by Jason Gurley
Cece shot me a severe glance—You see?—and gave chase, calling Vanessa’s name. I stayed rooted where I was. Kids bumped past, threw me annoyed looks, but all I could think was: This is a lesson. You’ve learned a lesson. Thing is, I already knew this one. It wasn’t new: Lock yourself up tight. Nobody gets a piece of you. In other words, save it all for the people who deserve my care, my time. For my family.
I’d hammered that lesson into my skull after Dad’s death. It earned me a reputation for being the loner, for being difficult. The whole “bad luck” thing underscored that narrative, and that was okay by me. Life hands you lessons like this all the time. I’ve found it’s better to take them than resist.
But Vanessa had taught me the opposite: that it was okay to be vulnerable, to let yourself be seen. Until now, I never thought I’d have to lock myself away from her, too.
After that, the days went hazy, and I moved through them as if they were fog. Without Vanessa taking up space in my day, in my head, I gave those hours over to the diner, and to Maddie, when she needed me. I trudged home near midnight most nights. I signed my checks over to Derek. He didn’t like that I was working more, but he didn’t lecture me about it, either. He did his part; I did mine. If I wasn’t asleep, I was at work or at school. I’d done the math; between those two things, I knew where my time was best spent.
I was running out of space for school.
28
Vanessa
I peered over the top of the stairs and sighed with relief when I saw that the loft was empty. No Zach. No anybody else. I threw my backpack down and sank into one of the fat beanbag chairs. I’d scoured the shelves for something to read, anything to take my mind off how sour things had turned. Nothing about space. Nothing by Dr. Sagan.
I stared at the cover of the novel in my lap, and everything within me threatened to revolt. The book was popular among my fellow students. A Times bestseller. From the first sentence, the author corrupted the English language. Cece would have cringed to see me reading it. “Porn for narcissists,” she’d called it once.
It was perfect.
I removed the headphones. Down there, they served as my own bubble-making device, sealing me away from the rest of the world. But here, in the library, I didn’t need them. The loft was my bubble. No one ever came up here. And anyway, my ears ached.
Forty pages later, I heard footsteps on the loft stairs. I sank deeper into the chair, willing myself to vanish. Then Cece’s face rose into view.
“Hi,” she said. She’d caught me without the headphones; I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard her. She noticed the book, but withheld comment. “You’re hiding from Zach,” she went on. “I didn’t think you’d run from me. But maybe you’re hiding from all of us.”
I didn’t say anything, and she dropped into a cross-legged position beside me.
“Not going to talk to me?” She scanned my face. I saw a range of emotions flicker across her features. One of them was anger. “Fine,” she said. “Don’t talk to me. But I’m here because I give a shit.”
She unzipped her backpack and removed a blue folder. “Mrs. Harriman handed back our exams,” she said. She held up a stapled packet. “Here’s mine. See?”
A large red 101—Woot!, circled and tagged with a smiley face.
Then she held up another. “And this is yours, which she gave to me because you skipped class for the second day in a row. That’s a twenty-two, Vanessa. Do you know why?” She fanned through the pages. “Because you chose A for every multiple choice, and you skipped every written one.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Oh, I’m glad that’s fine with you,” she went on, her eyes diamond hard. “If you’d actually tried and failed, maybe I’d be more worried. I’d really worry something was wrong. But I’m glad to know you’re just sabotaging yourself. For what? Is this fun for you?”
I went back to my book.
“I knew this kid once,” she said. “Liked to play those city-simulation games. He’d build these elaborate, complicated cities. Lay pipelines, install power lines, construct intricate highway systems. Took him weeks to get everything just right. But then there was nothing left to do, you know? So you know what he did?” She paused, waiting, but I didn’t say a word. “There were these disaster buttons. He’d send a tornado ripping through the city. Or drop a meteor on it. I asked him why, after he’d worked so hard, and you know what he said? He said once you mastered something, the only thing left was to burn it all down.” She paused. “Like you’re doing now.”
“If I wanted to kick your ass at this stupid valedictorian thing,” I snapped, “I’d have done it already. Believe me. You’re not that smart.”
She stared at me, fuming—and more than a little hurt. “You don’t even understand.”
“Oh, let’s hear it. Call me more names. Am I the manic dream girl today? Or the entitled fucking pixie?”
“It’s worse,” she said, lowering her voice. She leaned closer. “You’re lying to yourself. And you know you are. Stop pretending you aren’t.”
I pulled my headphones up and flicked the noise-canceling switch, drowning her in white noise. It was as if someone had pulled the plug on Cece’s microphone. The muscle in her cheek twitched; her eyes were rimmed with tears. She threw my test down, then snatched up her bag and stormed away.
When she was gone, I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and hurled the novel across the loft.
* * *
I ditched the rest of the day. Instead of biking home, I kept going. Orilly’s one selling point: bike paths. I followed the bike trail that ran parallel to the southbound highway. The sun was high at my left shoulder; the wind whipped at my face. The path sloped downward as I coasted; the bike accelerated, and the yellow grass and cracked asphalt blurred as they flew past.
In December, as I’d expected, an email had arrived from Cornell: I’d been wait-listed. I wouldn’t know until March if I’d gotten in. And now it didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t even want to know what Cornell decided. There were only two possibilities here:
1. Cornell could accept me. I’d be too broke to accept them, so the news would only be more heartbreaking than if they’d just rejected me.
2. They could reject me. My dream would be crushed, but, more than that, I’d have made an enormous stink about Mom’s betrayal—only for it to never have mattered anyway.
Everything had gone so wrong. Mom had torn Cornell out of my hands. I’d torched things with my best friends. Now I was stacking dynamite around my academic record. None of it mattered. It all cut deeply—I felt like I was watching myself bleed out—but I was too numb to feel any of it.
You’re lying to yourself, Cece had said. Stop pretending you aren’t. The words chased me down the trail. I couldn’t make sense of them. What was she talking about? The real hell of it was that Cece—as usual—was right. But I didn’t know how I knew that. I didn’t know what she was trying to say—only that it felt true.
Which made me feel like shit.
As I rode, I tried to sort it out. Lying to myself about Cornell? No. That was off the table. College was off the table.
Wasn’t it?
Cece wasn’t the only one who had called me out on this. Aaron had, too. Gently, in his way. They were both right. It didn’t matter if I didn’t graduate top of my class; my GPA would still get me through a hundred different doors. Aaron’s and Mom’s savings were gone—but their credit was aces, and I knew Mom’s guilt would drive her to take out a sizable loan if I asked. There were scholarships, financial aid; I was young, strong. A million kids before me had worked their way through college; there was no reason I was any better than them.
All these things were true. All of them meant I was still better off than lots of other people. Better off than Zach, who clung to the barest thread of hope that he might someday do something to get out of Orilly. The barest thread, and here I was holding a braided rope.
My eyes burned as I steered headlong into the wind. I
imagined running the Kestrel right off the trail, leaping off, watching it dash against the rocks. I wanted to smash something.
I was still angry.
Only now I didn’t know why.
By late afternoon, I’d reached Big Sur. My thighs burned, and I coasted down to Pfeiffer Beach. A few lonely people walked along the shoreline, one of them waving a metal detector slowly over the sand. Dogs barked, chasing sandpipers. I climbed off my bike and lay it against a rock, then wandered down to the water. Just offshore, there’s a massive rock formation with a gap right in the center. The sun sank perfectly through that gap, and the beach fell into shadow except for that golden bridge of light.
I came across a trio of signs screwed to metal posts in the sand. The usual warnings about swimming and rip currents, even one about a shark attack that had occurred thirteen years before. The third sign warned about unseen waves. It was clearly referring to the 2008 storm, the awful way it had wrecked this coastline. The light leaked out of the sky, making the words difficult to read.
Around me the beach was dotted with debris, and I surveyed the wreckage as I walked. A fiberglass boat protruded from the sand, warped and beaten in by rocks and surf. Most of it had been buried. There were other signs of that storm: timbers jutting skyward, their white paint abraded away. I recognized them as the legs of a lifeguard tower, but they were snapped in two. The structure atop them had long since disappeared, probably broken apart by those giant waves. I patted the timbers, and to my surprise, they wavered. The sea had done this. Split timbers as thick as my body. Driven a boat so deep into the sand it couldn’t be unearthed.
I lay on the sand as the sky changed from pink to violet to deep blue, and then, at last, it was dark. I wrapped my arms around myself, willing away the cold. I couldn’t see the moon, but the stars revealed themselves like stage performers entering a scene. Among them I spotted the pink pixel that was Venus; it only made me think of him. Worse, the whole sky was now a permanent reminder of everything my mother had taken from me. The thing I loved most, forever stained by my parents and their selfishness.
I used my iPhone’s flashlight to pick my way back over the sand and rocks to my bike, but the Kestrel wasn’t there anymore. It was the last indignity I could stomach today; my vision blurred, and I turned and hurled my phone into the dark. I heard it skitter across the sand, the flashlight stabbing upward into the darkness. I felt as if I’d been jolted by a live wire; a hundred thousand volts crawled through my veins like manic bugs.
“Fuck,” I muttered, and the word was magic. Everything drained out of me, and I trudged across the sand, toward my lonely phone. I picked it up, shook off the sand, then swiped through my contacts until I found Aaron’s name.
Thirty minutes later, he appeared at the side of the highway, and I climbed into the passenger seat, exhausted. “Your mother and I were so worried,” he said, and what I meant to say was I’m fine, but instead I fell against his shoulder and burst into tears.
29
Zach
Here’s the thing about grand, unanswerable questions: You can live with the not knowing. Are we alone in the universe? What would it be like to live forever? Why did my dad have to die so young? Deep inside, people understand they’ll never learn the truth. Questions like those might keep you up all night every so often—but they don’t derail everything.
It’s the pesky little questions, the ones that have real answers that you can’t quite get to, that’ll send the whole train right off the tracks.
I’d made up my mind to drop out of high school. Senior year, just months before graduation. It wasn’t the right decision for anybody else. Just for me.
But I couldn’t do it without answering the question of what the hell had happened to me and Vanessa.
* * *
It had been years since I’d passed notes in class. My third-grade teacher, Mr. Summers, had caught me passing around illustrations of Ninja Turtles to my classmates. I’d labeled them with little price tags: fifty cents a pop. I’d only been caught when a line of paying customers formed at my desk.
I slinked into health ed just before the late bell rang. As I passed Vanessa’s desk, I dropped a folded note into her lap and kept moving. I’d written it hastily in the hallway:
CAN WE TALK? PLEASE.
Mrs. Harriman paced at the front of the room, kicking off the day’s topic. “Has anyone ever had a family member who suffered from addiction?” she began, searching for hands. “No one? That’s good. Well, let’s discuss what to look for.”
I couldn’t tell if Vanessa had opened the note. For all I knew, she’d shoved it in her pocket for later. But as Mrs. Harriman droned on, Miguel Garza flipped my note over his shoulder. I caught it, then tucked it beneath my book. When our teacher’s back was turned, I unfolded it.
library.
At the board, Mrs. Harriman chipped out the stages of substance abuse with pink chalk: Stage one—experimentation; Stage two—regular use; Stage three …
After class, I maintained my distance and followed Vanessa to the library. She never once looked back or slowed her pace. It was weird to tag along behind her. I couldn’t help feeling like an overly attached puppy.
Inside the library, she climbed the loft steps. When I reached the top, she was standing there, waiting, a book clasped against her chest, her headphones around her neck. I felt my heart compress within my chest, as if all the air had been vacuumed out.
She was impatient, her tone curt. “Well?”
It threw me off. “Hi,” I said. “Cool. How are you?”
“Zach. What do you want?”
All business. No: trying to appear all business. But I’d spent enough time looking into those eyes to read the signs; they flicked subtly down and to the left, and she rocked lightly from heel to toe. As if she were using all her energy, struggling to maintain this composed state.
“Well?” she said again.
“I saw Cece and Ada,” I said. “At the diner. They had milkshakes.” She didn’t reply, just stood there. “It was old-school. Cece seems really happy. Ada, too, actually.”
“Zach. I have to go.”
I took a step back, opening her path to the stairs.
She didn’t move.
“Look,” I said. “Something’s up.”
She looked away.
“I don’t know what it is. You don’t have to tell me. It’s just—I’m right here, you know? I haven’t gone—”
“Zach,” she said. Her jaw tensed; I couldn’t tell if she was pissed or on the verge of tears. “Shit happened. Okay? I’m dealing.”
“Are you okay?”
She turned away from me. “Fine. It’s not your fault.” She was quiet, and then she added: “Or your problem. Okay?”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I repeated.
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Softly, she said, “I can’t go to Cornell.”
Damn. I knew what that meant to her. I wanted to go to her, but I stayed where I was.
“Can’t?” I asked.
“I’m not going.”
“Did something—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hey,” I said, quickly. “That’s fine. We don’t have to. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Her words clipped. “I said that already.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t help myself; none of this made sense. “It couldn’t have been your grades—”
“Zach.”
“I’m just trying to understand,” I said. But I’d lied, saying we didn’t have to talk about it. We didn’t have to, but clearly I was the idiot who was going to try to force the issue. “The Vanessa I know wouldn’t give up on this. So … it’s got to be something big.”
“Stop.”
“Is it your family? Did something happen?” I moved close, put my hand on her shoulder.
She whirled around. “I’m not your damn property,” she snarled.
From below the loft, I heard a shush
ing sound.
But her outburst had dissolved something in me. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “What happened?” I repeated. “One minute you were kissing me, then you were just gone. Where did you go?” She didn’t answer, and suddenly I was annoyed. “All this time, you’ve tried to get me to think about my future. But now—what? Same thing doesn’t apply to you?” I took a step closer. “Am I wrong? Tell me I’m wrong.”
She shook her head and backpedaled. “I said stop.”
“You want Cornell. It’s your dream.”
Dimly, I heard a bell ring, announcing the start of the next period.
“Just—stop.” Vanessa was wound so tightly her teeth were practically chattering. “Please. Knock it off.”
I couldn’t, though. Until this moment, I hadn’t let myself feel the hurt of being shut out. She’d done exactly what she’d asked me not to do. I hadn’t realized she was the kind of person who could do that to someone else. To me.
“You have no idea,” I said. “No idea what someone like me would do for even a shred of the chances you have.” I rocked back on my heels, adrenaline spitting through my veins. “Must be nice, Vanessa. Must be so nice. To just throw things away. Just throw a dream away like it didn’t mean anything. Just throw away people.”
Her eyes flashed, like I’d lit something in her, too. “Don’t put that on me,” she hissed. “You do have chances, you—you dick. You just won’t let yourself take them! Life’s so hard for you? Do the work, Zach. Nobody gives you anything? Take it.” She put a finger on my chest, tapped hard. “But no. You get off on it. On the suffering. Don’t you? Don’t say you don’t. You make it your thing, you pretend you’re all noble, but you’re doing the same thing, Zach. You just throw it all away, all that possibility, and for what? Huh? For your f—”
She choked on the word, and the fight went right out of her as she realized what she’d almost said. But I heard it. Heard it even though she didn’t say it.