm or was I 
cold? It didn’t seem to matter as I walked in 
up to my breasts, goosebumps adding to the 
imperfections of my skin, crawling across 
the surgical scars on my neck. I paused to 
consider the contrast of the temperature 
above and below the meniscus, the differ-
ence in the kind of soft the air was and the 
kind of soft the water was. As an experi-
ment, I leaned forward and dipped one 
frozen nipple into the lake. It softened. The 
lake was warm.
You’d think all the good stories come 
out of freezing, stormy water that wrecks 
ships and destroys island nations, but there 
are stories about calm water, too. They just 
always involve the water getting disturbed 
in some way. Like, in Greek mythology, 
there was this guy called Tantalus who was 
an amazing cook, and the gods made him 
cook them a feast. Tantalus wanted to put 
all he could into the meal, so much so that 

he sacrificed his own son and made him the 
main course. The gods hated human sacri-
fice, which you’d think Tantalus would’ve 
known, and once they realized what they’d 
been served, they damned Tantalus never 
to be able to eat or drink again. Tantalus 
was forced to stand in a pool of fresh, clear 
water under a tree hanging with ripe fruit, 
but whenever he reached up or down to eat 
or drink, the fruit would shrivel and rot 
or the water would recede from his out-
stretched hand. Water is an agent of ven-
geance.
Another myth was about a god called 
Alpheus who fell in love with Artemis, the 
goddess of nighttime or something, and to 
hide from Alpheus, Artemis ran into a river 
and covered her face with mud so that he 
wouldn’t be able to distinguish her from 
the nymphs and dryads. Then Alpheus was 
turned into a river himself for being a creep 
and was used by Hercules to clean horseshit 
out of some stables. Water is a place of ref-
uge (and nature’s poop scoop).
Lifting my knees to my chest, I slipped 
down under the water. It was murky, but 
not in a way that made it too dark, and I dug 
below the rocky bottom to where the sand 
began and pulled a handful up with me to 
the surface. I rubbed it into my face, just 
like Artemis, scrubbing away the oil that 
had accumulated overnight on my cheeks, 
my forehead and behind my ears. For how 
warm the water was, the sand was cool, and 
it felt as though it drew all the heat from my 
head.
I blinked open one eye and looked back 
to our campsite. Elio had woken up and he 
was standing over at the edge of our clear-
ing, facing the woods, peeing. His nest of 
curly hair was all flopped over to one side 
and his scrawny back hunched forward. He 
finished and turned around. We blinked 
at each other for a few moments, and Elio 
raised a hand. I waved back, toward myself 
— join me. He pulled off his sweater and 
T-shirt, leaving just his boxers, and dubi-
ously picked his way around the still-sleep-
ing couple down to the water. He waded in 
slowly as I had, but once the water reached 
his knees, he dove under. I dipped my face 
in to wash off the scrub and opened my eyes 
underwater, watching him swim toward 
me until he had his hands on my hips and 
was kissing my waist.
We sat together around the breakfast 
campfire. Ezra and Nicola looked suspi-
cious through their sleepy eyes but I didn’t 
address it. Better to let them make their own 
assumptions. I fried eggs in a little stone 
pan over the tiny flame while Elio sliced 
the tops off strawberries with his hunting 
knife. Ezra unscrewed his water bottle for 
Nicola while she counted out her pills and 

swallowed them one by one. Ezra had the 
types of hands that boys can have, the kind 
with impossibly long fingers that seem as 
though they could wrap around an entire 
basketball or reach across four octaves on 
a piano and the tiny orange pill canisters 
were lost in them like a fly trapped in a spi-
der’s web. While the eggs fried, I laid back 
and rested my head on my rolled up pants.
Above us, pine needles danced in the 
morning wind and considered raining 
down on us, only to send flecks of sap in 
their place. The sky was gray, nothing but 
clouds, but the sun was all the brighter 
for it, diffracting across its entire domain, 
looking like the mouth of a tunnel that was 
already behind us.
Nicola scooted toward my side of the 
fire and rolled down next to me while Ezra 
took over my egg duty. She laid her head 
on my chest, facing me, the tip of her nose 
tickling my chin. I felt her warm breath on 
my neck, the breath that always seemed 
to smell like nothing at all. Sterile, like the 
hospital rooms she’d been in and out of for 
the past five years warding off a particu-
larly stubborn bout of leukemia. I’d joked 
before that her breath was due to her never 
breathing fresh air anymore, and I’m sure 
she must have only invited me camping to 
make me watch her take deep breaths. I felt 
her blow on my neck, then laugh at herself. 
She reached up and slapped her hand to my 
forehead, let it slide down my face, pulling 
my lower lip down my chin. I licked her fin-
gers and she snatched back her hand, wip-
ing it on my sleeve. She rolled her head to 
face down to my feet. Nicola didn’t like to 
look up. I think she was afraid of the sky.
It rained during our hike. Like an idiot, 
I wore a fleece jacket and my fleece pants, 
and by the time we were halfway up the 
mountain breaking for lunch, I was soaked 
through. The others had spare clothing 
and were all smart enough to wear wind-
breakers, so I assembled a new outfit and 
wrapped a tarp from my pack around my 
shoulders as a sort of rain resistant cape. 
Elio picked me up by the waist, “Dirty 
Dancing” style, and ran a few paces while 
I kept my arms stretched out, the Super-
woman of the Rockies.
We paused on an overlook, the lake vis-
ible a mile or so away from our vantage 
point. It was sunny over there, the cloudline 
breaking just over the beach. A strange sort 
of promised land in the direction whence 
we’d come. The stretch of damn forest and 
rock that separated us from that sunny 
oasis felt impassable, a horizontal expe-
dition equivalent to trying to reach outer 
space, only with more obstacles stand-
ing in the way.
I tossed a rock experimentally off the 

cliff. It was lost in the fog and made no 
sound over the din of the rain drumming 
on the earth. Ezra came up behind me and 
handed me another rock the size of his fist. I 
lobbed that one, and we both tracked it with 
outstretched hands until it was lost in the 
trees. Ezra swore he heard a thud. I swore 
I heard my shoulder pop out as I’d thrown 
that one, but he didn’t believe me, either.
At the summit, the rain stopped. Or 
maybe we were above the clouds, but that 
seemed unlikely, given how easily even Nic-
ola could breathe. The air hung with that 
post-storm tension, unsure whether it could 
relax, exhale. We padded across a compos-
ite of pine needles and dirt and pebbles all 
glued together with sap in a cross-stitch of 
browns and greens, absorbing the sound of 
our footsteps and leaving no tracks. I won-
dered if animals could still smell we’d been 
there, whether the damp ground trapped or 
masked our scent.
Would Nicola be detected at all? Riding 
on Elio’s back? I’d been hunched over for 
the past few miles, staring at her dangling 
ankles to keep on course, watching them 
swing limply, parentheses around Elio’s 
scrawny legs doing their best not to drag 
his feet. Ezra led our pack, walking stick in 
hand, a fallen branch he’d picked up at the 
base of the mountain. Ezra was easily the 
strongest of all of us, but was still getting 
used to balancing on the new leg, a gift from 
his sarcoma in exchange for the original 
leg, and he leaned heavily on the stick on 
his right side. It looked as if he was rowing 
a gondola. I told him that and he reached 
back to whack me with the stick.
Four kids (or, I guess, young adults), all 
who’d been closer to dying than to living 
lately, unsupervised in the middle of nature 
with absolutely no means to get help should 
it be needed, allowed to go off for a week 
and tempt their odds. Test nature. We were 
all climbing for a different reason. Ezra to 
prove he could do it, Nicola to find some 
sort of absolute silence to forget her world 
of beeping monitors and whirring genera-
tors, Elio because I’d asked him to, and I to 
shorten the distance between me and the 
sun. It wasn’t as romantic as it probably 
could’ve been, but we’d never had great luck 
with how things could be.
My own story had begun and ended 
within the course of nine months. I never 
really counted myself among the others, I 
hadn’t suffered for it, really. Hodgkin’s lym-
phoma. I’d felt the swelling in my neck and 
had a few months of treatments before the 
doctors went in and pulled out what hurt. 
Now, I just had gnarly scars that I planned 
to adorn with tattoos after college and an 
annual checkup.

BY ELLA JOEL, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

See BETWEEN, Page 8B

