by Sara Wolf
Will’s face crumples in the dimness, and I smile.
“So yes, I pity you, Will Cavanaugh.”
The door behind me slams open, light flooding in from the hallway. Jack, breathless and furious, tumbles into the room, takes one look at the situation, and strides over to me, holding me in his arms.
“You took too long. Did he touch you?” He cups my face, looking it over with all the gentle intent of a doctor.
“No.” I smile up at him. “Not much, anyway.”
Jack tenses, eyes solidifying to the most subzero temperatures I’ve seen yet. The room itself seems to go cold as he fixes his twin icebergs on Will. Will’s eyes dart around, focusing on the exit behind us, and he musters up a mad dash but never quite makes it, because Jack trips him and in two seconds he has Will pinned to the ground, his arm twisted behind him and his cries echoing.
“Fuck! Screw you, asshole! Let me go!”
Jack looks up and stands on Will’s arm, using him as a footstool to reach the light on the ceiling. He pulls the bulb out, throwing it against the wall. It splinters in fragments of glass.
“Isis,” Jack says calmly. “The lamp.”
I oblige, stepping over Will and maybe dragging my foot a little so it hits his face. He swears, but he swears harder when I yank the lamp out by the cord. I’m about to throw it at the wall when Jack stops me.
“No. The bed. I’ll hold him. Use the cord and tie him to it.”
“No! Shit, shit, fuck, no! You can’t do this! You can’t fucking do this to me! Isis, don’t let him do this!”
I ignore his pleas as Jack fixes his arms around the iron bedpost sunk into the floor. I tie the cord twice, and Jack ties it a third time, yanking it to check the tightness.
“It should be about seven hours until sunrise,” Jack says. “And I’m sure we can persuade your roommate to spend the night somewhere else. Somewhere…quieter.”
“The window,” I say casually. “It should be covered.”
“No!”
“You know, it really should,” Jack agrees, smiling as he pulls the comforter from the bed and throws it over the window’s curtain rod, blocking out all the light from outside.
“Isis! I-Isis please!” Will pants, tears and snot dripping down his nose. “You can’t do this! I liked you! I cared about you—”
Jack punches him so hard I hear the crack of bone. He leans in, grabbing Will’s collar and sneering in his face.
“You will never speak to Isis again.”
“Isis! Plea—”
I turn away just in time to avoid seeing the second punch. But then I look back, because I deserve that much. Blood from his nose drips down his chin and mouth, and he pants, a thin sheen of sweat over his terrified face as Jack and I retreat.
“The joke’s on you, Will.” I laugh. “The key log you crushed was a fake I made from a soda bottle. I can’t believe you thought I was stupid enough to only have one. I planted the real one when you locked the door, when we first walked in. How many hours do you think it’ll take for them to find all the nasty shit you’ve been doing on that computer of yours? Probably more than it’ll take for you to see sunrise.”
“No! No!”
“Ah, the noise,” Jack says. He rummages through a nearby dresser and pulls out a shirt, handing it to me. “Should I do the honors?”
“I will,” I say. I rip the flimsy cotton down the middle and walk up to the pathetic boy I used to love. Will whimpers, the threat of another punch keeping him from speaking.
“Tell me why,” I say, squatting at his level. “Why did you hurt me?”
Will looks to Jack, who remains emotionless. Will tries a smile.
“I didn’t, Isis! I liked you! I thought you knew that!”
He struggles weakly as I force the cloth in his mouth. Not his throat, because I don’t want to kill him. I thought I did, but I really don’t. I want him to live. To suffer in the darkness like I did, except for the rest of his life.
I walk back to Jack, Will’s muffled screaming the last thing I hear before I shut the door and total darkness consumes him.
I manage to find Diana and Yvette before they get anywhere near the fire alarm. I’m too exhausted to track anybody down, so they offer to find Will’s roommate for me, a mousy boy with big glasses, and tell him what’s happened. He sighs in relief, saying he hates Will, and God bless us for fucking him over. He stays in Diana’s dorm, and they, curiously, stay with him. But I’m too exhausted to be very curious for very long about it.
Jack helps me into my room and collapses on the bed with me.
And I cry, and he strokes my face and my arms and waits.
Chapter Seventeen
Two years later
I’ve decided the sun is out to end me.
A lot of things are out to end me—cancer, animatronic dinosaurs, general death. But out of all the dire and dangerous things in this world, the sun has to be the worst of them. It grows our food and keeps us warm in the vast infinite cradle of space-time, so it forces us into the illusion we should be grateful for it, when in fact it’s very hard to be grateful to anything blinding your eyes with a cheerful saw blade of ultraviolet rays.
“Ugh.” I roll over on my beach towel. “Can you cool it for, like, five seconds?”
The sun brightly declines. I sip my Barbie-colored fruity drink from a fancy glass and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
“Where the heckle—” My hands scrabble for my sunglasses, and I shove them on my face. “Ahh, temporary relief. So sweet, so transient, so Gucci.”
“Mademoiselle!” a voice rings out. I groan and sit up, watching Gregory stride his way through the sand toward me. Even the southern French villagers, used to bright and colorful Mediterranean clothing, stare at his atrocious green-and-orange Hawaiian shirt. When we said “come visit us and have a vacation,” he apparently didn’t get the memo that he wasn’t visiting a tropical island.
“Gregory, you’re an eyesore,” I complain. Gregory laughs and offers me a hand up, his eyes taking in my white swimsuit with the low-cut back.
“And you, madam, are quite the opposite.”
“No!” I protest as I stand up. “No, no, no, look at these thighs! I’m far too young to be a madam. Try again in like, seven thousand years.”
He chuckles. “Very well. Come on, he sent me to fetch you and for some reason he’s antsy as fuck-all.”
“Antsy? Jack?” I quirk a brow, picking up my towel and drink and slipping on my sandals, trudging through the sand with Gregory. “Are we talking about the same human being I’m in regular personal contact with?”
“The one and only.”
“Are you hiring him again? Please say yes, please! I want those amazing little chocolates from Paris again—I want them with all my crappy idiot heart.”
“God knows you deserve them, putting up with him all the time,” Gregory huffs. “He’s been so off-kilter lately. Not that I’d know, but we do keep up in emails.”
“Oh, I know.” I nod. “I’ve seen those emails. It’s always you, begging him to come back to Vortex.”
Gregory laughs. “Can you blame me? He’s Jack.”
“He is Jack!” I agree. “Which is why he left in the first place. Teaching is a viable career, too, you know.”
Gregory’s eyes crinkle like a father’s around the edges. “He’ll be a good teacher. And that glare of his? He’ll have the most well-behaved students, I bet.”
Gregory walks with me up the beach to the tiny dirt road that splits the village in two. It’s been two years since Jack and I first visited, and eventually stayed, but still the villagers are a little wary of us, the American couple. But I’ll win them over. Or wear them down. Whichever comes first. I wave at the villagers as cheerfully as I can.
“Bonjour! François! La bouche un petite chienne! Oh dear, they don’t look happy about that last one.”
“That last one didn’t even make sense,” Gregory emphasizes, and makes little pardon noises at
the offended nearby villagers. I walk briskly past him and up the cobblestoned road. The village is tiny; children carrying boogie boards and floats bob and weave between bikes and too-slow couples. Two old men in stodgy caps take turns playing chess and drinking wine under the eaves of a flower shop.
Toward the edge of the village the cobblestone fades, replaced with a well-worn dirt road. Tall summer grasses sway on either side. I scoop up yellow and purple and white wildflowers, a honeybee fighting me for a particularly beautiful orange blossom.
“Go on!” I shoo her. “There are a thousand more; you can afford to donate one to the poor humans!”
Gregory chuckles, looking out at the ocean and the small farmhouses we pass.
“I’ll miss this town. You two’ve picked the best place in the world to settle down, I reckon.”
“Hey! No one’s settled! We’re going to Cambodia next year!”
“What’s the difference?”
“Settlement means like, minivans and baby barf. Home base implies we are explorers of the highest caliber. And after Greece—after that it’s back to Ohio.”
“That’s the plan, huh?”
“Yeah.” I kick a pebble down the path.
“Do you miss your family?” he asks softly. I nod.
“We stayed with my mom for two weeks after, planning stuff. We’ve Skyped, but…it’ll be good to see her in the flesh. And bones. And all the other parts of her.”
Gregory laughs. I watch the village crowd, mesmerizing in its fluid dance. I got kicked out of college the day after I confronted Will. He didn’t leak the video of me defacing the office or anything. I told them myself. I wanted them to kick me out, maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to come clean about everything.
I hugged Diana and Yvette good-bye, promising to keep in touch, and then I packed my things and left with Jack for Northplains and Mom’s house. Those two weeks after dropping out were some of the best in my life. Mom, Jack, and I hung out, playing board games and going to the zoo and making delicious meals together. I was so happy that when we got the news about Will’s arrest I barely batted an eyelash. Barely. But it was still batted. He got seven years in an Ohio jail for aiding and abetting a criminal organization, and that’s the last I heard of him.
After the night I confronted Will, I never heard from Vanessa again. I did, however, get an email four days later from someone claiming to be a “friend” of hers, who told me all recorded instances of the tape of Jack and Sophia and the others had been destroyed. It’d be easy to distrust Vanessa’s promise, but when Will’s arrest popped up in the news so quickly and he was sentenced so thoroughly, I knew she’d never leave something unfinished. I scratched her back, and she scratched mine, and that was the end of that.
When I told Jack, he’d held me close, wordlessly and tightly.
He quit Vortex shortly after that. Charlie came to my house, banging on the door and demanding Jack come back, but not because he liked him as a partner or anything. Jack went out and they talked, and eventually Charlie left, the spikes of his hair wilting a little in disappointment. Then Gregory visited, gave Jack his pay for Vanessa’s job, and it was enough for us to travel. Jack wanted to leave, and I wanted to visit somewhere. Anywhere but Ohio.
But first, good-byes were due.
Kayla and Wren couldn’t make it to see us off, so we planned to visit them instead when our airplane to Europe stopped at Boston. There were a lot of happy tears and ruffling of hair and promises to keep in touch. Promises that were kept, daily, with my internet connection and a lot of time zone planning.
Even before the airplane, there were other good-byes.
I said good-bye to Mom the only way I knew how, with tears and a hug and a cheek kiss and swearing I’d be back. Mom laughed and hugged me back, insisting she would be all right on her own. We call every day, and sometimes Skype, and it was through Skype she introduced me to Harold, a round, pudgy man with a warm smile who always wore sweater vests and treated my mom like a precious vase, a queen made of diamonds. She’s seemed happier than I ever could’ve thought possible after Leo, but when I get back to Ohio, I’ll be sure to check up on Harold’s sincerity. It’s not that I don’t trust him; I just don’t trust anyone. But for now, she seems all right.
After my mom, we visited Jack’s mom. Mrs. Hunter answered the door covered in paint stains and with her customary messy bun. When she saw Jack, she dropped the glass jar full of murky paint-water she’d been holding and flung her arms around him and sobbed. He’d called her before that, of course, but it was the first time she’d seen him since he left after Sophia’s funeral. I cleaned up the glass bits while Jack held her and soothed her and Mrs. Hunter wailed. Finally, when she’d calmed down enough, she invited us in for tea, and Jack explained where we were going. She tried to get us to stay—we could live at her house, she insisted—but we managed to convince her we needed some time away. She pulled me aside just before we left and thanked me for finding him, for being with him, and my heart melted on the edges as she hugged me. She made me swear to make Jack call her at least twice a week, and I Scout’s-honored it.
Eventually, Jack and I visited Avery’s house. The massive town house was chilly inside, all marble and white walls with no paintings or tapestries or even stains. Avery’s parents weren’t there, too busy with a case in Columbus, but Avery was. She came down the stairs, then froze when she saw it was us. Jack and I talked that way, her on the stairs and us in the hall. She didn’t look as bad as she did at graduation—she wasn’t as thin, and some color was back in her cheeks. Her hair was as vibrant red as ever, if not more so. Her eyes were skittish, though, and she was still too small. And she kept her mouth silent, no matter what we said.
“Isis!”
Halfway out the door, Avery called out to me. I turned, and she was at the bottom of the stairs, face earnest and honest in a way I’d never seen it before.
“Have fun,” she said, green eyes boring into mine. She wasn’t smiling, wasn’t frowning. But her expression was saying more than her words ever could. “Have fun” was also “be safe” and “thank you,” but silent and hidden in that reluctant, subtle-as-a-hidden-knife Avery way. I knew it, and she knew it, and finally I smiled.
“You got it, Avery Bobavery.”
Jack drove us to Belina’s house. We had to all but fight off her invitation to stay for a delicious-smelling dinner. She hugged Jack in farewell and cupped his face with her hands like he was her own child, saying something in Spanish I couldn’t understand.
Later, in the car, Jack told me she’d told him to live well and happily.
And then came the harder good-byes.
We visited Tallie’s grave one last time with a picnic. We had sandwiches and wine, and I poured a little cup of lemonade for Tallie and put it on her grave, and we talked about how cute she was, imagining all the different ways she could’ve grown up. It should’ve been sad, something like that, but Jack and I couldn’t stop smiling. When the sun set behind the lake, we packed up, and Jack’s hand went to the white bleached-wood cross that served as her marker.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Jack stared at the cross, then looked up at me with a soft gaze.
“They should be together,” he said simply.
“We can’t just deposit a baby skeleton on her grave,” I say. “The police will be all over that.”
“No, you’re right. But we can take the rest.”
So we took the cross. Sophia’s grave was serenely quiet, the graveyard empty and painted metallic by the golden sunset. Jack put Tallie’s white cross on the grave.
Jack let me talk to her first, alone. It didn’t feel right, visiting together, so we took turns. I told Sophia everything about what happened at college—from the bad food to the classes to Yvette and Diana to Will. I told her everything, just like I used to tell her in the hospital. She’d want to know. She couldn’t do college, so she deserved to know.
Jack took much longer than I did, and I sat beneath a tree
a ways away and let him have space. He knelt at the grave for two hours, and sometimes his lips would move. I don’t know what he was saying, but it was personal, and important. That much I could tell from the way he clenched his fists.
And then, all at once, his fingers went slack, and he approached me, and together we got in the car and drove to the airport.
I’m so lost in my memories I don’t realize Gregory’s led me out of the village and up the dirt path that leads to our cottage.
Gregory breathes the fresh air in deep. “How’re you doing here, anyway? Picking up the language at all?”
“Well, there’s honey and bread and lots of fruit in the fall, and I can’t speak a word of French, but at least my boyfriend can.” I smack my lips. “Boyfriend. Ugh, that word still tastes funny. There should be another word. Prince, maybe? No, that’s too regal. Significant other? Ugh, too suburban. Buttbear?”
I pause, then turn to Gregory.
“I think I’ve struck gold.”
“Buttbear sounds like a disease.” He sighs.
“Exactly! Haven’t you heard? Love is a disease, and the only cure is death. And sad breakup songs.”
Gregory shakes his head. We walk in silence, me skipping and him sticking to the shade of the oak trees. We pass another farmhouse, all white stone and logs and dogs chasing goats around.
“I’ve heard,” Gregory starts, “that a funny, beautiful girl has an internet advice show that’s gotten very popular lately on a certain you of the tubes. Something about…a network approaching her? And a contract?”
I wave him off. “It’s nothing big, really. People just like to watch me flail around and say weird things. That’s pretty much been my entire life. So really, they just like to watch my life. Not bad for a girl who got kicked out of college for defacing a professor’s office, huh?”